Cat's-Paw, Inc.

by L. L. Thrasher

  “Is that why you became a detective?”

  “Not if you mean so I can spend the rest of my life searching for her. I’m not looking for her anymore. But in a roundabout way it is. When I quit the cops, I worked part-time for a detective named Jake Matthews. He’s the one I hired to look for April. Arrow Investigations was his then. Jake’s way up in his sixties and he wanted to quit but couldn’t afford to. He’s the worst compulsive gambler I’ve ever known. If someone gave him good enough odds, he’d bet on the sun shining at midnight. He used to drive across the state line every week and buy fifty bucks worth of Washington lottery tickets. And he hit it. Almost two million dollars. He signed the business over to me and the last I saw of him he was heading out of Mackie in a thirty-foot-long motor home. I get a postcard from him every now and then. Nice guy, but he ruined the lottery for me. Oregon started its own lottery after that but I can’t get too interested in it. I figure the odds on two people who know each other both hitting the jackpot are astronomical.”

  Allison, who could fixate on strange details, said “April’s a pretty name.”

  “Yeah. I need to get to work.”

  “You don’t like to talk about yourself, do you?”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “You won’t tell me your last name.”

  “That’s different. I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not? Would I recognize it? Are you a runaway Rockefeller?”

  She smiled. “No. I’m not rich either.”

  I tugged on the thin gold chain around her neck, pulling the stone into view. I noticed it last night but had been too distracted by the slip and what was under it to give much thought to a diamond the size of a pencil eraser. “Somebody’s rich,” I said.

  She took the diamond from my fingers and twisted it slowly, catching the light. “It was a gift. I suppose I should sell it.” She clasped the stone tight in her fist.

  “Never sell anything with sentimental value. Look, I have to find Jessica or at least keep looking for her until her dad gets tired of paying me. Maybe afterwards I can help you out. In the meantime, you’re doing all right, here, aren’t you? You haven’t thrown up in at least twenty-four hours.”

  “Do you lift weights?” Another mind-boggling mental leap.

  “Sometimes. I carried you up here, didn’t I?”

  She grinned. “How much do you weigh?”

  “Oh, about two twenty. How much do you weigh?”

  “Two hundred and twenty pounds!”

  “Really? You don’t look it.”

  She fell backward on the bed, laughing. She looked so good stretched out in her brand-new faded jeans that I joined her. Several minutes later she pulled her mouth away from mine.

  “Zachariah?”

  “Mm?”

  “Do you think I’m sexy?”

  We were pressed about as close together as two people can get with clothes on. “If you have to ask, I’m going to start worrying about being underendowed.”

  Her cheek warmed up beneath my lips. “Well, I suppose men always… well, I mean, if we weren’t…”

  “I thought you were sexy when you were upchucking in the parking lot in Hood River.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not very pretty.”

  “You’re way past pretty. You’ll realize that when you get over wanting to be cute. Pretty doesn’t have much to do with sexy anyway.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being cute.”

  “Cute doesn’t last, beauty does. You’re beautiful. Trust me, I’m an expert.”

  “You can be very nice when you want to,” she said.

  I nuzzled her ear. “You’re nice all the time.” Allison chose that moment to move against me in a way guaranteed to turn any man’s brain to Silly Putty. “Getting naughtier every minute though. Let me up, babe, before I forget how innocent you are.”

  While we were dallying, the light patter of rain against the window had changed to a hard splatter. I decided to give Jessica Finney credit for having enough sense to come in out of the rain. I wanted to see how Mackie’s murder investigation was progressing anyway.

  The Chief of Police answered the phone. I asked for Phil and Harkins asked who was calling. I gritted my teeth. I had learned years ago that it was impossible to disguise a distinctly rumbly baritone. Harkins knew my voice as well as he knew his own. I thought about hanging up but instead I said “Smith” and spelled it for him, slowly, as if I were speaking to someone with the IQ of a banana peel. Two grown men. I consoled myself with the fact that Harkins was twenty years my senior, which had to make his behavior worse.

