by Grant Pies
“Here’s Mike’s address.” Claire handed a scrap of paper to Carter.
“Thanks. We’ll get this charged and speak to Mike. Like I said, we’ll contact you once we know anything else.”
“Thank you both,” Claire said. “Thank you so much.”
Good Fences…
“The Bishops?” the old woman repeated, glancing at Sam and then looking Carter up and down, lingering on the small notepad gripped in Carter’s hand.
“Yeah, across the street.” Carter motioned behind him. “They have a daughter, Rose.”
The woman squinted her eyes, and somehow managed to wrinkle her face more than it already was. She stood in her doorway holding her screen door halfway open. She wore a pale blue night gown that blew against her body with each gust of wind. It reminded Carter of a skeletal scarecrow he might have seen on a farm in his home town.
“I do my best to keep to myself.” She waved her hand in the air, shooing the two men away.
“The daughter is missing,” Sam said. “Anything you know might help us.”
“You cops?”
“No ma’am,” Carter said. “Private investigators.”
“Figures … cops don’t come ‘round here. Cops gave up on the girl.” It wasn’t a question.
“Mm-hmm.” Carter nodded.
“People leave here all the time,” she said. “Maybe she don’t want to be found. Maybe she don’t want to come back. Can’t blame her.” Her eyes moved around the neighborhood.
“Well the parents want to know where she is. Make sure she’s safe.” Carter handed the woman a business card. “If you think of anything, can you call?”
Pinching the business card between her thumb and spindly index finger, the old woman asked, “That house, right there?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve seen a man climbing through the windows a couple times. Large man. Usually wearing dirty overalls.”
“Overalls? Like a mechanic?” Sam asked.
“Could be,” she said and let the dirty screen door snap closed between the two men and herself. Now, the grimy screen blurred her face. “But I don’t get involved. Around here, it’s best you don’t see nothing.” The woman shut the door and locked the deadbolt.
“If you think of anything else!” Carter shouted through the door. “Please call!”
“She’s not calling. She’s probably throwing your business card away right now.” Sam stepped off the front porch. “You heard her. Around here, it’s too dangerous to be a witness. Cops only come through here if they’re chasing a suspect. They don’t come to do welfare checks. You rat on the wrong person around here, you’re on your own. Plain and simple.”
“What about your fearless boys in blue?”
“Stretched thin. Too thin.”
“I hear you use that excuse a lot.”
“Not an excuse. It’s reality.”
“So, a man in coveralls.” Carter looked across the street at the Bishop’s house and changed the subject.
“The friend? Roy?” Sam said.
“Yeah, unless you can think of a good reason Robert would be sneaking into his own house.” Carter stepped off the porch. He pointed down the road. “The house down there looks occupied.”
“Occupied?” Sam snorted. “If simply not having boards nailed over your windows is what passes for occupied these days then we are in serious trouble.”
The wind blew Carter’s hair across his face and flung his coat away from his body. The two men had to lean into the wind as they made their way down the road. The sky was gray, but cloudless, like a faded sheet had been thrown over the entire city.
Once at the crumbling house, Sam stood on the front lawn, shrugged, and stood still, like walking the three steps to the house would be a waste of effort. Carter took each step and knocked.
Eventually, a man in a loose-fitting tank top answered the door. He poked his head out. Dark circles surrounded his eyes, and his cheeks were sunken in.
“You live here?” Carter asked.
The man looked at Carter then peered around him to look at Sam. “You cops? You have to tell me if you’re a cop.”
This was always the first question anyone asked. Some people, perhaps like the old woman two houses down, would have been more willing to talk to Carter if he was a cop. But some people, like this man, who Carter guessed was squatting in a bank-owned property, might be less willing to talk to a cop.
“No,” Carter said flatly.
“What do you want?” The man darted his eyes around the empty neighborhood.
“How long have you been squatting here?” Carter cut to the chase.
