Courting Trouble

by Lisa Scottoline

  “Well, he’s good-looking, for a psycho. He has pale blond hair and blue eyes, close together. His nose is long and sort of beaked, a little—”

  “Wait.” Judy held up a palm, turned from the window, and began ransacking Mary’s desk. She stopped when she found a small pad of white paper and a sharpened pencil. “Start over, with his eyes.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to draw him.”

  “Why?”

  “I understand things better when I draw them.”

  This chick is crazy, too. Maybe I wasn’t missing anything.

  “Start again, with the eyes—”

  “They’re blue.” Anne went into a detailed description, surprised that she remembered as much as she did about Kevin’s face. She had read that many stalking victims become obsessed with their stalkers, but she thought it was simply impossible to forget the face of someone who had looked at you with intent to kill. “Light blue, scary blue. And he has a weak chin, by the way. It goes back a little.”

  “Recedes.”

  “Totally.”

  “Got it.” Judy sketched some more, asked a few more questions, then, after ten minutes, flipped the pad over and held it up. “How’s this?”

  My God. The likeness was almost dead-on. It looked like Kevin’s face emerging from the sketch. Right in front of Anne.

  “You hate it.” Judy’s face fell.

  “No! I mean yes! I hate it and it’s him! Exactly. You are incredible!”

  Judy turned the pad over, surprised at her own handiwork. “I never did that before, drew from words. Usually I only draw from life. Or pictures.”

  “It’s like a composite! A police composite!” Anne came around and stood next to Judy, staring at the sketch. It was almost as good as a mug shot and was already giving her an idea. “Can I have it?”

  “Sure.” Judy handed her the pad. “Why?”

  Eeek. “You really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a secret.”

  “I can keep a secret.”

  Anne didn’t know if she could trust her; she didn’t even know if she wanted to trust her. Judy might try to stop her, tell Bennie, or do something equally sensible. Anne had never confided in a woman she liked, much less one she didn’t.

  “Well? You gonna tell me?” Judy cocked her head, her silver earring dangling to the side, and on the desk, even Mel raised his chin, waiting for her response with interest.

  Curiosity Cat.

  9

  Fifteen minutes later, Uncle Sam and her large, stuffed manila envelope were downstairs in the office lobby, being let out the service entrance by Herb, who held open the door to make sure her breasts left unharmed. “You got the job?” he asked. “Congratulations!”

  “Thanks.” Anne clasped the manila envelope to her independent woman shirt like a lead shield.

  “Hey, what’s your name, honey? I checked the log but I couldn’t read it.”

  Heh heh. “Samantha. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Will you let me back in?”

  “Sure. Knock. I’ll be listening for you.”

  The mouth of the alley opened onto the cross street, around the corner from their office entrance on Locust. Crowds of tourists and other people were making their way down the cross street, going north to the Parkway, and the media was thronging south, trying to get to Rosato & Associates.

  Anne waited until the foot traffic was at its densest, then flowed into the crowd as Uncle Sam, with sunglasses, beard, and a package tucked protectively under her arm. She had insisted on making the delivery herself, despite Judy’s arguments to the contrary. Anne was the new messenger, after all, and this was something only she could do. She wanted to be down here in the crowd, in case she could spot Kevin. Any time she saw a blond head, she scrutinized the face. No Kevin. But she couldn’t help but feel that he was here.

  Anne walked toward Locust, craning her head to see if the hard-working kid on the corner was still there. He was, and his flyer supply was dangerously low, evidence that he’d been foisting junk onto the public with vigor. Sweat beaded on his brow, and he looked a lot younger down here, maybe sixteen. His hair was shaved into a fade, and he wore a heavy gold chain over his eat at bobo’s T-shirt, which matched his flyers. Damn. Anne wished she’d thought of matching T-shirts to her flyers. Mental note: Law school is useless.

  She slowed when she approached the teenager, giving the reporters and tourists a chance to flow around him. When she got next to him, she opened her hand. Inside was a hundred-dollar bill she got from the office kitty, and she flashed it. “You wanna pass some flyers out for me?”

