HARLOT'S MOON
Ed Gorman
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© 2012 / Ed Gorman
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OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS NOOK BOOKS BY ED GORMAN
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Serpent's Kiss
Shadow Games
The End of it All
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Cast in Dark Waters (co-written by Tom Piccirilli)
Jack Dwyer Mysteries:
Murder in the Wings
The Autumn Dead
Robert Payne, Psychological Profiler Mysteries
Voodoo Moon
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To Tom Spaight — in lieu of the six million dollars I mooched off him in our college days.
Injustice, suave, erect, and unconfined,
Sweeps the wide earth, and tramples o'er mankind –
While prayers to heal her wrongs move slow behind.
Iliad, Homer
PROLOGUE
POLICE DEPARTMENT
Tawanna Lucilee Jackson
Age: 23
Race: African-American
Occupation: Prostitute
Marital Status: Single
Military Service: None
Jackson: I'll tell you one thing, sweetheart, they sure ain't never gonna forget Tawanna. First thing after I got the phone call about my HIV test comin' back positive the second time . . . you know what I did, babe? I hit the streets. Absa-fuckin-lutely, like Cherie used to say before she went and died of AIDS a couple years ago. Absa-fuckin-lutely. You know what I'm sayin'? All these white Johns that think they're so high and mighty, pullin' up in their big cars and tryin' to impress me an' all . . . They're gonna remember Tawanna, I can promise you that. Just like Cherie, babe, they'll start runnin' this fever and havin' this scratchy throat all the time and they'll go to the doctor . . . They ain't ever gonna forget Tawanna, no way. I do me two, three Johns a night for the next few years . . . that's an awful lot of fancy white ladies see their lives go to shit the same way my mama and me saw OUR lives go to shit . . . No, sir, they never gonna forget ol' Tawanna.
Tawanna Jackson
So one night when she's thirteen, Tawanna decides to give it a try for herself. She waits till after eight, till her mother's done some dope and is sleeping in the bedroom.
She walks downtown. A lot of these businessmen, they work real late. She knows she looks a lot older than her years. At least that's what people always tell her.
Her sister Gayla's been doing this for three years now and that's how she can afford the five-year-old Chevrolet and her own apartment over in Wennington Heights and getting her hair fixed up all the time over at the Sassy Lady.
So now it's Tawanna's turn. Technically, she's a student in ninth grade but she knows this isn't going to last much longer. School bores the shit out of her. Anyway, who needs schoolin' for somethin' like this, just do what comes natural girl, that's all, just do what comes natural.
She's wearing a tan T-shirt and no bra, her young breasts outlined beautifully against the tan cotton, and white shorts so tight you can see the shape of her sex.
Plus she's done what her older sister once told her to do.
"There's three places a man wants a girl to put perfume, Tawanna, on your neck, and on your breasts and down between your legs." Tawanna has never forgotten this . . .
Night in downtown Cedar Rapids, hot July night, sodium vapor lights and lights in some of the offices in some of the taller buildings; smells of heat and exhaust fumes and the close by river, teenagers out in their cars radios booming, tires squealing; a road show at the Paramount, line around the block, mostly white folks wearing summer shirts and skirts and talking that way that white folks do. Lots of laughing, which Tawanna envies and resents. She laughs a lot too, she supposes, but she never sounds this happy when she laughs.
Over the next hour, Tawanna pretty much covers the downtown. The only attention she attracts is from teenage boys, farm boys especially. Hot nights like this, they come from all the little towns around Cedar Rapids. They pretend they're real hip and shit but they're not. They see a girl and all they can do is giggle like little kids.
There is a park in the center of town and that's where she ends up, hot and tired and frustrated. She figured this would be pretty easy. She even stole a condom from her mother's drawer. All ready. For nothing.
She is just getting up when she sees the shiny red sports car pull up to the curb across from the bench where she's sitting.
Gray-haired guy gets out, tall, lanky kind of guy, gray summer-weight suit on, and comes over to her.
"I'm looking for a little fun tonight," he says. "How about you?"
"Cost you."
"How much?"
"Hundred bucks."
He laughs. Actually, he's got a nice, gentle laugh.
"That's a little steep."
"I'm a virgin." As, technically, she is. The one boy who was ever inside her was Randy from down the block and he was so swacked on crack, he couldn't quite get it up enough to get it all the way in.
"How about fifty?"
"Seventy-five."
"Sixty," he says.
Sixty is so much more money than she's ever had . . .
They drive out along the river. You can see the lights of Harlot's Moon house boats in the dark summer night . . .
"How old're you?"
"Twenty," she says.
That oddly tender laugh again.
