Читать книгу All White Girls - Michael Bracken - Страница 6

CHAPTER 2

Rickenbacher suppressed a belch, then rolled over and retrieved the ringing phone from the stand next to his bed. The answering machine in the living room wouldn’t pick up until the sixth ring and he didn’t want to wait for it. He closed his eyes against the sunlight streaming into his room through a gap between the curtains. Into the receiver, he said, “Rickenbacher.”

Hubert Cove identified himself, then asked, “Any luck?”

“Some. Not much.”

“You’ve been at it for a week.”

“This is a big city.”

“Then make it smaller.”

Rickenbacher didn’t respond. He suppressed another belch.

“Just find her.”

Rickenbacher heard the click as Cove broke the connection. Then he rolled over, replaced the phone on the night stand, and lay on his stomach, his head turned to the side to stare at the broken paneling on his bedroom wall. A moment later he kicked his legs free of the tangled, sweat-stained sheets, then twisted until he sat upright on the edge of the bed. The sudden surge of movement did nothing to still the thunderstorm in his head nor did it quell the hurricane in his gut.

He’d finished an opened bottle of Jack Daniel’s he’d found in the cabinet under the kitchen sink when he’d finally returned home the previous evening, mourning a past that he’d long ago tried to forget, and his awakening had reminded Rickenbacher that he wasn’t as young and as tough as he’d once been. Lately, he lost more often than he won when he went ten rounds with Jack, and the hangover coursing through his body reminded Rickenbacher that he’d lost another fight.

He pushed himself off the bed and stumbled into the bathroom where he stood under a cold shower for almost half an hour before he made any effort to bathe.

Later, having dressed and having prepared himself a breakfast of lukewarm coffee, Rickenbacher sat at his kitchen table and thumbed through the slim folder of information Hubert Cove had sent. Inside were additional copies of Katherine Cove’s high school graduation photo, a newspaper article that listed her as second place winner in a locally-sponsored essay contest, a photocopy of the neatly-typed letter she’d mailed to her father the day she’d left home, and the report a well-known licensed detective agency had prepared for Katherine’s father before he’d fired them. Rickenbacher reviewed his notes, the seemingly meaningless jumble of words he’d jotted down to remind himself of the things her father had told him, of the things her high school teachers and friends had told him, and of the things he’d figured out on his own as he’d filtered through everything he’d learned since her father’s first phone call.

Katherine had been an average student, though she’d done particularly well in her English classes and always seemed to be reading. She attended church each Sunday with her father, often helping care for the younger children after children’s church. She’d dated a few times, but had never gone steady; had a date for Homecoming but not for the Senior Prom. Her friends had figured her to get a job at the new Wal-Mart after graduation and be married with children within five years. What none of them had expected is what had happened. She’d taken a bus to the city using a ticket she’d paid for with money saved from various baby-sitting jobs.

When he closed the folder and tossed it across the kitchen table, Rickenbacher knew no more about Hubert’s only child than he had known when he’d looked at everything the previous morning. During the week since Cove’s original phone call, Rickenbacher had exhausted the obvious sources of information. He’d tracked Katherine’s driver’s license through the Department of Motor Vehicles, but she’d not submitted a change of address, nor had she ever received any moving violations; he’d tracked her social security number through both the Social Security Administration and the state’s Department of Employment Security, but they had no record of her ever obtaining legitimate employment; neither of the city’s two largest credit agencies had any record of her; she’d not obtained a phone in her own name; nor, according to Lieutenant Castellano, had she ever been arrested in the city.

Rickenbacher didn’t like dead ends—dead ends had a bad habit of leading to dead people. And he didn’t like Hubert Cove. Even though they’d never met, even though all he knew about Cove was the sound of the man’s voice, his dislike for incompetent agencies that did little and charged heavily, and the fact that his checks didn’t bounce, Cove grated on his nerves. If he’d been hired for any reason other than the disappearance of Cove’s daughter, Rickenbacher would have refunded the advance to be shed of the man.

