“Come on in,” Malloy told her, pulling her into the apartment and closing the door, engaging multiple locks.
Didi was wearing a shiny black mini-dress that was about ten years out of style and clung tight to her chubby curves. She had on sparkly silver high-heeled sandals and was clutching a little matching purse that she had packed to bursting. Her mouth was slicked a bright, candy apple red and her mascara was smudged beneath her eyes. She had obviously been on a date when Malloy had called. She and I were very much alike in that respect. When we were upset, we went out and got laid.
“Did you notice that you were followed?” Malloy asked, looking out through the blinds again. “A dark gray Caprice. Not very subtle.”
“Those fucking cops,” Didi said. “They’re following me now?”
“Looks that way,” Malloy said. “They’re probably hoping Angel will try and contact you.”
“Listen,” Didi said. “About Angel—”
I couldn’t stand to stay in the kitchen any longer.
“Didi,” I said, stepping into the main room. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”
“Angel?” she said, rushing over to me. She looked me up and down, and her painted eyes went wide. “You call this okay? Holy shit, Angel, who did this to you?”
I couldn’t speak, I just pulled the ugly hat off my head and twisted it in my hands. Didi threw her arms around me, stroking my hair. Every time her fingers would find some lump or scab she would curse under her breath, swearing she was going to kill whoever did this. Her perfume made me feel like sneezing and I felt uncomfortable being hugged, as if the fact that I had just watched two people die was all over my skin like the stink of that trash bag dress. And of course it hurt, too. But I didn’t want her to let go.
“Lalo,” Didi said. “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”
Malloy gave Didi the Cliffs Notes version while Didi hung on to me like someone was going to try and take me away. When he was done, she sat down on the sofa and pulled me down next to her.
“Give me a cigarette,” Didi said to Malloy.
Malloy took the pack out of his pocket and shook out the last two cigarettes. He parked one in his own mouth and handed the other to Didi.
“I thought you quit,” I said as she accepted a light from Malloy.
“Fuck that,” she said, sucking smoke like it was oxygen. She ran her fingers through her hair and exhaled slowly. “What are we going to do?”
“First off,” Malloy said. “We need a cover story so I can talk to people without raising too much suspicion. I want you to tell everyone you hired me as a private investigator to find out what happened to Angel. I’ll need you to write me a check for my services. I’ll cash it and then give you the money back but I want a solid paper trail between us. That’ll explain this visit for your buddies in the Caprice.” He lit his own cigarette. “Also, people will be more likely to talk to me if they think I’m asking on your behalf.”
“If you find the fuckers who did this, you can keep the money,” she said. “What about Angel?”
“What about me?” I asked.
“She needs to keep a low profile,” Malloy said. “As soon as the guy that got away in Vegas reports back to his boss, then the boss is gonna know Angel isn’t dead. He’ll be looking for her too.”
“Jesus,” Didi said softly. “Jesus, this is bad.”
The three of us were silent for a stretch, all contemplating how bad it really was.
“Didi,” Malloy said, breaking the silence finally, “can you tell me everything you remember about the blonde with the briefcase?”
“You know, it’s funny,” Didi said. “After I left the office, I started thinking about her. I was pretty sure I recognized her. I’m sure she’s done videos, but I can’t remember the name she went by or the name of the series I saw her in. It was some super-low-budget amateur line. Mostly girl/girl and solo toy stuff but I’m pretty sure the one I saw her in was a boy/girl scene. It think it had ‘teen’ in the title.”
“Great,” I said, “That narrows it down to about seven billion.”
“It was a real boring title,” Didi said. “Very generic.”
“Teen Pleasures?” I suggested. “Teen Tryouts? Teen Cream? Teen Beaver?”
“No.” She shook her head. “It was more like Horny Teens or Dirty Teens.” She turned to Malloy. “You got Internet access in this joint?”
He nodded and gestured with his chin toward one of the two closed doors.