  “Sure, clown,” he answered, taking the bill and the manila packet. He opened the brass fastener, slid one of the flyers out, and looked it over.

  Anne couldn’t help but read over his shoulder. They’d printed the flyer on red paper, and the top half was a copy of the composite picture Judy had drawn. The text they had written together:

  CALLING ALL REPORTERS! HERE’S WHAT THE POLICE ARE HIDING FROM THE MEDIA!

  Do you want the hottest lead in the Anne Murphy murder? Find this man!

  He’s shown above in a composite drawing. His name is Kevin Satorno and he’s the prime suspect in Anne Murphy’s murder, but the police aren’t telling you that yet. Satorno is Caucasian, age 29, about 6 feet tall, 175 pounds, with light blond hair and blue eyes. He has recently escaped from a penitentiary in California, where he had been jailed last year for aggravated assault, for trying to kill Murphy. Find him and scoop the competition!

  Anne thought it was a beautiful flyer and a great idea. The press was as dogged as the cops and were aggressive by occupation. Why not turn the reporters to her advantage? Put them to good use? Get them working for her, instead of against her?

  “Fuck is this?” the kid asked, with teenage scorn.

  “It’s a flyer. All you gotta do is give one to any reporter you see. TV, newspaper, anything. Anybody with a camera or a microphone. You got me?”

  “How ’bout that shortie from Channel Ten?” The kid nodded at a pretty woman in the press crowd. “She’s fine.”

  “Fine is good. Hand it to everybody fine. Shorties and tallies. Knock yourself out. Don’t be picky. I’ll be watching you, and if you do a good job, I’ll be back with more.”

  “I’m down.” He waded into the crowd with the flyers.

  Anne watched him hand them out, and in the next few minutes bright spots of red began blooming in the crowd, like a poppy field. One anchorwoman, orange-faced with TV makeup, paused to read the flyer, and a photographer was handing his copy to the cameraman beside him. Reporters were putting their heads together, and Anne began to hear snippets of conversation, everybody suddenly buzzing: “You think this’s for real?” “You wanna take the chance it’s not?” “News at Six will get on it, they got the staff.” “Not this weekend! I wanted to be home by three. My kid’s got T-ball, my wife’s gonna kill me!”

  Hope surged in Ann’s chest, and she was about to go back to the office, according to plan. But then she saw him.

  Kevin?

  She stopped, breathless. A blond man in the middle of the crowd was reading the flyer, his face lowered. He looked like Kevin. His hair was crudely shorn. He was Kevin’s height. He wore a nondescript white T-shirt, and his shoulders were broad, with powerful caps. He was standing almost directly across from the office entrance, but he didn’t appear to have press credentials. Anne waited for him to look up so she could see his face, but when he did, he turned away. She didn’t get more than a flash of his features.

  It’s him, it’s him, it’s him. Is it him?

  Suddenly the blond man started moving. He made his way through the crowd, a light patch in the crowd of black cameras. He moved like Kevin. Slow. Deliberate. In control. Didn’t anyone notice he was the guy in the red drawing? Was he the guy in the drawing? She stood on tiptoe, watching him.

  He’s getting away!

  He was leaving the
crowd, calmly. Walking evenly, down Locust toward Broad Street, heading east and out of the action. She couldn’t see the rest of the man’s body, but he was doing what Kevin would be doing if he were handed that flyer. He would get away without drawing attention to himself. Anne was tempted to yell but she didn’t want to blow her cover, not with the media surrounding her. She wasn’t sure enough it was him. She shut her mouth, but she couldn’t let him go. She knew what she had to do.

  Stalk him. Stalk him back.

  She took off, trailing the blond man toward Broad Street, leaving the media behind but picking up more tourists. Kids waved stiff American flags, fake colonial dames conducted tours with tiny megaphones, and teenagers stampeded past. Anne passed the new hall for the Philadelphia Orchestra and avoided families posing for snapshots on the sidewalk. Her heart started hammering. Her eyes trained on the blond head, moving away with purpose, heading east.

