‘Mrs Mims?’ I asked.
‘Ms Mims,’ she corrected. ‘And I just finished talking to a police officer not twenty minutes ago.’
‘I’m not with the police, ma’am.’ I showed her my ID. She examined it carefully without touching it, her daughter straining up on her toes to do the same, then glanced back at my face. ‘I remember you,’ she said. ‘You called here, couple of nights back.’
‘That’s right. I knew Rita. Can I come in for a moment?’
She bit down gently on her lower lip, then nodded and closed the door. I could hear the chain being removed and then the door swung open, revealing a bright, large-ceilinged room. The couch inside was blue and decorated with yellow throws, its legs set on a bare varnished floor. Two tall bookshelves crammed with paperbacks stood at either side of an old, stained, marble fireplace, and there was a portable stereo on a stand by the window close to a combination TV and VCR. The room smelt of flowers and opened to the right onto a short hallway, presumably leading to the bedroom and bathroom, and on the left into a small, clean kitchen. The walls had been newly painted a soft yellow, so that the room seemed to be bathed in sunlight.
‘You have a nice place. You do all this yourself?’
She nodded, proud despite herself.
‘I helped her,’ piped the girl. She was maybe eight or nine, and it was possible to see in her the seeds of a beauty that would eventually grow to outshine her mother’s.
‘You’ll have to start hiring yourself out,’ I said. ‘I know people who’d pay a lot of money for a job as good as this. Including me.’
The girl giggled shyly and her mother reached out and gave her a little hug around the shoulders. ‘Go on now, child. Go and play while I talk with Mr Parker here.’
She did as she was told, casting a small, anxious look over her shoulder as she entered the hallway. I smiled to reassure her, and she gave a little smile back.
‘She’s a beautiful girl,’ I said.
‘Takes after her father,’ she replied, her voice thick with sarcasm.
‘I don’t think so. He around?’
‘No. He was a worthless sonofabitch, so I kicked him out. Last I heard, he was a drain on the economy of New Jersey.’
‘Best place for him.’
‘Amen to that. You want coffee? Tea maybe?’
‘Coffee would be fine.’ I didn’t really want it, but I figured it might take the strain out of the situation a little. Ms Mims seemed like a pretty tough woman. If she decided to be unhelpful, a steel hull wouldn’t be enough to break the ice.
After a few minutes, she emerged from the kitchen with two mugs, placed them carefully on coasters on a low pine table, then went back to the kitchen for milk and sugar. When she returned we sat. Her hand was shaking, as she held her coffee. She caught my look, and raised her left hand to try to still the mug.
‘It’s not easy,’ I said softly. ‘When something of this kind happens, it’s like a stone dropped in a pool. It ripples out, and everything gets tossed in its wake.’
She nodded. ‘Ruth’s been asking me about it. I haven’t told her that they’re dead. I haven’t figured out how to tell her yet.’
‘Did you know Rita well?’
‘I knew her a little. I knew more by reputation. I knew about her husband, knew he almost killed them in a fire.’ She paused. ‘You think he did this?’
‘I don’t know. I hear he was around lately.’
‘I’ve seen him, once or twice, watching the place. I told Rita, but she only called the police that last time he got roaring drunk. The rest of the time, she seemed content to let him be. I think she felt sorry for him.’
‘Were you here last night?’
She nodded, then paused. ‘I went to bed early – women’s troubles, you know? I took two Tylenol, drank a shot of whiskey and didn’t wake up until this morning. I went downstairs, saw Rita’s door was open, and went in. That’s when I found them. I can’t help thinking that if I hadn’t taken the pills, hadn’t had a drink . . .’ She swallowed loudly and tried not to cry. I looked away for a moment, and when I turned back she seemed to have composed herself.
‘Was there anything else bothering her, anyone else?’ I continued.
Again, there was a pause, but this one spoke volumes. I waited, but she didn’t speak. ‘Ms Mims . . .’ I began.
‘Lucy,’ she said.
