by Mark Dawson
“Thanks for the ride,” he said.
“Charming!”
He laughed, blushing. “I didn’t mean––”
“I know what you meant,” she said, the light dancing in her eyes. “I’m joking.”
The words clattered into each other. “Oh––never mind.”
“You’re a funny guy, John,” she said. “Relax, alright? I had a nice night.”
“Nice?”
“Alright––better than nice. It was so nice that I’d like to do it again. You up for that?”
“Sure.”
“Be at the next meeting. My place for dinner afterwards. Now––come here.”
He leant down and rather awkwardly kissed her through the window.
“What’s up?”
“I was wondering,” he said. “Could you do me a favour?”
“Sure.”
He told her about Doctor Andrew Brady and his potential involvement on the night that Madison went missing. He explained that he had worked at St Francis, like she did, and asked if she could find out anything about him.
“You want me to pull someone’s personnel file?” she asked with mock outrage. “Someone’s confidential personnel file?”
“Could you?”
“Sure,” she said. “Can you make it worth my while?”
“I can try.”
“Give me a couple of days,” she said.
“See you,” he said.
“You will.”
TRIP WAS WAITING outside Dottie’s, pacing nervously, catching frequent glances at his watch. He was wearing a woollen beanie and he reached his fingers beneath it, scratching his scalp anxiously. His face cleared a little when he saw Milton.
“Sorry I’m late. Traffic. Is he here?”
“Think so. The guy at the back––at the counter.”
“Alright. That’s good.”
“How we gonna play this?”
“I want you to introduce yourself and then tell him who I am, but it might turn out best if I do the talking after that, okay? We’ll play it by ear and see how we get on.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Just talk. Get his story.”
“And then the police?”
“Let’s see what he’s got to say first––then we decide what we do next.”
The café was reasonably large, with exposed beams running the length of the ceiling with a flat glass roof above. The brickwork was exposed along one side, there was a busy service area with a countertop around it and the guests were seated at freestanding tables. Blackboards advertised breakfast and a selection of flavoured coffees. A counter held home-made cakes under clear plastic covers and quartered wooden shelving bore crockery and condiments. A single candelabra-style light fitting hung down from the ceiling and there were black and white pictures of old Hollywood starlets on the walls. The room was full. Milton assessed the man at the counter automatically: the clothes were expensive, the empty mug suggested that he was nervous, the Ray-Bans he still hadn’t removed confirming it. He was sitting so that he could see the entrance, his head tilting left and right as he made constant wary assessments of the people around him. Milton paused so that Trip could advance a step ahead of him and then followed the boy across the room.
“Aaron?” Trip asked.
“Yeah, man. Trip, right?”
“Yes.”
He looked up, frowned, stabbed a finger at Milton. “He with you?”
“Yes.”
“So who is he?”
“It’s alright. He’s a friend.”
“Ain’t my friend, bro. I said just you. Just you and me.”
“He was driving Madison the night she went missing.”
That softened him a little. “That right?”
“That’s right,” Milton said.
“I don’t like surprises, alright? You should’ve said. But okay, I guess.”
“Shall we get a table?”
A booth had emptied out. Aaron and Trip went first; Milton bought coffees and followed them.
“Thanks,” Aaron said as Milton put the drinks on the table. “What’s your name, man?”
“I’m Smith.”
“You a driver, then?”
“That’s right.”
“Freelance or agency?”
“Mostly freelance, bit of agency.”
“Police been speaking to you?”
“All afternoon yesterday.”
The hardness in his face broke apart. “I’m sorry about you being involved in all this shit. It’s my fault. It should’ve been me that night, right?––I mean, I’d been driving her for ages. The one night I didn’t turn up, that one night, and… I can’t help thinking if it had’ve been me, she’d still be here, you know?”
There was an unsaid accusation in that, too: if it were me, and not you, she would still be here. Milton let it pass. “You were good friends?”
“Yeah,” he said with an awkward cough. “She’s a good person. Out of all the girls I’ve driven, she’s the only one I could say I ever really had any kind of fun with.” He looked at Trip, and, realising the implication of what he had just said, added, unpersuasively, “As a friend, you know––a good friend.”
Milton found himself wondering if that disclaimer was insincere, the way his eyes flicked away from Trip as he delivered it, and he wondered whether Aaron and Madison had been sleeping together. The boy was certainly all broken up about what had happened. Milton wondered whether Trip had started to arrive at the same conclusion? If he had, he was doing a good job of hiding it.
“What do the police think has happened to her?”
“They’ve got no idea,” Trip said. “It took them finding the bodies on the headland for them to start taking it seriously. Up until then she was just a missing person, some girl who decided she didn’t want to come home, nothing worth getting excited about.”
“Jesus.”
“Why didn’t you call before?” Milton asked him. “She’s been gone three months.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I felt awkward about it, I guess, you being her boyfriend and all.”
“Why would that matter?” Trip said tersely.
