by Dan Ames
So what auto convention? And where? And who would Kierra have been there with?
The good news was that you couldn’t live in Detroit without knowing a lot of people in the auto industry. And I mean a lot. The people who weren’t actually in the industry itself, in other words, working directly for Ford, GM or Chrysler, were usually working at industries that supported the auto manufacturers. Plastics suppliers. Leather suppliers. Gadgets and gizmos. Nuts and bolts. Someone had to make all of the million little pieces that the auto factories farmed out.
Now, I thought long and hard about who I could call that would have the best information when it came to auto conventions.
The name came immediately to me. Her name was Donna and she was a friend of Anna’s. I’d met her a bunch of times at various parties and knew she was a bigwig at Ford, alongside one of the famous Fords, but also heavily involved in marketing. She would know all about conventions.
I called Anna and asked her for Donna’s number.
“Why do you want it?” she asked.
“Oh, she’s been hitting on me for years and I finally decided to give in.”
“She’s a lucky girl,” Anna said, then gave me the number. “Tell her I said hi,” she added.
I’ve always been pleased that my wife and I are secure in our relationship, but sometimes I wished she’d at least pretend that another woman might be interested in me.
Since Donna’s job sounded high-powered and super important, I figured she was a very busy woman. And I guessed that I wouldn’t get her the first time I tried her number.
But I was wrong.
After an exchange of pleasantries, I asked her about auto conventions. Like, how many are there, where are they, and were there any recently.
“Are you kidding me, John?” she asked.
“No.”
“Conventions are to car guys like Fort Lauderdale is to spring breakers,” Donna said. “They find any and all excuses to have them. And they’re ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous how?”
“These guys go and the companies like Ford set up displays of the latest vehicles and technology and there are usually some reporters around,” she patiently explained. “But then at around three o’clock in the afternoon, although I swear, it gets earlier the longer I’m in this business, they roll out the bars.”
“Mobile bars?” I asked. I liked the sound of that. Maybe I would get one for my office.
“Yep. Complete with bartenders and usually some pretty girls around.”
Pretty girls.
“So were there any recently?” I asked.
“There were three last weekend. The biggest one being in Los Angeles.”
I thought back to Kierra’s social media accounts. It wasn’t last weekend. I ran through some quick timing scenarios.
“It probably would have been around three or four weekends ago, and I don’t think it would have been too far away, like New York or L.A.”
“Traverse City, I bet,” Donna said. “There was a convention in Traverse City in that time frame, one of the big ones. All of the players would have been there. May I ask why you’re so curious?”
“I’m working on a missing persons case,” I said. “An auto convention might have been one of the last places she was seen.”
“Is she one of those pretty girls I was just talking about?”
Either women are extremely perceptive or I’m just a friggin’ open book.
“I’m afraid so,” I admitted. “So what was in Traverse City?”
“North American Automobile Technology Expo,” she said. “Not so much for the gear heads, but with the way the industry is going, this has already gotten to be as big as all of the other ones.”
“So when was it? And did you go?”
“No, I didn’t go,” she laughed, her tone rueful. “Thank God. It was three weekends ago. Just go online, I’m sure you can find all of the details still on the website. They might even have pictures from the event.”
Just to be sure, I had her run down any other big auto shows that had happened within the past month or so, but I had a feeling the one in Traverse City was the one I needed to investigate.
“Tell Anna I said hello,” she said. I promised I would and thanked her.
“My pleasure, John. You know, I hope I didn’t make it sound like it was some kind of horrible debauchery. Most of the guys are usually harmless and just looking for an excuse to get plastered. I really doubt any harm would have come to your missing girl at the convention.”
I thought about that and wasn’t sure I agreed.
But just to be pleasant I said, “You’re probably right. At least I hope so.”
24
When you ask someone from Michigan where they live, or where their vacation cottage is, or where they’re from, they’ll inevitably hold up their hand, palm facing away, to represent the “mitten” shape that is the state. They’ll then point to an exact location on their hand.
If you were to do this with Traverse City, it would be on the left side of the mitten, near the top of the pinky.
The area was home to a lot of picturesque little towns where some of the wealthier Detroit suburbanites got away during the summer. Petoskey, Harbor Springs and other towns near Traverse City were the hub of these warm weather activities, mostly because of the lakes.
That part of Michigan was home to not only spectacular Lake Michigan shoreline, but dozens of beautiful inland lakes, some of them spring-fed and almost Caribbean in beauty.
Traverse City was the biggest of the towns and it even had a fairly good-sized airport. Most of the flights went directly into Detroit for connections, but it saved folks four and half hours in the car, and that’s on good days. On Sundays, the freeway, I-75, was choked with traffic coming back “down” from their cottages.
Not necessarily wanting to hop in the car and make the drive, I decided to see if I could find any news of the convention online. Reluctantly, I powered the computer back up, logged in and started searching around for news of the event. NAATE. North American Automobile Technology Expo.
