by R. J. Jagger
“—Jennifer Pazour—”
“—right, Jennifer Pazour, what I’m wondering is whether she was Tessa’s girlfriend, the one she was talking about. Maybe she had the number written down because Tessa gave it to her.”
Wilde was impressed.
It was a long shot but it was still a shot.
“You’re a pretty amazing woman.”
She leaned across the table and put her arms around his neck. She kissed him on the mouth then took his hand and put it on her breast.
“Amazing enough to fuck?”
122
Day Six
June 14, 1952
Saturday Afternoon
WILDE’S OFFICE was as good a place as any to be, so Shade and London hung out and waited for him to return. London turned on the radio to a jazz station. Tail hopped up and stuck his head right by the speaker, then rubbed his face on it. Ordinarily Shade would be impressed and make a comment.
Right now she was too preoccupied.
Words were stuck in her mind.
The words spoken by Mojag, He said he bought it from someone.
She lit a cigarette, flicked the burning match out the window and immediately hoped no one was underneath catching it with the top of a head. She looked out just to be sure and saw it on the top of a man’s hat still burning. The man wasn’t aware yet. She shouted out, “Hey, your hat’s on fire,” then ducked in before the guy could look up. Hopefully that did the trick.
She blew smoke and said, “Mojag said that the guy who killed Visible Moon first tried to claim that he bought the scalp from someone.”
London nodded.
She remembered.
“What if that was the truth?”
“That was just a ploy,” London said.
“How do you know?”
“Think about it,” London said. “It doesn’t even make sense. What do you think, that someone commits a brutal murder to the point of even scalping someone and then risks his entire life to sell something that ties him to the crime? For what, five dollars?” She shook her head. “He didn’t buy it. Not in a million years. That was a lie. Don’t even give it two more seconds of thought.”
Shade paced by the windows.
London was right.
STILL, SOMETHING NAGGED HER.
“Mojag shouldn’t have killed the guy,” Shade said. “Not without making him take her to Visible Moon’s body first.”
London shrugged.
“He snapped,” she said.
“He shouldn’t have,” Shade said. “We don’t have any proof that she’s dead. What if she’s still alive chained somewhere like she was in the shed, rotting to death even as we speak?”
London put her arm around Shade’s shoulder.
“Look, I know this is hard,” she said. “The last thing the guy would have done is tell Mojag he killed Visible Moon if he didn’t. If she was alive, he would have played on it. He would have told Mojag she was alive and that he’d show him where she was. That would have given him a chance to escape. Or he would have tried to make a trade, his life for information as to where she was.” She shook her head. “He wouldn’t have said he killed her unless he did.”
Shade blew smoke.
“I want to find her body,” she said. “I need to be sure.”
“You want some advice?”
“No.”
“Good because here it is,” London said. “Just let it go.”
“THE GUY SCALPED TEHYA.”
“So?”
“So, don’t you think he’d do the same thing to Visible Moon at the end?”
London shrugged.
She didn’t know.
“There was only one scalp on his wall,” Shade said. “Only one.” She exhaled. “We need to get to his house and pick up the trail.”
123
Day Six
June 14, 1952
Saturday Evening
MEAN CHARCOAL-GRAY CLOUDS rolled off the Rockies Saturday evening and threw a thick blanket over Denver. A breeze kicked up. Rain was coming. Blondie’s top was up. Wilde sat behind the wheel parked in front of Tessa Tanglewood’s house, waiting for her to show up from wherever she was.
His head buzzed from the whiskey, but not much.
The more he thought about Jackie Fontaine’s theory that Tanglewood was referring to Jennifer Pazour when she talked about a blackmail that was getting scary, the more it made sense.
That would explain the mystery deposits into Pazour’s bank account.
They were blackmail payments.
If this was a dead end he didn’t know where to turn next.
He was running out of ideas.
Alabama leaned over, pulled the pack of Camels out of Wilde’s coat pocket, lit one and handed it to him.
“Here. Smoke this, calm down.”
Right.
Good idea.
“I know you’re all sweet on that Jackie Fontaine since she gave you all that information and wanted to screw you,” Alabama said, “but I’m not so sure if she’s as naïve and innocent as you think.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What it means is, maybe the whole thing was staged. Maybe the whole story was a big charade, orchestrated by the lawyer and played out by her.”
Wilde blew smoke.
“Are you saying she’s covering up for Black?”
“I’m saying I wouldn’t necessarily rule him out. The matchbooks have a B on them; his last name’s Black. Don’t forget that.”
“I haven’t.”
“That’s not all,” Alabama said. “According to your new love Jackie-girl, the files were just notes that Black took while talking to Shadow—right there, that’s a clue something’s wrong. It’s a stupid name. Shadow. Who calls a client Shadow? No one, that’s who.”
