Robert Paul Baker was the lead guitarist and front man of SVMM. He was the last known person to have seen Katie before her disappearance. He wore thick silver rimmed sunglasses, even though we were inside under fluorescent lights. He wore black leather pants, a torn T-shirt, and a leather jacket with fur around the collar. There were diamond-crusted rings all over his hands and a gold chain hanging from his neck. In every way his appearance screamed “Rock Star”, as if his album playing at most record stores hadn’t nailed that.
“So, Mr. Baker,” I started, “Or do you prefer Robbie?”
“Robbie,” he said simply, blowing a smoke ring.
“So you were the last person to see Katie Vanders?”
“Yup,” he said.
“At Club 413?”
“Yup,” he said.
“Care to elaborate on that?” I said.
“Look, you’re not the first one of you wankers to come up here,” he said. He had what sounded like a British accent, but it was obviously fake. It just sounded off. “And every time one of you comes up here, they trot me out and I have to play twenty questions. I’m bloody sick of it by now.”
I decided to change tactics. “Do you know anyone who might have seen her after she left Club 413? I could go talk them instead…”
“Nope, I haven’t heard of anyone else. She went out the door and that was it.”
“No boyfriend?”
“’Boyfriend’ has a different meaning when you’re talking about Katie-fucking-Vanders. There was a guy in her life, but finally he couldn’t stand her shit either. Steve, I think. Left town a week or two before she went missing.”
“Where to?”
“I heard LA. But honestly, no idea.”
“Know his last name?” I asked.
“Nope.”
LA. I sighed as I made a note of it. Another haystack of a city I could search for my needle in. She probably felt she couldn’t live her life without this Steve, picked up and went to him and was living in some shithole with him, laughing about the publicity.
“Any of the other band members hear from her? Were they friends with her?”
“Nope. I was the closest thing to a friend in a band, which the others thought I was crazy for. Now I see what they mean.”
“I still don’t get it,” I said, “you were the last one to see her.”
“Yeah, and? What don’t you get?”
“But no one reported her missing for,” I paged through my dossier, “A week. You were her bandmate. Didn’t you notice she didn’t show up for practices or anything? Weren’t you friends?”
“Look, mate,” he said, “there’s something you need to understand about Katie. She was just like that. The girl would go out dancing and be out for a few nights, showing up at her flat like something the cat dragged in. She didn’t work, so she just partied all the time. Drugs, alcohol, you name it. She was into the boys too. She claims she was pining for that Steve, but that didn’t stop her from hooking up after shows. Everyone wanted a piece of her anyway, it might has well have been the Vanders Band back then.”
“But it’s different now?” I prompted.
“A bit,” he said, calming down. “It’s still her face everywhere. But with her missing, the rest of the band has actually gotten some attention. They profile us and just propose that she’s at rehab or something. I get to be the actual front man of the band.”
We were both thinking it, I figured I’d put it on the table. “So you directly benefitted from her disappearing.”
“Yeah, congratulations, boy detective, your subscription to the Hardy Boys fan club has paid off!” he said. “Yeah, I had something to gain. And that was exactly my diabolical plan: on the eve of hitting it big, when we’re still a crappy band getting low paying club dates, I do something nefarious to my lead singer so that we can’t tour live and we have to pussyfoot around her disappearance. Fucking brilliant, mate, you’ve cracked this case!” He grabbed his mug and took a large drink.
“Bit of an angry streak, eh?”
“Of course, wouldn’t you be? You have someone who you think is your friend, who you spend years working on something with, putting up with her attitude and bullshit because she is a fucking amazing vocalist, you do the legwork on going big which she doesn’t help with since you didn’t know she is secretly heir to millions, and then she splits, leaving you holding the bag? Fuck yeah I’m pissed. I put three years of my life into this band, shrugging off other invites from bands that did better while we struggled. I believed in SVMM, I believed in Katie. I fucking waited tables during the day, for every bloody wanker than came in, just so we could get SVMM off the ground and make some big bucks. I did all the work. Katie did nothing, Dave was useless, and Vince was lucky to join the band right before we hit. I wasn’t happy when people ran her background and found that she was a trust fund kid. It never mattered to her if we made big bucks, since she was already rich. So yeah, I have some anger.”