“No, of course, it wouldn’t––”
Milton nudged Trip beneath the table with his knee. “You said you could tell us who Madison was working for.”
“Yeah,” he said vaguely. “Same agency I work for, right?”
“Has it got a name?”
“Fallen Angelz. It’s this Italian guy, Salvatore something, don’t know his second name. I was out of work, got fired from the bar I was working at, I had a friend of a friend who was driving for them, I had no idea what it was all about until he explained it to me. I had no job, no money, not even a car, but I had a clean licence and I thought it sounded like an easy way to make a bit of cash, maybe meet some people, a bit of fun, you know? Turns out I was right about that.”
“How did it work?”
“Straightforward. The girls get a booking, some john all on his own or a frat party or something bigger, some rich dude from out of town wants company all night, willing to pay for the convenience of having a girl come to his hotel room. Celebrities, lawyers, doctors––you would not believe some of the guys I drove girls to see. Each girl gets assigned a driver. If it’s me, the dispatcher in the office calls me up on my cell and tells me where I have to go to pick her up. They gave me a sweet whip: a tricked-out Lexus, all the extras. So I head over there, drive her out to wherever the party’s at, then hang around until the gig’s finished and drive her back home again or to the next job, whatever’s happening. It’s a piece of cake: the more girls I drive, the more money I make. I get a slice of their takings. The agency gives all the drivers and girls a chart—kinda like a tip calculator—with the different hourly pay rates, everything broken down into separate shares for the agency, the driver, the girl. The drivers always get the least, about a quarter, max, but when you’ve got a girl charging a grand for an hou
r and she’s out there for two, maybe three, hours, well, man, you can imagine, you can see how it can be a pretty lucrative gig, right? I was getting more money in a night than I could earn in a two weeks serving stiffs in a bar.”
“What about drugs?” Milton asked.
Trip shot a glance at him.
“What about them?” Aaron said.
“They ever involved?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “Sure, man, what do you think? These girls ain’t saints. Some bring coke to help stretch the calls out beyond an hour or two. The dispatcher asks the john whether he wants any brought over––‘party material’, they call it––they give it to me and I deliver it. Sometimes I’ll get some to sell myself––I’ve lived here my whole life, it’s not like I don’t know the right guys to ask, you know what I’m saying?” He delivered that line with a blasé shrug of his shoulders, like it was no big thing, but Milton wasn’t impressed and fixed him in a cold stare. “I ain’t endorsing it,” Aaron backtracked, “can’t say I was ever totally comfortable with having shit in the car but the money’s too good to ignore, you can make the same on top as you do with the girls. This one time, I was out of the city and we got pulled over. It was me and Madison, actually, way I recall it. Apart from the fact that they were looking for guys driving girls, going after us for procuring prostitution, we had three grams on us. I said she was my girlfriend and we got away with it.” He looked apologetically over at Trip.
“What about Madison?” Milton asked. “Does she use at all?”
“Yeah, man, sure she does.”
“Bullshit,” Trip said.
Aaron looked at Trip with a pained expression. “You don’t know?”
“She doesn’t.”
“It’s the truth, dude, I swear. They use, all of them do.”
Trip flinched but held his tongue.
“What does she use?”
“Coke. Weed.”
“Anything hallucinogenic?”
He shook his head. “Never seen that.”
“Alright. Tell us about her.”
He shifted uncomfortably. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know, man, I’d driven her before, this one time, maybe a year ago. We hit it off right away. She’s a great girl, a lot of fun––the only girl I ever drove who I looked forward to seeing. Most of them––well, most of them, let’s just say they’re not the best when it comes to conversation, alright, a little dead behind the eyes, some of them, not the smartest cookies. But she’s different.”
“Go on.”
He looked over at Trip and then back to Milton. He looked pained. “Is this really necessary?”
“Come on,” Trip insisted. “Don’t pussy out now.” He must have known where this was going but he was tough and he wasn’t going to flinch.
He sighed helplessly. “Alright, man. I guess this was seven, eight months ago, before she went missing. The dispatcher said it was her and I was happy about it, I’d had the same girl for a week and she was driving me crazy. I went over to Nob Hill and picked her up in the Lexus, the same place we always met, and she got up in front with me, not in the back like they usually do. Sometimes there’d be more than one girl but it was just me and her this time and she talked and talked, told me everything that was going on in her life, said she was into books, I mean, that shit was never my bag, I ain’t the best in the world at reading, but she was into it big-time, loved it, writing too, and I thought that was kind of cool. Turns out that they put us together for two shifts after that. That’s like almost two whole days and nights. The third time out we were together the whole time. It was a day shift and it was quiet, just two or three gigs, and we kind of kept getting closer. The next night was the same. The shift ended, and we kept talking. I found a place to park the car, and she pulled out a fifth of vodka, and we drank it, then I had an eight ball of coke in the glove box and we ended up doing bumps of that, too. She said things about the work that I hadn’t heard from the other girls.”
“Like what?” Trip said, suddenly with a little aggression.
