by Jay Stringer
My other full-time employee was Matt Doncaster. My project.
Our lives had run in parallel; as my life had fallen apart, so had his. He had once been a law student, one of the brightest and best at Wolverhampton University. He’d been one of the young hopefuls they parade out to smile for the press, pose in brochures, and talk at local schools. His developing drug habit had been a minor problem at first. Universities allow a certain margin of error among athletes and high academic achievers. Let kids be kids. But then Matt was cut loose when a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl blamed him for the baggie she was found with.
By the time we’d met, he was a drug dealer on the bottom of the food chain, living mostly on the streets and sampling more of his own product than he sold. He’d been quite happy sliding downward until something had stopped him, and he’d turned up at my door at three in the morning, clean and sober, frozen and shivering. I guessed he was asking for my help, but his eyes were fixed on the floor and all he kept saying was:
“Billy was cold.”
“Billy was cold.”
“Billy was cold.”
Then, and I’ll never forget it, Matt had looked me in the eye and said, “You look like shit.”
And that was that. For the rest of that night, and the few that followed, I heard him crying as he slept on my sofa, whispering names and apologies for deeds he’d never told me about. I didn’t ask. I paid for him to go to private rehab, and Gaines paid for him to finish university. He’d had high enough scores to have built up academic credits and was allowed to switch his major, so he added another year on to his studies and changed to social work. He split his time between classes and the Community Center, with us footing the bill and paying his wages.
When I finally pulled out of traffic and into the car park of the Center, Matt’s car was in my space, so I boxed it in. I found Matt in the office, reading through the mail and stacking the bills in a neat pile that I knew I’d ignore until the last possible moment. He was in my chair, behind my desk, but I didn’t mind because he pretty much did my job.
“Hey, boss.” He didn’t look up from the letter until he’d finished reading it. When he did, he played a familiar tune. “You look like shit.”
“I could fire you, you know, I really could.”
“But then who’d do your job for you?”
I raised my hand and held my thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart. “Seriously, this close.”
He smiled and put his hands up in mock surrender. I eased into the chair on the visitors’ side of the desk and scratched my nose, looking for a subtle way into the conversation.
“Seen Jellyfish lately?”
He shook his head. “Nah. I try and avoid mixing with guys who still use.”
“So he was?”
“As far as I know.”
I thought back to the drugs at the scene. “Is he still selling?”
“Don’t think so. He’s not as well connected since Marv and Letisha left town, but he still goes for it at parties and gets high himself.”
I’d never told Matt the truth about Letisha, and he seemed happy not to ask. His recovery had been a slow and fragile one, and there were certain things he still couldn’t deal with.
“And you don’t want to be around someone who’ll just casually get wasted.”
He nodded. “Right. Too much to lose, you know.”
I did, so I didn’t push it. I also didn’t tell him about the drugs in my pocket. “Do you know who he hangs around with? He seems to have fallen off the radar.”
“He had a job for a while, out at the speedway, but he got sacked. As far as I know, he’s hooked up with someone I used to know at the Uni—a media studies student named Simon. He and Jelly started making Internet porn videos and selling ’em on a website. You know, a fiver for a ten-minute clip, or thirty quid for unlimited access.” He paused before adding the expected joke. “At least I’m told that’s how it works.”
Would there ever, in the history of the world, be a conversation about porn that didn’t involve someone cracking a variation on that joke? I wondered if, even in the porn industry, people would stop between takes and say, “Hey, I’m told that’s how it works.”
Chris’s words were still fresh in my mind, about Jelly wanting to film the two of them having sex. “When you say he makes porn—”
Matt smiled. “Relax. He’s behind the camera. Well, he does handle the talent, too, if you want to call it that. As far as I know Simon handles the technical side. You seen Si’s girlfriend? She’s been in a few of the films and she’s hot.” Then he paused, and his face asked his next question before the words came. “Are they in trouble?”
I didn’t answer straight away. I waited just long enough for him to know I was lying, but not quite long enough to invite a question about it. “No.”
He knew enough about my line of work to know when not to ask questions. Many times in the past he’d been one of the people I’d muscled in on for information, so it made sense that now he liked staying ignorant.
“Can we view the website now?” I asked.
We had all manner of blocks and filters on all the computers in the Center, to stop the kids from doing the very thing I was asking to do. Matt had also come up with a way of blocking outgoing payments, so that the kids could visit online shops and look around but couldn’t buy anything.
Matt nodded, clicked a few things with his mouse. “Let’s take a look,” he said. “The filter on this machine is easy to switch off.”
He did a quick web search and then waved for me to come around the desk and take a look. The home page on the screen featured a woman dressed like a trashy gangster and a disclaimer that said you had to be over eighteen to enter the site. Below the woman were two buttons: one said ENTER; the other said NO THANKS. I wondered what happened if you pressed the second button. Would you be routed through to BBC news? A children’s TV channel?
