She Talks to Angels

by James D F Hannah

  “Yeah.”

  She shook her head. “Not really.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe go become a nurse. Or a hairdresser. I’m not going back to Logan, though. Fuck both of you if that’s what you’re thinking. No way on that.”

  “It wasn’t,” I said. “There’s a shelter here in Charleston, a woman I worked with when I was a state trooper. She’s good people. You can be there. They’ll set you back up in school, point you where you want to go.”

  “Sounds great; they’ll camp me in a room with a bunch of other bitches, shift me out to a foster family where Dad decides he wants to play ‘peek-a-boo’ with his dick when the wife is asleep.”

  “Jesus,” Woody said. “She makes you sound not jaded.”

  “It won’t be that way,” I said. “And you’ll have my telephone number. You’ll call me if there’s anything that happens, or anything you need.”

  She seemed to offer it some thought. After a long while, she said, “Okay.”

  21

  The shelter ran out of a church on Charleston’s West Side. As we drove there, there were plenty of random guys slouched down on the benches, following cars with intense eyes and practiced casual posture. Women stood at the corners, watching the cars that didn’t stop to talk to the guys on benches. If you were there, that time of night, you were buying something or selling something.

  A woman named Mary Alice ran the shelter. She met us as we pulled into the church parking lot. A short, thin woman with black hair threaded with gray and a smile carved deep from years of sincere use, she sipped coffee from a travel mug as we got out. Ashley walked between us, and I kept my arm around her shoulders. She shivered a little.

  “Long time no see, Sergeant,” Mary Alice said.

  “It’s just ‘Henry’ now,” I said. I gave Ashley a gentle squeeze. “This is Ashley.”

  Mary Alice’s smile made you feel like you were the only person in the world. She focused it on Ashley. “How are you doing, Ashley?”

  Ashley shrugged. “Fine.”

  “Fine works. Fine’s a starting point.” To me, she said, “Ashley have anything with her? Clothes?”

  “Afraid not,” Woody said. “This was a rush situation.”

  “Then I should take Ashley inside, get her a bed and some clothes,” Mary Alice said. “I suspect she’s tired.”

  I dug into my pocket, found a scrap of paper and wrote my number on it, and handed it to Ashley. She looked at me with wide eyes the color of oceans, and I thought of the pictures of Meadow, her own pale blue eyes, and kids who grew up faster than they needed to grow up.

  She reached through the neck of her T-shirt and tucked the paper into her bra. “I’ll call you.”

  “Damn straight you will.”

  Ashley walked to Mary Alice. The older woman hugged her. Ashley stood with her arms at her side, maybe unsure what to do. Finally, she reached around and returned the hug.

  Mary Alice let go and said, “Thanks, Henry.”

  “Thank you. Take care of her.”

  “We’ll do our best.”

  They turned and headed into the church.

  We found a motel and slept until Tommy’s cell phone rang. I slapped blindly at the nightstand between the beds until I found it. The caller ID read “The Boss Man.”

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Motherfucker, I will find you, wherever you are, and fuck you like a goddamn dog. I’m not a faggot, but I’m gonna fuck you ’cause I can. Then I’m gonna hook you up to the back of my truck, find the worst road I can, and drag you down it like a—”

  “Tommy,” I said. I pushed myself upright in bed. “How’s the family? Work’s going well? That’s good to hear.”

  Another voice—more even and relaxed—said things in the background I couldn’t understand. Tommy mumbled and then I heard the phone be handed over to someone else.

  “Hello,” the other voice said. “I understand that you’ve got one of my whores.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Where is she, then?”

  “Somewhere else.”

  “‘Somewhere else.’” He let the words hang in the air. “That’s fine. No, it is. I’m not happy about this, but nothing I can do now. I know this is where I’m supposed to tell you to bring her back and blah blah blah, but let’s be honest: I didn’t know the little tramp, Tommy brought her into the business, and there’s always a fresh piece of pussy waiting off-stage somewhere.”

  Woody got out of his bed. He slept in his clothes—a habit left over from his previous life, he said—and started a pot of coffee at the machine next to the bathroom sink. It popped and hissed, and I heard the tinkling of the precious lifeblood of the morning. What followed was another tinkling sound, that of Woody taking a piss with the bathroom door open.

  “Think we should exchange names,” the man on the phone said. “Let’s be professionals here.”

  “Name’s Henry.”

  “Henry, it’s good to make your acquaintance. I’m Gerald Black. Have you heard of me?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “As you shouldn’t have. I work hard every day of my life to make sure gentlemen such as yourself have no clue who I am.”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t be running whores out of a shithole motel.”

  “It’s a shame about the kind of activity that goes on in places like that, but I have a rather diversified portfolio and—”

  I put on my jeans and twisted opened the shades to let in sunlight. Woody came up behind me and handed me coffee in a Styrofoam cup. It was black, hot, and bitter. Except for the parts about being “hot” and “black,” I could relate.

  “Cut the shit, Gerald,” I said. “I need to talk about Meadow Charles.”

  “I can’t say I know that name.”

  “You’ll know that name when the state police bust the operation you’re running. They might not care about the porn, but they’ll sure as fuck care about the fifteen-year-olds.”