“That sometimes the calls are just about sex, sometimes they’re about keeping someone company—a john paying someone to hear him out. Said she liked those calls best.”
He cleared his throat and looked down at the table.
“Keep going,” Milton said, knowing what was coming next and hating himself for pressing, hating what it was going to do to Trip.
“Then––I guess it just sort of happened. We had the cash to get a hotel but I guess we didn’t wanted to wait. We had sex in the car.”
“And?”
“She said she liked it. I didn’t really believe it but then, the next time I was driving her, like a couple of days after that, it happened again.”
Trip stood abruptly. Without saying a word, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the café.
“I’m sorry, man,” Aaron said helplessly. “I didn’t want to say––”
Milton stared at him. “Keep going.”
He frowned, his eyes on the table again. “I had a girlfriend then but I ended it. I couldn’t stop thinking about Madison. I knew it wasn’t right, my girl was cut up and I knew Madison had a guy, but I couldn’t help it, neither of us could help it. I was getting pretty deep into working for the agency then and my girl had always been jealous about that, the girls I was driving, but Madison didn’t have any of that. No jealousy, just totally cool about it all. She got me, totally, understood where I was coming from. Sometimes I drove her and sometimes I didn’t, but it didn’t matter. We were both cool with how it was. When I drove her, we slept together between calls. Sometimes she’d pretend to be on call during the day but she’d meet me, we’d check into a hotel and stay there all day. We’d get room service, watch movies on the pay-per-view, I’d usually have a couple of grams on me and we’d work our way through that.”
“What was she like?”
“How do you mean?”
“Ever think she was depressed?”
“She had her moments, like all the girls, but no––I don’t think so. If you mean do I think she’s run away or done something worse, then, no, I’d say there was no chance. That’d be completely out of character. You want my opinion, I’d say that something bad has happened. No way she stays out of touch this long. She says nothing to me, nothing to your friend––no, no way, I ain’t buying that.”
“You know you have to tell the police, don’t you?”
“About us?”
“Yes, and about the agency.”
His eyes flickered with fear. “No way, man. Talk to the cops? You mad? Salvatore, he’s connected, you know what I mean? Connected. It’s not like I know everything about how it works, but, my best guess, the things I heard from the girls and the other drivers, he’s fronting it for the Lucianos. You know them, man? The fucking Lucianos? It’s fucking mafia, right?––the Mafia! Ain’t no way I’m getting myself in a position where they might think I was ratting them out to the cops. No way. You know what happens to guys they reckon are rats, right?”
“Your name doesn’t have to come out.”
“Fuck that shit, man! What you been smoking? That kind of stuff don’t ever stay under wraps. They got cops on the payroll, everyone knows it. My name would be on the street in minutes and then they’ll be coming over to talk to me about it and that ain’t something that I want to think about. Next thing, I’d be floating in the Bay with my throat cut. Fish food, man.”
“Alright,” Milton said, smiling in the hope that he might relax a little. “It’s okay. I understand.”
Aaron looked at him suspiciously. “You’re just a driver, right?”
“That’s right.”
“So why you asking all the questions, then?”
He spoke with careful, exaggerated patience. “Because I’m one of the last people to have seen Madison before she disappeared. That means I’m a suspect and I’d rather that I wasn’t. T
rip is a suspect now, too, and it’ll probably get worse for him when the police find out that you were sleeping with his woman. Jealousy, right? That’s a good motive. The more information you can give us, maybe that makes it easier for us to find out what happened to her and then maybe the police realise me and him had nothing to do with it. Understand?”
“You wait for her that night?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you help her, then? If it was me out there, I guarantee nothing would’ve happened.”
Milton looked at him dead straight, staring right into his eyes; the boy immediately looked down into the dregs of his coffee. “She didn’t give me a chance,” Milton said sternly. “Something happened to her at that party and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. By the time I got to her she was already in a mess.”
“So where is she?”
“She ran. That’s all I know.”
He gestured towards the door. “That dude––you tell him I’m sorry, will you? I didn’t want to say anything and, you know, muscling in on another guy’s girl, that ain’t the way I do things, that ain’t my style at all, you know what I’m saying?”
“I’m sure it isn’t,” Milton said.
“Alright,” he said. “I’m done.”
“The agency. How can I get in touch with them?”
“What are you gonna do?”
“I’m going to visit them.”
“And?”
“And get as much information as I can.”
“No way, man. I can’t. That shit’s gonna come back to me, right? They’ll figure out I’ve been talking. I don’t know. I don’t know at all.”
He got up quickly, the chair scraping loudly against the floor. He made to leave but Milton reached out a hand, grabbed the boy around the bicep and squeezed.
“Shit, dude!” he exclaimed. “That hurts.”
Milton relaxed his grip a little but he didn’t let go. “Have a think about it,” he said, his voice quiet and even. “Think about Madison. If you care about her at all you give me a call and tell me how I can get in touch with the agency. Don’t make me come and find you. Do we understand each other?”