by Dan Ames
“Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that, but now that you mention it,” I said. Actually I had thought of it.
Grandmaster of Love.
“Grandmaster of Love, I bet,” my wife said, reminding me again that I should never try to put something past her. It would never work.
“There!” I practically shouted.
“Shhh, you’ll wake the girls,” she said.
It was a perfect profile shot of Kierra, or Jade, as she was probably calling herself during this shindig.
“Wow, she looks so different from that other photo you showed me,” Anna said.
And she did. Lots of makeup. A tight black dress that showed off an amazing figure. She’d lost weight.
“And so much older.”
She was looking up at a man who had his back to the camera. He was tall, with a fine mane of silver hair. The suit he wore looked expensive.
I held my finger on the photo until the toolbar appeared and I sent the image to myself via email.
Then I let go and swiped again.
The hope that it would be a string of photos of Kierra vanished. The next shot was a different setting altogether. I went through the rest of all the photos and that was the only one.
“Well, one out of five hundred,” I said.
“Now what are you going to do?” Anna asked.
I took a long drink of my beer, reopened my email and forwarded the message I’d sent myself to Harris Photography, Marcy, and the Traverse City blogger, asking all three of them if they knew who the man with the silver hair was and if they had any other pictures of the girl.
Once it sent, I ejected the thumb drive and powered the iPad down, and finished my beer.
“What am I going to do?” I repeated. “I’m going to take you upstairs and show you why they call me the Grandmaster.”
26
The mail at the office consisted of glossy catalogs from a local jewelry store and a women’s western wear company. Had someone put me on a mailing list for a joke? I filed them in the wastebasket, sat at my desk and pulled out my phone.
The first message went to Nate and I included a photo of Kierra at the auto convention with the silver-haired man. I asked him if he had any idea who the guy might be, even though you couldn’t really see his face. There were a few people in the background of the shot and I thought maybe Nate would recognize a face or two.
It was free and worth a shot.
Next up was my weekly check of the bank account. It was okay news. A few deposits had finally landed for some divorce work I’d done a few months back. My automatic deductions for rent and Internet service had cleared.
All in all, I was doing fine.
But I hadn’t charged Marvin Cotton a high rate and I’d been spending a fair amount of time on the case. So I typed up an estimate for the invoice thus far and emailed it to him.
While my email was open, I answered several prospective client questions. One asking if I handled business espionage cases, to which I responded in the affirmative. Of course I did. Just about every question I received that asked if I had experience in a certain field was answered in the affirmative. I wasn’t lying. So much of what I did crossed a lot of lines. In every sense.
The second email asked if I handled prospective divorce cases, to which I also responded positively. The “prospective” divorce case question always meant a spouse suspected the other of cheating. Always.
Speaking of cheating, my mind went back to Kierra and the escort service. She used the name Jade. I assumed her clients all used fake names, too. But how did they pay? Cash, most likely. But I knew there were some high profile cases where politicians used their credit cards. Which was incredibly stupid.
Same thing in the case of some website for affairs that had been invaded by Russian hackers and the database posted publicly. Hopeful cheaters had supplied the website with their real names, addresses, phone numbers and credit card information. You have to be pretty horny or pretty dumb to do that. Maybe a little bit of both.
It made me wonder how and who took Kierra to the auto convention. Did a client pay for her travel? For her services the whole time she was up there? Or was it the escort service, Platinum Escorts, that sent her up there and told her to service some clients?
And then I realized what I’d missed. I swung my feet off the desk and sat up straight. Grabbed my phone.
Derek had told me that Kierra was thinking of leaving the escort business. That she’d had a couple of big scores lined up and was going to try to leave after that. The auto convention was the one she’d told him about.
What was the other one?
Obviously, he hadn’t told me for a reason. And I had assumed it was because he didn’t know. But what if he did?
In my wallet was the card he’d given me with his number. So I punched it in, half expecting it wasn’t really his number.
But he answered on the second ring.
“Yeah?”
“Derek, it’s John Rockne, the private investigator looking into the Kierra Cotton case.”
“Yeah.” He sounded less than enthused to be talking to me again.
“Listen, you told me that Kierra said she had a couple of big gigs lined up and then she was going to try to get out of the escort business. One of them was the auto convention. Do you know what the other one was?”
There was a slight pause and then he said, “Naw, man. She only said something about that auto thing.”
“Nothing at all about the other one? When it was. Or where it might be?” I asked. That pause in his answer suggested that he might not be telling me everything. But why would he lie now? He’d obviously been telling the truth about the auto convention.
“Sorry, man, I told you what I knew.”
I let the silence hang for awhile. It sounded like a lie, maybe even to him.
“Okay, well call me if you think of anything. Anything at all,” I said.
He didn’t answer because he’d already disconnected.
I was staring at the phone as I watched Nate’s name and number appear on my screen. I slid the answer button.
