by Laurel Dewey
They drove back to the B&B in silence. When Hank parked at the curb, he looked at the clock. “Look at that…five minutes on the nose. I guess I do keep my word.” Jane sat still, looking straight ahead. “Aren’t you getting out?” She opened the door, stepped outside and shut the door. “Before I forget…” He pulled a piece of paper out of his breast pocket. “I was finally able to translate that Patois saying you asked me about.” He handed her a folded piece of paper.
Jane opened the paper and read the words:
I HOPE FOR THE ONE WHO CAN MAKE MY TENDER
HEART WHOLE AGAIN.
“I don’t know where you got that from,” Hank said, motioning to the translation. “But I find it just a little too ironic, don’t you?” He put the truck in gear. “It’s too damn bad you decided not to keep me around, Jane. I could do a lot of the heavy thinking for you.” Hank slowly drove away.
Jane thought she was confused before, but now it was magnified by the shame and hell she was feeling. She stood there in a daze until the sound of her cell phone slammed her back into the world. She checked the number and didn’t recognize it.
“Hello?” There was an onslaught of loud music in the background.
“Hey, it’s me!”
Jane didn’t recognize the voice. “Me who?”
“Candy! Candy Cane from the club?”
Jane jumped to attention. “Candy! What’s up?”
“You told me to call ya if that guy ever came back? Well, he’s here by himself, but when I told him we weren’t open for another hour, he gave me a hundie if I’d let him wait inside.”
“Did he say who he was waiting for?”
“Yeah, sure, riiiiight,” she said with a sarcastic laugh. “All he said was he had an important appointment.”
“Don’t let him leave, Candy!” Jane yelled before hanging up and jumping into her Mustang. She tossed the book onto the passenger seat as the envelope Butterworth dropped slid out from the book and onto the passenger floor. Jane peeled out of town, calculating it would take at least forty minutes to get to the strip club, and that was if she drove like a bat out of hell. The mountain roads were mostly clear as she easily flew by cars and trucks and took the curves too fast. Thirty-eight minutes later, she skidded into the parking lot of The Cat House Lounge. A smattering of cars were in the lot, including Bailey’s black SUV. Jane removed her holster and Glock and stuck it under the front seat before getting out of her car and walking inside. The place pounded with too much bass as Don Henley’s recording of “Get Over It,” punctuated the darkness. It took several seconds for Jane’s eyes to get used to the drastic change in light. She peered over to where Bailey had been seated on her first visit but saw no one.
“Hey!”
Jane turned around. There was Candy wearing an exceptionally tight, loose knit top with no bra. A short pink skirt that barely covered her ass and chunky, four-inch Lucite heels completed the tawdry ensemble. “Where is he?”
“Taking a leak. That guy standing by the far booth,” Candy pointed discreetly, “just showed up about ten minutes ago.”
Jane tried to make out the man in the semidarkness. Based on her memory, it wasn’t the same one as before.
Candy stuck out her chest, showing off her top. “Hey, what do ya think?”
She turned back to Candy. “About what?”
“You gave me money to buy a sweater, remember?”
Jane looked askance. “That wasn’t the kind of sweater I had in mind.”
“It’s made of yarn, right? Anyway, I wanted to say thanks again. Because this sweater worked.”
Jane snuck a look back at the men’s room but Bailey was still inside. “Worked?”
“Yeah!” Candy said, her eyes wide with enthusiasm.
Behind her, a stocky man, mid-fifties appeared. His combover was inexcusable and his oily skin matched his greasy vibe. “Let’s go, baby!” he said, locking his right hand around her neck. His gold pinky ring screamed creep.
“See what I’m talkin’ about?” Candy quietly said to Jane. “He’s a doctor!”
Jane grabbed Candy and took her aside. “Yeah, he’s a doctor and I just split the atom. Candy, or whatever the hell your name is, don’t do this! Go home.”
The girl’s doe eyes lost their glimmer. “I can’t. I don’t exist anymore as far as they’re concerned.”
The guy spun Candy around, gave Jane the evil eye and disappeared out the door.