Sounded fascinating.
If it were me, I would spend about a half hour at the convention and then sneak out and go to the beach.
It didn’t take long for me to find the website for the event, but it was nothing more than the schedule with links to nearby hotels and restaurants.
Still, I printed off the schedule as it had a list of some names and speakers.
I found a Traverse City news website but after digging through their entertainment section I still came up blank. Not a lot of entertainment going on in Traverse City, other than a country music act I’d never heard of and a fishing derby. Such a strange name. I pictured human-sized salmon on roller skates trying to knock each other over.
My luck changed when I stumbled across a local blogger who had been at the convention and taken some photos.
There were only a handful of pictures but I could see that the convention had been a much bigger deal than I thought. It looked like there was a large dining hall and at least several hundred people were there.
I sent an email to the blogger through a form on the site, and then made the executive decision to drive to Traverse City to interview the staff at the hotel. There was no way I could do it from Grosse Pointe. And from experience I knew that calling the hotel and asking for information about the guests would get me nowhere. Hotel staff were notoriously tight-lipped when it came to their guests and most of them knew they would get fired for giving out the wrong information to the wrong people.
I made sure to grab my little mileage notebook so I could write the trip off.
With a brief stop at home to throw a change of clothes into a duffel bag and a quick goodbye to the family, I headed out on I-75 and figured I could make it to the site of the convention before they closed and everyone who was anyone went home.
It began to rain by the time I passed Auburn Hills and when I was passing the Birch Run outlet m
all it was coming down in sheets.
If it hadn’t been for the rain, I would have appreciated noticing the change in geography one experiences when heading to the northwest of Michigan’s lower peninsula. For much of the drive, the scenery is flat farmland. But the chunks of glaciers that created so many lakes in the area also left some beautiful bluffs and rolling hills.
When I hit the first of those big rises I knew I was getting close to Traverse City. As if on cue, the rain shut down and I rolled into town at the same time I was finally able to shut off the windshield wipers.
My navigation app directed me to the Traverse City Hilton, which had a nice spot overlooking a beautiful stretch of Lake Michigan.
I parked, went inside and asked to speak to the manager. It was only 4:30 so I figured he or she hadn’t left for the day.
As luck would have it, she was still in and available to chat.
Her name was Marcy Conklin and she was a solid-looking woman with curly red hair and puffy cheeks.
After introductions were made, she invited me back to her office and asked me, “What can we do for you, Mr. Rockne?”
I sat down in a pleather chair across from her, noticed the mounted fish on the wall.
“Lake Trout,” she said, following my eyes. “My husband is a charter fisherman.”
“Nice,” I said. “I’m here following a lead on a missing girl.”
Her eyes went a little wide.
“What, was she a guest here?” she asked. I could see a slight sense of panic in her eyes. Not that she was guilty of anything, but I remembered that Traverse City was a small town, and they didn’t get as much crime as Detroit.
“I don’t believe she was a registered guest, but is there any way you can check?”
“Sure, I can’t give out certain kinds of information but I can tell you if we had a reservation under that name.”
I gave her Kierra’s name and Marcy clicked away on the computer, shook her head and her curls gave little jiggles.
“No, sir, no sign of that guest,” she said and I could hear the relief in her voice.
Well, I knew Kierra wouldn’t have booked a room under Jade, and if she was working the event, she probably would have been with a client.
It would be overstepping my bounds to ask for a guest list and even though Marcy seemed an apple-pie-small-town kind of gal, I knew she wouldn’t go for that.
“Did you have anyone taking pictures during the convention?” I asked.
“We didn’t, but I believe there was a photographer present,” she said. “I seem to recall people posing for photographs when the awards were handed out.”
“Awards?”
“Oh, they gave an award or two for people who contributed to some charities, I believe.”
“How would I find out who that photographer was?” I asked.
“Ralph would know,” she said. “He’s my assistant manager and he took care of any media requests. Hold on, I’ll see if he’s in.”
She picked up the phone and I took another glance at the big lake trout on the wall. That had to be tough to handle, glued to a piece of wood and forced to look out at the lake you once swam in.
“Hi Ralph, what was the name of the photographer who handled the auto convention?” Marcy said into the phone. She waited and then jotted something down on a notepad. “Thank you, and don’t forget to contact the parents of those fraternity boys who pooped in the elevator.”
Marcy hung up, and her face flushed a little.
“Boys will be boys,” I said.
“Harris Photography was in charge of pictures, they have a studio down on Main Street.” She glanced at the clock.
“You can probably catch them before they close up shop for the night.”
“Okay, I’ll try to do that,” I said. “Thank you, Marcy. I may come back if I have to spend the night.”
She handed me a business card.
“I’ll see to it you get the best room in the hotel,” she said, with a little wink.
From the time I left Marcy’s office to the time I opened the front door to Harris Photography a whole five minutes had elapsed. Say what you will about small town America, it had its perks.
