“Anastasia.” She looked like an Anastasia the way I looked like a DeShawn. Then again, since I was a member of a Heroic community which routinely used code names, who was I to judge Amy or Jill or Kim or whatever in the heck this girl’s real name was?
I pulled out some cash. “My name’s Truman. I’ll tell you what, Anastasia. I’ll pay you for your time, and you tell me everything you know about that guy in the picture.”
“Just talk?” she asked, both dubious and puzzled. Few men probably wanted to just talk with her.
“Just talk.”
“Okay, deal,” she agreed. I handed her the money. She made it disappear with a sleight of hand move that would have made David Copperfield envious. “As long as you payin’ the meter, we can talk.” Anastasia glanced around. “But not here. If my boyfriend come around and sees me just talkin’ to some dude, he’ll think I’m loafin’.”
“This boyfriend of yours your pimp?”
She moved her shoulders slightly. It was a noncommittal shrug.
“He the one who did that to your arm?” There was a fresh greenish-black bruise on her left bicep, and what looked like cigarette burns on her forearm. Anastasia gave me the same slight shrug.
“You hungry?” She gave me the shrug again. I was Truman Lord, Master Interrogator. With interrogation skills like these, it was shocking I hadn’t figured out who had murdered Sabrina Lamb yet.
Well I for one was hungry, and it looked like Anastasia needed a decent meal. I had seen more meat on barbecue ribs than she had on her whole body. So, I walked Anastasia over to a nearby twenty-four hour diner I had been to already to flash Ethan’s picture around in.
As the diner’s hostess walked us to a booth in the back, a woman around my age sitting alone watched us as we approached her table. She looked Anastasia up and down disapprovingly, and then glared at me. Her disgusted face read, You’re old enough to be her father. Because you’re only as old as you feel, I stuck my tongue out at the woman and crossed my eyes as I passed by her. She harrumphed in response. Food caught in her throat, no doubt. I had made sure Anastasia wasn’t looking before I stuck my tongue out. I didn’t want Anastasia to think less of me. I also didn’t want my outstretched tongue to give her the idea I’d changed my mind about partying with her.
I studied Anastasia as the waitress took our orders. She couldn’t sit still in her seat, constantly shifting positions. Was she on meth? Coke? Something else? I disapproved of drugs. I had seen them destroy too many lives and ruin too many communities. Then again, alcohol was a drug and I seemed to be in a love affair with it. My last drink had been hours ago, and I desperately wanted another one.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” I mused aloud.
“Huh?” Anastasia said.
“Never mind. Just quoting a wise man who died a long time ago. Okay, let’s try this again.” I pulled out Ethan’s picture. “Have you seen this guy before?”
“All the time,” Anastasia said. “I been workin’ this neighborhood for months now. The cops asked me about that guy a while back, but I ain’t tell em nuthin’. It don’t pay to talk to no cops.” She jabbed a thin finger at the picture in my hand. “That’s the pretty boy’s been fuckin’ the woman who lives around the corner.” I wanted to tell her to mind her language, but Anastasia’s foul language was the least of her problems.
“What makes you say they’re sleeping together?”
Anastasia looked at me like I was the world’s biggest simpleton. “The only times I seen him, it’s been when he was going into that lady’s house late at night. When I seen him leave, it was late at night or early in the mornin’.” She snorted. “They ain’t studyin’ no Bible in there.”
“Whoever so commits adultery lacks understanding; he who does it destroys his own soul.”
“Whut?”
I shook my head. “Another quote, this one a lot older. It’s from the Bible. I grew up in the Bible Belt. I know more about the Bible than Gutenberg.”
“You talk funny.”
“You’re not the first to think so.”
The waitress brought our food out: a milkshake, chicken wings, French fries, and a double-bacon burger with American cheese for Anastasia; fries and a cheeseburger for me. I had blue cheese instead of American because I didn’t want Anastasia to think I was a copycat. Also, to add a note of sophistication. I was a licensed Hero, after all. Anastasia started to inhale her food like she had not eaten in days. Perhaps she hadn’t. I didn’t know how all that food was going to fit into Anastasia’s skinny body, but she was certainly giving it that old college try.
