Death of an Escort

by Nathan Pennington

  "This is all on camera," he said.

  I pressed the sharp edge up against his throat. "I'm really not in the mood for this," I said. "Tell me where it happened so I can do my thing."

  "You're not going to actually cut me," he said.

  I heard someone coming and let him go. A Hispanic maid stepped into the lobby, if you could call it that, from the hall that led to the back office.

  "Hey," I said. "Come here."

  She looked at the man and then at me.

  "Come here," I said authoritatively.

  She came over to where I was standing.

  "Do you speak English?" I asked.

  "Yes," she said softly, but she said the "y" like a "j", so that it sounded like "Jess".

  "Do you what room the woman committed suicide in Saturday?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Will you show me the room?"

  She looked at the man. He shook his head no.

  "No," she said.

  "Please?" I said.

  "How much?" she asked.

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "Money?"

  What a low-life joint! "Five bucks," I said.

  "No," she said.

  "Okay, okay. Twenty-five bucks," I said. I had no intention of giving her any money, but I'd promise her the moon to get what I needed.

  She nodded.

  "Wait for me outside," I said. She left. To the man, "Look, Jack, I—"

  "My name's not Jack," he interrupted.

  "Jack," I said again and turned away like I was going to leave. I picked up my brass knuckles. Then I swung around suddenly and in the middle of the swing, I put my brass knuckles on.

  My fist connected with the side of his jaw bone. I didn't even feel it because of the metal I was wearing, but he toppled right off of the stool he was sitting on.

  He toppled right off and made an awkward heap on the ground wedged in to the corner of the desk. Yes, he was out like a light, so to speak. Hell yeah, that felt good.

  Of course, I was going to have to confess that now. I'd given into violent urges. The thing is I knew I was going to. I'd always known it. Even when I tried to make that vow to give the violence up, I knew better.

  I know God knew better too, and I'm pretty sure the priest did as well.

  I started after the Latina maid, but stopped before I got to the doorway. An idea has suddenly come to me. Now was the perfect time to get the name of the person who'd checked in with Kelly, the deceased.

  "Hello? Ma'am? Señorita?" I called out.

  A moment later, she reappeared in the doorway. "Yes?"

  "What room number was it?"

  "Two, one, four," she said.

  I needed to put the computer monitor back on the desk, and then I had to crawl around down where he was to connect the cable I'd ripped out. After that was done, the monitor worked fine.

  I didn't have open the program. There was already one minimized that was called some hospitality suite or something.

  When I enlarged the window, it showed a calendar. I selected Saturday and a list of names and room numbers showed up. Scrolling down, I found the listing for room 214.

  Room 214 was booked for the night by Carlie Smith. And my heart sunk. If that wasn't a fake name, I'd never heard one.

  Apparently, I'd never heard one. Carlie Smith paid with a credit card. That didn't mean it was a real name for sure, but it sure increased the odds of it being a real name.

  Now it was time to see the room. The maid took me down a hall that needed repainting and by an ice machine that made a roaring noise. The refrigerant system needed to be looked at.

  Up some stairs we went. Then we went to room 214. It wasn't locked. She opened it up for me.

  "There were cops here?" I asked.

  "Yes."

  "And paramedics?"

  She looked confused.

  "Doctors?" I said.

  "Yes."

  "And who cleaned the room afterward?"

  She shook her head.

  "Did you understand my question?" I asked.

  "Yes," she said.

  "But you don't know who cleaned the room."

  Again, she shook her head.

  "Can you find out who it was?"

  "Yes." But then she reconsidered and shook her head no.

  I'd had about enough of that. "Fine. I'm going to look around."

  "Yes," she said.

  Inside was a stubby hall. Immediately to the left was the door to the bathroom. I passed by it for the moment.

  Opposite the restroom door was a small closet space. It was a cubby with a coat rod.

  Then the actual sleeping area opened up. It was small. There was a double bed in the center to the left. To the right was a low dresser.

  An old TV sat on it, and a grimy remote control sat on top of that. The bed had a covering on it with flower printed on it. It wasn't good looking, and the once bright and pastel colors didn't jive with the worn maroon carpeting on the floor.

  The bed visibly sagged in the middle. You could actually see it dipping down.

  Hung above the bed was a picture of a vase of flowers. It would have been nice if the glass covering the picture hadn't been filmy and even a little fuzzy in some areas. I couldn't tell if stuff was stuck to it, or if there was something actually growing out of it.

  Either way it wasn't cool.

  However, so far I hadn't seen anything that would tell me that someone died in this room over the weekend. I decided to look in the bathroom.

  The toilet had been cleaned and flushed. The sink was dry. What passed for fresh towels were hung up in there. The shower was cleaned, although black mold was growing on the caulk joints.

  The trash was empty.

  I had to admit, this was a little depressing. I had hoped to find a clue, and even more so after I'd arrived. I figured the cleaning would be horrendous. It wasn't. It was actually decent.