There was no one in the shop, which consisted of one small room whose walls were adorned floor-to-ceiling with photographs. A glass case sat at the back. Behind it stood a door that was only partially open.
“Hello?” I said as I walked toward the back of the room, hundreds of sets of eyes from high school graduation photos following my every room. An incredibly large canvas featuring an Italian Greyhound dressed in a cardigan sweater caught my eye. Some people really loved their pets.
I heard someone curse under their breath and then a thin man with a porn mustache peeked out at me from behind the door.
“Was just about to leave,” he said, very little attempt to conceal the annoyance in his voice.
“Oh, sorry about that,” I said. “I was wondering if I could take a look at the photographs you shot at the auto convention a few weekends back.”
He stood up and I was shocked at how tall he was. Easily 6”8” or 6’9”.
“Yeah, I don’t have time to show them to you,” he said. “If you come back–”
“I’ll pay you for them. Fifty bucks for everything you shot.”
I had to be bold because this guy obviously had a hot date. Hopefully she was a volleyball player or a walking pituitary gland.
“Cash?” he asked.
Stretch was way too young to own the place, so I smelled an under-the-table kind of deal.
“Of course,” I said, congratulating myself for having the foresight to withdraw some cash before I’d left Grosse Pointe.
“Okay, hold on,” he said.
I heard him tap away on a computer followed by a couple of clips and snaps. A minute or two later he handed me a thumb drive and I gave him the money.
“They’re all on there,” he said. “Probably about five hundred shots or so. Hi-res. Boring as hell. Don’t know why anyone would want them.”
“It was a big event for me, I was honored as Wiper Blade Supplier of the Year,” I said. “I could really use some more pictures for my scrapbook.”
He shook his head as if to say, ‘whatever.’
Lurch walked me out of the office then and he shut and locked the door behind me.
Unfortunately, I had more than enough time to make it back to Grosse Pointe at a reasonable hour so I wouldn’t be needing the nicest room at the Traverse City Hilton.
Oh, well. Something told me it would pretty much always be available if I ever needed it.
25
When I made it home, the girls were in bed, but the better half was still up. She was sprawled out on the couch in our family room, eyes half-mast, a nature show on the television.
I went upstairs, changed into a T-shirt and shorts, grabbed the iPad from our home office and went into the family room. I transferred the photos from the thumb drive to the computer and then put them on the iPad. I joined Anna on the couch.
“What you got there?” Anna said. “Did you really go to Traverse City and back today?”
“Yep.”
“Hope you kept track of the mileage,” she said.
“Sure did, dear,” I said. As I watched the progress bar of the photo app on the iPad continue to process the pictures I stood back up. “Want a drink?”
“Sure, why not?” she said. I grabbed a beer from the fridge for me, dumped some white wine in a glass for Anna and dropped in an ice cube – just the way she liked it.
When I got back, she was sitting up on the couch, with her feet up on the ottoman and the television turned off.
We clinked, and I sat down next to her, put the iPad between us.
“Want to look at some dirty pictures with me?” I asked.
“Are they of us?”
“You wish,” I said. “You love to see me in action. From every possible angle.”
“That’s true,” Anna said.
“I was just watching that nature show about lowland gorillas. Totally made me think of you.”
“Hey, I’m no lowlander, I’m an uplander gorilla. Isn’t that a Billy Joel song?”
“Uptown Girl,” Anna said. “I hate that song.”
“Christie Brinkley was good in it, though.”
“That’s the video, not the song.”
“Aren’t they the same?” I asked. Anna rolled her eyes.
The photos finished loading and the first one popped up on the iPad’s screen. I changed the setting so all of the images would go full screen and I could just slide them with a finger swipe.
“There’s a lot,” I warned my wife. “You might get bored.”
“That’s okay, occupational hazard.”
I wasn’t sure if she meant my occupation, or hers.
The first photo was of a few guys standing around a car whose dashboard had been pulled apart to expose the wiring and gizmos inside.
“Look at that guy’s suit,” Anna said. “Was this a convention or a costume party?”
“Please, we’re looking for Kierra,” I said. “But that guy’s suit is bad. It looks like velvet.”
I swiped and then swiped again. And again. And again.
Gradually, the photos began to change from people standing around cars to people standing around drinking alcohol.
“It looks like everyone was pounding the booze,” Anna said. “And I’m not surprised. That party looks like about as much fun as an infected toenail.”
It did look painfully boring. One of the pictures was of a band that answered the eternal question of whatever happened to the Lawrence Welk musicians.
“Should be easy to spot her, if you know what I mean,” my wife pointed out. I did know what she meant. There weren’t many African-Americans at the party.
The swiping continued with no avail.
“Are you sure she was there?” Anna asked.
“Not exactly sure, but I think she was.” I explained a little about meeting Grandmaster D and what he said.
“I suppose you want me to call you Grandmaster of something,” Anna said.