“Did you see this pretty boy at the lady’s house the evening of the twelfth?” I asked. I wanted to hurry and finish questioning Anastasia before she slipped into a food coma. Maybe she gorged herself and then went weeks without eating again anaconda-style.
Anastasia considered my question. Her cheeks were as full as a chipmunk’s.
“Nuh-uh,” she finally grunted around a mouthful of food. “I was up and down that street all night. Nobody was buyin’ that night. Stingy assholes. If that dude or his car had been at that lady’s house, I woulda saw it.”
“What about this guy?” I asked, showing her a picture of Ethan in his Massive Force costume.
“That one of those Meta freaks?” she asked. I wanted to object to the word freaks but, as the Good Book said, don’t muzzle the mouth of the oxen while they are treading the grain. Instead of objecting, I nodded. “Never seen that freak before,” Anastasia said. She chewed for a bit before swallowing. “You should ask pretty boy’s boyfriend about where he were on the twelfth. I bet he know.”
I blinked in surprise. “What makes you think pretty boy has a boyfriend?”
Anastasia looked at me like I was beyond stupid again.
“Guy that good-lookin’ don’t go slingin’ dick in just one direction. He like both bitches and boys. I seen the way that guy look at both of em. He look at a good-lookin’ dude the same way he look at a bitch—like they a big juicy steak and he starvin’ to death. This my bidness. I know what I’m talkin’ about. Pretty boy’s seen more wang than a urinal, believe me. I seen my fair share my own self.” Anastasia shrugged. “‘Sides, I saw pretty boy get into a guy’s car some nights after he left the lady’s house. Saw em kissin’ before they drove off. They were gonna go play hide the salami for sure.”
“You ever think about applying to be poet laureate?”
“Huh?”
I shook my head. “Never mind. I was making a dumb joke. I do that sometimes.” I didn’t want her to think I was making fun of how she spoke. My parents had died in a car crash when I was a teenager. If the Hero Zookeeper had not stepped up to raise me as his own and had not pointed me in the right direction, I would’ve grown up on the streets and would probably sound exactly like Anastasia. “Did you by any chance get a look at the license plate of the car you saw pretty boy and the other guy in?”
“I ain’t the DMV.”
“I’ll take that as a no. Well, what did the car look like then?”
Anastasia screwed her face up in concentration as she thought. Her plate was empty, like it had been attacked by a plague of locusts.
“It was a four-door silver car. Something fancy. Not a Mercedes. I gotta friend named Mercedes. If it’d been a Mercedes, I’d remember dat.” I wondered why sex workers were always named things like Mercedes, Porsche, and Lexus. If I ever had a daughter, I would name her Ford or Hyundai to be on the safe side. “A BMW or a Saab, maybe?” Anastasia snapped her fingers. “Definitely a BMW. I member now. It was a BMW for sure. Cause I member thinkin’ ‘Blow my wad is more like it’ when I saw them dudes kissin’ in that car. Blow my wad. BMW. Get it?”
“I do.” If Anastasia were a Metahuman, subtlety was not her superpower. “What about the guy? Not pretty boy, the other one?”
“Didn’t get a good look. Good-lookin’ though. Not as pretty as the other one, but good lookin’. Longish black hair
. Brown skin. Hispanic, or maybe Indian. The dot kind, not the feather kind. In his twenties, though it hard to tell sometime with those brownies. Just like black don’t crack, brown don’t breakdown.” I suppressed the urge to say something. Being politically incorrect was the least of Anastasia’s problems. “Smaller than the other guy, and you too. I think. He was sittin’ when I saw him, so it kinda hard to tell.”
I asked her some more questions. Though Anastasia had plenty more to say, she didn’t seem to know anything more about Ethan.
“How long have you been hooking?” I asked.
