by Frank Zafiro
“A few months ago. It wasn’t a passing fancy for him. I could tell he was building up to it. The thing is, I don’t know how he was going to finance it. He wasn’t exactly poor, but I don’t think he was swimming in cash, either. Not enough to start a new life, anyway.”
“He was a councilman,” I said. “They have to make good money.”
She snorted lightly through her nose. “I thought so, too. But you know what? The city considers it a part time job, even though I know he put in a lot of hours. They didn’t pay shit.”
“How much?”
She rattled off a figure. I raised my eyebrows and gave a low whistle. I made more than that as a first year police officer fifteen or so years ago. “Not much to live on,” I observed. “How’d he manage?”
“He owned a coffee stand,” she said. “Extreme Caffeine?”
I shrugged. There was a coffee stand on almost every corner in River City. We probably out-coffeed Seattle on that point, even though we were a quarter the size of the Emerald City. Still, most of those stands were small gold mines.
“So he worked a coffee stand by day and was a council member by night?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. He owned the stand, but he didn’t work there. He had a manager that ran the place and pretty little baristas to serve the coffee. But between the money from that place and his council salary, he did okay.”
Okay enough to afford you, I thought, but I kept my words to myself.
She looked at me as if she’d heard my thoughts, but said nothing about it. “In the last few months, he’d gotten excited about the whole idea of leaving River City and starting a new life. He never gave me any details, but he said that he was getting closer to realizing his dream. I always took that to mean that he was working up the courage to do it, but in the last few weeks, I started to think he was actually doing something specific to make it happen.”
“Why?”
“At first it was just a feeling. Then he started to say things like, ‘I’m getting closer’ and ‘Couple more moves.’ That made it pretty obvious.” She met my eyes. “And then he asked me to do something very important for him.”
“You’re talking about the exchange at the Rocket?”
“You saw that?” she asked, looking a little surprised.
I nodded.
“Well, yes, that was it. Lawrence stayed the night with me. We’d been up at my kitchen table all through the evening and into the morning, talking about everything but his plans.” She smiled, her eyes distant. “We’d rented an old movie and he kept quoting the funniest lines from it at random times throughout the night. It became like a secret, funny code.” She shook her head slightly, seeming to clear the memory away. “Then, around five in the morning, he asked to use my phone. He called someone, spoke cryptically for a few minutes, then hung up. After that, he asked me for a favor.”
“He wanted you to deliver a package,” I said.
“Yes.”
“What was in it?”
“I don’t know.”
I stared into her single deep brown eye, looking for the truth.
“I don’t,” she repeated. “The package was already wrapped in a box, made to look like a gift.”
“Was it heavy?”
“No. It was light.”
“How light?”
“Almost like nothing was in it.”
I nodded. “And who was the old guy?”
“I don’t know. Lawrence told me to go in and meet him. I was supposed to pretend he was a date, bring him outside and then exchange the package for the envelope.”
“What was in the envelope?”
“I’m not sure, but I think it was money. It felt like money.”
“You walked away while the other two both drove,” I said.
She nodded. “I went around the corner and Lawrence picked me up. He was very excited. He said that everything was done now and that he’d be leaving soon.”
“I suppose that could still mean he intended to...do what he did, but-”
“No,” she said adamantly. “He asked me to go with him again. He wasn’t planning on killing himself. He was planning on leaving River City and he wanted me to come along.”
“What did you say?”
She shook her head slowly, sadly. “I said no.”
We sat and stared at each other for a long while. My unspoken conclusion hung between us, but neither of us said a word. She didn’t seem to want to believe it was possible and I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was.
“How did he take it?”
She shrugged. “Like he took everything. He absorbed it, internalized it. Acted like it was nothing.”
“Did you see him again?”
She shook her head no.
“But you don’t think he killed himself?”
Another head shake.
I sighed. “Why not?”
“Because,” Monique said, “he called me later on the phone. And I changed my mind. I told him yes. I’d leave with him.”
9
If what Monique was saying were true, it made Tate’s death more suspicious. Why would a guy with plans to run away with a lover and the money to do it suddenly kill himself?
“How firm were your plans?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, was it just ‘let’s run away together’, as in an idea? Or did you have a destination in mind?”
“Oh. Yes, we had a plan. Montreal. I grew up in Laval, Quebec. Montreal is the closest I’ll ever get to going home. And no one there will care about the color of our skin not matching.”
“So you loved him?” I asked. It was a cliché, a call girl and a john falling in love. I had a hard time believing it.
She didn’t reply right away. Finally, she said, “I can’t answer that question in a way you’d understand. The closest I can come is to just say yes.”
I stared at the floor and thought things through, running everything I’d learned through my mind. I looked for connections, for possibilities. The human heart is a dark place, though, and understanding motivations isn’t always easy. Then again, movivation usually comes straight out of the big three – sex, money or power.