Instead, he pushed himself away from the table and up from the yellow vinyl kitchen chair, rinsed his coffee mug under cold tap water and set it upside down on a faded dishtowel next to the sink, then retrieved a sky blue windbreaker from the coat closet to pull over his bulky sweater. From his collection of nearly a dozen hats, Rickenbacher selected a dark blue baseball cap devoid of logos and pulled it snug over his head, covering the bald spot whose very presence annoyed him almost as much as Hubert Cove.

The apartment door opened directly to the outside and Rickenbacher carefully secured the dead bolt behind him before looking over the second-floor railing and down at the parking lot where his Pontiac 6000 used to be. Three weeks earlier the car had disappeared during the night and pieces of it had probably made their way from a local chop shop to service stations and auto parts stores all over the midwest. The dark green Dodge van now in his parking space had belonged to his brother-in-law until Rickenbacher had peeled five crumpled hundreds out of his wallet and had taken possession away from the wiry young auto mechanic his sister had married seven years earlier. The van—all he could afford when the insurance company’s check did little more than pay off the outstanding loan balance on the Pontiac—had quickly become familiar.

The concrete stairs leading down were halfway between his apartment and the one to his left as he faced the street and he took them two at a time, zipping his windbreaker closed against the late morning chill.

He nodded to Mrs. Stegmann and her obese white poodle as he climbed into the van, then he brought the engine to life and backed out of his parking space. When he pulled into traffic, Rickenbacher pointed the van toward the bus station downtown. One of the two file folders on the passenger seat contained the material he’d obtained from Mr. Johnson’s office the night before. In the other were a dozen copies of Katherine’s graduation photo. He would show Katherine’s photograph around and see if anyone remembered a nervous young blonde from downstate Illinois stepping off a bus six weeks earlier.

And who might have met her or picked her up.

* * * *

Less than a mile away, someone had turned a hotel room into a Jackson Pollock abstract using only red. Blood red.

Inside the room, officers from the Mobile Crime Scene Unit finished photographing the scene, then called the Emergency Medical Technicians back in to remove the body.

In the hall just outside, a greasy little man stood with Lieutenant Castellano, twitching nervously. “Rosalinda didn’t come in today, that’s why I was cleaning the rooms. I told her if she misses work one more time I’ll fire her. That’s what I’ll do if she ever comes back. Fire her. I’ll bet she doesn’t even have a green card. I’ll bet—”

The Lieutenant lightly touched the manager’s bony shoulder, silencing him. The little man swallowed hard, then pushed his hair off his forehead with one gnarled hand and waited for the Lieutenant’s question.

“You touch anything?”

“Just the door when I opened it. It was 11:30. Check-out’s at 11:00 but the Do Not Disturb sign was still hanging from the door. I knocked and when nobody answered, I used my pass key to open the door. The drapes were pulled shut so I turned on the light. I didn’t see her. I just saw the blood.” He pushed his hair away from his face again. “I saw all the blood and then I turned and I saw her on the bed and—”

“You touched the light switch?”

“Yeah, I turned on the light.”

“You touch anything else?”

“Nothing. I swear it. I didn’t touch nothing.”

Two Emergency Medical Technicians wheeled a stretcher out of the room, a full body bag its only occupant. The Grafenberg Hotel’s manager turned away, almost gagging when he realized what the body bag contained.

“What did you do then?”

“I backed up, backed right out of the room and pulled the door closed.”

“Closed?”

“It wouldn’t do for the other guests to see something like that.”

“Then?”

“I dialed 911.”

“From where?”

“My office. I went straight to my office and dialed 911 and I waited in the lobby until a cop showed up. I took him directly to the room and then I got the hell out of the way like he told me to.”

Both men were silent for a moment, then Lieutenant Castellano asked, “Who rented the room?”

“I don’t know. He said his name was Marky D. Sod. That’s how he registered.”

“Did he show you any identification?”

“I didn’t ask. Why would I ask? He paid cash up front. Most people do when they come here.”

“Do you know who the Marquis de Sade is?”

“Should I?”

