by Laurel Dewey
“If it’s not a street address, it could be anything from a ticket number at the cleaners, a safety-deposit box number at the bank or a headstone number at the Imperial Cemetery.”
Jane could see she had her work cut out for her. She halfwished she could put Hank on the payroll so he could do some footwork for her. The waitress delivered Jane’s hot dog. She took a hearty bite and couldn’t believe how good it was. “Damn, Hank. What do you make these hot dogs with? Crack?”
“Naw. Just a lot of heart,” he replied, gathering the pages together and clipping them into a neat pile.
The front door opened and in walked Annie Mack. She still had her apron on from the diner, covered with various sauce stains.
“Hey ya, Hank!” she said in an offhand manner as she strolled up to him.
“Hey, sweetie,” he said. Jane noted that same softening of the eyes when he looked at her. He put his arm around her waist tenderly when he greeted her.
Annie asked if Hank had any one-dollar bills she could have for a twenty. He hopped off the barstool, walked to the cash register and doled out the singles to her. “There you go, kiddo,” he said with a warm smile.
Annie nodded to him and acknowledged Jane before leaving the place. Hank wound around the bar and came back to rest next to Jane. She must have had a discernable look of judgment on her face because Hank analyzed it for several seconds before speaking up. “What?” he asked, with a cockeyed grin.
Jane took a large bite of the hot dog. “Hey,” she said, hiding her mouth full of food, “it’s none of my business.”
Hank continued to scrutinize Jane’s face, something she wasn’t used to other others doing. “You think Annie and I…”
“Look, if you can keep her happy with a twenty-five-year age difference, then you ought to ferment and bottle whatever you got and sell it to everyone over twenty-one.”
Hank broke into a fit of laughter. “Oh, Jesus, you just made my day. But she’s not my girlfriend.”
Jane finished off the hot dog and regarded Hank with a doubtful eye. There was no denying the loving look he cast toward Annie—not once but twice, in her presence. If Annie wasn’t his girlfriend, Jane deduced that he was working the angles to make it happen. “Everyone lives in Midas for one reason, right?” Jane wiped mustard off her mouth and slid the plate away from her. “You’re all hiding something. I get it. I’ll keep your secret.”
Hank smiled and shook his head, “You like to hover around people, don’t you? Like a helicopter? Not too close, but just hover. Try to figure out what’s what and who’s who? And I bet you wonder why they don’t take your advice more often.”
Without a doubt, that’s exactly what Jane was doing when she ambushed Carol Van Gorden. She certainly wasn’t comfortable being around someone who could read her that well. It was one thing to have a telepathic loony like Jordan Copeland worming his way into her head. But to have a fifty-year-old ex-cop with a cute ass understanding how Jane’s mind worked was more than she could handle at the moment. Besides, she needed to get back to work. “Look, I gotta go pound some pavement. What do I owe you?”
“Another visit. And if you need me to research something for you, let me know.”
Jane considered her words carefully before she spoke. “What do you know about Chesterfield cigarettes?”
“God, that’s an old brand. When I think of Chesterfield cigarettes, I think of how they used to sponsor radio and TV shows back in the 50s and 60s. You know, the face of Chesterfield that I remember the most was Jack Webb from Dragnet. Didn’t Jack used to come on at the end of the show and tell you to buy a carton or two?”
“That was before my time. I’m a child of the 70s.” Jane stood up.
“I won’t hold that against you. What’s a thirteen-year-or-so age difference, anyway?”
“Less than twenty-five,” she said with a knowing smile.
“See you later, Chopper.”
“Chopper?”
He held his palm over the bar. “You hover like a helicopter. I think it fits.”
The familiar aroma of catnip doobie wafted across the backyard of the B&B. Jane’s heightened aromatic sensors started detecting it when she was outside the front gate. She walked through the backyard and followed the sweet smoky smell to the strip of land shaded with trees and bushes. Seated on the ground with her back against the tree and listening to her iPod, Mollie didn’t see Jane as she moved toward her. Jane lightly tapped the girl on her shoulder, causing Mollie to jump.
“Oi!” she yelped, quickly removing the earbuds. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that!” She dropped the catnip joint on the wet earth.