“In there,” he said. “But I don’t know if I want to go surfing a bunch of teen smut on my PC. Won’t I get logged by the FBI or something?”
“‘Teen’ just means girls with no implants and an amateur look,” I said. “There’s nothing illegal about adult videos featuring girls that are over eighteen and besides, most of those girls are older than they look. I was twenty-one when I did Teen Temptations.”
Malloy shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Me, I like real women. You know, grownups.”
Didi flashed him a smile and stood, smoothing her tight skirt.
“Well,” she said. “We’ll discuss that later, honey.” She winked and took my hand. “Come on.”
Inside Malloy’s predictably spartan bedroom was a small metal and glass desk with an inexpensive laptop sitting beside a jar of pens, a small printer and a cordless telephone. There was just the one chair so Didi and I sat on the bed behind Malloy like backseat drivers.
A Google search for the word “Teen” plus “Adult” and “DVD” gave us a staggering 20,000,000 hits.
“Forget that shit,” Didi said. “Try slutfinder.com.”
Malloy shook his head as he typed.
“Right,” Didi said. “Pick the ‘amateur’ category and then put ‘teen’ in the title field.”
“Jesus,” he said as his screen filled with flashing photos of teen beaver. I could see the muscles in his jaw bunch up as he watched the screen.
“What?” I asked.
“This,” he said, gesturing with his chin. “I don’t know about this shit.”
“What’s not to know?” I said. “It’s just pussy. It won’t bite you.”
Malloy didn’t respond and I felt myself starting to get hot and defensive. The last thing I needed just then was some moralistic argument about the evils of smut.
“You’re not getting squeamish on us, are you Lalo?” Didi asked.
“It’s just...” He shrugged.
“You got something to say,” I told him. “Say it.”
“Well, look at this girl here.” He pointed to a skinny blonde on the cover of a DVD titled Goodbye Seventeen. “She’s still got braces on her teeth, for chrissake.”
“A lot of the amateur girls get braces,” I said. “It’s a better investment than implants and the guys love it.”
“That’s sick,” Malloy muttered, clicking away swarming pop-ups with lurid headlines like TEEN TWATS WANT YOUR SPUNK NOW!!! and SEE WHITE TRASH TEEN TRAMPS TAKE ON THE TEAM! “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for dirty movies, but this... I don’t know. I know it’s legal, but I just don’t think it’s right for a man my age to be looking at girls that seem so young. Christ, half these girls look younger than my daughter.”
“I never knew you had a daughter,” Didi said.
“Yeah,” Malloy said. “Her name’s Paloma. She was eighteen back in April.”
He took a drag off his cigarette and looked away from the images on the screen. He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a posed school photo and handed it to Didi. I peered over Didi’s shoulder. The girl in the photo was plain and a little heavy and looked way too much like Malloy to be considered particularly attractive, but she had a crooked smart-ass grin that I liked. She looked like she wouldn’t take any shit from anyone. I wondered why Malloy had never mentioned her.
“She looks like a real smart kid,” Didi said, handing the photo back to Malloy.
“She lives with her mom out in Santa Fe,” Malloy said
, looking at the photo for a second and then putting it back in the drawer, face down. “We’re not all that close.” He looked back up at the screen. “But I sure as hell wouldn’t want a bunch of dirty old men jacking off over her on the Internet.” He closed the drawer. “You think these girls don’t have fathers too?”
I frowned and stood up.
“Yeah, well, these girls are all legal, consenting adults,” I said, taking Malloy’s jacket off and tossing it on the bed beside me. “Whether their daddies like it or not.”
“You can’t tell me something called Teenage Nympho Cheerleaders isn’t meant to get older guys off on the idea of nailing underage high school girls,” Malloy said. “It’s like one step away from statutory rape.”
“It’s a hell of a step,” I said. I was really angry now. “It’s just a fantasy. What are you, the thought police?”
“Come on, now,” Malloy started to say but I cut him off.