I nodded and Matt clicked the first button, and the sound of movie gunfire came out of the computer’s speakers as the screen reloaded. The new page was modeled on 1940s Hollywood, done in silver and black with Art Deco styling. Written across the top, in some approximation of the Hollywood sign, was the name of the company: STUDIO NOIR.
Below the sign was a menu with links to a free tour, membership information, and contact details. There were also more pictures of scantily clad women, and a few men, all in campy re-creations of classic film scenes. I hoped there wasn’t a porn version of The Maltese Falcon, because I didn’t want to see what they did with the statue. A couple of the women looked vaguely familiar, and I decided they must have been dancers at Gaines’s strip club, Legs, before it burned down.
I pointed at the link for contact details but all that brought up was a formatted box for you to type in an e-mail.
“That’s not what I need. Where are they based?”
Matt nodded and clicked through to another part of the site. “Porn websites have to have registered contact details on display, though I think it’s more for U.S. laws than U.K.” He looked uncomfortable for a second. “I, uh, read that in the newspaper, I think.”
He eventually found a simple page with an address, but it was a P.O. box listing for Birmingham, nothing that would tell me where the office was or where I could find the people who worked with Jellyfish. I pulled my worn old notebook from my jacket pocket and thought of Claire. It once had a piece of elastic to hold it shut, but when that had snapped, I’d replaced it with one of her hair bands. I wrote down the address in case it proved useful, then waved for Matt to get rid of the page.
“Where’s Becky?”
“Field trip with one of our classes.”
“How things going between you?”
His mouth wobbled a little, and I smiled. They both thought they’d kept their little romance a secret. I didn’t mind it. Becky was at least eight yea
rs older than Matt and liked to mother people; she was perfect for someone as insecure as he was. And if there was anyone on earth who could put up with Becky’s earnestness, it was Matt. If he could sit through a twelve-step program he could put up with anything.
“We, uh—”
I stood up and waved it away. “I really don’t need to know. Just stopping in to tell you that I might be busy for a few days. There’s something I have to take care of.”
He didn’t ask.
I needed to find out where Studio Noir was based, and I knew a man who could tell me.
“Pepsi, get your ass out of bed.”
Pepsi was a short Asian man with accountant glasses but a salesman smile. He’d been a major player for the Mann brothers before the changeover. Now he handled our talent. His tax returns listed him as a modeling agent, and he did do a half-hearted job of running an agency that supplied talent to local newspapers, social events, and Internet video companies. But the time he spent on the tax cover was insignificant; most of his efforts went into handling the bookings for our ladies of negotiable affection.
He lived with his parents in a terraced house on Bilston Road, one of the main routes out of the city. Usually when I visited I would show a lot of respect to his parents and act like a visitor in their home. Today was not one of those times. This was Pepsi’s place, and I needed him.
“Open the fuck up, Peps.”
Finally I heard chains being moved behind the door, and then the lock turned and the door opened inward. Pepsi stood there in a T-shirt, tight across his beer belly, and boxers. He was running his hand through his hair and squinting out at me, like he’d been down in a mine for years and was only now seeing daylight. “What’s up?”
I stepped in toward him and he moved aside, letting me through. He shut the front door and for a moment we were plunged into gloom until he flipped the light switch. It was an odd sight, his parent’s cheaply but ornately decorated living room littered with pizza boxes and empty Cobra bottles. The large plasma TV on the wall was tuned to some cable channel with a message onscreen saying programming didn’t resume until midnight. There were a number of smells in the room, none of them good.
I stepped to the front window and pulled back the curtain, letting daylight in, then cracked it open to get some air. In the new light I saw for the first time that there were other people in the room, asleep on the floor and furniture likes sacks of potatoes.
Pepsi stood there looking around us and scratching his balls. He shrugged. “Family’s away in India, innit, so I’ve been having a birthday party.”
“I thought your birthday was in November?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re in April.”
“I’m practicing.”
I cut to the chase. “We got a problem, Peps. Business problem.”
Any cobwebs in his head were pulled away at the mention of business. He led me upstairs, stepping over a few more sleeping men, to a back room that had been converted into a cut-rate office. He shut the door and locked it. Then he switched on the laptop that was on the desk and waved for me to sit on the fake leather swivel chair while he logged on.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know yet.” I gave him a half-truth. A quarter-truth, since I knew only half of it myself. “First, you heard of a company called Studio Noir?”
He rubbed more sleep out of his eyes as he nodded. “Sure, Jelly’s thing. I supply some of the talent.”
“You know where they’re based?”
He nodded and rummaged through a stack of papers on the desk, handing me a business card. It was matte black and designed in the same fake Deco style as the website. It had an address in Wednesbury.
I slipped the card into my notebook. “You know Jelly was with one of our girls at the hotel last night, right?”
