The Forgotten Man

by Robert Crais

  "I didn't think of him—I thought of you. Look, it's not a big deal if you're too busy or can't or whatever. I'll call Poitras. That's a good idea."

  "I'm not saying to call Poitras. Look, I'll run the goddamned name and call you later. Forget I said anything."

  "What's wrong?"

  "Forget it."

  She hung up, and I thought maybe I should call her back, but I didn't. I locked the house and drove down the hill.

  Victoria was the last.

  Victoria had been the last of the three escorts to see Faustina, so I wanted to talk to her first. She was also the most reluctant to see me, Golden had said. She was married, and had children. She wouldn't agree to see me at her home, and didn't want me to call, but she agreed to meet me at Greenblatt's Delicatessen on Sunset after she dropped her kids at school. Great.

  I eased into the morning chain of commuters creeping down Laurel to Sunset, then hooked a tight left, and parked behind Greenblatt's. Lucy and I had often gone there for bagels because it -was close to my house, but when the memories of her came I pushed them away. I told myself it was important to stay focused, but the truth was I was tired of hurting.

  The deli was crowded with people buying bagels and coffee to go. I strolled to the front of the store, then along the wine aisles, but no one looked like a potential murderer or a soccer-mom escort with her eye out for a private detective.

  I bought a cup of coffee, then carried it upstairs to a small dining area. It was crowded, too, but I knew Victoria as soon as I saw her. She didn't look away when our eyes met. She had black hair cut to frame her face, and pale skin, and was wearing an unzipped burgundy sweat jacket over a black tee and sweat pants. She watched with remote detachment as I approached.

  I said, "Victoria?"

  "Let's do this in my car. We'll have more privacy."

  I followed her outside to a gleaming S-class Mercedes sedan. It was an eighty-thousand-dollar car. She pointed her key, and the Mercedes chirped. She hadn't bought the car by working as a prostitute; her money came from somewhere else. Probably her husband.

  "Get in. We can talk in the car."

  Her Mercedes was parked facing out so we would be in open view of everyone entering and leaving the deli. She had probably planned it that way. When we closed the doors, the sounds of the city vanished with the heavy thump of sealing gaskets. Victoria folded her hands in her lap, and twisted a platinum wedding band on her left hand.

  I identified myself, then asked to see her driver's license. She shook her head.

  "I didn't bring it. Stephen said you aren't a policeman—"

  I didn't see a purse, so she was probably telling the truth about her license. I slipped a digital camera from my pocket, and snapped her picture before she realized what I was doing. She covered her face after the flash, when it was too late.

  "You bastard. You sonofabitch—"

  "That one is for the night clerk at the motel. I'll also run the license plate on your car. You want to stop fooling around?"

  She glared at me, but she didn't try to run, and she didn't make a scene. I took out the morgue shot of Faustina.

  "Do you recognize this man?"

  "Yes. Stephen said he's dead."

  "When and where did you last see him?"

  "The night before last at the Home Away Suites. There wasn't any before or after—just the once. At about ten. Five minutes before ten."

  "Did you leave the motel with him?"

  "It was an outcall date. I went to his room, I left—that's how it works."

  "So you didn't leave with him?"

  "No. I don't know what he did after I left. I don't know anything about this. I don't want to be involved—"

  She twisted the band harder, and shook her head, not as a negative, but to swing the hair from her eyes. Her calm expression and frantic fingers didn't go together, as if they belonged to different people.

  "Victoria—"

  "My name is Margaret Keyes."

  "Margaret. If you had to prove you weren't with him later that night, could you?"

  She studied me for another moment with the same detachment she had shown earlier, then glanced past me at something she wanted me to see.

  "See over there—the other Mercedes."

  A black Mercedes AMG sat at the far end of the parking lot. I couldn't see the driver clearly with the sun glaring off its windshield, but a man wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap sat behind the wheel.

  She said, "You see the AMG?"

  "I see it."