  But I wasn't giving up yet. The maid still stood in the doorway watching me. Why she was watching me, I didn't know. If she thought I was going to steal the TV that had been brand new in 1982, she was mistaken. It would have taken up the whole backseat of my car.

  I knelt down and picked the edge of the bed spread up. Too dark to see under the bed.

  So, I flipped up the bed spread on all three sides. Then I knelt down, and I was rewarded.

  There was a lump of something. I didn't care what it was. It could have been a crumpled candy wrapper, and I would have been elated.

  I'd found a clue—although, what it was I didn't know yet.

  Chapter 3

  Here I was, a licensed private investigator, letting this stuff get to my head. Geez.

  I crawled around to where the little lump lay. It was a button, a huge button.

  I stood and studied it. It almost looked like it was hand carved out of wood. On the back, a small steel loop was secured with a dot of glue. I assumed that was there so the button could be sewn to something. Indeed a little wisp of thread was still on it. I couldn't tell if it was navy blue or black.

  But that was it. There was nothing else to learn in the room.

  I went back to the maid in the doorway. "So, you don't know who cleaned this room?"

  She shook her head.

  "Who was working that night?"

  She shook her head again.

  "Were you working?"

  "Yes."

  "Who was working with you?"

  She shook her head.

  I had to stop that. I was going to hit her if we kept it up. "Thanks," I said.

  "De nada," she said softly.

  Downstairs, the moron had woken up, and the whole side of his face where I clocked him was puffy and red.

  "You. You're still here?" he said.

  I had this urge to go over there and do it again. He brought it out in me. My hand closed on the heavy steel brass knuckles in my pocket.

  "Yeah, I'm still here."

  "You're going to jail," he said. "I'm reporting
this."

  "You got nothing on me," I said.

  "It's all on camera," he said.

  "Oh yeah, I forgot about that," I said. "Where is your camera?"

  He looked away and down. I started scanning around the ceiling. I saw it in the corner close to the door that I'd taken to get up to the room.

  I walked over there and jumped up and grabbed at it. The first time my hand slipped off it, but the second time I ripped it off the ceiling. It came free and there were no wires. I cracked the case open. Inside was a battery to make the light on it blink.

  It was a fake camera.

  "It's a fake," I said.

  He didn't look at me.

  Viciously, I threw it at him, and he tried to duck. It conked him on the shoulder, and he deserved it. The twit.

  I went out to my car and decided to head to the local Walmart. They had a big fabric section. More than likely, it was a dead end, but I felt that I should follow up on this button and see where it would lead.

  It was only minutes away, and I pulled into the parking lot moments later. The fabric and sewing section was all the way in the back.

  And as I got close, I started to feel weird. You never saw guys in that back part. It was for women, and old women at that.

  I waited in the main aisle until I didn't see any guys. Then I ducked into the area. There was a clerk up ahead. She was old and white-haired.

  "Excuse me, ma'am?" I said loudly, in case her hearing was failing. Hey, she looked old.

  She turned around. "Yes, sir? Can I help you?"

  I dug the button out of my pocket and held it out for her on my flat palm. "Can you tell me anything about this?"

  She took it from me and dropped it. I picked it up for her and put it back into her hand. Her knuckles were enlarged with arthritis.

  She turned it around and around and looked at it. "We don't carry anything like this, sir," she said. "You could try the fabric shop down the street. Jo Ann fabrics. They have just about everything."

  That sounded odd from someone at Walmart to say, but I took the button back and said thanks. I went out and got into my car and drove about half a mile down the main highway to the Jo Ann fabric store.

  Now, if I thought it was bad going into the fabric section of a department store, this had to be a hundred times worse. Here I was about to walk into a store devoted totally to feminine things. Guys, not even gay ones, went into this store.

  But I had to, so I did. The first clerk behind the counter directed me to someone further into the store.

  And that person called someone from the back room. That person took it from me.

  "I've seen some like this," she said. She needed to lay off the cake, or whatever she'd been eating too much of. She needed to get out and really do something and quit all the sewing or whatever else she did that didn't involve any activity.

  "What can you tell me about it?" I asked.

  "Not much," she said.

  "Tell me all that you can, please," I said.

  "I can tell you to go to Jackie's Emporium. She'd be able to help you with this."

  "Jackie's Emporium?"

  "A local store," she said. "You've probably never been to it."

  She got that right. "And you think they can help me with this button?"

  "I'm sure if it," she said. "Let me jot the address down for you."

  I wasn't so sure that Jackie or whoever at this other store could help. It was a feeling I was getting after being jostled from store to store, but I was going to check it out. While at the same time I felt that going store to store was wasting my time, I also felt that in some way I was getting closer to the answer.

  The answer may be, probably was, nothing I wanted to hear and would be completely unhelpful, but I was going to give it a shot anyway.

  She came back with a note card and address on it. I took the button back and the note card as well.

  Off I went again. This store was deep in the old, historic part of the downtown. I needed to get off the highway and away from what was now the true downtown.