"Now tell me how old you are really?"
"Eighteen."
He smiles at her. "I could get in trouble."
She smiles back "So could I."
The weird thing, and the thing she really likes, is that she feels in control of the situation. Here's she with this older white guy who's got this fancy sports car . . . and she's in control.
They get out past the boat docks then, and out past the point where the river suddenly turns north, and he aims his little red car up into the hills, and the state park.
He pulls over by a pavilion and punches off the headlights.
Night in the country: owl cry and star-blessed sky and distant dog bark and silver moonlight on long grasses waving in the sudden and blessed breeze.
And that's when she hears the odd snicking sound and looks over to see that he's just opened a very long pearl-handled switchblade, the point of which he puts against her throat.
He travels the blade down from her throat to her left breast, where the point lingers against her nipple, and then continues on down to her sex.
"You scared?"
"God, mister, please."
Now he don't even look like the same guy. Or sound the same, either.
Then he takes her hand and guides it to his groin.
The knife point goes back to her throat.
"Please, mister," she says. "Pleas
e."
"Do me," he says. "Do me."
What choice does she have?
And all the time she's doing him, he keeps the knife point pushed right against the side of her neck.
When it's all over, he takes the knife and puts it in the glove compartment.
"You really got scared, didn't you?" he says.
She doesn't say anything. She's pissed off, she's frightened, and suddenly she's very, very weary. No thirteen-year-old in the history of the world has ever been so weary.
"Hey," he says, "I want us to be friends."
She glares over at him. He's crazy. Like most white folks.
He laughs his laugh. "I wasn't really going to hurt you. It's just how I get off. I mean, I can't even get it up unless I'm pretending that I'm going to hurt the girl I'm with. But I wouldn't actually do anything. I really wouldn't."
And the weird thing is, she believes him. He's his old nice-guy self again and she believes him.
"You really scared me."
He puts a paternal hand on her shoulder. "Tell you what, how about if I make it a hundred for tonight?"
"Wow. Are you kidding?"
"Nope. A hundred dollars it is."
She's thinking of all the stuff she can buy with a hundred dollars. She'll go to the Sassy Lady and get her hair fixed for sure.
He takes out his billfold and pulls out a crisp new bill and hands it to her.
"I was just having my fun," he says. "I didn't mean to scare you that much. You forgive me?"
She looks at the hundred-dollar bill and says, "Yeah, yeah I do."
He reaches out a long, slender white hand and they shake. "Friends?"
She giggles. "Yeah. Friends."
That night, Tawanna decided that her sister's profession was a lot better than going to school. A whole lot better.
PART ONE
Chapter One
In the morning, the first thing she said was, "I'm going to try very hard not to be depressed today."
"Good for you," I said.
We were both in my large double bed in the apartment I keep in Cedar Rapids. I spend some of my time in a small country town forty miles west. But these days I worked for a law firm as an investigator so I'd brought my shaving kit, my three cats and several packages of new white jockey shorts along. You can never be too rich, too thin or own too many pairs of jockey shorts. At least if you're baching it, you can't. Saves on a lot of unnecessary trips to the laundry in the basement.
"I mean it's raining, and I feel like I may be getting a head cold but I don't care. I'm not going to be depressed."
"I'm proud of you."
"I'm not even going to think about Frank this morning," she said.
"That's the way to do it."
"You don't give a damn about any of this, do you? You'll say anything to shut me up. You won't even tell me the truth about my buns when I ask you, will you?"
"Oh God," I said, "not the buns thing. It's too early in the morning."
Felice is a woman I met at a seminar I spoke at last year.
She attended because the subject of psychological profiling, which I did during my years with the FBI and which I now do for law firms and police departments who need specialized help from time to time, interested her. She hadn't enrolled in college. She just attended seminars.
You can take her the wrong way, Felice, and a lot of people do. They see the doe-eyed beauty and the reckless poise, and they hear all about the money, and they think she's a cream-puff. But they don't bother to see the sorrow. Two bad marriages, with her being cheated in all meanings of that word by both husbands. Nor do they see the neurotic, alcoholic parents who raised her. Or the three miscarriages that ultimately landed her in a mental hospital up in Dubuque. Every few months she tries some new anti-depressant but none of them ever work very well for her. She's walked down some long, hard road, Felice has.
Lately, she's become obsessed with her buns. This started about a month ago when she went up to the mall to try on swimsuits for summer and happened to get a glimpse of her bottom in a four-way mirror.
"I'm going to walk over to the window, all right? And you watch my buns as I walk, okay?"
I sighed. "All right."
"And be honest now."
"Of course."