‘Lucy,’ I said gently. ‘You can’t say anything to hurt her now. But if you do know something that might help to find whoever did this then, please, tell me.’
She sipped her coffee. ‘She was short of money. I knew, because she told me. There was a woman helped her out, but it still wasn’t enough. I offered her some, but she wouldn’t take it. Said she had found a way to make a little on the side.’
‘Did she say how?’
‘No, but I looked after Donnie while she was gone. Three times, each at short notice. The third time, she came back and I could see she’d been crying. She looked scared, but wouldn’t tell me what had happened, just said that she wouldn’t need me to watch Donnie no more, that the job hadn’t worked out.’
‘Did you tell the police this?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t. It was just that . . . she was a good person, you know? I think she was just doing what she had to do to make ends meet. But if I told the police, it would have become something else, something low.’
‘Do you know who she was working for?’
She rose and went into the hallway, and I could hear her footsteps on the bare floor as she walked. When she appeared again, there was a piece of paper in her hands.
‘She told me that if there was any trouble with Donnie or Billy, or if she didn’t come back on time, I was to call this number and talk to this man.’ She handed me the piece of paper. On it, written in Rita Ferris’s tight, neat script, was a telephone number and the name Lester Biggs.
‘When did the crying incident happen, Lucy?’
‘Five days ago,’ she said, which meant that Rita had called me the day after looking for help and money to get out of Portland.
I held up the piece of paper. ‘Can I keep this?’
She nodded and I placed it in my wallet. ‘Do you know who he is?’ she asked.
‘He runs an escort service out of South Portland,’ I replied. There was no point in sugaring it. Lucy Mims had already guessed the truth.
For the first time, tears glistened in her eyes. A drop hung from her eyelash, then slowly trickled down her cheek. At the hallway, her daughter appeared and ran to her mother to hug her tight. She looked at me, but there was no blame in her eyes. She knew that, whatever had happened, it was not my fault that her mother was crying.
I took my card from my wallet and handed it to Lucy. ‘Call me if you think of anything else, or if you just want to talk. Or if you need help.’
‘I don’t need help, Mr Parker,’ she said. In her voice, I could hear the echo of someone being kicked all the way to New Jersey.
‘I guess not,’ I said, and opened the door. ‘And most people call me Bird.’
She walked across the room to close the door behind me, her daughter’s arms still clutched tightly around her.
‘You will find the man who did this, won’t you?’ she asked.
Passing clouds dappled the winter sunshine, creating movement on the walls behind her. And, for a moment, it seemed to assume a human shape, the shape of a young woman passing through the room, and I had to shake my head slightly to make it disappear. It lingered for a second, then the clouds cleared and it was gone.
I nodded. ‘Yes, I’ll find him.’
Lester Biggs operated out of an office on Broadway, above a hairdressing salon. I rang the intercom on the door and waited about thirty seconds before a male voice answered.
‘I’m here to see Lester Biggs,’ I said into the speaker.
‘What’s your business with Mr Biggs?’ came the reply.
‘Rita Ferris. My name’s Charlie P
arker. I’m a private investigator.’
Nothing happened. I was about to ring again when the door buzzed and I pushed it open to reveal a narrow staircase carpeted in faded green, with a small, grimy window on the landing. I went up two flights of stairs to where a door stood open on to an office overlooking the street. There was the same green carpet on the floor, a desk with a telephone, two wooden chairs without cushions and a pile of skin magazines on the floor, twin stacks of videocassettes beside them. Three sets of filing cabinets stood along the wall. Opposite them, beneath and alongside the two big windows that looked out onto Broadway, stood a selection of electrical items in boxes: microwave ovens, hairdryers, cookware, stereos, even some computers, although they were made by no company that I knew. The writing on the box appeared to be Cyrillic: trust Lester Biggs to buy and sell Russian computers.
Behind the desk, in a leather seat, sat Lester himself, and to his right, on one of the chairs, sat a bearded man with a huge pot belly and biceps the size of melons. His buttocks hung over the edges of the chair, like balloons filled with water.