“I’m here fair and square,” the man said. “I pay rent—"
“C’mon, cut the shit. You think I care if you’re squatting here? It’s fine. I just want to know how long you’ve been here. Longer than two months?”
The man’s face relaxed and his eyes focused on Carter. He opened the door all the way. Inside, on the floor, were empty bottles of vodka and crumpled fast food wrappers. Some other person laid curled up on a worn-out couch in the middle of the otherwise empty living room.
“Six months … off and on.” The man’s arm, the arm that was previously hidden by the door, was covered in a tattoo. Black and gray lines curved from his wrist all the way up to his shoulder, creating a twisting maze with the center at the crook of his elbow. His veins were dotted with red track marks.
“You ever seen this girl?” Carter held out the picture of Rose. “She lived across the street.”
The man squinted and pushed his face forward at the picture. He studied Rose for some time, then spoke. “What’s with her eye?”
“Just something she was born with. Do you recognize her? She would have had darker hair than what’s in this picture.”
The man snapped his finger and nodded. “Yeah, yeah. I think I saw her around. Goth girl. Black hair. Always hanging out with this other guy. Skinny kid. Half his head shaved.” Carter jotted in his notepad. This sounded like Mike.
“You ever see anything strange over there?” Carter pointed at the house. “Anyone hanging around that shouldn’t be there?”
The thin man smirked. “Most people in this neighborhood shouldn’t be here.”
“Anything suspicious?” Sam spoke loudly from the front yard, still not motivated enough to step on the porch, but curious enough to ask a question.
“I saw the two of them arguing once I think.”
“The girl and the boy?” The man nodded. “He hit her or anything?”
“Psssh. Nah. I’m guessing that girl could’ve taken that kid if she wanted to. The boy was maybe a hundred pounds.”
“Did they argue a lot?” Carter asked. Clouds rolled through the solid gray sky. The wind died down and tiny droplets started to drift through the neighborhood. Carter tucked the picture under his coat to keep it from getting wet.
“I don’t know, man. I stay inside. I never saw ‘em arguing other than that one time. Most of the time that kid followed her around like a lost puppy. He’d sit outside her house for like half an hour before she came out. They’d leave in the morning. Then he’d walk her home in the afternoon.”
“Every day?” Carter asked. “He walked with her every day?”
“I told you. I’m not looking out my window every afternoon.” The same cat that had run out of the Bishops’ house earlier scurried into the squatter’s house and began licking an empty food container on the floor. “Sometimes I’m asleep, you know what I mean?”
“I get it.” Carter nodded. “What about when you’re not asleep? How often did you see the skinny kid walking her home?”
“All the time.”
“Was there any time you weren’t asleep and you saw her walking home by herself? Was there a time he wasn’t with her?”
After a short second of consideration, the squatter shook his head. “No. He always walked her home … as far as I know.”
Carter looked back at Sam, still standin
g on the strip of dead grass off the front porch. By now the rain was coming down and blowing in at an angle underneath the covered porch.
“Thanks,” Carter said and turned to leave the house. He looked over his shoulder and said, “A piece of advice. Cops don’t have to tell you if they’re cops. It doesn’t work like that.”
The two men jogged in the rain until they made it back to their car.
Partners?
When he first made it back to his office Carter dug through a drawer of cords and chargers, collected over the years from technologies that had been left behind. Mostly from old flip phones Leland had refused to abandon. Those phones belonged to an era before the tech companies tracked, catalogued, and sold the users’ every movement and interaction with the world. Most technology is just regression disguised as progress, he’d say. So there the old phones sat in the drawer.
He pushed aside batteries of different sizes, a handful of rubber bands, a pocketknife, and a tiny screwdriver until he located a cord that looked like it would fit Rose’s cell phone. It was a small round plug, likely used some years ago on his own ancient Nokia.
He plugged the phone in. A large battery symbol lit up on the screen, but it would need more power before he could use it. While he waited, he turned and hung Rose’s picture on the blank wall opposite his desk, a space typically reserved for pictures of cheating spouses or maps filled with push pins tracking someone’s movements.