“Hey,” I said.
“How am I supposed to recognize people from the back of their heads?” he asked.
“It’s a new investigative technique,” I answered. “Rear cranial identification approaches. It’s all the rage in law enforcement these days.”
“Very funny,” he said without a stitch of humor in his voice. “Oddly enough, I might know who it is.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said. I grabbed a notepad and a pen. “Shoot.”
“I think he’s an attorney.”
I jotted down “attorney” on the notepad.
And waited.
Finally, I said, “That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not saying who it is. That’s saying what he is.”
“I know, I know. But I think I can figure it out. Not on an empty stomach, though.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Have you heard about that new crepe place?” Nate asked. “Let’s meet there tomorrow. I might have an answer for you.”
I sighed into the phone.
“Okay.”
27
Clay Hitchfield loved a good titty bar. He wished there were more titty places of business. Titty grocery stores. Titty gas stations.
The titty bar by the airport was mostly empty except for a skinny dancer on stage, a bartender and two businessmen sitting together at the foot of the stage, occasionally putting a dollar bill in the skinny girl’s underwear and slapping her ass.
Clay waited for his eyes to adjust and then spotted the other guest of The Runway. It was John Wayne, a.k.a. his employer, a.k.a. the big guy with the fine head of silver hair, sitting in a booth at the back of the place. The worst seat in the house to see the dancers, but the best seat if you didn’t want to be noticed.
He wanted to laugh. The guy really didn’t want to be seen with him.
Clay walked up
to the bar, ordered a beer and pointed to the guy in the booth, telling the bartender to put it on that guy’s tab.
Then Clay joined his meal ticket in the booth.
“Enjoying the show?” Clay asked.
John Wayne took a sip from his drink. It looked like Scotch. On the rocks.
“I need an update,” the man said. Clay noticed his fancy suit, his big watch, the way he looked around the place like he was worried about germs.
Clay smiled and took a drink of his beer. “The black kid was a dead end. Literally.”
He laughed, picturing how he’d dumped the kid’s body into the cistern full of acid.
“Great,” the man said. He shook his glass from side to side, let the ice mix with the remnants of the liquor and then drank. The expression on his face wasn’t so much disappointment as resignation. As if he had known all along that Clay wouldn’t come through for him.
“Hey, it’s not my fault the asshole didn’t know anything,” Clay said. “You were wrong. Your information was bad. That hood rat had no idea where the girl was. Believe me, he would have coughed it up, considering the pain he was in.”
The chick on the bar was on her hands and knees, her ass in the face of one of the business guys. Clay felt himself get hard. It’d been awhile since he’d had a woman. If he could get some cash from his client here, maybe he’d make an offer to the skinny bitch for a quickie somewhere. Maybe she’d let him rough her up a little bit. Or, more likely, he’d do it anyway, with or without her consent.
Old Silver Hair reached into his sport coat and pulled out a couple sheets of paper and a photograph.
It was a shot of some middle-aged guy.
“This guy’s a private investigator,” he said. “Name is John Rockne. He was hired by the girl’s father to try to find her. We think he’s making some progress.”
“Who’s we?”
The man ignored him.
“Follow him. See what he’s looking into. If you have to, get the information from him. He’s got an office in Grosse Pointe. You know where that is?”
Clay shook his head. “No, but I’ve heard of it. That’s where all the rich fucks live, right?”
The guy ignored his question again. Clay was starting to get a little pissed. He hated being ignored.
“You have to be really careful with this guy, though,” Silver Hair said. “His sister is Chief of Police of Grosse Pointe. Anything happens to him, you’re going to have cops all over your ass.”
“So, what are you telling me? Don’t touch him?” Clay almost laughed at the idea. That wasn’t the way he worked. He wasn’t what you would call…an observer. He liked to get his hands dirty. Or better yet, bloody.
“I didn’t say that,” the man said. “I simply pointed out that if you touch him, you’re going to have cops all over your ass. So either don’t do it, or if you do, be smart about it.”
The guy smirked when he said that, and Clay knew it was about the idea of him being smart. The bastard thought it was funny.
“If you do it, don’t get caught,” Silver Hair said. “And if you get caught, keep your fucking mouth shut. Got it?”
Clay’s eyes drifted to the guy’s watch. It wasn’t overly gaudy, but he could see the name Patek Philippe.
That sounded expensive to Clay.
It would be a two-step process. Stick a knife into John Wayne’s chest. Steal watch.
Now it was his time to smirk.
He scooped up the papers and the photograph.
“I need my next installment,” he said.
John Wayne got to his feet and dropped an envelope onto the table.
“Find her, or that’s the last of it,” he said.
Clay laughed as the man walked away.
I’ll decide when it’s the end of it, he thought.
