“Maybe not. I wore a blond wig and sunglasses and some other stuff. Anyway, they let me in, probably because Jo-X likes girls, good-looking young women, and when I saw him I just screamed at him, which I know was dumb but I couldn’t help it. He laughed at me. Just laughed. Told me I was crazy and had two guys drag me off the property, back out to the street. And that was that. I figured I couldn’t get close to him again after that.”
“Then,” Shanna said, “I did. He’s always got a girl on his arm. If you check the archives you’ll see that the girls change every few months. It’s what he does, like part of his act. They’re mostly white, but sometimes black. He’d had two white girls in a row so I figured he’d be ready for a black girl. So—you’ve seen Celine on TV—I was really dark, which was a good disguise, always wearing a wild red wig, dark glasses, a little bit of stuff in my cheeks to round out my face, bright red lipstick, and—well—wearing outrageous dresses to show off my . . . my . . .”
“Got it,” I said.
“I didn’t want her to do it,” Danya said. “Except . . .”
“Except that you did.”
“I wanted him. I wanted him in prison. I wanted him to get raped in prison, hoped that would happen anyway.”
“How about where he is now?”
“In hell? That’s perfect, too. Maybe he’ll get raped there.”
Nice.
“So,” Shanna broke in, “I got close to him. I was dressed in a typical Celine outfit. It was at a concert in Phoenix. I had on body paint, turned myself into a very dark black girl. I bribed a security guy two hundred dollars to let me go backstage. Soon as I saw Jo-X, I hooked an arm around his neck and pulled his face two inches from mine, and said something like, ‘Know what you need to take your act to the next level? Me. White as you are, black as I am. We make a statement, not like you with that Snow White Krissy bitch.’ And he totally snapped it up, the boldness of it, what I was wearing. And, yes, breasts were a big part of it, if you want to know. Perfect for his raunchy act.”
“And you did all that in order to . . . ?”
“Get close to him, of course. Like I said. Go to parties. Keep a close eye on him. Wait for him to roofie someone. Catch him in the act, if at all possible. What I really wanted was to get a video of him raping some unconscious girl, shut his life down.”
“And sex?”
She laughed. “Sex was not an option. I was arm candy. I made that clear up front. I was career enhancement—I was for show only. I told him he could have any girl he wanted, no problem, all I wanted was money, which gave me credibility. I told him he’d make a lot more with me than with Krissy. His fan base was mostly young teen girls. I could pull in the boys. I told him I’d wear any outfit he asked me to, no matter how revealing. I figured that would hook him. I was onstage with him, visible in restaurants, limos, hotels, everywhere he went. I was mysterious and unknown, instantly famous. I made him a lot of money. I was Celine for a few weeks, and now I’m not.”
Then she gave me a cold-steel look. “So what?”
So what? Suddenly I didn’t know. I found that I hadn’t put a lot of thought into the question of what it might mean if Shanna or Danya really was Celine, where that might end up. But at least I was a hundred percent sure now, something I could report to my favorite RPD detective. Maybe. I would have to give that some thought. Josie was a significant problem. Did I want to tell Russ about her being raped? How much could he take?
Lucy said, “So what? Here’s what—he didn’t roofie anyone so you couldn’t catch him. So you killed him instead.”
“And hung him in our garage to stink up the neighborhood and get the police involved,” Danya said. “That’s brilliant.”
“You killed him and someone else put him in your garage.”
Danya stared at her, then at me. “When you pick up women—well, high school girls—you should have them checked for rabies before taking them out in public. She’s delusional.”
Rabies. Interesting. That had never occurred to me. “Okay, now tell me about the helicopter,” I said to Shanna.
She looked down at her hands. “The video was at that place where I first saw this girl this afternoon”—she nodded at Lucy. “Arlene’s Café, Diner, whatever. A lot of people think Jo-X has a secret place, some sort of a hideaway somewhere, no one knows where. Turns out it’s true. I don’t know who all knows about it, or exactly where it is, or how he managed to keep it so secret, but I was there. Before that, I was with him for almost three weeks, then one afternoon he gave me an address and told me to be there the next day at one p.m., not to be followed, and not to arrive as Celine, but as me, since by then he knew I was white, but not my real name, who I was, or even that I was from Reno, so he called me Celine like everyone else.