"You bastard. You really don't care about this, do you?" She was genuinely on the verge of tears.
"God, look, Felice, I like your buns. Just the way they are, I mean."
"And how are they?"
"How are they what?"
"They're drooping, aren't they? That's what you're afraid to tell me, aren't you?"
"They aren't drooping."
"Then they're sliding."
"They aren't drooping and they aren't sliding, either."
"You're sure?"
She stood at the head of the bed completely naked, her backside to me, her fetching face in profile over her shoulder. Her flesh would be nice and soft and she would smell wonderfully of sleep. I liked her butt, I liked her arms, I liked her ears, I liked her elbows, and I liked every other part of her, too. I especially liked her soul. For all her self-absorption, she was one of the sweetest, most tender women I'd ever known.
Then she smiled. "God, I can't believe I'm doing this again. Can you? The buns thing, I mean. All the poor people who don't have anything to eat and all the poor people in mental hospitals and all the poor people dying of some terrible disease — and I'm whining about my butt."
"You said it. I didn't."
"I don't know how you can stand me. You're such an . . . adult, Robert. You really are. And I'm — I'm—"
She apparently couldn't find a word derogatory enough.
The six-unit apartment house sits on a shelf of rock above the Cedar River. On sunny days you can see half a mile upriver, to the first bend where the speed boats race on Sundays. Now the windows were hard gray and dirty with city rain. Rain has a tyrannical effect on Felice's moods. Fortunately, her bad moods are sometimes tempered by her sense of irony. As now, when she suddenly realized that the buns thing was getting tiresome.
The phone rang.
She smiled at me. She has a lovely damned smile. She really does. "I'm tired of talking about my buns. How about talking about my left breast?"
"I think I'd rather talk about your right one, if you don't mind. We always talk about your left one."
She laughed. "I'm sorry I started in on the buns thing, Robert. I really am. Do you think they offer night-school courses in how to be an adult?"
That's the other thing about Felice. She apologizes like the morning-after drunk who destroyed your living room the night before.
I picked up on the fourth ring.
The funny thing was even though I had seen him only sporadically over the past fifteen years, I recognized his voice immediately.
"Robert Payne?"
"Hey, Father Gray. How are you?"
"You don't have to call me "Father," Robert. You know that."
Steve Gray and I had grown up in the same rural town where I still kept the house where Kathy and I had lived, Kathy being my young wife who'd died of an aneurysm four years earlier. Steve had always been the jock and I'd always been the book reader. I'd been a more likely candidate for the priesthood than him. He'd had plenty of girls, had put away more than his share of teenage beer, and had even smoked a few illicit joints in his time. He went to the University of Iowa for two years, made the first-string JV football squad, and then suddenly transferred to the seminary in Dubuque. His beloved father had died of cancer over a grim two-year period. During that time, Steve drove back home from college every chance he got.
Watching his father die had changed Steve. He suddenly understood the 'idea' of Jesus Christ, he'd explained to me one beery night a few years back. Even if you didn't believe that Christ was divine, you had to believe in the compassion and dignity of His words, Steve said. So Steve became a priest. He was now a Monsignor, and a very young Monsignor, at St Mallory's here in Cedar R
apids.
I suppose we distrust the kind of religious calling Steve got. We're too cynical about such things. Some people really do want to live their lives helping others.
The last time I'd spoken to Steve I'd asked him if he could give me a general dispensation for sins such as fornication and masturbation but he said he didn't think he could do stuff like that. Not and keep his Roman collar anyway.
"It's great to hear your voice, Steve."
A hesitation. "Robert, I need to ask you a favor and if you don't want to do it, I'll certainly understand. It may be . . . illegal."
"What's the favor, Steve?"
Felice was watching me carefully. The word 'Father' had gripped her attention.
"I'd like you to come to the Palms Motel."
"Out on 49?"
"Right."
"Come now, you mean?"
"Yes. But I need to tell you the rest of it."
"All right."
"There's a dead man in the room."
"I see."
"A priest. He worked with me at St Mallory's."
"Don't say anything more on the phone. I'm working for lawyers in a murder case and the other side may have bugged this phone."
"They really do things like that?"
"They really do things like that." I swung my legs off the bed. "What's the room number?"
"154. Ground level. Around back."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"Is it illegal, you coming out here this way?"
"Probably. But I'm not going to worry about that right now."
"I really appreciate it, Robert."
When I got off the phone and stood up, Felice said, "You'll want to take the first shower."
"Thank you, honey — that would be helpful."
She stood there lusciously naked, hip-switched, her sweet face that of a little girl who wants to ask her father a question but is afraid to.
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