  “Funny thing about that is the police weren’t knocking on my door this morning. Why was that? You go through all of this trouble just to save one little girl?”

  “The only reason you don’t have cops crawling all over you is because of Meadow Charles.”

  “That name again. You’re so—”

  “I’m not in the mood, Black. I want to talk.”

  He gave me the name of a restaurant, told me to be there in an hour, and the line went dead.

  Woody said, “Gonna meet him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Think he’ll tell you anything?”

  “Don’t know. Hate to think we drove down here for nothing.”

  “Probably wasn’t nothing for that girl last night.”

  I looked out the window and drank more coffee.

  “This coffee sucks,” I said.

  “It does. How you feeling?”

  Like hammered shit was how I felt. Everything on me ached, and what didn’t ache, didn’t work. I went to the bathroom mirror and gave myself a good look and had to admit I didn’t look good.

  That goose egg under my eye was the color of jaundice and beets; my other eye was rimmed in black. I had crosscuts of scratches on my face where Tommy had ripped at me during the melee. We’d checked into the motel a couple hours earlier wearing what we’d had on in the fight. The clerk had struggled to mask apprehension in giving a room to two bruised men in ripped shirts covered in blood. It wouldn’t have helped if I had let him know all the blood wasn’t mine.

  22

  The restaurant was one of those places that specializes in brunch, and everyone there looks like they either came from playing tennis or from going to court. It was half-full of families with small children and uptight white guys talking business. Michael McDonald was gargling peanut butter while warbling his way through “I Was Made to Love Her,” and it might have counted as a war crime.

  Gerald Black looked like a moderately priced defense attorne
y. He had a tan, unlined face with just the right amount of stubble, and dark hair graying in that George Clooney style. He wore a lime green golf shirt and stared at his cell phone through drugstore readers. I took the seat across from him. He set the readers on the table with his cell phone and folded his hands together.

  “I wish I could say it was a pleasure to meet you, Henry, but to be honest, you’ve done nothing but cause me consternation and heartburn since last night.”

  “In my defense, I know I’m a colossal pain in the ass to everyone, so don’t take any of it personal. It’s just how I am.”

  “It must make you popular during the holidays.” He sipped at a cup of coffee. I eyed it with vague envy. “So Henry? Anything else go with that? Because ‘Henry’ alone doesn’t ring the same way ‘Madonna’ or ‘Prince’ does, standing off by its lonesome.”

  “I’m working to make it a thing.”

  “How’s that going for you?”

  “It’s getting there. I’ll tell you what happens after I drop my first single.”

  Black laughed as the waitress filled my coffee cup. I scanned the menu and ordered oatmeal with granola.

  “Very healthy,” Black said.

  “I’m trying to live forever.”

  “You should work on some better habits.” He placed the readers back on his face. “Seems like Tommy got a few licks in last night.”

  “He made his presence known. You should put him on a leash.”

  “Every job requires a different tool. Sometimes you’re going for precision; other times you’re going for sheer brute force. Tommy’s a blunt object in human form.”

  “Dude’s a Louisville slugger wrapped in barbed wire, and the barbed wire has tetanus.” I drank my coffee. It was better than I’d had at the motel, but that wasn’t a tough bar to clear.

  “I’ll say you don’t look like a pimp,” I said. “And this isn’t where I’d think you’d want to meet to talk about pimp shit.”

  “I’m a businessman, Henry. I keep a diversified portfolio. Plus, I believe breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

  The waitress brought our food. Black had eggs over easy with sausage. My bowl of oatmeal was large enough to have an undertow. It included a cup of fruit that was almost all cantaloupe, with half a strawberry and a suspicious-looking grape. I set it aside. I’m never excited about cantaloupe, and I’m not sure anyone else ever is, either. I feel like we eat it because it’s there. It’s the melon of concession.

  Black took a bite of his food. “You poking around in the past for a good reason, or this part of you being a pain in the ass?”

  “Meadow worked at the Washington Inn the summer before she was murdered,” I said. “How well did you know her?”

  “I didn’t. My tendency is to let Tommy handle that part of things. I’ve tried to move from running girls out of there, and more into the web modeling, but Tommy, he’s old school. He meets these young girls, sees they’re in trouble, wants to help them out.”

  “He’s quite the humanitarian that way. A regular Mother Teresa.”

  “Those girls wouldn’t have a place to sleep or food to eat otherwise. Most of ’em would be on street corners, and trust me that that’s not an option they would want to explore. So you can jump on whatever high horse you want, but living in that motel, doing that work, is better than almost every other option they have.”

  I leaned in across the table. “I took a fifteen-year-old girl out last night. Meadow Charles was seventeen when she was working for you. Those girls aren’t even fucking adults. Don’t act like you’re saving them. You’re using them and making it sound like you’re keeping them safe.”

  Black looked at me for a moment and set down his fork and knife. “You’re right that I’m using them—the same way anyone who owns a business uses their employees. But I bring in a doctor every month who checks them out and makes sure they stay clean. Tommy keeps clients in line. You work for me, you get paid, and the government doesn’t see that money, so that’s better than if they flipped burgers at McDonald’s. No one’s a junkie.”