Wilde smiled.
“Right,” he said. “So?”
“So, it’s one thing to take notes,” she said. “But there were pages torn out of the magazines in there to. So what happened? Are we supposed to believe that Black got the reports from his so-called Shadow client, and then independently went out and dug up the magazines—most of which were out of print by that time and no doubt hard to find—just so he could rip the pages out and make the files a little more complete? That seems like a lot of work. It seems like a lot of time consumed by someone who really doesn’t have a lot of time to spare.”
Wilde chewed on it.
He gave it fair consideration.
Still, it didn’t fit.
“I don’t think Jackie was lying to me.”
Alabama rolled her eyes.
“Wilde, here’s a problem,” she said. “Women lie to you all the time and you never have a clue.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I do it myself.”
“You do?”
“All the time,” she said. “God, you’re so naïve.”
He wrinkled his forehead.
“What do you lie to me about?”
SHE WAS ABOUT TO ANSWER when a cab appeared from out of nowhere and pulled into the driveway. The back door opened and legs encased in a tight red skirt swung out, followed by a young woman about twenty-two. She was tall, five-ten or five-eleven, with the body of a tennis-player. She paid the driver and fumbled in her purse for her keys as she headed for the front door.
Wilde and Alabama hopped out and followed.
“Hey Tessa, wait up,” Wilde said. “We want to talk to you about Jennifer Pazour.”
“You know Jennifer?”
“Sort of. I hate to tell you this and don’t know how to do it except to just do it. She’s dead.”
OVER THE NEXT thirty minutes, they learned a few things.
“Jennifer dropped a fare off one night way up on the north edge of the city and ended up getting flagged down by a man and a woman just as she was starting to head back,” Tessa said. “They were sort of out there in the middle of nowhere with nothing really important around. The guy had blood on h
is hands, not a lot and not obvious, more like he’d been pretty bloody at one point and then wiped it off but didn’t get it all. They were both pretty tipsy. Anyway, they had her drop them off at a bar on the west side, almost in the foothills, a place called Senior Frogs. She knew the bar. It wasn’t their kind of place. A younger crowd went there.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, the next day she’s reading the paper and comes across an article about a woman being run over the night before,” Tessa said. “Accordingly to the article, someone named Mary something-or-other got a flat tire. She was changing it when a car came speeding down the road and took her out, the side of her car, too. This all happened at night, after dark. Are you following me?”
Yes.
He was.
“It turned out that Mary got run over not far from where Jennifer picked up the man and woman. She started to wonder if they were the ones who did it.”
Wilde nodded.
“That makes sense.”
“That’s when things went bad,” Tessa said.
“How so?”
“She didn’t go to the police like she should have,” Tessa said. “Instead, she hired a PI to find out who the man and woman were. Somehow, the investigator actually figured it out. Then Jennifer blackmailed the guy, doing it anonymously, just being a voice on the phone. I didn’t know any of this was going on. You believe me, right?”
“Sure, why not?”
“It’s the truth, I didn’t know,” Tessa said. “Anyway, the guy she was blackmailing was starting to close in on her. She got scared and told me everything that was going on. That’s the first I knew of it. I told her to contact my attorney, Stuart Black, who might be able to arrange some kind of a standoff between the two. She said she would and wrote the number down. That was the last I saw of her.”
“Who was the guy she was blackmailing?”
Tessa didn’t know.
“She never told me.”
“Why not?”
“Probably because she want exclusivity but I don’t know that for a fact.”
OUTSIDE, walking to Blondie, Alabama said, “Whoever she was blackmailing caught up to her.”
Wilde said nothing.
“You’re supposed to say, Right,” Alabama said.
“Maybe that’s right, maybe it isn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe she did call the lawyer like she said she would.”
Alabama wasn’t impressed.
“If she did, your little love Jackie-girl wouldn’t tell you about Tessa. There’d be too big a risk that you’d run it down.”
Wilde lit a cigarette.
“Maybe she didn’t know about the call,” he said. “Maybe she wasn’t at work when the call was made.”
“Interesting.”
“Isn’t it?”
“So we’re back to Black again.”
“Not necessarily,” Wilde said.
Alabama punched his arm.
“Make up your mind,” she said. “Is he the guy or not?”
Wilde blew smoke and said, “You never answered my question before. What do you lie to me about?”
She kissed him on the cheek.
“Got you curious, don’t I?”
He fired up the engine.
“Where we going now?” she asked
He took off and said, “Got you curious, don’t I?”
124
Day Six
June 14, 1952
Saturday Evening
SATURDAY EVENING, Fallon and Jundee drove south under a windy, blackening sky. A storm was moving in and it wouldn’t be pretty. Fallon sat in the center, next to her man. Jundee had his left elbow out the window and a cigarette in his left hand. His right hand alternated between the steering wheel and Fallon’s knee.