  He stopped at a red light at the corner of Broad and Locust, and she picked up her pace not to lose him. She scooted to Broad and, as she got closer, she heard string music plinking on the breeze, with the bass thumping of kettle drums. There had to be a parade marching down Broad, stalling the blond. His back was turned, and she caught a glimpse of his build. His triceps bulged under his T-shirt and a deep crease ran down his back. He was more muscular than the Kevin she knew, but maybe he had started working out in prison.

  Anne heard the characteristic ringa-jinga of a summer Mummers string band, and a phalanx of harlequins in orange, magenta, and black sequins began to parade past. The costumes caught the sun in riotous color, and sky-high peacock feathers sprouted from their elaborate headpieces. The crowd burst into applause, except for the blond man pushing his way to the curb.

  She wedged her way through people, toward the front. The music, clapping, and cheers got louder but she blocked it all out. The Mummers’ string band surged in full glory, then strutted by. The crowd, finally permitted to cross, pressed forward, with the blond man in the lead, crossing Broad Street, then breaking into a casual run.

  No! “Please lemme through. I gotta get through!” Anne shouted and took off after him, fighting the crowd. Everybody was trying to cross at the parade break, west to east and east to west, jostling each other out of the way. She stayed on her feet but when she reached the other side of Broad, she’d lost sight of him.

  No! Where was he? Anne looked wildly around. People were streaming toward Broad, and she ran the other way, sprinting upstream. Only an expert could sprint in Blahniks, and she qualified. When the crowd thickened, she jumped into the air to see him above the crowd.

  There! Her heart leaped when she did. He was two blocks away! Straight down Locust, and he was taking a left, onto the cross street. She ran for it, confident that he couldn’t detect her now that he’d turned the corner. She banged into only one man and apologized over her shoulder as she turned the corner. Then she stopped. Kevin was nowhere in sight.

  Anne looked desperately down the street. A young woman was striding toward her, a block away. She would have been on the block when Kevin turned onto it. Anne straightened her sunglasses and hurried over to her. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m looking for my friend. He’s tall and blond, but he wears his hair really short, almost shaved. Did you see him? I thought I just saw him come around the corner.”

  “Was he wearing a white T-shirt?”

  “Yes!” Anne couldn’t believe her good luck, and the woman pointed to the top of the street. A windowless storefront lay in the next block, and it appeared to be open for a very active business. A crowd flowed into the place from the sidewalk, and red, white, and blue balloons flew from a sign. “In there?”

  “Yeah. He went inside, I think.”

  “Thank you!” Anne said. She almost hugged her, but remembered that she was Uncle Sam, so hugging strange women carried federal penalties. She caught her breath and made a beeline for the store.

  10

  Frankie & Johnny’s, said the sign on the storefront, in funky black letters. The windows had been covered with plywood and painted black, and the large front door, also black, was nondescript. Anne slowed her step, and a man at the end of a group going into the place smiled back at her as she fell into step behind him and went inside.

  Dance music blared from the pitch-black within, and the smell of sweat and cigarette smoke assaulted her nose. She recognized the song instantly, The Weather Girls singing “It’s Raining Men.” And when her eyes adjusted to the light, Anne saw that it was. The place was packed with bodies moving to a single beat, and all of the bodies were male. Shirtless, tank-topped, flag-shirted, and tattooed; they were all men, with only one or two women. She turned around and peered through the darkness at the crowd near the door. They were all men, too. She stood, rooted uncertainly to the spot. She was inside a gay bar, for the first time in her life. Mental note: New things are disconcerting at first, then stay that way.

  She suppressed the strangeness and tried to find Kevin in the crowd. Where was he? Redheads, shaved heads, brown hair, baldies, and fades; she couldn’t see the blond head for the darkness. The only illumination came from red, white, and blue spotlights roaming over the crowd, flashing with the boom-boom beat of the music. Everybody was moving, shifting, boogying, changing places. It was almost impossible to keep track of any one of them, and Anne couldn’t see a thing for the darkness and smoke. Not to mention her sunglasses. Was Kevin really in a gay bar? He wasn’t gay, not that she knew. He’d been fixated on her.