  "That's my husband. When I left the motel, I got into his car and we found a quiet street. It was one of those little streets just above the freeway, I think by a school. We had sex. After we finished, we went for dinner in Studio City. That would have been around eleven-thirty. We eat there all the time, so the maitre d' will remember. We'll have the credit card receipt."

  I watched the AMG as she said it, then looked back at her, feeling uncomfortable that she had to open herself to me and a guy like Pardy.

  She shrugged.

  "I don't trick for the money. He likes it when other men pay for me. He likes waiting while—"

  "Is he armed? If he gets out with anything in his hands, it's going to be a problem."

  "We didn't know what to expect. Stephen made threats. He said if I didn't talk to you, he would tell the police a lot more about me than the evening I spent with Faustina—"

  She hesitated, to choose her words carefully.

  "Stephen has pictures. We have children."

  "I'll talk to Stephen. I don't care what you did with Faustina sex-wise—I want to know what he said. Did he mention what he was doing here in L.A. or what he was going to do later that night? Did he mention any names? I don't need a description of the sex."

  The corner of her mouth curled again.

  "Everything is sex."

  "Just answer my questions."

  "We prayed."

  She stopped, waiting for my reaction.

  "You prayed?"

  "He paid me two hundred dollars to pray. So tell me, was that sex or not? We knelt and he read from the Bible. That's what he wanted."

  "What did you pray about?"

  "We asked God to forgive him, like, please forgive this man his sins, forgive this sinner, show him mercy, like that. I thought it would become sexual, but it didn't."

  "You prayed for an hour?"

  "He paid for an hour, but he got a phone call and asked me to leave. I was probably with him about forty minutes. I got there at ten, so that was about ten-forty."

  The phone call could have been from the person he went to meet.

  "Do you remember what he said to the phone?"

  "No, I'm sorry. I wasn't paying attention, and then he let me out. I know he was still on the phone when I left."

  I made a mental note to recheck the calls Faustina made that night. One of his outgoing calls might have led to his getting the call she remembered. I glanced at her husband, but he was still tucked in his car. The lot attendant was busy directing traffic. Something in what she said bothered me.

  "He walked you to the door, but he was still on the phone? Did you mean he was holding the phone when he brought you to the door?"

  "That's right. You know how you cup it so people can't hear?"

  "His phone was on the nightstand on the opposite side of the bed. It wouldn't have reached the door."

  "No, no, not that phone. His cell phone. It was one of those flip phones."

  A cell phone meant he could have made calls other than the calls that showed on his motel bill. A cell phone opened an untraceable world of possibilities unless I could learn his number. I made a note to ask Diaz if a cell phone had been found with his body.

  Margaret Keyes said, "Are we finished?"

  "Yes. You've been a big help. I appreciate it."

  I glanced at her husband. She saw me looking, and smiled.

  "Go introduce yourself. It would scare the shit out of him."

&nbs
p; I opened the door, then looked back at her.

  "This thing you do, you do it for him?"

  She laughed, and her eyes sparkled with cold fire.

  "You can't even hope to understand."

  I didn't ask what she meant. I walked back to my car, then went to find the others.

  18

  Hot Pursuit

  After Frederick had taken care of Father Wills, he was scared to return to Payne's. He wanted to; he wanted to race back and search for anything that would tell him where Payne had gone and what he intended, but it was late when he finished with the priest. Even with Payne's house hidden the way it was, Frederick was frightened that filling his house with light in the middle of the night would draw unwanted attention.

  Frederick went home and spent a fitful night, tossing and turning as he dreamed about killing Payne with the skewer from his Weber. The dream played out on the inside of his skull like one of those IMAX theaters, totally surrounding him as if it was real. In the fantasy, he saw himself drinking a Coors Light outside his mobile home while the Weber grew hot. The skewer glowed yellow over a huge mound of coals so hot the air rippled. Payne stepped out of the trailer, and said, "I confessed. I went to Los Angeles, and told them our nasty little secrets, and now I feel better. They know all about us, and now the dead will carry you down into Hell, but it's okay because I feel better, and isn't that what confession is all about, me feeling better while you pay the price?" Frederick was swept by a tsunami of fear, betrayal, and indignation. In his fantasy, he snatched up the skewer and drove it through Payne's belly into his lungs, screaming, "YOU TRAITOR!"