“Bout three years.” The answer depressed me.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.” I thought it was the first time she had lied to me. I had clothes that were as old as Anastasia probably really was. I didn’t think she was lying to me about Ethan, though. I suspected her observations about him were probably spot-on. Girls like Anastasia weren’t book smart, but they were plenty street smart. If they weren’t good at paying attention to their surroundings and at sizing people up—who was a potential John, who was a cop, who was liable to hurt them, that sort of thing—they didn’t last long on the street. The fact she had been a streetwalker for three years, a lifetime in the streetwalking world, spoke volumes about how adept Anastasia was at paying attention to her surroundings.
Anastasia reapplied her garish lipstick using the glossy surface of the diner’s napkin holder as a mirror. She painted well outside her lip line, trying to make her thin lips look fuller. Instead it made her look clownish. I paid our bill and we left. The woman who had stared daggers at me when we had come in was not in her booth anymore. No doubt sitting in judgment somewhere else.
Anastasia and I walked back to the block I had left my car on. I reached into my wallet. I pulled out some bills, put one of my cards on top, and held the bundle out to Anastasia. She looked at the money, confused. It was a good deal more than I had already paid her.
“What this for?” she asked.
“The money is a tip. The card on top is a Get Off The Street card. If you should decide to get out of the life, give me a call. I’ll help you.”
“Who da fuck you think you are, Richard Gere?” I was shocked she knew a Pretty Woman reference. I did not let the shock reach my face. I was supposed to be an unflappable detective and Hero. I had a reputation to uphold.
“I just try to help when and where I can.”
“Don’t need help.” Anastasia still reached out and took the money and the card though. They disappeared on her person as mysteriously as the first batch of money had. She started to turn away, then hesitated.
“You wanna have a go?” she asked. “You nice. Kinda cute too. I won’t even charge you.” She looked up at me expectantly. Her overly painted lips were slightly parted in what she probably thought was an alluring look. It made me even more depressed than before. Anastasia didn’t seem to be able to relate to a man other than sexually. I wondered what her family life had been like. I probably didn’t want to know.
I could have told Anastasia she was too young for me. Also too skinny, too high, too worldly in all the wrong ways, too immature in others, and too several other things.
Instead, I only told her part of the truth. “Thanks, but I can’t. I’m seeing someone.”
Anastasia looked at me incredulously. I felt like an alien who had tried to communicate with her in High Vulcan.
“Whadafuck do dat got to do with anything?” she demanded. She shook her head at me in disbelief and started to walk off. Apparently I was one of the few people on the planet who still believed in fidelity. I definitely could not say the same of Ethan.
I watched Anastasia as she walked away. I hoped she would use the money to buy warmer clothes and food. I feared the money would go up her nose, into her veins, or be beaten out of her by her pimp.
I sighed as Anastasia turned the corner and was lost to view. I didn’t really expect her to call me. However, I did expect her to be dead within five years or so. I’d seen girls like Anastasia before. Too many. It was discouraging. Trying to save girls like Anastasia was like trying to bail out the Atlantic Ocean with a teaspoon—as soon as you took one out, a bunch more rushed in to take its place.
I thought of Clara Barton again. You can’t save everyone. All you can do is try.
CHAPTER 8
As the expression went, when the only tool you had was a hammer, everything looked like a nail. That was why when you consulted a surgeon about back pain, she was quick to suggest surgery instead of yoga or back exercises. It was why professional boxers got into a lot of fights, even when they weren’t in the ring. It was why Anastasia had offered to sleep with me.
And, it was why I sat in my Altima on Kylie Street the day after I spoke with Anastasia, staking out Ethan Lamb’s brownstone. When you were a private snoop, you snooped on somebody. I couldn’t think of whom else to snoop on, so Ethan won by default.
I did not usually put my clients under surveillance. There were usually plenty of other things to do: witnesses to interview, leads to follow up on, clues to ponder, Rogues to thrash, that sort of thing. But I was fresh out of all of the above. Never before had I wished a Rogue would make an appearance. Beating on him would at least have given me something to do.
