Cat's-Paw, Inc.

by L. L. Thrasher

  He must have thought I was crazy. I decided to believe I overreacted to his questions because I was tired. I was as sane as the next person. Of course, the next person was a runaway blonde who was a bad car thief and a worse pickpocket. Not very reassuring.

  I rolled over and sat up. Allison was sitting cross-legged at the foot of her bed watching “Wheel of Fortune” with the sound off. At the sound of my movement, she tipped her head forward so her hair made an effective screen between us. I stayed in bed long enough to figure out the puzzle—“WALK DON'T RUN”—then I pulled on my jeans, gathered up some clean clothes and my wallet and went into the bathroom. I came back out immediately to get my gun out of the bed where it had nestled next to me all night. I concealed it in a shirt to carry it into the bathroom. Hiding it wasn't really necessary. Allison had apparently decided she was never going to look at me again.

  When I finished in the bathroom, I checked myself out in the bureau mirror, considering a tie and deciding against it. I was wearing blue pants and a navy blazer over a white-on-white shirt. I looked at Allison's mirror image. She had turned the volume up on the television and was watching a commercial for Stayfree Maxi-Pads as if her life just might depend on it.

  “Would you like to go downtown this morning?” I asked.

  She shook her head then said, “Oh, yes. Of course. I'll get my things.” She untwined her legs and went into the bathroom, leaving the door ajar. When I looked in, she was reloading her purse.

  “I didn't mean I want to get rid of you. I just thought you might not want to sit around here all day. Portland's a great town for a walking tour. I have a map you can take and we can meet somewhere later and I'll bring you back here.”

  She managed to meet my eyes in the mirror for about half a second. “All right,” she said.

  “Would you feel better if I told you I committed burglary on a regular basis when I was younger than you are?”

  “No.” She looked at me in the mirror again. “Is that true?”

  I said it was and she asked how a burglar could get a job as a policeman.

  “You're only a criminal if you get caught.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Steal? Same reason you would. I needed money.”

  She unloaded her purse and got her sweater and we headed out. After a quick stop for Egg McMuffins, which Allison insisted eating in the car, we crossed the Willamette. When I told her what river it was, she smiled and said it would be hard to miss.

  I found a parking spot downtown and spread my map across the steering wheel. Allison put her glasses on and slid over to look at it.

  “You'll be better off staying downtown. That's this area where we are, mostly high-rise buildings. Old Town is this part.” I pointed it out on the map. “You'll know it if you wander into it. It looks just like it sounds. You'd be all right there in the daytime but you might not like it. All this area around here is called Fareless Square. You can ride the buses and MAX for free.”

  “What's MAX?”

  “The light rail system. Metropolitan Area Express. Like a subway but above ground. And cleaner. You'll see it.” I made a big X on the map. “This is Pioneer Courthouse Square. Meet me there about two o'clock. You can't miss it; it's a plaza, paved with brick, and it has a lot of stairs. You got all that?”

  She said yes and put her glasses and the map in her purse.

  “Ignore the drunks and the panhandlers. Don't give them any money. If you need to ask directions, go in a store and ask someone who's working. Don't talk to strangers on the street.”

  She smiled. “I've been shopping in Manhattan. I think I can survive in Portland, Oregon.”

  I tried to figure out how many states she could live in and go shopping in New York. She must have read my mind. “I don't live near there,” she said.

  “I'll walk you down to the Galleria,” I said. “You'll like. There are about fifty shops.”

  I left her gazing into shop windows and spent the next few hours traipsing around not finding Jessica Finney.

  At a quarter to two I arrived at Pioneer Courthouse Square and took full advantage of the fact that I had a legitimate excuse to closely scrutinize every female there. There wasn't a one of them who wasn't worth looking at. As Phil Pauling once said, they don't call Oregon the Beaver State for nothing.

  A couple minutes after the hour I saw the best-looking one of them all heading my way. I noted the changes in her appearance with interest. Her hair was tucked up beneath a big floppy-brimmed straw hat with an attached white scarf that was tied in a bow under her chin. Her eyes were hidden behind very large, very dark sunglasses. When she got closer, I saw that she had also bought new pantyhose. The run was gone.