The Lieutenant shrugged, then dismissed the nervous little man and stepped into the hotel room where a pair of officers from the Mobile Crime Scene Unit used tongs and tweezers to slip various bits of potential evidence into individual evidence bags, each one labeled like leftovers from a particularly messy holiday gathering. Someone had forced open the room’s only window and had propped it up with a Gideon’s Bible. Air moved slowly through the opening but a dying city’s smog smelled little better than one woman’s death and the Lieutenant covered his mouth with his fist and coughed into it.

“Anything?” the Lieutenant asked the taller officer as he leaned against the dresser, his hands at his side, the palm and two fingers of his right hand pressed against the wood.

“Partials on the night stand and all over the bathroom. Lots of fluids, apparently seminal.”

“We got a cause of death?”

“Multiple stab wounds to the abdomen and torso, defensive cuts on the dorsal side of her arms where she tried to defend herself. You’ll have to wait for the M.E.’s report to confirm what I’ve just told you.”

“Of course,” Castellano said. “Where’d she die?”

“On the bed. There’s no evidence that the body had been moved after death. There’s lividity in her back, buttocks, and the backs of her legs. The sheets and the mattress are blood-soaked and, despite the condition of the room, there’s nothing to indicate that the body was transported.”

The shorter officer looked up and saw where the Lieutenant’s hand rested. “Lieutenant,” he said, “we haven’t dusted there yet.”

Castellano jerked his hand away from the dresser. “Sorry.”

* * * *

At 6’4,” Rickenbacher appeared inconspicuous only in a big and tall men’s shop; at the bus station he towered over the ticket takers and the bag ladies. He used this advantage to extract answers from even the most reluctant potential witness. Even so, none could identify the girl in the photo he repeatedly displayed for their examination.

“When you say she come through here?” A stringy black man the color and texture of a raisin squinted at the photo, his brow furrowed in concentration. The seventeen-year-old blonde in the photo had since turned eighteen, but to the man holding the photo it didn’t matter. He saw a young white woman wearing her best beige blouse. It had been buttoned demurely, revealing no hint of cleavage. She also wore a pair of gold chains around her neck, each bearing a tiny gold cross that nestled in the valley of cloth between her breasts. Her wavy blonde hair had been sun-bleached the color of honey and it cascaded loosely over her shoulders, ending nearly halfway down her back. Her pale blue eyes sparkled and the corners of her lips were pulled up in a coy smile as if she’d remembered the punchline to her favorite joke just as the photographer captured her image on film.

“Month ago,” Rickenbacher prompted.

“She pretty. Real pretty.” The black man looked up. “Lotsa pretty girls come through here.”

“Yeah. This one?”

Shaking his head, the black man returned the photo to Rickenbacher. He’d crumpled the edge and Rickenbacher carefully smoothed the photo as he listened.

“She come through here, I never see her.”

Rickenbacher nodded his thanks and moved on.

A moment later a uniformed police officer stopped him. “You’ve been asking a lot of questions, bothering a lot of people.”

Rickenbacher pushed the baseball cap back on his head and waited.

The cop touched Rickenbacher’s forearm, unwilling to make a scene when he had no backup, but wanting to encourage the bigger man to cooperate. “I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

Rickenbacher’s gaze slowly swept the interior of the bus depot, taking in the flatulent old women huddled under layers of Goodwill clothing, the young Puerto Rican pushing a broom across the broken tile as he bounced to music only he heard through the headphones of a Walkman radio, and the trio of adolescent Marines laughing at each other’s scatological jokes as they awaited their Greyhound limo back to camp. Then he walked with the officer toward the glass doors at the southern end of the building.

As they stepped outside, the officer asked, “What’s got you bugging all these people?”

Rickenbacher showed him the photo of Katherine Cove.

“Good looking girl.” The officer looked up from the photo. “Your daughter?”

Rickenbacher said she wasn’t.

“Then check the stretch. She’s probably giving head for twenty bucks a pop.” He laughed as he nudged Rickenbacher with his elbow. “If you don’t find her, you’ll find one just like her.”

Rickenbacher stared down at the blue uniform, wondering how long the city had been hiring children to patrol the streets. Then he pocketed the photo and turned away.