“Besides, who the hell are you to be getting all high and mighty about what’s right and wrong after...”
I had to stop myself before I said another word or things were really going to get out of hand. I turned away and tried to get a handle on my anger. I wished that I could stop being so defensive about all this. Malloy was probably right that some of the teen videos went a little too far. It’s not like he was criticizing me personally. But I was feeling fragile and ugly and couldn’t seem to help taking Malloy’s distaste as a personal attack. Plus, my own father broke my jaw when he found out about my videos, so my sympathy for fathers who don’t approve of their daughters doing porn is basically nonexistent.
“Listen...” he started to say, but Didi could see it was getting ugly and quickly cut him off.
“Enough, already,” she said. “Knock it off, Mr. Fucking Sensitive and just read off the damn titles. You want to find that blonde or don’t you?”
Malloy was silent for a handful of seconds and so was I. I looked down at the back of Malloy’s flushed neck and I realized abruptly that this little spat was the most Malloy had revealed about himself since I’d known him. I think he knew it too and was regretting it.
“Right,” he said and started reading off the list of titles on the screen.
Listening to Malloy read off titles like Teen Cum Dumpsters or Pop My Tight Teen Poop Chute in his gravelly, deadpan voice was suddenly way funnier than it had any right to be. I had been sulky and pissed off just seconds before and now I was fighting to repress a fit of crazy giggles. I was afraid to start laughing. I might never stop.
“There,” Didi said, getting to her feet and putting a hand on Malloy’s shoulder. “Click on Dirty Teens.”
Turned out there were only three DVDs in the Dirty Teens series. Didi was pretty sure the DVD she’d seen the blonde in had a high number.
“Try Naughty Teens,” Didi said.
There were twenty-one DVDs in that series and the box covers were cheap and inept, all bad Photoshop and tacky yellow titles. I didn’t recognize any of the girls but they were all very similar. Wan, pale and sickly. Probably junkies. All natural and all very young looking. Each one had a bland, unimaginative GND name like Beth or Tracy or Heather. No last names.
“There she is,” Didi cried triumphantly when Malloy clicked on number seventeen.
She was right. The blonde who had called herself “Lia” and wriggled out my bathroom window was prominently featured on the cover of Naughty Teens 17. She was billed as “Kimberly” and she had a male friend posing with her in the photo. A very close friend, apparently. The friend’s head was blocked by the ‘g’ in Naughty but I didn’t need to see his head to recognize him instantly. I felt a sick flush of anger.
“Jesse Black,” Didi said. “Motherfucker.”
12.
“Okay, ladies,” Malloy said. “We need a plan of action.”
“We need to find Jesse fucking Black and cut his goddamn nuts off,” Didi said. “How’s that for a plan of action?”
“As satisfying as that might be,” Malloy said. “I advise we start by figuring out what the hell is really going on here. We’ll get to Jesse eventually, but I don’t want anybody going off half cocked.”
There was some kind of a dirty joke in there somewhere, but I was too exhausted to make the reach.
“What about the note?” I said instead. “We need to get someone who can translate Lia’s note.”
“Someone who can keep quiet about it,” Malloy added.
“Wanda Curtis?” Didi suggested.
“I think she’s Hungarian, not Romanian” I said. “What about Honey Westlake?”
Didi snorted.
“The only time Honey Westlake is quiet is when she has a dick in her mouth,” she said. “Might as well put it on the six o’clock news.”
“Tabitha Moore,” I said. “She’s Romanian, right?”
“Right,” Didi agreed. “Tabby’s a decent kid.”
“There’s really that many Romanian chicks in porn?” Malloy asked.
“Romanian, Czech, Hungarian,” Didi replied, “It’s like these Eastern European girls are taking over the industry. They look like supermodels and they’ll do double anal with no condom for five bucks. Makes it nearly impossible to get decent treatment for American girls.”
“No shit,” Malloy said.
“Come on,” I said. “Not all Eastern European girls are like that. I mean, look at Zandora...”