  The phone clicked. I wasn’t sure if he hung up or put me on hold. I waited and there was another click and Phi said, “Hey, Bucky. What’s up?”

  “Nothing. Just wondering how you’re doing.”

  “Oh, I’m just hunky-dory. You know what we got here? We got us a locked room mystery, only it’s a locked hotel. The night clerk swears up and down no one came in the hotel after midnight. The restaurant closed at eleven. None of the customers in the bar were hotel guests and they all left by the street exit. The clerk didn’t see a living soul after midnight. Which means the killer came in earlier or came in through the parking lot entrance. That door’s locked after eleven o’clock but all the room keys open it. Last winter when the Arms was having trouble with vandals spray-painting the halls in the middle of the night, we figured some kids got hold of a room key somehow and were using it to get in. So the Arms called in a locksmith and changed all the locks. Ever since then they’ve been keeping track of keys like they’re gold bricks at Fort Knox. They even have signs in the rooms asking the guests to turn them in at the desk instead of leaving them in the room when they check out. Every goddamn one of the keys was accounted for Monday morning. Vanzetti’s key was in his pants pocket. So what do you think?”

  “Either the killer was in the hotel for several hours or Vanzetti went downstairs and let him in the back door. Or maybe Vanzetti went out and they came back together.”

  “That’s a whole lot of tramping around the halls. The Arms is pretty small. None of the guests remember hearing anyone walking around. And the people in the room next to Vanzetti’s are pretty sure his television was on for an hour or so before the shots. The woman’s a light sleeper and she woke her husband up about four o’clock to bitch about the TV waking her up. You want to hear Harkins’ theory?”

  “Sure.”

  “He thinks the nightgown and the Kleenex are some kind of red herring. He thinks Vanzetti was smoked by a hit man from Chicago who was hired by his ex-bosses so he couldn’t finger them if he got picked up on the federal warrant.”

  “You mean he thinks a hit man left a nightgown and some dirty Kleenex to throw you off the track?”

  “Shit, even Harkins isn’t that dumb. He just thinks they don’t have anything to do with the murder. I could almost buy the nightie as a coincidence. The cleaning ladies could have been careless. And Vanzetti was alone. He could’ve been there for three days without ever closing the john door. Or maybe he wouldn’t bother complaining if he did see it. But there’s no way in hell the Kleenex was in the trashcan for three days and the nightgown and mascara go together like a hooker’s knees at the sight of an empty wallet.”

  “And you have the fingerprints. Someone was in the room long enough to get a drink.”

  “Yeah, too bad we don’t have one of them super computers like the cops on TV have. We could zap those babies through it and come up with the owner’s name, address, and favorite food in about five seconds flat. The only other new stuff I have is a bunch of worthless shit about Vanzetti. That man was a high-class transient. Lived in ritzy hotels, didn’t have any personal belongings except a bunch of expensive clothes. Regular customer of a classy call-girl operation. Sounds like a real loner. Didn’t socialize much even with his criminal buddies. They didn’t like him because he was an unfriendly bastard, but they tolerated him because he did his job.”

  “How did he get to Mackie
?”

  “If you mean how did he come about picking Mackie as a place to die, we don’t know. How he got here was in a car. He left his brand-new Caddie behind in Chicago, bought an eighty-three Chevy off a used car lot. Paid cash and registered it under the name of John Thornton.”

  “You said he did twenty years. What was he in for?”

  “Homicide. I wish some of these assholes we arrest would get twenty years. That was a while back, though. Vanzetti was sent up when he was twenty-nine, got out when he was forty-nine. Hell of a way to spend the best years of your life, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is. Why hasn’t there been any mention of a woman in the news reports?”

  “Aw, that’s the fucking Feds. They think they’re running some kind of covert operation or something.”

  Phil was silent for a moment. Not exactly silent, he was whistling softly, a sure sign that his thoughts were elsewhere. I tried to see what Allison was doing. She had taken the stationery store bag out of a drawer and put her glasses on. She was sitting at the table with her back to me and was doing something that produced a tiny repetitive scratching sound. I couldn’t figure it out.