Jane recovered it and snuffed an errant ember with the toe of her cowboy boot. “I see you’re still self-medicating,” she said and handed the catnip back to Mollie.
“And I see you’re still mud wrestling on the side,” Mollie motioned toward Jane’s shirt. “How does all this shmuts find you?”
She looked down at her shirt and realized that she had two identical ones upstairs in a pile. “Your parents have a washing machine?”
“It’s broken. Should be fixed Monday or Tuesday.”
“Is there a cleaners nearby?”
“Twenty miles south. And they’re only open half a day on Saturday and closed on Sunday.”
Jane figured she’d be using her bathtub that night to wash clothes. “How well do you know the Van Gordens?”
“Wow. That was an abrupt shift. You should try schmoozing with me before you yank me under the third-degree light.” Mollie took a quick puff on the herbal cigarette.
“Just answer the question.”
“I know them well enough to know I don’t want to know them.”
“Because of what Jake told you or because of what you experienced?”
She took another hit of the catnip. “Mostly what Jake told me. But I wasn’t too impressed by what I saw of them. Carol’s a dr one…”
“She didn’t know you and Jake split up.”
“No shock there. She’s not very connected to the earthly plane. She’s a white-bread shikseh. She wasn’t rude or anything. She just wasn’t…”
“Aware?”
Mollie looked at Jane. The kid was warming up to her. “Yeah. Exactly. As for Jake’s dad… he’s a schmuck. A shmendrik. A tool. I don’t trust him.” Mollie sat back down on the ground.
Jane followed her lead, if only to mirror the kid’s actions and make her feel more comfortable so she would possibly divulge more info. It was a classic manipulative move and it usually worked. “Why don’t you trust him?”
“The few times I’d go over to Jake’s house and bump into his dad, he was too involved in his own little world to even say ‘hi.’ When he wasn’t checking to see how many people were admiring his YouTube clip of their house and returning emails from prospective clients, he was either checking himself out in the mirror or driving off to meet a customer.”
“I got the impression he wasn’t interested in generating tons of work for himself. Kinda like if it happened, it happened, but he wasn’t going to break a sweat.”
“Yeah. They have tons of family gelt.”
Jane didn’t understand. “Is that like family guilt?”
“Family money.”
“Who’s side has the gelt?”
“Jake’s dad.”
“Where’d the money come from?”
“Not sure. I think it was like architecture or design. The artistic gene is in Jake’s blood… just like his dad.” Jane wouldn’t call Bailey “artistic.” Maybe gaudy and garish, but not much artistry there. “But even though he didn’t have to work, his dad was always acting like he had some big deal that he had to follow up on.”
“You ever see Bailey working on any of those deals?”
“I wasn’t there that much.”
“What did Jake tell you?”
“Why are you asking me all this?”
“Because I have to work every angle there is.” There was no way Jane was g
oing to tip her hand to the kid, not knowing how well she could keep her trap shut.
“All Jake ever told me was that his dad was too busy for him. And anyway, I’m not sure his dad liked me that much. There was a broygis between his dad and me.” Jane needed a translation. “We weren’t on speaking terms.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I stood up for Jake when his dad put him down. You know how Jake liked to dress? The vintage shirts and fedoras? I thought it looked cool. It’s why I liked him. He wasn’t afraid to look different. But his dad hated Jake’s style. Jake would put on one of those shirts or a fedora and his dad would get this disgusted look on his face and just freak out on him.”
“Freak out how?”
“Just totally go postal on him! It’s like it triggered something deep down. He’d tell Jake he looked stupid and how the shirts made his small stature appear more obvious. His dad was always on him because he was shorter and not as developed as other fifteen-year-olds…told him he should lift weights like he did.”
“So when did you stick up for him?”
Mollie took another hit on the dying catnip joint. “One day, his dad was on his case again and said, ‘I used to be small like you but look at me now!’ And I just couldn’t stand it any longer. I said, ‘Maybe Jake doesn’t want to look like you! Maybe he prefers to dress and think for himself!’” Mollie let out a sigh. “That didn’t go over well. Jake thought the comment was great. He thought I had chutzpah. But his dad, big putz that he is, totally acted like a damn woman. Got all uptight and stomped out like he was on the rag. After that, he wouldn’t so much as say ‘hi’ to me again.” Mollie squashed out the catnip doobie into the dirt. “Then, the two-faced drek suddenly starts initiating conversations with my dad on the street… always just the two of them.”