Rose looked older than fifteen, maybe seventeen, eighteen with the right makeup. Her face was round and her deep brown eyes looked as if she wasn’t so much looking at you but at someone else just behind you. Her right eye had the imperfection in the iris. A malformation, like it was an ink blot spreading out into the other parts of her eye, or like she was melting from the inside out. But apart from that, she looked perfect. Happy even.
Carter sighed and crossed his arms, staring at her picture tacked against the wall with nothing but empty space surrounding it. On the ride back to the office, he had been flipping through his notes and the flimsy police file trying to piece together a narrative for Rose. But he only had snapshots of stories.
Sometime later, Sam burst into the door, kicking it open and holding a large box in his arms. “Got ‘em! Well, maybe not all of them, but enough I suppose. Traffic was awful!” He dropped the box on the desk next to Carter. “Guess being an ex-cop has its perks, huh?”
“I never said it didn’t,” Carter said, still staring at Rose’s picture, his back turned to Sam. The thick smell of alcohol had followed Sam through the door. “Traffic? Must’ve been really awful. You’ve been gone over two hours.”
“Pile up on the highway.”
“Mm-hmm. Sure you didn’t stop off at Milano’s?” Carter traced the route Sam would take from the office to the police station, then counted the bars that were opened this early. Milano’s was one of the many Sam had frequented in the past.
“C’mon, it’s one in the afternoon!”
“Never stopped you before.” Carter turned to Sam. “I know you drink on the job. You carry around a damn flask for God’s sake. I’m not busting your balls for it, but don’t lie to me. Don’t tell me it’s traffic then come in smelling like you bathed in whiskey.”
Sam shrugged, his eyes pulling closed slightly. He shook his head and changed the subject. “Missing girls, aged thirteen to fifteen, family ruled out, but never found.” He pointed at the files he’d brought in. “You plan on going through all of those?”
“No. We are gonna go through all of them.” Carter glanced over at the old cell phone. The screen was still blank but for a blinking battery symbol slowly filling up.
“C’mon, I got the case files. I did my job.” Sam dropped into a desk chair, and flipped a cigarette into his mouth.
“Have you ever had a job where you told the boss what your job was?” Carter pulled the unlit cigarette out of Sam’s mouth and dropped it onto his desk.
“That what you are? My boss?”
“Well, yeah.” Carter chuckled. “What’d you think?”
“Dunno. Partners?”
“Sam.” Carter pulled the files out of the large cardboard box and spread them out on a desk. “I gave you this job—"
“Cuz I was a good cop?”
“Well, yeah. You are a good investigator … in your own way. But I saw your path. It was no good for you the way you were going.”
Sam stopped grinning and his face fell to its natural position. “Path?”
“Yeah, c’mon. Right around the time you got served with the divorce papers, two years ago. You started drinking on the job. Took too many pills.”
“My prescriptions, you mean?”
“Oh, you get your prescriptions filled at the evidence locker?” Carter said. “In powder form?”
Sam shrugged. “Once. I went to work drunk once.” Sam held up a single finger. Carter tilted his head and glared at Sam. “Twice,” Sam said. “Two times.”
“I’m not coming down on you.”
“That’s sure what it feels like,” Sam shot back.
“I’m just saying, things weren’t looking all that promising for you after you left your job. You hadn’t seen your wife outside of a courtroom in a year, and you saw Ashley even less. You needed a change. And I had a stack of surveillance jobs piling up after Leland passed.”
Carter glanced at the stack of intake forms sitting on a desk in the corner. Even after taking Sam on six months ago, the jobs kept piling up faster than they could get to them. He hadn’t even gone through them since he took the Kingsley job three weeks ago. Now he was on the Rose Bishop case. Leland would roll over in his grave if I took a basic surveillance gig over a missing girl, he thought. Especially one the cops have given up on.