  The old downtown was tight and everything was made of stone and bricks. Iron rods stuck out from over tops of the doors of the shops and wooden sides swung from them declaring the name of the shop and often the proprietor's name as well.

  I never shopped down here, but there was a very loyal demographic that only came down here and kept these shops alive and profitable. It tended to be an older demographic, and they'd always lived here, and so had their parents before them. It was a generational thing.

  I found Jackie's Emporium, and there was an open parking space in front of the store. I parked there and then had to dig around for coins for the parking meter.

  That's why I never came down here. It was always a pain to pay for parking, but I found a dime and nickel. That should cover it, I thought.

  After paying for my parking, I went inside.

  Jackie, she was wearing a handmade name tag, wasn't as old as I thought. In fact, she was probably about ten years older than me or so, putting her in her very early forties.

  "Hello. How may I help you?"

  "By telling everything you know about this button," I said. "And hopefully you know something."

  She looked at it. "You want to know about this button?"

  I did. That's why I'd said I did. "Yes, I do," I said and tried to be nice about it.

  "I can't tell you much," she said.

  That's it. I wasn't chasing around with this stupid button anymore. It was a dumb idea to begin with.

  "But I know who made it," she said.

  "You know who made it?" I asked. Now I was doing it, repeating what had just been clearly stated. Maybe being around fabrics did that to you.

  "Yes," she said. "He comes in here and makes them."

  "Is he here now?"

  "No, but he'll be here tomorrow," she said. "He makes these by hand. Each one."

  "Sounds expensive," I said.

  "Fine quality often has a higher investment," she said. "Can I tell him to expect you tomorrow?"

  I took out a business card. "I'll be here," I said.

  She read it. "A private investigator?"

  I nodded and walked out before she could ask any more questions. The meter said I had only a minute-and-a-half left. I guess fifteen cents doesn't buy much time.

  To get back to where my office was, I had to do a u-turn and go back to the main highway. I don't have an assistant, so I couldn't call the office to look something up for me, so I had to go there myself.

  My office is about four miles down at the far end of the main highway, and I had to drive past all the button stops that hadn't proved fruitful to get to my building.

  It's not really my building. I have one office in a building of a bunch of privately divided offices. It would be cheaper to have office at home, but never, ever would I do that.

  I'm not going to make it easy for them to find me, if they're still looking.

  At my office I used the internet to look up Carlie Smith here in town. She had an apartment address. I wrote it lightly in pencil on the back of one of my business cards.

  Then I used an online map service to map out the quickest route there from where I was.

  When I was done I shut the internet browser down and completely cleared the history, cache, and cookies. Then I disconnected from the proxy service that I had been using (SOCKS proxy, not HTTP proxy as I felt the SOCKS proxy was more secure).

  Finally, I didn't shut the computer down, but instead I started up a program that I had commissioned to be created for me especially at eLance.com. It had cost about seven hundred dollars and some guy in Virginia had programmed it for me.

  It was called Scrambler. When you delete a file on your computer, it's not really gone. It sits there on your hard drive, and anyone with an ounce of determination can get it.

  Call me paranoid, but I want no one being able to tell what I'm up to on the computer. The scramble program creates a bunch of nonsense files
of varying size and deletes them for as along as I set it to.

  I leave it on the one hour setting. So, for one hour now, it will run and be creating and deleting random, gibberish files. That uses up all the hard drive space that the recently deleted files were using.

  It makes them unrecoverable, and covers my tracks, like the SOCKS proxy hides my online activity.

  Then after running for one hour, the program terminates and shuts the computer down automatically.

  I turned the computer monitor off and locked the office door on my way out.

  Hurrying down the hall, I glanced at my watch. It was past three in the afternoon.

  I hadn't called ahead because I didn't want to alert or alarm anyone, but that did mean that this could be a wasted trip. I hoped it wouldn't be.

  I pulled up in front of the triplex or whatever-plex it was. I think it was only three units in the building, but I wasn't sure. Anyway, I was here.

  I was struck at how similar the outside condition of this building resembled the outside of the motel. It had that same disrespectful lack of care look that I really disliked.

  The address said it was apartment three. Three was up some stairs that ran up the side of the building, and I went up them.

  There was no doorbell, so I knocked. Probably louder and harder than I needed to.

  A girl opened the door. She was maybe twelve or thirteen.

  "Hi," she said and pushed some of the boyishly cut blond hair out of her face.

  "Hello," I said. "Is Carlie home?"

  "Does she know you?"

  "Nope."

  "Is she expecting you?"

  "Go get her, okay?" I said.

  "Okay," she said. "Will you wait outside?"

  I nodded and the door closed. There was a good chance she wasn't going to come back, but there was an even better chance that I was going to stand here and keep knocking if that happened.

  However, the door opened a short time later. A grown up version of the girl was standing there. She had the same roundish face and longer, bowl-cut hairstyle. The same blond hair and blue eyes, but it was darker or possibly dirty blue.

  She was wearing a shirt that had the CarTech logo on it. They were the largest employer in the area and had a huge factory in town.

  "What is it?" she asked and sighed.