When I looked up again, Monique had fallen asleep. Our conversation must have taken a lot out of her. The steady beep of the heart monitor and the slight whistle of her breath going in and out filled the quiet room.
I need help.
10
It was late, but I figured that the escort business was a nighttime trade, so I called Rhonda from the hospital lobby.
She answered on the third ring. “Rolo said you’d be calling,” she said after I identified myself.
“He also said you might have a list for me?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know what good it’ll do you. It’s just code numbers for her clients. You’ll have to get her to match up who each one of them is, if she even knows.”
She knows one, I thought.
“Can I pick it up from you?”
“I don’t want you coming to the house,” she said.
“Okay. Where?”
“There’s a convenience store at 29th and Grand. You know it?”
“I know it.”
“I’ll meet you there in half an hour. I’ll be in a silver Lexus.”
She hung up without saying goodbye.
The drive to 29th and Grand only took me ten minutes. I sat in the parking lot, backed into the spot farthest from the front door. I hoped Rhonda was on time. If I sat here for too long, I was pretty sure the clerk inside would make me for casing the place to rob it. The last thing I really wanted right now was to come across the boys in blue. Enough time had passed that it was becoming less and less likely that the responding patrol officers would know me. But I didn’t need the complication right now.
While I waited, I thought about the mad rush that had been the last twenty-four hours. I was involved now. There was no sense trying to change that, so I put my mind to w
ork on how to solve this situation. Rolo wanted to know who put Monique in the hospital. No, more importantly, he wanted to know what world that man came from and why he threw her a beating. That was a mystery. However, it didn’t seem like it would be too hard to figure it out after some poking around. The harder part was what Monique wanted. She didn’t think Tate committed suicide. I didn’t necessarily buy that yet, but she was convinced and wanted me to prove it somehow.
Monique was convincing. More so than Rolo’s money or the underlying, unspoken threat of force. Her manner, her aura, whatever you want to call it, it all spoke of truth, or at least less guile than I’ve seen everywhere else I’ve looked these days.
Or maybe I was just kidding myself because I wanted to be a hero for someone. I’ve only worked three cases since I quit being a cop, if you can call what I did “cases.” Better to call them “helping out a friend,” even though I only did two of them for money. The third one was for love. Unfortunately, none of them turned out so great.
Sometimes you do the right thing for the right reasons and the outcome still sucks.
A few minutes later, a small, sporty silver Lexus turned into the parking lot. The parking lot lights glinted off the high gloss of the metallic paint. The car drove directly toward me.
Times had changed. Last time I'd seen Rhonda, she'd been slutted up, working in The Hole. The Lexus spoke of her change in station as much as her classy new hairdo and understated makeup.
When she rolled down the window, I caught a faint whiff of her perfume. Even that smelled subtle but expensive, an untouchable jasmine.
“Never thought I’d see you again,” she said coolly.
“Same here,” I answered.
She handed a thin manila envelope out her window toward me. I took it and set in on the seat beside me.
Rhonda stared at me for a few seconds, her eyes seeming to calculate some equation before she spoke. Finally, she said, “Monique isn’t my best girl.”
I raised my eyebrows a little. That didn’t seem like a nice thing to say about someone who was currently hooked up to an IV.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Rhonda said. “Don’t judge. Everyone judges, and all that judgment is bullshit.”
I didn’t respond. Who was I to talk about judgment, anyway?
“The thing is,” she said, “even though she doesn’t earn as much as a couple of other girls, she’s sweet. She’s easy to be around. She doesn’t lie. That’s probably because she’d never been in the life the same as some of us. Never worked streetside.”
Like you, I almost said, but didn’t. Somehow I didn’t think Rhonda wanted to remember her past.
“Maybe that’s what got her beat,” Rhonda went on. “Maybe she didn’t have the street smarts to see it coming. I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either.”
“But you’re going to find out.”
“I’m going to try.”
“Rolo’s not paying you to try. He’ll want results.”
I looked her in the eye. “Rolo will get what he gets, and that’ll be whatever I can give him. I’m not a magician.”
“You better work some motherfucking magic,” she said, her voice hardening, “or that night in the alley behind The Hole is going to seem like a play date.”
She stared at me with a hard, flat expression as she powered up the window. Then she backed out and zipped away.
I sat for a few moments, wondering what to make of her. Were those her words, or a message Rolo wanted to send? A spark of anger flared in my chest. I never gave him a guarantee.
In the end, I figured it didn’t matter whose message it was. If it was Rhonda saying it, she was probably just pissed to have to talk to someone who knew she’d once trolled East Sprague and thrown blowjobs in alleys and the front seats of cars. If it were Rolo sending a message, it wasn’t going to change whether I was going to be successful or not.
I guess it just changed the stakes a little bit.
Or a lot.
I drove away from the convenience store before the clerk decided that the suspicious guy in the Celica wasn’t casing the place but was dealing drugs and called the police for that instead.