Make this matter, Leland’s words pulsing in his head.
“Tell you what, you want to be partners? Equal partners? Then let’s start by splitting the work – fifty-fifty.” Carter dropped half of the files onto Sam’s desk. “You show me you’re a team player, and we’ll discuss you being a partner full on.”
“Seems like having you as a partner is the same as having you as a boss.”
Carter smirked. “If I were your boss, you’d be reading all of the files.”
“I think I liked it better when we just spied on people fucking. This is feeling more and more like I’m a cop again.”
A soft beeping noise came from across the office.
“That’s it!” Carter jumped out of his chair. “It’s charged.”
The two men rushed over to the old cell phone. It was lit up and waiting to tell a story.
Carter pulled a latex glove on and picked up the phone. Flipping it open, he said, “Where would she even get a phone this old? To a teenager, this is a fossil.”
He navigated through the menu to the contacts. Nothing.
“What about recent calls?” Sam leaned over Carter’s shoulder, the smell of whiskey wafting from his breath and oozing through his pores. Carter scrolled through the menu and found a list of numbers called from the phone.
“Only four. All incoming. The first call came in almost a month before Rose went missing.” Carter jotted the numbers down. All local area codes. “That’s all. No contacts. No texts. At least it’s something.” He pulled the gloves off his hands and sat back at his desk. Clicking keys on his laptop, he said, “Shit! The first two numbers are burner phones. Not traceable without a warrant.” He looked up at Sam.
“I still have connections, but not like that.” He shook his head. “What about the others?”
Carter checked the third number. “Brandi Deslin. Call came in three weeks before Rose went missing. Address is uptown. Forty-six years old. The last number, I only get an address on South Cicero Avenue. Nothing else. No name. This was the last call. One week before she was gone.” Carter rolled his chair away from his desk and crossed his arms.
“Huh?” Sam shrugged, a bit let down. “What would Rose want with a forty-six-year-old woman?”
“Drugs?”
“Buying or selling?”
“Buying is my guess. Selling’s too complex. Supply chains and all that.”
“If she’s buying, wouldn’t the call be outgoing? Never heard of a drug dealer just checking in to see if their customers needed a fix.”
“You really think she’s selling drugs?” Carter focused on his pad with the numbers written down.
“You’re being too narrow minded. Who says it’s gotta be drugs?”
Carter jotted the address for the last number down. “Do you want Brandi or the mystery address?” Carter held each out, one piece of paper in each hand.
“Hmmm.” Sam scratched his chin. “Brandi kinda sounds hot. Sounds like a stripper name or something. Brandi Deslin. But I do like me a good mystery address.” Sam reached out and took the piece of paper with the address of the last number.
“So I get Brandi.” Carter stuffed the other paper in his pocket. “You take your car. I’ll take the L. We meet back here.”
“Okay, but if she’s hot—"
“If she’s hot, I’ll talk you up. ‘Oh, Sam’s so great. He’s the one that solves all our cases.’” Carter rolled his eyes and threw his raincoat on.
“You’re a good boss,” Sam said.
“You’re a good employee. And you’ll make a good partner … one day.” Carter smiled.
Girls Just Want to Have Fun
Brandi lived in an apartment uptown, just one block from Argyle Street, or Little Saigon as some called it. Carter shoved his hands in his pockets and weaved around petite elderly Asian women, clutching bags of groceries as they left the local Vietnamese market. Most of them had clear plastic bonnets wrapped around their hair to keep dry. At the corner was a food cart selling steamed buns and hot tea.
He reached Brandi’s building, a three-story brick walk-up. The stairwell was narrow, and paint peeled from the walls. The humid air from outside filled the halls of the apartment, and Carter wondered if the air conditioning was broken.
The door to the first apartment on the third floor was propped open. He glanced inside to see an old woman sitting in front of a television, stirring a large pot of something on a hot plate. He recognized the smell and guessed she was making pho.