Jane shook her head in disgust and turned back just as Bailey emerged from the bathroom. But instead of crossing to a booth with the other man, they exited the back door. This time, Jane wasn’t going to let him slip away. She raced out the front door and got into her Mustang before Bailey could see her. Hunkering down in her front seat, she watched as the two men had a seemingly somber conversation as they walked around the club. Bailey motioned several times up the road, pointing and turning his hand right and left as if he was giving directions to the other man. They nodded and each got into their own vehicle. She watched Bailey slide into his black SUV and roll to the edge of the parking lot while he waited for the other guy to drive up behind him in his sedan. Bailey rolled down his window and gave the thumbs up sign before turning right onto the two-lane road that headed further away from the club. The man followed him closely. Jane gradually got behind the sedan, making sure to stay far enough away so as not to attract Bailey’s attention.
They drove for several miles, passing the occasional convenience store and gas station on the rural roadway. As Jane looked around the somewhat desolate area, she envisioned it being the perfect place to dump a body. Gradually, more houses rose up and the topography gained a few signs of an active, albeit, pissant town. She followed behind the sedan, easily hidden by several other cars as they made their way down the main drag of the nameless community. At the far end of the town, they turned left onto a short side street and slowed. Jane backed off a bit, not knowing when the two cars were going to stop.
Watching in the distance, she saw them turn into the parking lot of a one-story motel. She followed and parked on the street behind a tree for adequate cover. Jane watched as Bailey got out of his SUV and furtively looked around the parking lot in an apprehensive manner. The other man joined him but didn’t have the same body language that indicated concern. They talked briefly before Bailey pulled a large envelope out of his shirt pocket and handed it to the man. Jane had a perfect line of sight as the man opened the envelope and counted the cash. The man nodded, replaced the money in the envelope and stuffed it in his jeans. Bailey then took the assertive lead and walked to a door, opened it with a key and ushered the man inside. He closed the door and Jane watched as they appeared in the window together, highlighted by an auspicious shaft of sunlight. Bailey aggressively pulled the man toward him and locked lips with him in a passionate kiss. He chaotically stripped off his starched white shirt, continuing their ardent affection before drawing the curtains on their covert tryst.
Jane sat back, staggered. She never saw this one coming. Bailey was indeed working a backend deal. The only difference was, it was Bailey’s backend that was getting worked. In seconds, everything shifted for Jane. The entire case took on a new and curious patina of possibilities. Jane’s eyes drifted to the nondescript motel sign, located above her head. Suddenly, one of the mysteries was solved.
This back-road motel was strangely called, Fourteen O-One Imperial.
CHAPTER 32
The pieces started to click for Jane, although, there were still a helluva lot of missing chunks. Her mind raced with the various connections. Jake obviously suspected his father was up to no damn good and that’s why he ripped off Bailey’s monogrammed pad with the words, 1401 Imperial. At some point, Jake decided to slide down the rope outside his bedroom and follow his dad furtively in Bailey’s second car to this remote location where he must have witnessed his dad’s sexual addiction. This also finally explained Jake’s last post on March 6th on the secret revelations website when he wrote,
I saw you but you didn’t see me, YOU FUCKING PERVERT! Which one of us will hang in hell???
Jane’s frantic mind jumped to the YouTube video simply titled, Bailey Van Gorden. She rewound the self-indulgent video in her head and recalled some of Bailey’s comments. More pieces fell into place. It wasn’t an advertisement for Bailey’s architectural services; it was a covert visual ad Bailey constructed to solicit men. Rather like, “Come check out my package before agreeing to sell me your skin.” The opening shot with him wearing that tight-fitting black T-shirt that exposed his muscular arms was an exemplary start. And the statements that Jane now understood with their double entendre meaning carried more weight. Bailey jabbered about how he loved to create “magic and passion,” how he had “enthusiasm for the lifestyle,” that it was important that clients “came to the table with that same passion” and that if they only “collaborated on one project together” he knew that it would be memorable. In the end, it was all an elaborate profile piece and the project de jour climaxed with a “collaboration” behind a grimy curtain at the Fourteen O-One Imperial no-tell motel. All the sundry asides—the shots of his unused Weber grill or his three-tiered Italian fountain, both of which he stupidly misspelled in the tags to the video—might have been there to either raise his profile in the eyes of prospective partners or create a look of legitimacy for someone who came upon the video and didn’t realize the audience it was intended for. Jane had to make the assumption that somewhere out there in the cyberworld of gay websites, Bailey inserted the link to his YouTube video. Just how many gay sites featured the link was unknown. But he was certainly eliciting enough email traffic and follow-up phone calls to make it worth his while.