I bit my lower lip. Nobody said anything. The screen of Malloy’s computer kept flashing lurid, fleshy images.
“What do you know about the guys who put out Naughty Teens?” Malloy asked, gently changing the subject. He squinted and read off the screen “PDM Productions.”
“PDM’s one of those companies that buys amateur content from independent producers,” Didi said. “You know, guys in Idaho shooting their girlfriend and her gal pals making out after too many diet beers. PDM buys the raw footage, edits it down, and sells it as Heartland Hos 23.”
“So how can we find out who made Naughty Teens?” Malloy asked. “And who this Kimberly chick really is?”
Didi and I both looked at each other and spoke simultaneously.
“Two-two-five-seven.”
Malloy frowned.
“US Code Title 18 section 2257,” Didi said, wrinkling her nose. “The so-called ‘child protection’ act.”
“That’s something to do with record keeping, right?” Malloy asked.
“It’s basically just another way to make life hard for godless smut peddlers,” I said. “Now not only do you have to have all your drivers licenses for all your talent—scanned, not just photocopied—but you also have to put your physical address on the beginning of every DVD and on every Web site. Not a PO box, but the actual physical location where the records are kept. You also need to put a real legal name as the custodian of records and guarantee that person will be at the listed address to make the records available for a minimum of four hours every business day. There’s more, but that’s the part that’s gonna help us.”
“God,” Didi said. “I never thought I’d see the day when I’d be grateful for 2257.”
“Right,” Malloy said. “So if we go out and rent Naughty Teens 17, we’ll get the address of the guy who made the video?”
“No,” I said. “We’ll probably just get the address of the PDM office. But what we can do is show up during the allotted four hours and get a drivers license for Kimberly or Lia or whatever her name is.”
“Outstanding,” Malloy said.
“What else?” Didi asked.
Malloy reached into the desk drawer and took out another pack of cigarettes. He offered one to Didi and she took it, letting him light it for her and then fanning the smoke away from me with one ring-heavy hand.
“Well,” Malloy said. “I don’t know about you, but I’d like to know what happened to that briefcase.”
“Who cares,” I asked. “For all we know, they’ve found it already.”
“If they had,” Malloy said. �
�They wouldn’t have gone after Zandora. You want to know what I think?” He lit a cigarette for himself. “I think the blonde hid the briefcase somewhere in your office, probably in the bathroom, and then someone else found it, after the first round of goons had split but before they went back to toss your place while you were at the phony shoot.” He sucked smoke and squinted at Didi. “You don’t have it, do you, Didi?”
“Fuck off, Lalo,” Didi said. “If I had it, don’t you think I would have mentioned it by now?”
Malloy shrugged.
“Just asking,” he said.
“So who all was in the office that day?” I asked. “It was pretty busy wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Didi said. “I’m so frazzled right now, though, I can barely remember.”
“Got a surveillance system in your office?” Malloy asked.
I shook my head.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a security camera in the lobby,” Didi said. “I have no idea who keeps the tapes.”
“I’ll see what I can find out,” Malloy said.
No one said anything for several minutes. Malloy and Didi smoked. I looked at the image of Jesse Black on the screen. My head hurt.
“Okay, look,” Malloy said, crushing out his cigarette. “I think we oughta call it a night. Didi, remember what I said. Spread the word that you’re paying me to look for Angel.”
“Sure,” Didi said, taking my hand. “I just hate to leave you alone, honey, what with everything that’s happened.”
“I’m not alone,” I said. “I got Malloy.”
“Okay,” Didi said, “But the next time I come by, I’ll bring some ginger snaps or something.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to come by again,” Malloy said, shaking his head. “It’s too risky.”
“Are you sure?” Didi asked. “I mean...”
“I’ll stay in contact by phone,” Malloy replied, gently taking Didi’s arm and maneuvering her toward the door.
“I’ll be fine, Didi,” I said, wondering if that were really true.
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