Authors: Jaden Terrell
“What about earlier that morning? Or the night before? See anything unusual then?”
“I come in at nine, leave at five. And no, I didn’t see anything. Do you mind?” He held up his watch. “My client was gracious enough to reschedule, and I can’t afford to be late.”
I stepped aside, and Khanh moved with me, her presence an angry heat behind me, her breath between my shoulder blades quick and shallow. I said to Casey, “What is it you do, exactly?”
He locked the door behind him and held up the presentation folder. “Comics. Anime. That sort of thing. I’m a procurer.”
I wondered if he procured other things, but that was a question for another time. Beside me, Khanh cocked her head and listened to his footsteps clatter down the stairs. “He very big creep,” she said. “Woman die, Tuyet missing, he only care about stupid meeting.”
“He cared about the stripper,” I said. “For what it’s worth.”
“Not worth much,” she said. “Not even know her name.”
We stepped out into the cool, gray morning and made our way up my street and down the next, alternating sides, covering the apartment complex on the corner and the row houses that backed the alley. All dead ends. Not even old Mrs. Corcoran, who lived three doors down and spent her nights watching classic films and peering out the curtains at her neighbors, had seen anything out of the ordinary.
A little after one, Pat Freeman’s Chrysler pulled into the driveway next door. The driver’s door popped open, and Pat leaned his seat back so he could pass his wheelchair, sans wheels, across his body and onto the driveway. Standing, Pat would have been around six-four, with broad shoulders and a heavily muscled torso, but a bad tackle in his senior year had left him paralyzed from the waist down. Now he made his living freelancing for sports magazines and spent his off-hours kayaking and training for the Paralympics. Like Mrs. Corcoran, he was a night owl.
By the time Khanh and I got there, he had pulled both wheels out of the back seat. He looked up at us and grinned. “Hey, Cowboy,” he said. “Who’s your friend?”
I didn’t ask if he needed a hand. I knew he didn’t. Instead, while he reattached the wheels, I said, “Her daughter, Tuyet, is missing. Nineteen years old. Maybe related to the murder last week.”
He regarded her for a moment, then stuck out his left hand. She clasped it awkwardly with her good hand and gave him a self-conscious smile.
With the chair assembled and the right brake on, he lifted each leg out from under the steering wheel, then swung himself into the chair. “So you’re tracking down the missing daughter?”
“Something like that. Any chance you saw anything that night?”
“Only thing I saw was that little Strip-o-Gram girl. I don’t know when she came in, but she left around two thirty. I know because I heard a crash outside my garage, and when I looked out the window, I saw her hightailing it across the yard. She’d knocked over my garbage can.”
I turned it over in my head. “She didn’t find the body until that afternoon. So what scared her at two thirty that morning?”
He paused, hand stretched toward the chair arms in the passenger seat. “She didn’t find the body.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw the news. It was a blonde girl found the body.”
“Bridget. Right. That’s not who you saw running across your yard?”
“No. It was the little Mexican. Lupita. You’ve seen her. Petite. Hair like a black silk curtain, ass that won’t quit.” He glanced at Khanh and slid the chair arms into place. “Beg pardon, Ma’am. Talked to her a couple of times, but her English isn’t too good.”
“You describe her to the police?”
“I haven’t talked to the police. I was away all weekend, covering a wheelchair basketball tournament. I’m just now getting back.”
He couldn’t add anything more, so we shot the bull for a few minutes, and then he said, “You guys want to come in for lunch? I make a mean PB and J.”
“Next time, maybe. I need to confer with my client. And you might want to let the police know about Lupita.”
He gave me a mock salute. “Will do, Captain.”
As I walked Khanh back to my building, she poked me in the arm and said, “Client?”
“You wanted me to tell him you’re my maybe-half-sister from when my dad screwed around on my mom during the war?”
She shrugged. “Why not? Thing happen sometime. Nobody fault sometime. Get over it.”
7
I
didn’t answer. My head knew she was right. My father had been a young man in wartime, a long way from home. Lonely, scared, not knowing if the next day would be his last. Who knew what I might have done, in his shoes? But knowing and believing were two different things. I’d spent my life trying to live up to him. Now it seemed like there were some things not worth living up to.