Phone calls, Jane thought to herself. Of course. Now it makes sense. Suddenly, the implication of the two rings followed by a hang up on the Van Gorden’s phone was evident to Jane. That had to be a code Bailey gave his prospective partners to use to let him know they were on their way to the motel. As Jane recalled, he seemed to be more anxious to leave once he heard that phone code. Another thought crossed her mind. Bailey was eager to release the officers from his house who wiretapped his phone in hopes of receiving and tracing a call from Jake’s kidnapper. Of course he didn’t want them there! It was interfering with contacting his tainted trysts as well as receiving the ringing alerts that signaled when his conquest was ready to meet him. Yeah, that demonstrated a lot of heart on Bailey’s part, Jane deduced. Nothing like having your priorities straight when your only child has been taken and feared dead. That act alone warranted a new addition to the definition of egoistic.
Bailey had been unable to curb his sexual addiction throughout the entire case. Jane was on the right trail when she checked his SUV on the first visit to their home and found his rear view mirror flipped for nighttime driving. He’d probably been out the previous night knocking boots with an anonymous “Andy.” Ah, she realized, in a somewhat disgusted revelation. That funky odor she smelled in his SUV was sex.
She glanced at the curtained room where the two men were undoubtedly getting busy. Jane couldn’t care less what people did behind closed doors. What she did care about was the way some people manipulated their transgressions and wrongly projected them onto someone else when they got caught in an effort to take the spotlight off of themselves. That’s exactly what Bailey did to his own son. Jane felt the anger building within her. It was so clear now. Jake witnessed the sexual deception, confronted his father with it and his dad’s response was to project the flagrant indiscretion onto him. Maybe Bailey made the kid believe that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree? Perhaps Jake looked, acted and dressed just odd enough to make him question his identity after his father laid a gay trip on him. Whatever happened, it pushed Jake over the edge and to a bridge where he intended to end it all. Jane prickled at the thought of how Bailey boldly told Aaron with impunity that his son was obsessed with gay porn and regularly snuck out of the house to meet with male prostitutes that he met online. Jesus, Jane concluded, Bailey used his story to sully his kid’s reputation after Bailey got caught with his bum in the nookie jar.
Jane’s visceral reaction to Bailey’s treatment of his only child was to bound across the parking lot and kick in the door on the illicit love shack and bring all kinds of hell raining down on Mr. Van Gorden. The more she thought about literally catching Bailey with his pants down, the more she realized the kind of ass-kicking leverage she could finally have with the SOB. Yes. This could be the ticket she needed to finally get Bailey to answer her questions. Jane reached under the front seat and pulled her Glock out of the holster. Getting out of the Mustang, she shoved the gun in the back waistband of her jeans, covering it with the dressy shirt. The closer she got to the door, the more satisfaction she felt. But fifty feet from the room, her cell phone rang out. “Shit!” she whispered, ducking behind a parked truck to ensure she wasn’t seen by anyone. Checking the number, it was Weyler.
“Yeah, boss?”
“Jane, where are you?”
“Out and about. Why?”
“All hell’s breaking loose here. Carol Van Gorden called Bo about half an hour ago. She found another note from the kidnapper in their mailbox. He cut letters out of magazines and pasted them on the page to form words.”
Jane sprinted back across the parking lot to her Mustang. “What does it say?”
“Listen to me now. If you don’t, it’ll be so sad, too bad.”
Jane stopped in her tracks. “’So sad, too bad?’ Those words exactly?”
“Yes. Why?”