  “Did Vanzetti have a gun?” I asked Phil.

  “No, and that’s a hell of a note. Seems to me an ex-con running from the Feds would carry one. He had a shotgun and a rifle in the trunk of his car but nothing in the room. And no handgun in the car. Which makes me think maybe he was shot with his own gun and the killer took it with him. Or her. The other thing that’s bugging the hell out of me is where did Vanzetti get the hundred and fifty thousand. He wasn’t paid enough to have that much petty cash lying around and he had a reputation for not putting anything away for a rainy day. So how are you doing? I haven’t seen Jessica Finney down at the old malt shop.”

  “I’m still looking.”

  “Is it raining there?” Phil sounded wistful.

  “Pouring, as a matter of fact.”

  “Jesus, I wish it would rain here. It was a hundred and two yesterday and the fucking air conditioner went on the fritz. We had prisoners upstairs trying to confess to felonies just so’s we’d transfer them to the county jail. We’ll be lucky if one of them doesn’t file a suit for cruel and unusual punishment. We finally took them outside and turned the hose on. You shoulda seen it, Bucky, a bunch of hungover drunks running through the sprinkler like little kids. And the photographer from the Mirror showed up, of course. Someone’s yelling for me, I gotta go. Call me later.”

  I said okay and hung up. The telephone immediately rang.

  It was Marilyn. “Well, it’s about time,” she said. “The motel operator had me on hold for ten minutes. Hank Johnston wants you to call. You have his number?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.” I broke the connection and called Hank. Same song, second verse. Jessica had called again to tell him to tell her dad to tell me to stop looking for her.

  I called Finney. He swore lengthily, asked a few pointless questions, and hung up on me. He was consistent anyway. Since he hadn’t fired me, I decided I’d better go out and look for his daughter.

  But first I wanted to see what the scratching sound was. I walked over and stood behind Allison’s chair. She had one of the tourist brochures that had been in the room open to a page with a picture of a full-blown rose. She was duplicating the flower on a piece of scratchboard she had cut to about five by seven inches. Each tiny movement of the X-Acto knife scraped off a bit of the black coating, revealing the white beneath. I realized I had seen scratchboard drawings before and had admired them without having any idea how they were done.

  “You’re good,” I said. “Are you an art student?”

  She shook her head. “It’s just a hobby.”

  I moved around so I could see her face. “What are you crying about?”

  She took her glasses off and brushed a hand across her wet cheeks. “Nothing. I was just feeling sad.”

  I crouched beside the chair. She leaned her head on my shoulder, wrapping her arms tight around me.

  “I wish you’d let me help,” I said.

  She let go of me and straightened up. “I’m all right, really. I think it’s the rain. It always makes me feel sad.”

  “It always makes me feel wet.” She smiled, just a little. “And I have to go out in it now,” I added. “Are you going to be okay?”

  She nodded. I kissed her on the forehead and left.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The steady rain didn’t make it any easier to find Jessica but it didn’t make it any harder either. I had my usual amount of success. I called my office number every thirty minutes out of sheer boredom. No one called in response to my flyers. Hank Johnston didn’t call to betray any new confidences from Jessica. Jefferson Bundy didn’t call to invite me down to look at pictures of dead girls. Jason Finney didn’t call to hang up on me. In fact, the whole world didn’t call.

  Late in the afternoon, I was in the neighborhood so I stopped by the Justice Center to see if Bundy was around. He was.

  “You’re dripping all over the floor,” he said by way of a greeting.

  “It’s raining.” I shook the water from my cowboy hat and sat down on the chair in front of his desk. “Did you figure out who killed Dobbs and Baylor yet?”

  “Hell, no. Did you find the Finney girl?”

  I said no and told him about Jessica’s calls to Hank.

  “So you’re looking for her and she’s looking out for you. Maybe you should consider a disguise.”