“So I did. I put the address into the system and left his house in Vegas as Celine in a car with dark tinted windows. I had to get rid of some media lice, which took a while, but all they knew was they were following a car from Jo-X’s place, didn’t know it had ‘Celine’ in it, so they probably didn’t try as hard as they would have. I pulled off the highway and changed back into myself, which took some scrubbing to get off the black, but it’s just body paint, expensive stuff meant to do just what it did. When I finally got to that diner, I went into the bathroom and made sure all the body paint was off, then I waited. I was there for over an hour, then a helicopter flew over the diner and came down behind the place. A few minutes later, there’s Jo-X, but you wouldn’t know it since he was wearing mirrored sunglasses, a hat, and a flight suit like the kind a real pilot would wear with a bunch of pockets and zippers. I guess that was in case anyone else was at the diner, but if you think about it, the owner, maybe that waitress since she was kinda old and didn’t really act like a waitress, has to know that the guy was Jo-X. If so, she probably phoned him and told him I was there, waiting.”
“Two hours ago the waitress there was young,” Lucy said.
“I saw her. That wasn’t the same one. The one who took the video was in her fifties or sixties. Jo-X came inside and got me. We walked out to the helicopter and he flew it. I didn’t know he could fly one of those. Turns out he really was a pilot. I don’t think anyone in the media knows. If they did, you would’ve heard about it on TV—more Jonnie Xenon hype to thrill the girls. He took off, kept low, circled around a bunch of canyons and hills and made a lot of turns, then finally landed at this place in a sort of valley way up in the mountains. What we flew over was all dry desert, like a maze. I couldn’t find the place now if I had to.
“He was more relaxed, not so wild or hyper, not like the Jo-X everyone sees onstage and television, but he tried like hell to get me into bed. Maybe that was why he took me there. Probably was. Thing is, I’m a lot stronger than I look. Meaner, too. And I knew he’d roofied Josie so I didn’t drink anything but bottled water from bottles where the cap was still sealed at wherever they bottle those things. I figured he could even roofie an ice cube. And I slept in a different bed, different room, with the door locked and the back of a chair stuck under the knob. He tried, but didn’t even get to first base.”
“First base. That’s tits, right?” Lucy said.
Shanna glared at her. “You oughta know, girl.” Then a glance at Lucy’s chest—“Okay, maybe not.” She looked at me. “Anyway, he flew me out the next morning, back to that diner, and that was the end of Celine since Celine didn’t put out and she maybe called him a few pretty bad names. He told me to get my stuff out of his Vegas house by noon since I was staying there, which didn’t give me much time. He told me Celine was done, gone, adios, he never wanted to see her again.”
She shrugged. “And that’s it. I didn’t get him. I was at five parties and sort of young girls were all over the place, but I didn’t catch him roofying anyone. Maybe I should’ve fucked the fucker at his hideout to stay with him, I don’t know.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” Danya said, kissing Shanna’s shoulder. Shanna’s eyes were on me as Danya did
it, a defiant stare with a fair amount of carborundum in it.
“Then you ate at Arlene’s,” I said, working on the timeline.
“I was hungry,” Shanna said. “Starving. That asshole flew me out of there early that morning, before I could get anything to eat. The diner was right there. The drive to Vegas would’ve taken over an hour. So then that waitress came over and called herself Celine.”
“Celine?” I said.
“Yeah. There wasn’t any sound in that video, but the bitch freaked me out, saying that, told me she’d be my waitress and her name was Celine. She was like fifty or sixty, cigarette smoke in the air around her, in her clothes and hair. But then . . . that was all. She took my order and the cook in back made me an omelet, not a very good one, either. But I guess that old bitch made a video with a hidden camera, like in her hair or clipped to her shirt or something.”
“Wonder why she would do that?” Lucy said.