“That’s the same fucking term Louise Van Gorden used when I talked with her.”
“Good God. That’s worth noting given the second part of my news.”
“What?”
“When Carol showed the clue to her mother-in-law, Louise became highly agitated and collapsed. She’s in the local ER and it doesn’t look good, Jane. To cap it off, Bailey’s gone and not answering his cell.”
Jane put the pedal to the metal and barreled back to Midas. It was as if the veil had been ripped off her eyes and she was quickly seeing what had been staring her in the face all along. All the nervous eye shifting, all the hesitations, all the excuses that didn’t make sense, and all the obscure comments were suddenly making a little more sense to Jane. But there was no way she was going to let one of the players leave this world without gleaning vital information that could save Jake’s life.
Jane got directions to the local hospital from Weyler and squealed to a halt in front of the place in less than half an hour. She blew through the doors of the ER and into the wide hallway where curtained partitions separated the wheeled cots. The only area curtained off was at the far end. Jane strode in that direction as the beeping sound of a heart monitor and a doctor’s urgent voice rang out from behind the cloth wall. She slipped between the sliver of curtain and stood behind Carol who nervously tugged on her sweater hem as the doctor and nurse hovered over Louise’s face, attempting to rouse a verbal response from her. “Louise! Louise!” they kept repeating. Her eyes were open and alert, but she seemed unwilling or unable to speak.
“Louise!” the doctor yelled. “Can you tell us what occurred before you collapsed?”
Louise pursed her thin, wrinkled lips and looked as if she would spit nails at the good doctor.
“Louise?” the nurse interceded, “did you eat anything that may have caused an allergic reaction?”
Again, Louise eyed the nurse with venomous intent and remained taciturn.
Out of sheer desperation, Carol managed a breathy interruption. “We’ve been extremely stressed…”
“Carol!” Louise growled, sounding like her vocal chords had been dragged across the pavement. “Shut up!”
Carol turned and jumped when she saw Jane behind her. “How did you…”
“You gonna shut up, Carol?” Jane whispered to her. “How’s that working out for you?”
“Get…out…” Louise said, struggling for breath.
Ja
ne quickly crossed to the nurse’s side. “Don’t take it to the grave, Louise,” Jane urged. “Tell me what you know!”
“Who are you?” the doctor asked with a tinge of anger.
“Do you know where your grandson is, Louise?” Jane asked, her voice rising an octave.
The nurse glanced down at Jane’s Glock still tucked into the waistband of her jeans. “She’s got a gun!”
Jane spoke to the nurse. “I’m a cop!” Turning back to Louise, Jane leaned closer. “Louise…tell me what you know! Help me save your grandson’s life!”
“Officer,” the doctor intervened, “I’ve got to ask you to leave!”
Jane was undeterred. “Louise, for God’s sake, don’t sacrifice Jake!” The heart monitor rang with a code alert.
Louise arched her back in pain and turned her dying, steely eyes to Jane. “Fuck you, Jane!” she snarled with a chilling sneer.
The nurse pushed Jane outside the curtain, leaving only a few inches of an opening for Jane to watch the final tortured seconds of Louise Van Gorden’s miserable life.
They called her death at 12:12 pm. Jane left the ER and walked outside into the suddenly chilled spring air. Within twenty minutes, she saw Bailey’s black SUV speed into the parking lot. He raced to the doors of the ER but stopped when he saw Jane.
“What in the fuck are you doing here?” he asked, fighting a severely congested nose and wearing a flushed face.
“I’m like the wind, Bailey. I’m everywhere you don’t want me to be.”
“Get the fuck away from us!” he yelled before crossing through the automatic doors.
Jane sniggered, realizing that Bailey’s classical symptoms of flushed skin and stuffed sinuses coincided with his client meetings. It wasn’t the little blue flowers that made him wheeze; it was the original little blue pill’s side effects. She sauntered back to her Mustang but took a detour toward Bailey’s SUV after she spotted something amiss from across the parking lot. While she couldn’t be certain, Jane hadn’t previously noticed the striking front-end damage to the vehicle’s front bumper.