“Maybe it would just be better to let the body be,” Fallon said.
“We’re already en route.”
“We can turn back.”
“It’ll be fine,” Jundee said. “Don’t worry about it.”
They got to their destination exactly when they wanted, at the edge of darkness.
The road was deserted.
The last car they crossed was fifteen minutes back.
Jundee stepped out, closed the door and stuck his head through the window.
“If I don’t get back before dark, turn the headlights on for three or four seconds every minute or so.” He ran a finger down her nose. “See you soon.”
“I’ll be here.”
She watched him as he headed into the terrain. Before long he was nothing more than a black silhouette. Then the thickening darkness swallowed the silhouette.
Five minutes passed.
Rain came, light at first then mean and nasty.
It blotted out the little light that was left.
Fallon slid over until she was behind the wheel, flashed the headlights for three seconds then shut them down.
“Come on, Jundee.”
MINUTES PASSED.
Lightning exploded overhead simultaneously with a deafening slap of thunder. Then something bad happened; headlights appeared in the rearview mirror, still distant but definitely heading this way.
What should she do?
Think.
Think.
Think.
If she just sat there the person might stop. It would be too suspicious if she didn’t at least roll down the window. He’d see her face. More importantly, he’d want to know what she was doing out here. What would she say?
The other option would be to lock the car and head into the terrain out of sight.
Wait for him to pass.
That would be better.
It still wouldn’t be good though.
He might stop.
What if he turned out to be the guy who stopped last night? Now he’d really think something was strange. If he didn’t write the plate number down last time, he definitely would this time.
Damn it.
This was bad.
Wait.
There was another option.
She could drive down the road a quarter mile or so with the lights out, turn around, put the lights on and then drive back this way.
That way they’d be nothing more than two cars passing each other.
That was the best option.
SHE CRANKED OVER THE ENGINE and looked ahead.
The road was nearly invisible.
She’d have to be careful.
“Don’t go off the road. The last thing you need is to get stuck in the squish.”
She shifted into first and took off.
125
Day Six
June 14, 1952
Saturday Night
BAXTER FOX—the man Mojag killed—wasn’t listed in the phone book. He should have been easy to track down, being a lawyer. How the hell did Mojag find his house yesterday? Did he follow him home from the office?
“I can’t believe this is so hard,” Shade said.
“Maybe he does divorce law,” London said.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning a lot of those types lay low out of the office. That makes it harder for mad husbands to hunt ’em down.”
Shade smiled.
It was a joke but there was probably some truth in it.
As a last resort, they went over to the Daniels & Fisher Tower to see if there was anything there to be gained. The building was locked and the lobby was dark. They knocked on the door next to the revolving door until someone came and cracked it open.
It turned out to be a middle-aged woman in a blue cleaning uniform.
“We’re trying to find Baxter Fox,” Shade said.
“The building’s closed.”
Shade pulled a five-dollar bill out of her purse and dangled it in her fingers. “I’m supposed to pick something up from his office. I’m running late. It’s important. If you could let me in it will only take a second.”
The woman hesitated.
“I’m
not supposed to do that.”
“It’ll be our secret. No one will know.”
She studied Shade’s eyes for a second, looking for danger or exaggerations, then opened the door and let them in. She took the bill and handed over a key.
“His office is on the ninth floor, No. 904. The elevator’s shut down. You’ll have to walk up.”
“Thanks.”
“Lock his door when you leave. I’ll probably be gone before you get back down. Put the key over there in that flowerpot,” she said pointing. “To get out of the building use that back door over there. Be sure it’s closed tight. It locks by itself from the inside.”
“Will do.”
“Don’t tell anyone I let you in. I’d get fired.”
“I won’t.”
Rain pelted against the building.
“Be careful of the ghosts. There are a lot of ghosts in here, even on a nice night. On a night like this you never know what you’re going to get.” She wrinkled her face. “I don’t like the guy, personally.”
“Who?”
“Baxter Fox. I don’t like him.”
THE STAIRWELL wasn’t just dark, it was pitch-black. There were no emergency lights, no after-hours lights and no other lights. They may as well have been a mile under the surface of the earth, blindfolded.
“This is creepy,” London said.
“Don’t talk, you’re going to wake the ghosts.”
“Do you think she really believes in them?”
“No. She was just messing with us.”
“I don’t know,” London said. “You don’t see her in here with us. Maybe she really does know something we don’t.”
“Are you trying to freak me?”
London laughed.
“Maybe a little.”
“Well stop it, it’s not funny.”
They came to a landing.
“This is floor five if I’m counting right.”
“That’s what I have too.”
“Four more then. Four more to go.”
THEY CONTINUED UP.
“At least we don’t have to worry about running into the cops here,” London said.