  She took off the sunglasses when she reached me and did the standard tourist's double-take at the man with the umbrella, who was a few feet away from me. She laughed with delight and walked over to take a closer look at him.

  “He's wonderful,” she said, gingerly touching his arm as if he might object. He was fairly wonderful, life-sized and life-like down to the wrinkles in his metal skin. He was frozen forever in mid-step, one hand upraised to hail a cab or a friend, the other hand holding an open umbrella over his head.

  “Does he have a name?” Allison asked.

  “Officially it's called Allow Me but most people just call it the man with the umbrella.”

  We took a quick tour of the Square. Allison was intrigued by the bricks beneath our feet, which were inscribed with the names of people who had donated money for the development of the Square.

  I suggested lunch at the restaurant on the upper level. Allison preferred hot dogs and Cokes from the vendor at the bottom of the stairs. I'm easy. We had hot dogs. We sat near the fountain to eat them. The clouds cooperated by blowing apart, providing what the weathermen in Portland like to call a sunbreak. The Square filled up with Webfoots scurrying out to take advantage of the break in the gloom.

  I asked Allison how she liked Portland. She loved it, which wasn't surprising. Most people do. Portland has all the problems that plague any metropolitan area but it's easy to forget the problems when you can turn just about any corner and find a park or a fountain or a statue or a work of art disguised as a building.

  She had ridden a bus and MAX and preferred MAX. She had also ignored my advice and wandered through Old Town, spending some time window-shopping at the Skidmore Fountain Building.

  “What's the Saturday Market?” she asked. “I saw a sign.”

  “That big empty area under the foot of the Burnside Bridge is set up as an open-air market every weekend, except in the dead of winter. The merchandise is all hand-crafted and there are lots of food stalls. Maybe you can go Saturday. In the meantime, why don't we go buy you some clothes?”

  She balked politely until I assured her she could consider it a loan. She hadn't mentioned her purchases. In addition to the hat and sunglasses, she had a big flat bag from a stationery store. When we stood up to leave, she saw me glance at it and said, “Scratchboard.” While I was pondering the significance of that, she started babbling.

  “I know I shouldn't be buying things I don't really need when I hardly have any money and you're paying for my food and everything, but, well, it's windy here and my hair blows all over and… um…” She looked upward. The clouds had regrouped. Failing to find an explanation for the sunglasses, she fell silent.

  “The hat's pretty,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  I drove us out to Clackamas Town Center, where Allison could shop while I gave Jessica's picture to the security people. Allison read all the freeway signs out loud on the way and asked if Milwaukie wasn't spelled wrong.

  “Only if you're in Wisconsin,” I said.

  When we arrived at the mall, Allison checked the directory and decided on Penney's. I wondered if she'd ever been inside a J. C. Penney's but I didn't argue. When we got to the women's clothing department, she suddenly became very shy about spending my money. She didn't kno
w what to get.

  “Pretend you're going away for a weekend and get what you'd take with you. A weekend in Portland, not Paris, okay?”

  She said, “Oui, monsieur,” and headed into the racks of clothes.

  On my way to and from the security office, I checked out the girls. They were there, noisy droves of them, all sizes, shapes, and colors, but not a Jessica Finney among them.

  Back at Penney's, I found Allison looking at panties. She told me to go away. I went to the luggage department and bought a medium-sized canvas suitcase. By the time I got back, Allison had her selections piled up at a checkstand. Her weekend wardrobe consisted of a pair of already-faded jeans, a pair of dressier dark blue pants, a white woven belt, three blouses—one blue, one pink, and one in blurry rainbows stripes—three pairs of white panties, one bra, three pairs of blue cotton knee-high socks, a package of three pairs of pantyhose, a pale blue cotton nightgown, and a gathered, light-weight blue denim skirt with a wide ruffle around the bottom. I handed over three hundred-dollar bills and got enough change back to pay for a pair of white and blue Adidas in the shoe department. Size ten, which made Allison blush.