“Jelly? Nah, can’t be. He never booked with me. He didn’t use the hotel, either. If he wanted girls he always just called me directly. We supplied for his videos sometimes. Don’t think he ever checked into the hotel.”
I changed the subject fast to keep him on his toes. “Drugs, Peps, you still selling?”
I’d always half-assumed Pepsi had been the secret drug dealer who’d infiltrated our prostitution set-up the year before. I’d let it go since the problem had gone away on its own, but now I needed to push. I watched his profile as I asked the question, judging his reaction. Shock is one of the hardest emotions to fake, and few actors onscreen ever really pull it off. I remembered reading about a film director shooting off a gun next to his actor’s head to get the right reaction. The shock on Pepsi’s face looked genuine enough as he turned to me with wide eyes.
“I don’t sell. I don’t even take. Except for weed, you know. What happened?”
“I don’t know yet, but I need to know which girl you sent to The Hound last night. Russian-sounding, or Polish, whatever. Blonde. Said her name was Maria.”
“Yeah, don’t they all. Half our list goes by that name.” He opened up a few files and spreadsheets and started scrolling through them. “I don’t think we had anyone there last night. Everything was over in West Brom, some footballer party. There was—wait—yeah, we had someone there. She was due to meet them in the bar, texted me to say they had changed the plan and she was heading to their house.”
“You allow that?”
“They’re regular customers. No problem.”
“They?”
“Yeah, there were two of them.”
“She go by the name Maria?”
“Not that she’s told us. And she ain’t Russian. Wait.” He clicked on another file and waited for a database to load up. It was labeled as his talent list and was laid out like a social networking site, complete with head shots of his models. He scrolled through the thumbnails until he stopped at a brunette’s photo and clicked on it. The next page that opened showed her glamour shot as well as her profile information. “Here you go.”
He turned the laptop so that the screen was facing me. I pulled it closer and scrolled through the page he’d selected. It was a listing for a Joanne Rhys, who lived nearby in Tipton. It listed her occupation as full-time student, and her model names as Paige, Lucille, and Sloane. There was a list of hot links that looked like they’d bring up another page on the database with headers including classy, secretary, and posh. Her photograph matched these descriptions: she had sleek brown hair, proud, angular features and a cool expression. There were other photographs as I scrolled down, of her in different outfits, each one a variation on a theme.
I copied her address into my notebook in case I wanted to talk to her, see if she’d seen anything at the hotel that might help, but she wasn’t Maria. I shook my head and turned the laptop back to Pepsi.
“How about the guys who canceled?”
He blinked for a second. “Not guys. It was a husband and wife—like I said, they’re regulars. Never canceled before, always been good for it, you know?”
“You got a database for regular customers?”
“Contact details, yeah, but not something like this with profiles and head shots. Hang on, I can probably—” He pressed a few keys and then scrolled around with the mouse. “I think the guy’s on Facebook with me. Yeah, here.”
He turned the laptop back to me and pointed at the screen. It was the profile page for Craig Cartwright. The name rang a bell, but not the face. He looked like any number of thirty-something men in the area: a tight black shirt, a little too much weight in the neck and shoulders, and far too much fake tan. But it wasn’t Cartwright who was holding my attention. I was staring at the woman pressed up against him in most of the photographs. The two of them caught in loving embraces, holiday snaps, family occasions. She was slim and attractive, if a little haunted looking.
Her hair color ranged from auburn to dark brown in the photos, but it wasn’t hard to picture her
as a blonde. It wasn’t hard at all.
I’d seen it last night.
This was Maria.
Pepsi gave me the couple’s address. He said he didn’t usually keep track of customers in this much detail but they were very open about their lives and kept inviting him round. He’d never taken them up on it.
I drove out to the pub, one of the few in the area I’d never tried myself. It was in the outskirts of Willenhall, a town that bordered Wolverhampton and was about a five-mile drive from the city center. Historically it had been known for its locksmiths, but like the rest of the area it was now known for discount stores and pubs. I found The Bridge Tavern at the junction between a bridge over the river and the main road. It was a large freestanding building, painted butterscotch blond and adorned with football flags and the cross of Saint George. The pub had its own parking lot to the side that overlooked the canal. I parked at the far end, near the water, and then made my way back to the building, looking up at the rear windows as I passed, trying to spot any sign of life in the living quarters upstairs.
Inside the main bar it was more cramped than it looked from outside. All of the wood was dark and glossy, and the bar had a brass rail running around it. I felt like I was on the deck of the Titanic. The early afternoon trade was limited to the usual suspects: old men and the unemployed. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light, I stepped up to the bar and waited to be served by the woman across the counter, who was chatting with a regular. She was in her early twenties, with bottle blonde hair and a fake tan; he was in his sixties with a flat cap. His words carried the whistle of the toothless. I didn’t fancy his chances.