  “I do a great Michael J. Fox impersonation. Listen, I met a boy last night. He’s about twelve, dresses like the Tooth Fairy, and lives with a ‘friend’ who gives him limo service home.”

  Bundy said, “You mean Nikki, darling?”

  At least that’s the way I heard it and in the instant before I heard it right, I felt my jaw drop. I started laughing so hard I almost tipped the chair over. Bundy crossed his arms and glared. After a moment, his shoulders were shaking. He gave up and started laughing, too, and then we were lost. Every time our eyes met we laughed harder, like two kindergartners caught in a giggling fit. Bundy finally walked out of the room. I deep-breathed for a while and managed to meet his eyes, straight-faced, when he came back.

  “You mind telling me what I’m laughing about?”

  I told him about Nikki introducing himself and my assumption that the “darling” was directed at me. “And when you said Nikki Darling…”

  “Don’t start up again. I got a stitch in my side already.”

  “Is that his real name?”

  “He says it is. Who knows? What’s your problem with him? Did he proposition you?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the problem. I don’t like the way he lives.”

  “And you think we should do something about it? What do you suggest? We could bring him in for curfew any night of the week but he’s safer on the street. We got kids in Detention who would rip him to shreds. We can’t put him in with the girls. Shit, some of them would rip him to shreds. Juvie’s talked to him. He won’t say who his people are and you can bet your ass they don’t want him back anyway. So what happens if we start him through the system? You know any couples waiting to adopt a racially-mixed thirteen-year-old with a severe gender-identity problem who dresses in drag? They probably couldn’t even get a foster home to take him. So he’d be placed in an institution. That’s if he stuck around, which he wouldn’t. He’d split the first chance he got.”

  “Whoever owns that limo isn’t taking care of him out of the goodness of his heart.”

  “No, but the question in Nikki’s case isn’t whether it’s right for him to be some rich old pervert’s plaything. The question is whether that’s better than him turning twenty tricks a night for some pimp. He’s fed, he’s clothed, he’s sheltered. I don’t think he does drugs. He goes to private school. He goes to church, for Christ’s sake. We got upwards of five hundred minors living on the street in this town. Hell, you’ve been out there talking to them. They’re hungry, they
’re sick, they’re scared. Nikki isn’t hurting. His keeper’s up in his sixties and I don’t think there’s a whole lot of action going on. So Nikki cheats a little on the side. At least he’s selective.”

  “Should I take that as a compliment?”

  “Take it any way you want. But take it out of my office. I got work to do. And forget about Nikki. Stick to saving the one you’re being paid to save.”

  “I’m not making much headway there.”

  “Welcome to the club.”

  “Okay if I use your phone?”

  Bundy shoved it toward me and I called the motel to see if Allison was hungry. She was starving. “Put your blue dress on and I’ll take you out to dinner,” I said.

  She asked if I could bring something to the motel instead.

  “Sure, I’ll be there in about an hour.”

  I hung up and looked at Bundy, who was grinning broadly.

  “Must be one fine-looking dress to rate a smile like that over the telephone,” he said. I wasn’t aware of any smile and I used the back of my hand to remove any lingering trace of it. “Or one fine-looking woman,” he added.

  I muttered something about her just being a friend and left Bundy laughing over his homicide reports.

  I used a pay phone to make my second dinner date for the evening.

  “Do I get dessert?” Virginia asked.

  “Only if you eat all your veggies.”

  “I love veggies,” she gushed.

  I told her I’d pick her up about seven and headed to the motel, stopping on the way to buy ham and swiss sandwiches on onion rolls, pasta salad, and one piece of cheesecake. I figured I’d skip dessert since I was having dinner again in less than two hours. There was a T-shirt shop next to the deli and I picked out a shirt for Allison. It was blue with a cartoonish, disgruntled duck in a raincoat on the front. Above the duck it said “Oregon Rain Festival” and below the duck it gave the dates of the festival—January First through December Thirty-first. I felt the typical eastern Oregonian’s irritation at the assumption that all of Oregon was in the wet spot west of the Cascades, but I figured Allison would like the shirt.