It didn’t matter, in the long run. Khanh existed. She and Tuyet needed me, or someone like me, and whether or not any of us liked it, I was what they had.
I nudged Khanh up the porch steps.
Ina Taylor, owner of Strip-o-Grams, opened the door on my second knock. A cap of white curls framed a sweetly wrinkled face, and a pink sweater draped her bony shoulders, sleeves knotted at the chest. She looked like a kindly piano teacher—until you looked behind her wire-rimmed glasses into eyes as clear and cold as an Arctic winter.
She gave Khanh a quick, appraising glance, then dismissed her and turned her attention to me.
“Come in, Mr. McKean. Forgive the simple decor.”
Simple was an understatement. Hardwood floors. Beige couch and a couple of chairs on one end of the room, an open space with a ballet barre and a stripper’s pole at the other. A crocheted afghan thrown over the back of the couch for a splash of color.
I got down to business. “Ms. Ina, the girl who reported the body . . .”
“Bridget.”
“Tall, blonde, wearing jeans and a tank top when she talked to the police.”
“All right, Mr. McKean, we’ve established you know who she is. What’s your point?”
“She told police she found the body.”
“She did find the body.”
“She found it in the afternoon. But what about earlier? Say, around two thirty
A.M
.?”
She tilted her head and scanned my face with narrowed eyes. “She was coming back from an appointment, wanted to shower before she went home. She heard something in the alley, like a scuffle. It scared her.”
“Then later that day, she got Mr. Warfield to go with her to take out the trash, and that’s when she found the body.”
“So?”
“How many times you think she’s taken out the garbage around here?”
She pursed her lips. “A few.”
“She never asked Warfield for help before.”
“I told you, she’d heard something out there that scared her.”
“Or maybe she already had an idea what was in that dumpster because Lupita told her.”
She sucked in a little gasp of surprise, then caught herself and raised a calculated eyebrow. “Lupita?”
“She knocked over Pat Freeman’s garbage can. Pat recognized her. And then you staged it so Bridget would have a witness when she found the body later in the afternoon. Why wait so long?”
She picked at the knotted sleeves of her sweater. I could see her weighing it—how much we knew versus how much we were guessing. Whether it would be more trouble to tell the truth or lie. Finally, she straightened her shoulders and went for truth. “We hoped someone else would find it and save us the aggravation.”
“But no one did. Look, my—” I stopped,
my client
hanging on my tongue. “We don’t care about her immigration status. We’re just trying to find a missing girl. If Lupita saw something, she could maybe help us keep the same thing from happening to Khanh’s daughter.”
Khanh leaned forward, left hand wrapped around the monkey pendant between her breasts. “Please.”
The doorknob rattled, and Bridget strode in, her blonde hair pulled into two ponytails. She flashed us a smile, then tossed her gym bag into a corner, peeled off her sweatshirt and sweatpants, and began a series of dance stretches, clad only in a sports bra and a g-string.
For a moment, I lost the power of speech.
“Perk of sharing office space,” Ms. Ina said. “You’ve been a good neighbor, but that doesn’t mean I’ll sell out my girls for you.”
I tore my gaze away from the floor show. “Just ask Lupita. I promise I’ll keep her name out of it.”
“You can do that?”
“You have my word. I keep her out of it unless she gives me permission not to. We just want to find Tuyet.”
She gave her curls an absent pat. “Suppose I agree. What’s in it for us?”
“I’ll pay. Your regular rate. Just to talk to her.”
“I don’t think so. It could be dangerous. For the girl, and possibly for me. Inconvenient, at the least.”
“Double the rate, then.”
“Double. And a favor.”
“What favor?”
“I don’t know just yet, but one day, I’ll ask you for one, and you’ll say yes.”
“I’m not killing anybody.”
She smiled. “Good. I can’t think of anybody I want killed.”
I glanced at Khanh, saw the tension around her eyes.
“Okay,” I said. “Within reason.”
Ms. Ina hunched a bony shoulder. “I suppose that will do. But if she says no . . .”
“We’re no worse off than we are now.”
“Except for the favor. You owe that, either way.” She gave a curt nod and pulled her cell phone from her purse. “I’ll be right back.”