Lester Biggs was slim and kind of well-groomed, if your definition of well-groomed was a disc jockey at his sister-in-law’s wedding. He looked about forty and was dressed in a cheap three-button pinstripe suit, a white shirt and a slim pink tie. He wore his hair in a mullet-cut, the top short, the back long and permed. His face was tanning salon-brown, his eyes slightly hooded, like a man caught between sleeping and waking. In his right hand he held a pen, which he tapped lightly on the desk as I entered, causing the gold bracelet on his arm to jangle.
Biggs wasn’t a bad man by the standards of his profession, according to some. He had started out running a used electronics store, had progressed rapidly into buying and selling stolen goods, then branched out into a number of other areas. The escort service was a recent one, maybe six or seven months old. From what I heard, he took the calls, contacted the girl, provided a car to take her to the address and a guy, sometimes the big man Jim who sat beside him, to make sure everything went smoothly. For that, he took fifty per cent. He wasn’t morally bankrupt, just overdrawn.
‘The local celebrity sleuth,’ he said. ‘Welcome. Take a seat.’ He gestured with the pen to the remaining unoccupied wooden chair. I sat. The back creaked a little and started to give way, so I leaned forwards to take the pressure off.
‘Business is booming, I see.’
Biggs shrugged. ‘I do pretty good. It doesn’t pay to maintain a high profile in my line of work.’
‘And that would be . . . ?’
‘I buy and sell things.’
‘Like people?’
‘I provide a service. I don’t force anybody to do what they do. Nobody, apart from Jim here, works for me. They work for themselves. I just act as the facilitator.’
‘Tell me how you facilitated Rita Ferris.’
Biggs didn’t reply, just twisted in his seat to look out the window. ‘I heard about it. I’m sorry. She was a nice woman.’
‘That’s right, she was. I’m trying to find out if her death was connected in any way to what she was doing for you.’
He flinched a little. ‘Why should it matter to you?’
‘It just does. It should matter to you too.’
He exchanged a look with Jim, who shrugged. ‘How’d you find me?’ he said.
‘I followed the trail of cheap porn.’
Biggs smiled. ‘Some men need a little something extra to get them going. There are a lot of screwed-up people out there, and every day I thank God for them.’
‘Did Rita Ferris meet one of those screwed-up people?’
Biggs kicked back from his desk until his chair came to rest against the wall. He didn’t say anything, just sat sizing me up.
‘Tell me, or tell the cops,’ I said. ‘I’m sure Narcotics and Vice would be happy to discuss the nature of facilitation with you.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Tell me about last Monday night.’
Again, he exchanged a look with Jim, then seemed to resign himself to talking. ‘It was a freak call, that’s all. Guy rang from the Radisson over on High Street, wanted a girl. I asked him if he had any preferences and he gave me short, blonde, small tits, neat ass. Said that was what he liked. Well, that was Rita. I gave her a call, offered her the job, and she said yes. It was only her third time, but she was keen to make some cash. Cash for gash.’ He smiled emptily. ‘Anyway, Jim picked her up, dropped her off, parked the car and waited in the lobby while she went up to the room.’
‘What room?’
‘Nine-twenty-seven. Ten minutes later Rita comes down, runs into the lobby and straight over to Jim, demands to be taken home. Jim hauls her into a corner and tries to calm her down, find out what happened. Seems she got to the room and an old guy opened the door and let her in. She said he was dressed kind of funny –’ He looked to Jim for confirmation.
‘Old,’ said Jim. ‘He was dressed old-fashioned, like his suit was thirty, forty years out of date. It smelt of mothballs, she said.’
For the first time, Biggs looked uneasy. ‘It was strange, she said. There were no clothes in the room, no cases or bags, nothing but the old guy in his old suit. And she got scared. She couldn’t say why, but the old guy frightened her.’
‘He smelt bad,’ said Jim. ‘That’s what she told me. Not bad like rotten fish or eggs, but bad like there was something rotten inside him. Bad like . . . like if evil had a smell, it would have smelt like him.’ He looked embarrassed by his own words, and started examining his fingers.