“How do you know they were talking?”
“It’s a small down, Jane. Word gets around.”
“And then your dad tells you to break up with Jake?”
“Yeah,” Mollie hung her head.
“Because you were rude to Bailey?”
“Guess so.”
“You’re not buying that?” Mollie shook her head. “What do you suspect?”
“I think Mr. Van Gorden is threatened by me. I don’t get the sense that he respects women that much. I think he tolerates us…the same way he tolerates his mindless wife. I think he decided to punish Jake by taking me away from him. I think he told my dad that I wasn’t welcome in his home anymore and that it was best if we just broke up. And so my dad did what Mr. Van Gorden asked. But I know that when my dad sat me down to give me the news, he seemed kinda disturbed by the whole thing. When he said, ‘It would never work out between Jake and me,’ I knew he wanted to tell me more but he didn’t.”
“But you’re fifteen. You’re just friends. It’s not like you’re engaged.”
“Exactly. The whole thing seemed kinda blown outta proportion. I think it really sent Jake off the deep end. You can’t have someone controlling your life like that who you don’t even like and not feel like your life is fucked six ways to Sunday!”
“You think Jake wanted to hang himself because of you?”
“That would make me sound pretty arrogant, wouldn’t it? That a boy would want to kill himself because of me? Sorry. I don’t think I have that kind of power over boys. I mean, come on, look at me, eh? I think it was…something about his life he just couldn’t face.”
Jane thought of the sketchpad with the animated drawing of the man in the prison cell hanging himself. Was Jake drawing a picture of himself in the process of killing himself to maybe see what it would look like before he did the deed? If so, why on earth would he draw himself as a middle-aged man with a somewhat jutting jaw wearing one of those vintage shirts? God, Jane wanted to show Mollie that damn sketchpad and see what she thought. But that was off the table for now. “What couldn’t Jake face?” Mollie licked her lips and turned away. Her jaw clenched. “What is it, Mollie?”
“How in the fuck should I know?!” Mollie yelled, her voice choked with sadness.
It was a classic reaction, especially for a kid—exercise a healthy, stressful pause and then snap back with an emotive response. It was the way a kid who knows something and feels the world on her shoulders reacts when she doesn’t feel she can expose all the cards on the table. “What do you know, Mollie?”
“I don’t know anything!” She looked Jane hard in the eye. “I only know what I feel.” She started off but Jane held her back.
“So tell me what you feel.”
She hung her head. “It doesn’t matter now,” she said sadly. Mollie shook off Jane’s soft grip and trod back to the house.
It was strange, Jane thought. In less than a few hours, two people closely linked to Jake told her they didn’t “know anything.” Jane figured that if they didn’t know for sure, they sure as hell suspected something big.
CHAPTER 18
The clothesline in Jane’s bedroom was starting to get crowded with the new clues she’d gathered. Directly after the mysterious I BEARED MY SOUL AND STILL YOU IGNORE ME??? clue, Jane clipped one of the Chesterfield cigarettes to the clothesline. Next to the notepaper with 1401 Imperial written on it, she attached the short stack of info that Hank copied for her.
Jane stood back and read the clothesline like a book from left to right. Until somebody proved it to her otherwise, she was convinced that this was a story—albeit a complex one—and all she had to do to figure it out was to be as smart as the kidnapper and get into his skin. Into, not under. That’s the way Jane always worked. She could stare at a photo or a bloody crime scene and eventually, there would be that intuitive nexus that bonded her with either the perp or the victims. She’d feel things that didn’t belong to her. When she worked the tragic Stover and Lawrence cases nearly two years prior, the numinous nudges of the dead haunted her and drove her to dive into a bottle of Jack Daniels every night. The booze numbed the pain and darkness that enveloped those two cases. But now she was over fifteen months sober and she had to allow the heartbeat of the person behind the clues to resonate within her. She had to open her eyes and hear what he was desperately trying to tell her.