It seemed like a reasonable question, and Lucy hadn’t asked it in an aggressive way. A sign of progress?
Shanna shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe because she knew the pilot was Jo-X? Really, I don’t see how she couldn’t. There’s a big metal building in back of the restaurant where he keeps the helicopter. How could he keep himself a secret for however long, like a year or two or three? She’s got to know. So then she comes up and calls herself Celine, maybe to see what I’d do? Or”—she looked at me—“maybe my figure sort of gave me away like you suggested, but I doubt it. I think she knows more about Jo-X than about anyone else on the planet.”
Lucy and I left. I gave Danya my cell number, just in case. In case of what, I didn’t know, but this investigation had become a Hydra, with tentacles all over the place. No telling what might happen. Too bad I said all that out loud.
“A Hydra has a bunch of heads,” Lucy said. “Not tentacles.”
“My bad.”
“You should keep me around. Learn cool stuff.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ROAD RUMBLE AND wind. White noise. Unlike gangsta rap, white noise doesn’t interfere with thinking. Gangsta rap inhibits not only all semblance of thought but all emotional growth and maturity. You can see it when cars thump by, emitting rap like a person pounding an empty ten-thousand-gallon water tank with a sledge hammer, the person behind the wheel looking like the reincarnation of Attila the Hun. People who listen to gangsta rap should not be allowed to vote.
Beside me in the passenger seat, Lucy was quiet. The temperature was still in the nineties. The sun had gone behind the hills and high thin clouds were illuminated in orange and rose.
So, white noise and thinking . . .
Waitress goes outside and makes a video of a girl—Shanna—walking toward a helicopter with a guy dressed like a pilot. Odds are she knows the guy is Jonnie Xenon, has known it for a while. Next day she makes another video of the girl sitting at a table in the diner. The videos end up on a flash drive in Jo-X’s pocket in Shanna and Danya’s garage, and a note demanding a million dollars ends up in their mailbox. Add it up, big guy. Put two and two together.
Yeah, right. Like this was a two-plus-two deal.
How about this? The waitress kills Jo-X, puts his body in the girls’ garage, and demands money? Does that work? Uh-uh. That had so many holes in it I didn’t know where to start counting.
Someone put Jo-X in that garage. But who? Couldn’t be the newlyweds. That didn’t make a lick of sense.
Okay, try this: the waitress is Jo-X’s mother, stepmother, aunt. One way or another, they’re close. That explains why she’s willing to keep a secret that she could sell for tens of thousands. Then why wouldn’t Jo-X take Josie to the Midnight Rider Motel right next to Arlene’s? Why take her to the Pahranagai Inn?
To keep her away from mom, of course. To keep the police from snooping around mom’s place if things went bad with the girl. I doubted he would think that way, but she might—if she knew he was roofying girls, and I had no proof or hint of that.
But, wait. Mom has a son worth thirty million dollars and she lives in a decomposing shack attached to the back of that craphole diner? She’s not in a big luxury house somewhere with maids flitting around all day dusting stuff, a cook whipping up culinary delights?
I couldn’t see it.
I couldn’t see anything. But when you can’t figure out where to start, you grab a string and start pulling, so I pulled on the video string. The waitress made two videos. Why make videos of Shanna—or at least of an unknown girl about to meet Jo-X? She might’ve called herself Celine to see what kind of a reaction it got. That made sense. Maybe Shanna’s “figure” had entered into it. Then—how and why had the videos ended up in the dead rapper’s pocket?
I was tired. I still didn’t have enough information. So much for white noise enhancing thinking. Maybe this one was going to require gangsta rap to figure out.
I missed Ma. She would probably know where to go from here.
Something I’d heard earlier was lodged in my head, but it was staying there. My brain was a clotted mass of disconnected facts.
“Lot of boobs back there,” Lucy said, breaking the silence.
“An interesting and salient observation for sure.”
“Just sayin’.”
“Which is why it’s so interesting.”
She was quiet for half a mile. Then: “I’m starting to think maybe I got shortchanged.”
“Hey, kiddo. I’ve seen big and I’ve seen small. You’re about as perfect as it gets.”