‘So he puts his hand on her shoulder,’ continued Lester, ‘and, immediately, she just wants to run. She pushes out at him and he falls back on the bed, and while he’s down there she makes for the door, but he’s locked it and she loses some time trying to get it open. By the time she gets it unlocked, he’s behind her so she starts to scream. He’s pulling at her dress, trying to cover her mouth, and she strikes out at him again, catches him on the head. Before he can recover, she has the door open and she’s running down the corridor. She can hear him behind her, too, pounding after her, and he’s gaining. Then she turns a corner and there’s a group of people getting in the elevator. She reaches them just before the doors close, jamming her foot in the opening. The door opens and she gets in. There’s no sign of the old guy, but she can still smell him, she says, and knows that he’s close. She was lucky, I guess. The Radisson only has one functioning elevator in that bank. If she’d missed that, he’d have gotten her, no question. Then the elevator brings her down to the lobby, and to Jim.’
Jim was still looking down at his hands. They were big and heavily veined, with scars on the knuckles. Maybe he was wondering if Rita Ferris might still have been alive if he’d had a chance to use them on the old man. ‘I told her to wait for me in the lobby, by the reception desk,’ he said, as he took up the story. ‘I went up to the room, but the door was open and the room was empty. Like she said, there were no bags, nothing. So I went back down to the desk, told them that I was supposed to meet a friend of mine who was staying in the hotel. Room nine-twenty-seven.’
He pursed his lips, and tugged at one of his scars with a long fingernail. ‘There was no guest in room nine-twenty-seven,’ he said at last. ‘The room was unoccupied. The old guy must have bullshitted one of the staff so he could get in. I took Rita to the bar, got her a brandy and waited until she had calmed down before taking her home. That’s all there is.’
‘You find any way to tell the cops about this guy?’
Biggs shook his head. ‘How could I?’
‘You have a telephone.’
‘I have a business,’ he replied.
Not for long, I thought. Biggs, for all his posturing, was no better than a cluster fly, insinuating himself into young women’s lives and then draining them from the inside. ‘He could try again,’ I said. ‘Maybe he did try, and Rita Ferris ended up dead because of it.’
Biggs shook his head. ‘Nah, these
things happen. The freak probably went home and jerked off instead.’ His eyes told me that he didn’t believe his own lies. Beside him, Jim still hadn’t lifted his face. Guilt rolled off him like a fog.
‘She give you a description?’
‘Like we told you: old, tall, grey hair, smelt bad. That’s it.’
I rose. ‘Thanks, you’ve been a big help.’
‘Anytime,’ he said. ‘You ever want to party, you give me a call.’
‘Yeah, you’ll be the first to know.’
When I stepped outside, a car drew up: Ellis Howard’s car. He didn’t look overly happy to see me.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘Same thing you are, I guess.’
‘We got an anonymous tip-off.’
‘Lucky you.’ I guessed that Lucy Mims’s conscience had got the better of her in the end.
Ellis rubbed his hand across his face, dragging his skin down so I could see the red beneath his eyes. ‘You still haven’t answered the question,’ he said. ‘How did you know she was working as a prostitute?’
‘Maybe the same way you did. It doesn’t matter.’
‘But you weren’t going to tell us?’
‘I would have, eventually. I didn’t want her labelled as a hooker, that’s all, not with the press around and not before I had a chance to find out more.’
‘I didn’t know you were so sentimental,’ said Ellis. He wasn’t smiling.
‘I have hidden shallows,’ I replied, as I turned and walked to my car. ‘See you around, Ellis.’
Chapter Eight
After I left Lester Biggs’s office, I headed down to the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters at Temple Street, where I ate a muffin, drank some French roast and watched the cars go by on Federal Street. A handful of people queued to see cheap movies in the Nickelodeon movie theatre next door, or took the air around Monument Square. Nearby, Congress Street was bustling. It had suffered when the suburban malls drew the retail businesses out of the city, but now had restaurants, and the Keystone theatre é, and was reinventing itself as Portland’s cultural district.
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