  We stashed her purchases in the suitcase and then walked the length of the mall because she wanted to see it. We took a break midway and ate frozen yogurt while we watched the ice skaters on the level below us.

  On the way back to the entrance nearest where I'd parked, we stayed on the second level. We were walking on a wide balcony. There was a matching balcony on the other side of a wide open space revealing the lower level of the mall. On the other balcony I spotted a definite Jessica Finney type in the center of a group of girls who looked as if they didn't have mothers to nag at them. I stopped and leaned against the railing, waiting for her to turn toward me.

  She didn't cooperate. The nearest connection between the two balconies wasn't close and involved going downstairs and then up again. The makers of malls don't believe in the closest distance between two points.

  Allison was fidgeting beside me. I whistled my very best, very loudest male chauvinist pig wolf-whistle. Every female face in the place turned toward me. The girl wasn't Jessica. I waved at her anyway, and the whole cluster of girls giggled, wiggled, waved, and blew kisses.

  Allison was looking faintly aghast. I grabbed her arm. “Let's get out of here before I'm mobbed by a horde of sex-crazed teenyboppers.”

  All the way to the car Allison shot me little sideways looks, as if she had serious doubts about my sanity.

  I stopped at a Fred Meyer on the way back to the motel and bought fruit and snack food and junk food and beer and soda pop to stock the room. Allison chose to sit in the car while I did the shopping.

  She had kept her hat on all day but had removed the sunglasses at the mall. When I pulled into a parking place at the back of the motel, she put them back on for the ten-foot walk to the building, and didn't take them off again until we were safely in the room.

  While she was in the bathroom, with the water running full force as usual, I peeked into the stationery store bag. Scratchboard was heavy paper, more like cardboard actually, with a glossy black coating on one side. There was also a metal straightedge in the bag.

  She emerged from the bathroom and I went into it to change into jeans and my denim jacket. When I was ready to go, I told her I wasn't sure when I'd be back. She nodded absently, intent on cutting the price tags off her new clothes with the tiny scissors from her manicure set.

  I picked up the Monday Oregonian as I was leaving the room. I had barely glanced at it but Allison had done the crossword. I stopped in the lobby to buy the Tuesday edition, then I sat in the car and went through both papers page by page. I went through the Monday edition a second time, looking for missing pages. There weren't any. There was also no picture of Allison and no story about a missing nineteen-year-old blonde.

  So why the disguise?

  Chapter Fifteen

  I resumed my search for Jessica Finney, taking a break to have dinner with Virginia Marley. Our plan to go to her place afterward was foiled when I checked in with the service before we left the restaurant. I had two messages: Call Hank Johnston and call Jefferson Bundy.

  Hank answered the phone on the first ring. Jessica had called him thirty minutes earlier.

  "She wants me to give her old man a message," Hank said. "I didn't call him yet. She knows about you. She said to tell her dad she doesn't want to come home and he should tell you to stop looking for her."

  "Did she say where she was?"

  "She said Portland and I asked whereabouts and she said downtown. I asked her if she was sleeping on the street and she didn't answer. I told her I could send her some money if she gave me an address, trying to find out where she was, you know. Well, I would send her money. But she said she didn't need any and then she said she was at a pay phone and couldn't talk any longer and she hung up."

  "Does she know who I am or just that her dad hired a detective?"

  There was a short silence then Hank said, "I guess I blew it. She knew a detective was looking for her and I said I knew because you talked to me. And I guess I kinda told her about you being the guy who talks at school. She remembers you okay. The girls think you're a real hunk. They practically drool while you're talking." Hank sounded bitter. "I guess I shouldn't've told her, huh?"

  "Don't worry about it. It probably won't make much difference. You want me to talk to her dad?"

  "Yeah. I don't want to call him. He acts like it's all my fault. Shit, I didn't want her to leave."