“Seems like she didn’t trust a lot of people,” I said.
“Katie didn’t trust anyone,” he said, taking another drag of his cigarette. “There were the obvious people she didn’t trust: the government, police, corporations, the Man. She said as much, and often. But anyone who knew her could tell she didn’t trust anyone really. Not me, not us, not even those she dated. Especially not the men she dated. Honestly, I don’t even think she trusted herself.”
“You’re not painting the picture of a stable girl,” I said.
“She wasn’t, mate, she wasn’t. You don’t know how long I held her hand just to get this band off the ground. It was always ‘Katie, can you make sure and make it to practice?’, ‘Katie, we know you two broke up, but you think you could make it to practice?’, ‘Katie, I know you are having trouble finding something to live for, but you think you could just show up when we have a fucking gig?’ She wasn’t a stable girl. Not at all. Then again, none of them really are. I’ll be glad when this whole Katie thing is over and we can go tour.” He rubbed his chin, the diamonds on his rings glinting in the air.
“You think we’ll find her?” I asked.
“Shit, mate,” he said, smiling, “It doesn’t really matter.”
“It doesn’t matter? Looking at how you’re dressed, you don’t seem to be saving a ton for investments. What if she isn’t found? Hell, what if she’s found dead in a ditch? That’s a horrible possibility, but it could happen.”
“Look, mate,” he said, “Katie doesn’t really matter. You’re missing how record companies work. Since Intersperse picked up our album, nobody has seen her. Only a few people remember her from smoky bars in Chicago, and after that we’re talking about someone who’s existed only in photos and video. If Katie turns up dead, well, too bad for her, we’ll have a private funeral. The record label finds some hopeful model or aspiring singer, gives her an image makeover, and now she’s the new Katie Vanders. If people think she’s different from the real Katie, well, we just say she found God or reinvented herself or got out of rehab. Maybe she got a nosejob with her newfound cash. Who knows? There are tons of ways to spin it. But the important thing is Katie doesn’t matter.”
“So Intersperse has detectives searching because…” I said.
“CYA. Cover Your Ass,” he said. “So say we make a fake Katie. Everything’s fucking brill, we’re making records, new tours, great. Then suddenly who shows up, but the real Katie. She’s been out in an Unabomber shack looking for Jesus or some crap. We’ve not only been using her name and likeness for profit, but she can make both SVMM and Intersperse look like loons in public. This would be very bad. So we need you wankers to find Katie, even if it’s a dead Katie.”
“Your concern for your friend is touching,” I responded.
“Look, mate, she burned me first. Even if she was kidnapped – and I’m not even convinced she didn’t get fickle and just go on walkabout – she fucked me over before that. So yeah, it’d be great if you found her and we could go back on tour, but if not, we
have it covered. I’ll light a few candles down at the church, and we’ll get on with all this. Some of us have rock stars to be. If she doesn’t want that, then she needs to at least give us her walking papers.” He grabbed his mug, taking a drink before stopping and peering into it. Empty. “We done here?”
I glanced at my notebook. “What I’ve got from this is that you’re a sonovabitch and you don’t know anything.”
“Great! Perfect!” he said. “Alan!” he shouted to the door, “pull my fucking limo around so I can get the fuck out of here!”
I left Intersperse and got a cab to my hotel, making a single stop on the way. My room was about the same as any hotel room I had stayed in: bed, television, desk, chair, phone, night table, bible. I threw my suitcase on the bed and grabbed what I needed from it. I set up my laptop and my papers on the desk. I poured myself some Seagram's from the bottle I got from the liquor store I made the cab stop at. I took a big sip, then slouched back in the desk chair.
I had nothing.