Because of a lack of something better to do, my natural snooping instincts had kicked in. That was why I had been in my car for hours, across the street and down the block from Ethan’s brownstone, watching his front door like it was a dark television I hoped someone would come along and turn on and show me something interesting. Something was going on with Ethan and his voluminous extracurricular sex life that I didn’t understand, and I was hoping someone would pay Ethan a visit and help me understand it.
And, like I said, I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I had already drained several glasses of liquor the night before in hopes of finding a clue on the bottom. That had resulted in a big fat goose egg. Also, a big fat hangover.
I wound up watching Ethan’s brownstone all day. My diligence yielded nothing more than a sore back from sitting in one spot for hours and a healthy dislike for talk radio. I’d been accused in the past of being a misogynist for admiring the female form, and I didn’t even see in Ethan’s neighborhood some attractive women I could practice my misogyny on.
I did see a few homeless people loitering on Kylie, though. Seeing homeless people was not at all unusual in lower income parts of Astor City, but it was very unusual in a ritzy area like the one Ethan’s brownstone was in. Then I remembered how a black homeless man had been shot by the cops days before in Dog Cellar, a run-down part of the city. The cops said they thought the homeless guy had a gun. It turned out to be just a stick. The usual suspects were yelling their heads off about police brutality. And, maybe they were right to do so; I hadn’t been there when the shooting happened, so I couldn’t say. A cop’s uniform didn’t immunize him from being a murderous jackass.
Regardless, in response to the complaints and protests, the cops had quietly stopped enforcing vagrancy laws. “Let JoJo pee on people’s front steps for a few days and flash their kids when they’re coming home from school, and the protesters will shut their fat traps double-quick,” a half-drunk, off-duty cop on the barstool next to me had said days before. Because of the police looking the other way, homeless people were sprouting up all over town like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Ethan’s neighborhood clearly was not immune.
I brought along some jazz music as I watched Ethan’s place on the second day. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and other musical aristocrats kept me company. Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder was playing softly on the car stereo when I noticed an Astor City bicycle cop looking at me as he slowly pedaled by. I was on Pretty and the Wolf when I saw him again a few minutes later, pedaling in the opposite direction than before.
The officer hopped his bike up on the sidewalk. He stopped his bike abreast of but a few feet from my door. He was a solid-looking, dark-skinned black guy wearin
g shorts and a light police jacket. His thighs were like hairy tree trunks. He wore sunglasses so dark I couldn’t see his eyes. He had a thick ebony moustache that was so dark and shiny, it looked like it had been freshly dyed. Not many people could look intimidating straddling a bicycle and sporting what looked like a dead caterpillar dipped in tar under their lip, but this guy pulled it off.
He motioned me to roll my window down. I did so, simultaneously turning off the car stereo.
“Howdy, officer,” I said, aiming for cheery. “Nice day for a bike ride. Do you agree that American popular music has gone downhill fast since Duke Ellington’s day?” I was glad I hadn’t given in to the temptation to bring a flask of liquor with me on this stakeout. The officer’s hand was not on his gun, but it was near it. I was careful to keep both of my hands on the wheel where the cop could see them. I knew my size and the way I looked might give someone an itchy trigger finger.
“Sir,” the cop said. His sunglasses were mirrored. I resisted the urge to wave at myself. “I saw you here yesterday. Do you live around here?” I knew he already knew the answer.
“No.”
“So what are you doing here?”
“People watching.”
The officer considered this. His mirrored glasses reminded me of a praying mantis’ eyes. Between that and the caterpillar moustache, this guy had quite the bug theme going on. I wisely and uncharacteristically didn’t voice that observation.
“This is a nice neighborhood,” he finally said. “I plan to keep it that way. People-watch somewhere else.” It was not a request.
“What about all these homeless people? Why aren’t you telling them to move along?”
“Sir, are you trying to tell me how to do my job?”
“Perish the thought. I was just curious, is all. I have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. I’m famous for it. Speaking of my fame, would your advice to move along change if I told you I am a dashing and intrepid private detective hot on the trail of a desperate criminal?”
The officer considered that.
Superhero Detective Series (Book 5): Accused Hero Page 6