While she was in the next room, I watched Bridget dance. Every few moves, she’d catch my eye and give me a practiced, enigmatic smile. Her real smile was better. She was just finishing her routine when Ms. Ina came back, cell phone in hand.
“She’ll meet with you,” she said. “An hour from now at the Dairy Diner near Briley and McGavock Pike. You know where it is?”
I nodded.
“If you screw us over . . .”
“I won’t.”
Bridget put her right foot in her right hand and lifted it over her head. Laughed as I sputtered a good-bye. As the door closed behind us, Khanh nudged me in the ribs. “She like you.”
“She’s too young for me. Besides, she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at my wallet.”
“You handsome man,” she said, exaggerating her accent. “For round-eye American.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. She ducked her head, but not before I saw her faint smirk.
“Come on,” I said. “We’re burning daylight.”
“My mother say all time,” Khanh said, her voice tinged with wonder. “Burn daylight. Not Vietnam words. You father say?”
“My brother always said it. It’s a pretty common phrase around here, but I guess he could have gotten it from Dad.”
“Early bed, early rise,” she said. “Not count chicken still in egg.”
“Don’t count your chickens before they hatch,” I said.
Half a world away, my mother had said those same words to my brother and me. A big world, Malone had said. And yet, sometimes, so very small.
8
I
pulled out my cell phone and called Eric, Jay’s lover and my sometime sketch artist. After I’d filled him in, he agreed to meet us at the Dairy Diner. Thirty minutes later, we settled into the parking lot, Khanh and me in the Silverado, Eric idling in his Beamer, head tipped back against the headrest, fingers tapping on the steering wheel in time to some lively music we couldn’t hear. The lot was about half full, not bad for the middle of the afternoon.
Khanh and I sat in uncomfortable silence. I fidgeted with the radio. Poked my bobble-head Batman. Drummed on the steering wheel with considerably more vigor than Eric. Khanh sat perfectly still, eyes forward, jaw clenched. A muscle pulsed in her cheek, but her breathing was even. In for a count of four, out for a count of four. Calming breaths.
At three fifteen, a rusty pickup splashed through a puddle and pulled into the lot. In the bed of the truck were six swarthy, wiry men in painter’s pants and wife-beater T-shirts spackled with paint. The passenger door of the truck swung open, and Lupita climbed out wearing an orange and yellow Dairy Diner uniform. She looked younger in the uniform, no makeup, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. A paper hat with interlocking Ds on it was clipped to her hair.
“Wait here,” I said to Khanh and got out of the truck. I glanced toward the BMW and caught Eric’s eye. He’d wait for a sign from me before he did anything.
The driver said something that made Lupita grimace and wave him on. Behind me, the door of the Silverado slammed. Obviously, someone needed to teach my half-sister the meaning of
wait here
.
Lupita pushed back her bangs and watched me approach, weight shifted onto the balls of her feet as if in preparation for flight. “I have only a few minutes,” she said in heavily accented English. “I have to make biscuits and red-eye gravy.”
I gestured toward Khanh, who had padded over and stood just behind my left shoulder. “This is Khanh. Her daughter might have been taken by the man you saw kill the girl at our office.”
The girl hugged herself. “I . . . hear about . . . what he did. He is a very bad man.”
“You knocked over the neighbor’s garbage can around the time of the murder. We need to know what you saw.”
“No, I . . .” She tilted her head, tugged at her ponytail. “Señor Freeman make a mistake.”
“I didn’t say it was Mr. Freeman.” At her uneasy glance toward the diner, I added, “We’re not here to make trouble for you. We just need to know what you saw. Did you see his face?”
“This is a mistake. I tell Señora Ina I don’t want to talk to you. I should not have agreed.”
She started toward the building and I stepped in front of her, barring the way. “Look, I get it. You’re illegal, and you’re scared.”
Her cheeks flushed. “I’m Mexican, so I must be illegal?”
“Why else wouldn’t you go to the police?”
She lowered her head. “You saw what he did.”
“Yeah, I did. Did you? Because I’d think you’d want to get this son of a bitch off the streets. Especially if he knows you saw him. Does he?”
She tugged at her ponytail again, the blood leeching from her face, and choked, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“If you could talk to the police—”