Grand Avenue turns to a twenty mile an hour zone all along Manito Park, and I dropped my speed to comply. When I approached the entrance to the park, I turned the wheel and drove in. There were some parking spots that looked over the duck pond. The moon reflected off the acre-sized patch of water and when I rolled down the window, the air smelled fresh, and good.
I tore open the envelope and looked inside.
There were no names, only numbers. The highest one was eleven. As I went down the appointment list, there were only four or five regulars. And all I knew was that one of them was Councilman Lawrence Tate.
11
The next morning, I brewed a strong pot of coffee and sat at my small kitchen table, thinking things through as light streamed through the window and filled the room. Monique’s client list sat on the table in front of me, but it was useless until she translated it.
I needed to decide if I could do what Monique needed – find out if Tate was murdered and be the hero I wanted to be– and still satisfy what Rolo was paying me to do. The only way I saw it working out for everyone concerned was if Monique was right about Tate being murdered and if her being assaulted was related to that murder somehow.
Those seemed like two giant what-ifs to overcome, and there was not a whole lot of what-if to how Rolo would react if I didn’t get him the answers he needed.
Still, it was odd. Tate tries to get Monique to run off with him and she refuses. Then, as soon as she agrees, he kills himself? It didn’t make sense, unless he was full of shit about the running away part the whole time.
I considered that. Rhonda was right about Monique being sweet. Her kind nature radiated from her in quiet waves. But maybe the price of that kindness was that she didn’t see that Tate’s talk was all fantasy.
What if it wasn’t, though? What if he was serious? Then what?
I sipped the last of my coffee and tried to get my grip on that thought. I grappled with it for a few minutes, then rose and put my cup in the sink. I’d work it out on the way to the hospital.
I got in my car, my mind still working on the questions of this case as I drove.
If Tate really was serious about leaving town, then suicide makes no sense. If he really intended to leave with Monique, there was no way he would kill himself right then.
So either he was lying to her, or fantasizing or whatever, or…
Or he was murdered.
I stopped for red light, tapping the streering wheel with my thumbs.
Murder was a stretch. A huge stretch. Especially the way it happened. The guy suffocated on carbon monoxide in his own garage. I suppose someone could have just cracked him over the head and propped him up in the front seat, unconscious. Then all the killer would have to do is turn on the car and leave.
But if that happened, the autopsy would show the head trauma, and the cops would know it was murder.
So what did someone do, stand next to his car and hold a gun on him while wearing a gas mask? Even that wouldn’t work. The gunman would have to be wearing to self-contained breathing gear. How ridiculous was that?
Crazy ridiculous, that’s what it was.
Still.
Monique believed it.
The light turned green and I goosed the accelerator.
“Okay,” I muttered, “let’s roll with it. Tate was murdered. Now what?”
Exactly. How does that murder result in Monique’s assault?
Actually, once I got past the improbability of Tate’s death being a murder, the assault on Monique wasn’t as difficult. She’d passed something to the old man in the red Cadillac. It had been wrapped as a gift, but she said it was really light. The envelope he passed back to her for Tate had almost certainly been money. So Tate was obviously up to something crooked, and bad things can happen to people who mes
s around with crooked things.
Bad things can happen to the people around them, too.
So maybe Monique’s beating was a message from someone to shut up about something?
Could be, I thought. Only it was a mistake, because she obviously didn’t know what they thought she did, or she’d have told me already and this would be less of a mystery.
I paused there. Now I was making an assumption that I didn’t necessarily know was true. That Monique was telling me the truth, or at least all of the truth. I couldn’t forget what she did for a living. She played to men’s needs, physical and emotional. I imagine that the emotional, the ego, was probably the most important part of that equation. And to do that, to make them believe enough to keep coming back and keep paying her, she had to be good at it. She had to be able to convince them it was true. Or true enough.
She had to be an actress.
At her bedside, touching her hand, looking into her eyes, she seemed so sincere. She seemed so lost. So tired. Like she needed me.
Which, I told myself, is exactly what she’d be good at.
A little anger tickled my gut at the possibility of being played by Monique like just another gullible john. Then I felt stupid for falling for it. A moment later, doubt crept in. The truth was, I didn’t know for sure if that was what she’d done.
The only way to know was to confront her. Ask her who did this and why she was hiding it from Rolo. Watch her reaction, listen to her explanation. Then decide what to do.
It wasn’t like I worked for her. It wasn’t like she’d paid me.
By the time I parked and walked into the hospital, anger won out over the rest. The most likely answer to everything was that Tate had committed suicide and that, for whatever reason, Monique was manipulating me like every other man she came across.
But to what end?
I followed the orange lines to the elevator and headed up to the third floor. On the short ride up, I took a deep breath and let it out. It wasn’t going to do any good to go stomping in there like a mad bull. The nurses would pick up on that and might not even let me see her. I needed things to be a controlled burn, not a wildfire.