  The next morning—before he opened the station—Frederick went back to Payne's when the sky was misty with light. He worried that Payne had written a confession or journal or diary, or had some sort of incriminating scrapbook hidden away. He searched every drawer, cabinet, box, closet, and hiding place he could think of, trying to find something that would explain why Payne had gone to Los Angeles, and whom he had gone to see.

  Frederick searched high and low for the better part of three hours, growing more and more frantic at what Payne was saying, and where; finding nothing until he saw the Los Angeles Yellow Pages waiting on the kitchen counter. It was the San Fernando Valley East edition.

  If Payne had gone to Los Angeles, he would need a place to stay.

  Frederick opened the Yellow Pages to the section on hotels. Dozens of hotels were listed, but none of them stood out. Frederick flipped deeper into the book to find the listing for motels. A scrap of paper marked this page. A blue dot of ink indicated a motel in Toluca Lake.

  Home Away Suites.

  Frederick checked the time. Toluca Lake was less than thirty minutes away. If Payne was down there ratting him out, Frederick would make sure he paid.

  19

  Where Margaret Keyes had met me in an anonymous location, Janice lived near Dodger Stadium and had no problem with me coming to her home. Janice shared an exclusive condominium with her boyfriend, a wealthy Israeli named Sig who wanted to make a name for himself directing gonzo porn ("Sig's family has so much money they shit green."). Janice started talking the moment she opened her door, and talked so much I had to interrupt to keep her on point. Janice started tricking while a senior at an exclusive girls' prep school ("It was nasty, and I LOVED it!"), got implants on her eighteenth birthday ("They were a present from my mom."), and started stripping while a freshman at USC ("It's like getting paid to be me!"). Janice talked so much it was like drowning in a verbal Niagara Falls. She told pretty much the same story as Margaret Keyes, except in her version Faustina had received no phone call—she had stayed for an hour, and was paid two hundred dollars in cash. To pray.

  Dana Mendelsohn was the last escort on my list, but the first to have visited Herbert Faustina. I didn't expect Dana to tell me anything new. I stopped for an outstanding turkey burger at Madame Matisse in Silver Lake, then sat in my car, searching for Dana's address in the Thomas Brothers Guide. I had just found her street when my cell phone rang. It was Starkey.

  She said, "I left three friggin' messages. Didn't you get them?"

  I looked at the little window on my cell phone. It showed no messages.

  "I've had my phone with me all morning. It didn't ring and it doesn't show any messages."

  "I know I got the right number. It's your stupid voice on the message."

  My stupid voice.

  I hated my cell phone. I was the last person in Los Angeles to enter the Jetsonian world of cellular communications, and I have regretted it ever since. Before I got the cell, everyone asked how I got by without one, and my clients complained. I weakened under the cultural weight of a city filled with satisfied cell users, ponied up, signed a service contract, and was doomed to crappy cell service. I rarely got a signal. When I got a signal, I couldn't keep the signal, or found myself in someone else's conversation. When someone called me, the phone rang sometimes, but not always. When someone left a message, the phone told me when it felt like it, or not at all. Everyone in my life was happy I got a cell phone except me. I wanted to throw it down a storm drain.

  I said, "Okay, let's pretend I got your messages, and now I've called you. Why am I calling?"

  "I ran Faustina through the system. Nothing came up, which means he doesn't have a criminal record, and he didn't toddle off from a booby hatch."

  "Okay."

  "I also ran his name through the Social Security roll. The name Herbert Faustina doesn't show. Whoever he is, he doesn't have a Social Security number, which means Herbert Faustina probably doesn't exist. It's an alias."