I thumbed through the dossier again, looking at what I had of Katie’s life. I had facts, names, dates, credit history, but I had little that actually told me who she was and what she did. She had no job to check out, no boyfriend to pester, and each of her known “friends” weren’t turning out to be friends. There was still her apartment, now rented by the record company. I was scheduled for that the next day, but did not have high hopes. So many people had been through there that any personal touches were probably gone. Items probably had been removed and I doubted anything in the room was still in its original place when she left. I’d still look, since I had nothing on this case. The only other option was LA. She might have gone after a “Steve” in LA. That was both jack and shit to work with, and I didn’t look forward to even trying to get a useable piece of information out of it. I sighed and took another big drink of whiskey.
I guess now is the time to admit that as a private detective, I’m very close to being a fraud. Remember how I said I was neither Humphrey Bogart nor a sleaze? I don’t fall in either category, mostly because I did not set out to be a detective. I’m a private detective almost by accident. Like many, I graduated from college and found myself thrust upon a world that I was woefully unprepared for by the university system. I looked for an office job, but my resume was lost in the deluge of other, better-qualified recent graduates. I can’t quite describe the confluence of circumstances that led to it, but I eventually found myself with a nonconventional job: insurance inspector.
As an insurance inspector, it became my duty to check into fraudulent claims made by policy holders of Southland Mutual Insurance. On paper, my job was just to investigate claims that were not necessarily fraudulent. But if I was being called to check on someone, the company was already assuming it was fraudulent. What does this mean in practice? Say Jimbo gets injured on the job, we’ll say he hurts his knee. Now he can’t work. If he is insured by Southland Mutual Insurance or any of the other myriad of insurance companies, he’ll get disability paid out so he can stay home and recuperate without going homeless. Great, problem solved, right? Wrong. Inevitably, someone at Southland gets it in their head that Jimbo is faking. Maybe he’s costing too much, maybe he’s taking too long to heal, maybe someone back at corporate just doesn’t like the spelling of his name. A ticket is created which is sent to my inbox. It’s my job to investigate. And by investigate, I mean spy.
So typically this is how it shook out: I take the company-supplied spy equipment and start following this guy, which usually means staking out his house. I get all sorts of high-tech directional microphones, ultra-zoom cameras, and a choice selection of other surveillance equipment. I sit in a car across from his house, trample through his bushes, climb through random trees, etc. Mostly it’s just sitting in the car taking long range pictures with the camera. You’d be amazed how rarely people close the drapes on their houses, making this all very easy. I take some pictures and usually bring back the evidence Southland Mutual wants: Jimbo’s knee isn’t as bad as he’s saying, look here he is dancing with his wife, playing catch with his boy, running with his dog. He gets bounced from his insurance, I get a nice paycheck, and someone from the ACLU can’t sleep at night.
So why am I no longer in this prestigious line of work? It came down to playing to my strengths. I was pretty good at getting the evidence that someone was not injured when they claimed they were. Pretty good will pay the bills, but great will start a shining career. I found that I what I was great at was catching people’s “indiscretions”. I was much better at discovering people’s extramarital affairs than their healed knees. The first time I handed over the incriminating pictures to the policy holder’s wife, I did it because I felt she needed to know. The second time there was the same “need to know” feeling, but it was tarnished. The third time the wife asked what she owed me for the pictures. After that, I rationalized away the guilt by arguing that I could make some money on the side while doing the right thing. I still felt like the sleazy detectives. But I kept doing it, trying to keep my nose clean and making some money on the side. From there, it wasn’t long before I got a call from Morty.
Mortimer J. Rosen, real estate developer, to be exact. Technically Mortimer Jacob Rosenberg, as I found when I ran his credit, but he confessed to that – “Rosen sounds a little less Jewish.” Morty is rich, and that is not an understatement. Real estate development was very kind to him, especially when combined with his knack for wheeling and dealing. Since I had and have nothing to do with real estate development, what did Morty have to offer? I asked the same thing when he called, which elicited a chuckle from him. His simple answer: “More profitable business.”