  I told him to call me right away if Jessica contacted him again then I called Jason Finney. After some lengthy cursing, he asked if I thought Jessica had told Hank the truth about being downtown. I didn't point out that he should know his daughter a little better than I did.

  "It makes sense," I said. "She was seen at both those acting schools Thursday and she knows I'm here. I've spent a lot of time downtown."

  He said, "Shit."

  I told him I'd call again as soon as I had some news. He said, "Yeah" and hung up on me. Maybe he just didn't like goodbyes.

  I dropped Virginia off at her apartment and drove to the Justice Center. This time the picture Bundy slid across his desk was of a young black girl with two inches of blond at the ends of her dark hair and a thin scar like a whip mark down the side of her face. The bullet had shattered the bone beneath her right eye.

  I shook my head. "Did she have Jessica's picture, too?"

  "No, but the gun was the same one used on Diane Dobbs. This one is Karen Baylor, sixteen, ex-hooker. She quit the business about six months ago and moved in with her sister. The sister and her husband work graveyard shift. They got home this morning and found her on the floor. Time of death is within two hours of the time Dobbs was shot."

  "Did they have the same pimp?"

  "No. Dobbs' pimp is still around but he has an ironclad alibi for Monday night. He was here waiting to make bail. If he didn't do Dobbs, there's no reason to think he did Baylor. Baylor's pimp OD'd and she jumped at the change to get off the street. The sister says she was in a drug rehab program and was planning to go back to school next month." Bundy picked up the picture, shaking his head slightly.

  "Maybe you have a psycho killing hookers."

  "So why ex-hookers? Why not the girls on the street?"

  "Maybe some john didn't like them quitting. Did you want to know where I was when Baylor was shot?"

  "Not unless you plan to confess so I can wrap this up."

  "Maybe later. I need to find Jessica first."

  I called Virginia from a pay phone and told her I wouldn't be over. The dead girls didn't have anything to do with Jessica but knowing she was out in a world where young girls were being shot to death on a regular basis took my mind off sex.

  I wandered the dark streets and the darker parks of Portland for hours, looking for Jessica. As the night grew later and lonelier I became aware that I was also looking for April. But then, I always looked for April. I didn't s
ee her nearly as often as I used to.

  At one in the morning, I decided coffee might help. I found an open cafe and checked the sign in the window. The place had met the health department standards. I would have preferred a sign that said "Exceeded" but in some neighborhoods it doesn't pay to be choosy.

  I walked on in. The clientele was eclectic. I got some "woo-woo's" and a lot of batting eyelashes from the group in the first booth. The drunks were in the back, shaky hands wrapped around coffee mugs. Two working girls at the counter gave me a visual frisk and decided to set up shop elsewhere. They departed with elaborate nonchalance.

  I chose a booth midway between the drunks and the gays so as not to offend anyone. A waitress came and snapped her gum at me. I ordered black coffee. She said the cherry pie was good. I ordered cherry pie. She fished down the sleeve of her blouse for her bra strap and plucked it into place. It made the same snapping sound as her gum.

  I slouched down in the seat, stretching my legs out beneath the table. There was a kid at the counter with a bleached mohawk and no less than five earrings piercing the one ear I could see. He was wearing a black leather vest with nothing under it and jeans that looked older than he did. Next to him, a pale boy in a green fishnet shirt and Spandex pants was whispering sweet nothings into the ear of a man even I wouldn't have wanted to meet in a dark alley. A tired black woman in a tireder white uniform was propping her head up down at the end of the counter. Next to her, in a turquoise and gold caftan, was the most beautiful person in the world.

  I was caught staring and received a smile of infinite sweetness. The vision slid off the stool and floated my way, the caftan swinging gracefully from side to side, giving me glimpses of tiny feet in blue satin dance shoes. Above the glimmering gown, the face was exotically Eurasian with big round dark eyes, broad cheekbones tapering to a fragile chin, and a full, heart-shaped mouth, all framed by silky, shiny black hair in a deliberately ragged lost-waif style. The perfect face for a "save-this-child" poster. I was smitten. I was also stumped.