  The Social Security system was off-limits to police without special court orders. Cops couldn't just ask for someone's Social Security information. Starkey had probably used a personal contact, and she would get burned if anyone found out.

  "You didn't have to do that, Starkey. I wouldn't have asked you."

  "Don't worry about it, but since you're so slow on the uptake let me point out the obvious: I am definitely a woman you want on your side."

  "I guess you are."

  "I gotta get back to work. Try not to get killed."

  She hung up, but left me smiling.

  Dana's address led me to a small red apartment building south of Melrose between La Brea and Fairfax on a street without character or charm. It was one of those older areas where single-family homes had been scraped away a house at a time, replaced by four-or six-unit apartment buildings built on the cheap by heirs, retirees, or doctors looking for a positive cash flow. Now the street was lined by small buildings that looked like they had been designed on paper napkins while everyone laughed about how much money they would make. Dana's building looked like a Big Mac carton.

  I parked on the street, walked up along a short drive lined with garbage cans, and found her apartment under a set of floating stairs that led to the second floor. Two mountain bikes were chained to the stairs. I rang her bell, then knocked. Loud voices started up inside; a man and a woman arguing whether or not to open the door. Dana wasn't alone. I knocked again.

  A tall good-looking man jerked open the door and gave me the dog eye. He was solidly built with a fine neck and thick shoulders, and he knew it; he stood tall in the open door, showing himself off. His hair was high and tight, and he was neatly dressed with two layers of Raiders apparel.

  I said, "Dana?"

  "I'll Dana you up the ass, you talk trash to me."

  Behind him, Dana said, "Please, Thomas, Stephen said I hadda talk to him."

  "Stephen don't live here."

  "Thomas. Let him in."

  A chunky young woman touched him out of the way. She was maybe five four, with peroxide-blond hair, a deep tan, and wide blue eyes that made her seem open and innocent. She was wearing a cropped T-shirt over shorts, with the T-shirt showing large breasts and a gold navel stud. She was about the same age as Janice, but she looked younger; she was a lifetime younger than Margaret.

  She said, "This is Thomas. He's no
t my boyfriend or anything. He's my roommate."

  I made him for her boyfriend, and probably her driver. Thomas didn't move far. His hands hung loose at his sides as he leaned toward me to let me know he was ready to unload.

  "And what does Thomas do? He drive you to see Faustina?"

  Thomas shook his finger at her before she could answer.

  "It's not his damned business. You shouldn't talk to him or anyone else about this."

  "Stephen said we gotta."

  We.

  "Fuck Stephen, gettin' us mixed up in this shit. They gonna put this on someone and it gonna be ME!"

  Stephen told me he knew nothing about the drivers for his escorts, but apparently Thomas and Stephen knew each other. It made me wonder what else Stephen hadn't told me.

  I moved past and looked at their apartment. It was simple and clean, with the living room breaking to the right, and a dining area and kitchen ahead. The dining table had been pushed into the far corner and set up as a desk with a desktop computer and a clutter of notes pushpinned to the wall. The chairs were hung with what looked like camera bags and backpacks. In the living room, a fluffy couch faced a cabinet that held a television, a CD player, and a row of color photographs of Dana spinning around a stripper's pole. She looked pretty good upside down.

  I said, "Nice pictures. Is that you?"

  "What the fuck you care, is that her in the nice pictures? You think those pictures NICE? You want us to have a little coffee, pass time like we FRIENDS?"

  I looked at him. The day had been a slow grind from morning to midafternoon with not much to show for it. He didn't like me looking at him, and glowered even harder.

  He said, "What?"

  Dana came up beside me and pulled at my arm.

  "He's scared of the three strikes. He has two convictions."

  "Don't tell him nothin' about me, not a goddamned thing."

  I understood his fear—if he caught another felony conviction he could go back to jail for the rest of his life.

  I said, "No one cares about you unless you know something about Faustina. Do you?"

  "No!"