  She lingered, confused. The bar had looked like a small storefront from the outside, but inside it was so much bigger, with a twenty-foot-high ceiling and a half-shell of a balcony that held dancing men and a stage. A long martini bar lined the room’s right side, and affixed to an immense mirror behind the bar flickered a huge martini glass in hot-red neon. Anne used the mirror to try to find Kevin, but all it reflected was an anonymous, sweating throng of men.

  Wasn’t there a bouncer at the door? Everybody here was built like a bouncer. She peered through the cigarette smoke at men pouring into the bar. Behind them she spotted a muscle-bound man in a white tank top bearing the bar’s logo. She wedged her way to him, breathing in the commingled odors of chocolate martini and Paco Rabanne. “Excuse me,” she shouted to the doorman, to be heard over the music, “did you see a blond, tall, white guy come in here, just a minute ago? His hair is short and he’s muscular. He was wearing a white T-shirt!”

  “Yeah, plenty!” The guard cupped his hands around his mouth. “Why, he underage?”

  “No, but I have to find—” Anne started to say, but the crowd came between them, dancing as soon as they came in the door and crossed the threshold. Her heart sank with the realization that Kevin could have gotten past the guard the same way she did, on the far side of a big group. Maybe someone else had seen him come in.

  She made her way to the other side of the packed entrance, where a lineup of flat-screen TVs mounted ceiling-height showed a Jennifer Lopez video on mute. Anne sidestepped to two men standing against the dark wall near the door, who were wearing matching white tank tops with jeans shorts. “Excuse me!” she shouted, and they turned to her, still moving to the boom-boom. “Excuse me, did you see a man just come in here, five minutes ago? About thirty, blond, tall, very muscular?”

  “Don’t I wish!” shouted one of the men, and they both laughed. Other men stood grouped around the door, all of them drinking and bopping to the music, which was segueing into Grace Jones’s “I Need a Man.” She approached the second group, but they hadn’t seen the man. Neither had the third group. The fourth asked her if she wanted to party, and the fifth told her that her sunglasses were so Six Flags. She agreed, but like Grace Jones, she still needed a man. A blond man in particular.

  She looked around. All she could see with any clarity at all was a bartender by the cash register, illuminated by a single pool of halogen. He also wore a white bar-logo tank top and was shaking a gleaming martini shaker. She made her way through the
crowd to the bar, which was packed, and finally got the bartender’s attention. “I’m trying to find somebody, a blond man in a T-shirt. It’s really important.”

  “Did you ask one of the Muscle Queens?” he shouted, and when Anne looked puzzled, he translated. “Security.”

  “I didn’t see any security, I asked the doorman.”

  “Then try the manager, in the back office. He can help you.” The bartender waved her off, responding to the clamoring customers, and she edged from the bar, made her way around the dance floor, and found an office, past the rest rooms. She knocked on the black door and laughed with surprise when it opened. The manager was dressed like Uncle Sam, too, but in a classy beard, real satin stovepipe, and a shiny blue jacket with fancy lapels.

  “I’m jealous,” Anne said. “You have the jacket.”

  “No, I’m jealous! You have the Blahniks.”

  Anne laughed. “But my sunglasses are so Six Flags.”

  “That’s why they’re great!”

  Anne slid them off, feeling fairly safe with him. He wouldn’t recognize her and he certainly wouldn’t hit on her. “Can I bother you a minute?” she asked.

  “Sure, come on in.” He ushered Anne into his office. He had a Madonna-type headset hanging around his neck, was about five foot eight or so, with silvering at his close-cropped sideburns, and he was slightly overweight. Mental note: Evidently not all gay men work out, which is to their credit. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  Uh. “Sam?”

  “What a coincidence,” he said, smiling, and she looked around quickly. The office was crammed with a gray metal desk and a file cabinet, a computer and an old monitor, adding machines, money counters, and a black matte safe with a silver combination lock. Invoices, correspondence, and inventory sheets sat in stacks on the desk; a large clock with manila timecards in slots hung by the door. It was another surprise. Anne had expected The Birdcage and was getting Cigna.