The officer called after him, “This place is like a cherry tree. We do our best, but we can’t keep the pimps from picking the ripe ones when they arrive.”

Rickenbacher had parked his van a block away from the bus station. On his way to it, he stepped into a noisy diner and used the pay phone to call Colette Rees and make an appointment to meet her at the Muff Inn later that afternoon.

Rickenbacher had a list of places to visit after he completed the call, and he began with the nearest one and worked his way down the list. While he visited the main offices of the gas, electric, and cable television companies, the police were busy working on another case involving a young girl.

In various locations around town, uniformed patrol officers and plainclothes detectives talked to their favorite snitches and collected a motley group of men informally known as the usual suspects, seeking information about the previous evening’s murder of a brunette teenager. Within a few hours all but one of the known violent sex offenders had been released, and the remainder waited patiently for yet another interrogation.

* * * *

The smell of desperation hung in the air like the cloyingly cheap perfume of redneck women. The habitual criminals had long since moved on, leaving only the hard-core alcoholics sleeping off their latest binges and the first-time offenders whose families were too poor to raise bond or post bail.

Lieutenant Castellano walked down the center of the aisle without really noticing the two dozen men crowded into a cell designed for twelve. He’d never seen the holding tank when it wasn’t overflowing with society’s effluent, and he’d long since passed the point where he noticed or cared. He did notice the wiry blond sitting behind a scarred wooden table in a cramped room on the north side of the building, just past the holding cell. Behind him stood a beefy sergeant whose expansive gut strained the glittering gold buttons of his blue uniform.

The Lieutenant slipped easily into the remaining chair, adjusted the creases on his precisely pressed black slacks as he settled in, and then asked the sergeant without looking at him, “Read him his rights?”

“Twice.”

Lieutenant Castellano looked a question at Sergeant Kowalski.

“I don’t think he understood me the first time.” The sergeant ran a handful of sausage-thick fingers through his closely-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. On the street he had busted heads with his billy and his bare hands long before criminals had rights, but Kowalski had changed with the times and knew just how far he could go before Internal Affairs would question him.

The Lieutenant returned his gaze to the man on the other side of the table. Gilly Boy Thomas stared back through a tangle of greasy blond hair that fell over his forehead and nearly hid his cobalt blue eyes. Gilly Boy’s hands were folded neatly on the table before him, his wrists held only inches apart by a pair of stainless steel handcuffs.

“You like to cut women?”

“You’ve read my sheet,” Gilly Boy responded. “I’ve cut a few.” He seemed alert but wary, with no indication that he had any difficulty hearing or understanding the Lieutenant’s question.

Lieutenant Castellano had carried a slim manila folder into the room with him and he placed it on the table. From it, he withdrew a pair of 8”x10” glossy photos of the dead woman found at the Grafenberg Hotel and he slid them across the table. “You cut this one?”

Gilly Boy picked up the first photo and examined it closely, the way an art critic might examine a newly discovered van Gogh. He smiled. “No, sir,” he said. “But somebody did a damn fine job on the bitch.”

“Seen your parole officer lately?”

“Tuesday last,” Gilly Boy said as he placed the first photo on the table and picked up the second. His faded jeans grew tight and he made no effort to disguise his pleasure. “She’s young.”

Lieutenant Castellano retrieved the photos much to Gilly Boy’s disappointment and returned them to the folder. The wiry blond watched until the folder snapped shut. The room remained silent save for Kowalski’s heavy breathing and the tick of the Lieutenant’s index fingernail against the table.

Finally, Gilly Boy asked, “Got any more pictures?”

Lieutenant Castellano pushed himself out of the chair and looked down on the wiry little man. Gilly Boy’s prison pallor had disappeared after six months on the outside, but he still bore the crudely etched tattoo of a prison gang on the back of his left hand.

The sergeant cleared his throat. When the Lieutenant looked up at him, Kowalski said, “He says he spent the night at his mother’s. She said the same thing.”

“Anybody else see him there?”

“The next-door-neighbor came over, spent about fifteen minutes in the same room with him.”

Gilly Boy smiled. His alibi had held.

“Cut him loose.”