I was making extra money from my incriminating pictures side business, but it wasn’t great money. Ultimately the people making use of workman’s comp are not affluent people to begin with. They can pay for photos of cheating husbands and wives, but they couldn’t pay well. “But what if,” proposed Morty, “you were instead documenting the indiscretions of rich socialites? They pay quite a fee for divorce lawyers, so what do you think they’d pay for divorce-worthy pictures?” Here in Austin, by and large the rich and well to do live in an area of town known as Westlake Hills. What Morty offered me was a connection to this culture. Whenever a Westlake wife suspected her husband of cheating or a husband suspected his trophy wife of straying during the daytime, Morty would get them in touch with me. I traded in my job sitting in cars with spy equipment on the less affluent side of town for a job sitting in cars on the more posh side of town, but the difference in wages were dramatic.
So I went into business for myself, nominally partnered with Morty. How did I find myself partnered with a wealthy businessman? Anyone who knows Morty would know that even when feeling benevolent, he doesn’t give favors for free. His price is simple: he sees all the evidence of affairs first. He’s quite a character, really. He wants to know everything going on in the lives of his neighbors, laughing behind their backs while smiling in their faces. I’m sure he also files it away for strategic use later.
With my benefactor’s help, I started my own business, spying on the wealthy, waiting for them to screw up. This paid the bills, but it’s not what I wanted to be doing. My dream was to slowly change my business over to real detective work, just using the hotel detective work to get started. I’ve been lucky enough to do some other types of cases. I’ve done blackmail, protection/bodyguard, lost-and-found, runaways, and theft-retrieval. I’ve been beaten up a few times during the course of an investigation, and if that’s not the mark of a stereotypical private detective, I don’t know what is. But all those were few and far between. By and large, most of my work is vast portfolio of marital affairs that Morty sends my way.
It was through Morty that I heard about the Vanders Situation from Intersperse Records. I admit I’m small time. If Katie Vanders was cheating on her boyfriend, girlfriend, whoever, I’d be the one to call. But tracking? I’ve dabbled in it, but I’m hardly top shelf. There a
re probably hundreds, if not thousands more qualified for that type of work than me. But Morty had the connections. Someone – I never found out who – at Intersperse owed Morty some favors. Morty had their ear as he talked up his favorite detective, his “whiz kid back in Austin”.
Morty may have had confidence in me, but as I sat in that hotel room in Chicago, I had none in myself. I was pretty close to calling myself a fraud. What was I doing competing with the professionals to find a lost rock star? I knew that I should be home taking pictures of a businessman playing doctor with his secretary. That I knew I could do.
I flipped on the TV. The best thing on was the fifth Planet of the Apes movie, “Battle for the Planet of the Apes”, when their budget was small and their ideas were stretched. I let it play in the background as I went over the dossier. I kept returning to my notebook and the description of my dream. I still felt that there was something there. My GPS coordinates idea was fruitless, but the dream still might have something. I read over the conversation between the two men, looking for any sort of code. Somehow, it would be significant.
As the Battle for the Planet of the Apes went on, I gained no new ideas and grew steadily drunker. The less I discovered, the more I drank. I am not an alcoholic nor even a heavy drinker. I am an infrequent drinker. I just am well aware of the value of drowning feelings of failure and futility at the bottom of a glass. Also, there’s something about traveling that always makes me want to drink, even if I am not on vacation.
Drunk, I decided to revisit my latest failure. I brought up a map webpage and put in those meaningless coordinates, N44 47 W072 32. The page brought me the stunning view of green nowhere that I had discovered earlier in the day. I toasted that nothingness and took another sip of my drink. I zoomed in again, seeing nothing, not even a road. I laughed at my foolishness in thinking I had solved it. I laughed that I thought a dream would give me a break in a case I knew nothing about. This wasn’t a lost watch, this was a half a million dollar missing girl. I spun the wheel on my USB mouse, zooming myself back out to the default view. I zoomed it a bit farther than that, but didn’t care.
The Lost and the Damned Page 3