Desperate. That was the word that Jane kept coming back to again and again. The desperation permeated each clue. She focused on one clue and then the next, and felt herself going deeper within herself. The world around her fell away as the tips of her fingers prickled. Yes, she was moving toward him. She didn’t budge an inch, not wanting to jar the connection. Without warning, a wellspring of grief engulfed her and tears fell from her eyes without any concrete emotion to support them. It was unmitigated sadness, fear and abandonment. Jane gasped and shot out of the moment.
She sat down on her bed, trying to sort out what just happened. From the way it felt, she wondered if she was sensing what Jake was going through. But the more she pondered that prospect, the less it felt true. That profound anguish belonged to the kidnapper exclusively. The idea was repellant at first because she was taught the black-and-white dogma of perp and victim. But she’d learned through working the case with Kit Clark the year before that the perp can become the victim and vice versa within the same lifetime. It was an acknowledgment that Jane fought but had to accept, even though the comfort of black-and-white realities was easier to allow.
She stared at the Chesterfield cigarette on the clothesline and opened the desk drawer to reveal the rest of the cigarettes she found in the forest that day along with the vintage-style ashtray and crushed burgundy Chesterfield 101 pack. Chesterfield cigarettes weren’t exactly her generation, and she was grateful that Hank gave her the hat tip about the celebrity history of the brand. Turning to her computer, she entered CHESTERFIELD JACK WEBB DRAGNET in the search engine and came up with a list of choices. It seemed that the actor was tightly affiliated with the cigarette brand when Dragnet was a radio show. While other TV and film stars such as Ronald Reagan and James Dean pimped the cigarette in ads and commercials, Jack Webb se
emed to have a longer connection with the product. Jane easily found a vintage newspaper ad of Jack Webb promoting Chesterfield. She hooked up her portable printer that she’d thrown into her duffel bag and printed off the page that showed Webb in a grey tweed jacket, black tie and plastered trademark black hair holding a lit Chesterfield cigarette and smiling.
She clipped the page on the clothesline next to the cigarette and stared at the latest entry on the clue line. It was as if Webb was teasing Jane as he comfortably held the cigarette in his left hand. “Look at me,” she felt he was saying. “I can smoke, but you can’t.” Her eyes drifted momentarily to the lone American Spirit cigarette she brought with her. The temptation. The face of her struggle. Then she looked at the drawer, full of Chesterfield cigarettes. It was suddenly cigarette heaven. But the idea of smoking the evidence brought her back to reality. She picked up one of the Chesterfields and noted the clear black mark of a pen encircling each cigarette about one millimeter from the tip. Obviously, whoever took the time to draw on each of the twenty cylinders wanted to make sure that whoever found the clues would clearly see this and do some research. Jane started entering everything she could think of that related to the black mark in the Internet search engine. But none of the websites proved fruitful. By chance, she entered, MILLIMETER CHESTERFIELD CIGARETTE and a cascade of results greeted her.
It seemed that Chesterfield launched a new product in their line in late 1967 called, Chesterfield 101s. The product was in response to other brands putting out cigarettes that were longer in length and they wanted to go that extra mile—that extra millimeter—to set themselves apart. Jane found an old advertisement from early 1968 promoting the 101s with the slogan, A silly millimeter longer than the 100s. It isn’t much. But wait ’til you taste it. It’s one better. She found herself grimacing at the idiotic ad, silently wondering how many fools took up the habit just to get an extra millimeter on their smoke. Then she realized she was already sounding like one of those bitchy ex-smokers who rail against cigarette companies.
Doing more research on the Web, Jane tried to find a pack of Chesterfield 101s that matched the same crumpled burgundy pack she found at the staged scene in the forest. Many websites, mostly in Europe, sold the brand but not with the same burgundy packaging found in the ad from early 1968. It seemed that that particular packet had long been replaced by a more modern version. After more than half an hour, she finally found the burgundy packet on a British auction website which was dedicated to selling vintage shtick from the 50s and 60s. However, upon reading closer, she discovered that the hard-to-find pack had already been sold several months before and that there were no more available from that seller. She could contact the British seller and ask for records of that sale, once she had a warrant. But that would mean she’d have to confess to Weyler and Bo that she recovered a massive clue and didn’t tell them. God, the trail of lies was long in pursuit of the truth.