  “Meadow was.”

  “She’s the reason we got rid of anyone shooting up. She OD’d at the motel. It put the fear of God into everyone.”

  “What happened that night?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Wasn’t there, but Tommy was. She took too big of a hit. One of the other girls found her in her room, her eyes rolled to the back of her head. Someone called an ambulance, and we got her to the hospital.”

  “Had she been using?”

  “She was a goddamn junkie; what do you think? She had baggage. Hot-and-cold running crazy in her family. Dad did nothing but work, work, work. Mom drank whiskey like it was mother’s milk and sucked more dick than Pat Nixon. And she had these half-siblings, a brother and a sister—” Black shook his head and let out a low whistle. “Those two, there was so much weird whirling around there.”

  “Why would she tell you shit if you’re whoring her out?”

  “Because I run a business based on trust. Those girls, they need someone to trust. The sister was an ice queen. Wanted nothing to do with her. Refused to even acknowledge that she was alive most of the time. The brother, though, she was close to. Way closer than felt right. I’m talking V. C. Andrews-level bullshit.”

  “You think Meadow was being abused by her brother?”

  “No idea. She didn’t talk about him the way you talk about a brother. And Tommy said the night she OD’d, she mumbled something about an uncle. Just going on and on about it. ‘Uncle Something-or-Another.’” He took a drink of coffee. “Hospital tracked her dad down through her insurance card, and he was here the next morning. Took her home. Never saw her after that.”

  Fuck me. That shifted things and changed why Deacon had been so reluctant to talk about Meadow the other night. What if Deacon’s guilt wasn’t survivor’s remorse for Meadow’s death, but regret for something else? Shit I hadn’t even considered.

  Fuck me.

  Gerald Black smiled ever so slightly. He was comfortable and relaxed, a man aware of his surroundings. There were a dozen conversations going on around us, the random chatter of business deals and children and vacations and things that seemed bigger than the lives of a few young whores.

  “You seem to be a determined man, Henry,” he said. “Are you always this way?”

  “No. Sometimes I want to quit and walk away.”

  “Any chance you can be convinced to walk away from this?”

  “What’s it matter to you?”

  “You’re now in my business, and my resources are such that I can have you killed if I need to, but I don’t want to.”

  “What do you think it would be worth to you to have me leave this alone?”

  Black laughed. “Henry, I just threatened to have you killed, and you’re trying to have me buy you off. You have a set of brass swingers on you. I will give you that.”

  The waitress came by and refilled our coffee. I took a sip.

  “I started doing this job for free, and people keep offering me wads of money to either leave it alone or to keep on going. By now, I’m almost ready to set all of you fuckers on fire just to watch you burn.”

  “You going to close me down?” he said.

  “I’d like to. Would it do any good?”

  “Not really. That motel, that’s part of a business portfolio that’s expanded over the years. Call the cops, I’ve got plausible deniability about the whores. Plus, I golf with damn near every judge in this county at least once a month. I know where bodies are buried because I keep a shovel in the trunk of my car.” He took a small sip from his water glass. “All of this, this is that pond you probably had when you were a kid, that looked clear and lovely and birds would skim across the top to snatch a fish or whatever. What you’re doing is throwing rocks in that pond and stirring up the stuff underneath the surface. The issue isn’t the ripples in the water; it’s the muck and debris that floats to the top. Leave that alone, b
uddy. It’s best for you and for everyone around you.” He smiled and stood. “I’ll leave a good tip at the counter. Have yourself another cup of coffee. Stay the hell away from me.”

  Gerald Black stopped on his way toward the exit to talk to a white-haired couple having breakfast with a syrup-covered grandchild. They all laughed like they had heard the greatest joke in the world.

  23

  I picked Woody up outside a bookstore down the street from the restaurant. I told him about Black as he slid the seat belt over his chest.

  “Deacon lied about him and Meadow,” I said. “They were closer than he let on. Possibly much closer.”

  Woody nodded. “An addict lied. Pardon me as I clutch my pearls.”

  “I’m tired of being lied to by people asking me to help them.”

  “If they were willing to tell you the truth, they probably wouldn’t need your help. Is Deacon aware you’re investigating Meadow’s murder?”

  “No. There didn’t seem to be a need to blur the two together.”

  “Understand that Deacon staying sober is a separate issue, but if he’s somehow connected to Meadow’s death, you can’t put a wall up between those.”

  “The question becomes then is what if Deacon’s somehow involved in this?”

  “Nothing says he is. What we’ve got is that his relationship with Meadow was different from what he told you. Go back and tell him you want the truth.”

  “Or here’s an option: I give Dagny back the check, tell Deacon to find another sponsor, and walk away from all of this shit-storm before it blows back in my face.”

  “You could do that too, if you want to be a pussy about it.”

  I gritted my teeth a little.

  “We should talk to your boss about the uncle,” he said.

  “We? Is there a we in this?”

  “I’m bored. What else I got to do?”

  “What do we tell her about her brother?”

  “Nothing, because there’s nothing to tell her yet. When you know something, tell her then.”