She hit me with a two-hundred-watt smile. “Think so?”
“Yep. You got lucky, hit that happy medium.”
She settled back. “Well, okay then. If you think so, then tonight you should rub massage oil on ’em. That’d be nice.”
“Be still, my heart.”
“You wait. It’ll be good for you. Get another knot untied. Good for me, too. Really, there’s nothing like a good boob rub.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Trust me.”
The sky darkened to cobalt blue. The temperature slipped below ninety. Desert cools off quickly when the sun goes down.
Lucy looked over at me. “You believe any of what those two broads said back there?”
“The best lie is ninety-seven percent true. So, yeah, I believe most of it.”
“Ninety-seven percent of it?”
“Yep.”
“How’d you come up with ninety-seven percent?”
“Ninety-six percent is an obvious lie, ninety-eight percent gives too much away.”
“Oh, jeez.”
“Stick with me, kid. Improve your mind.”
“Yeah, I feel that happening. So if ninety-seven percent of what they said is true, then three percent is a lie.”
“Or missing. When they ducked into the bathroom, they decided how much to tell us.”
“So there’s more.”
“More than just a little. I think that missing three percent is more like twenty-five.”
“Your math totally sucks, in case you didn’t know.”
“Math is like that.”
“True.”
Stars were starting to appear when the lights of the motel and diner appeared in the gloom, two miles ahead.
“We oughta stay there tonight,” Lucy said. “Check this place out. Maybe we’ll see that old waitress.”
“I was thinking the same thing—if they’ve got a room. The place only had four units.”
“Midnight Rider Motel. Name gives me the willies. We’ll have to stay in the same bed so I don’t get scared. If this place has scorpions on the ceiling, though, I’m outta there. So, same bed? We did okay last night.”
“Dressed like that, you still look seventeen. Was that really your mother yesterday? She wasn’t lying? You don’t have a sister and the two of you didn’t cook up a story?”
She laughed, which wasn’t an answer. Scary.
I might have to give Fairchild a call, have him check out Lucy Landry, see how old she reall
y was.
The sign in front of the motel had the vacancy sign lit, a nice little blood-red glow in the night. A Lexus LX SUV, dusty but new, was in front of unit four, farthest from the diner. Thing was worth nearly ninety thousand dollars, but I figured we could take it in a drag race in the Mustang, easy. It might have power, but it would still accelerate like a tuna boat.
No office at the motel. A sign lit by a tiny light directed us to the diner. Inside, at a glass-front counter, a tall, thin woman who reeked of cigarette smoke took fifty-two dollars and gave us a key to room one. She had a smoker’s voice, red hair, gnarled fingers, thin lips, eyes that evaluated the two of us, lingering on Lucy’s crochet top. From what Shanna said, that would be the waitress who took the video.
She told us the diner would be open for another half hour. The kitchen shut down at ten. Tonight’s special was meat loaf—no doubt warmed over and over for the past three days. Special indeed. Good thing we’d eaten before leaving Caliente.
Back outside, Lucy said softly, “Spooky lady. That’s gotta be her. The video waitress.”
“Yep. And that’s ‘gotta be she,’ not ‘gotta be her.’”
“I’m working on my colloquial English.”
“Okay, then. Just don’t let it get out of hand.”
Room one was a swayback queen-size bed in a twelve-by-twelve room—not much space for morning stretchies. A fifteen-inch color television with a picture tube was anchored to a wall with a chain—an antique, probably worth more now than when it was new. No remote. I didn’t know if I still remembered how to run one of those things, turn it on and off, change channels. The bathroom was a rust-stained toilet, old sink, a shower stall with a leaky shower head, a grimy back window that faced west with a view of empty desert and the last dregs of light above low black hills. An overhead bulb put out twenty-five watts, barely enough to keep us from bumping into things. A swamp cooler blew cool humid air into the room with a weary hollow rumble. The whole place looked and felt early nineteen sixties, about the time my mother was running around in diapers. I would have to text her and let her know I was thinking about her. She’d be thrilled.
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