28
It was time to get the ears lowered and I had a strict philosophy when it came to haircuts. I wanted the dollar amount to equal the minutes required to do the job. And in both cases, the lower the better. In other words, a ten-dollar haircut that took ten minutes was ideal. Even better? A nine-dollar haircut that took nine minutes. You get the idea.
I went to this fancy, French-inspired salon called Cheap Cuts. Yes, I’m kidding. Nothing French, or salon-looking. Cheap Cuts was my kind of place.
There was a five-minute wait so I took a seat and picked up the newspaper someone had left on the table next to a well-worn Good Housekeeping. Did they still publish Good Housekeeping? Who read that anymore? I remember my Mom reading that magazine. Surely the publication’s audience now spent most of their reading time on prescription labels at the old folks home.
There was the usual blather about the Detroit sports teams, and on the politics page a shot of the Mayor.
Detroit’s Mayor was a man named Bill Mahorn, a former professional basketball player who had never been a star player, but a journeyman who had endeared himself to the city’s populace by being one of those blue-collar, hard-working kind of guys.
He was an African-American but also well-liked by Detroit’s mostly white suburbs, not that it mattered in terms of getting elected. Suburbanites don’t get a vote in Detroit, but it helps if the candidate looks like he or she can work with people outside of the city.
Despite his workmanlike reputation on the basketball court, he had always been rumored to have a playboy-like mentality off the court. A large entourage followed him everywhere and there were rumors that he had multiple children with multiple women pretty much all over the country.
Now, on this report in the newspaper, he was surrounded by that entourage as he discussed more attempts to get funding from the state government in Lansing for some of the city’s floundering projects. It was a never-ending request, time worn by all of the previous administrations.
I was about to flip the page and go to the entertainment section of the paper when something made me stop.
The photograph was intriguing.
There was big Mahorn, standing head and shoulders above everyone else, flanked by his security team.
None of the faces looked familiar to me.
Except one.
It was Nix.
The guy at Destroy Records who had asked me why I wanted to talk with Grandmaster D.
He worked for the Mayor, too?
That seemed odd to me.
And why had the photo jumped out at me?
The Detroit community was a small one. It made perfect sense that some of the Mayor’s entourage might also have ties with one of the city’s most famous musicians.
In fact, Mahorn had sometimes referred to himself as America’s first hip-hop mayor.
A weird feeling ran down my back. I actually started sweating.
My iPad. It was at the office. I got up and walked out of Cheap Cuts, got into the car and drove immediately back to my office, ran up my steps and barged into my office. I grabbed the iPad and started at the beginning. I already knew that what I was looking for wasn’t in the photograph of Kierra.
But I wondered, had I seen Nix in the auto convention photos?
I remembered Anna and I joking about the fact that it would be easy to see Kierra because there were so few African-Americans at the convention. But there had been a few. One in particular I now remembered.
The photos flew past me until I got to the one I was looking for. It was a shot of the band and off to one side, standing at a table partially obscured by two other people, was a black man. Most of his body was blocked from view, but I could just make out the side of his face. I used my fingers to enlarge the photo.
Damn, it was entirely possible that the man in the photo was Nix. It had to be. He had that angular face, with a sharp nose. The man had a presence. Even in this crappy photo.
I made a copy of the photo, then cropped it so Nix’s face filled the screen. It was a little pixelated but my gut told me it was him.
And for the first time, I had a really bad feeling about what had happened to Kierra.
&nb
sp; 29
Unfortunately, I didn’t know anyone at the mayor’s office, and I couldn’t even think of anyone who might have a contact there.
So I tried a cold call.
The first person I spoke with immediately transferred me to the head of public relations and I left a message saying I had some questions for the mayor’s security team regarding the case of a missing girl.
It seemed like a good bet that I would never hear back from anyone.
There was also a fairly good risk I was going to wear out my welcome with Grandmaster D, but until Nix was ready to talk to me directly, he was the only source I had for more information about him.
I called the cell phone number and this time he didn’t answer. Instead of leaving a message on his voicemail I took a chance and sent him a text message asking him if we could again meet face to face.
When he called me a few minutes later, he gave me an address in downtown Detroit. He said it was his recording studio and that they would be there well into the evening. It sounded like he would be willing to speak with me when they took a break.
There was a moment when I thought how cool it would be if I could rap a few lyrics onto one of Grandmaster D’s songs. Yeah, probably not.
With that dream quashed, I figured there was no better time than the present so I punched in the address on my phone and followed the directions down to a place right off of Jefferson, to a warehouse district that ran along the banks of the Detroit River.
These buildings had been boarded up for as long as I could remember. There used to be a great blues bar in the area that I had frequented years ago, but that was gone, too. It was difficult to find the place because there were no street signs and none of the buildings had any address numbers anywhere to be found.
My first inkling I was close, though, was when I came across a Bentley coupe parked next to a Mercedes G-Wagon parked next to an Aston Martin.
My minivan looked cooler than all of them, so I parked a block away, not wanting to outshine them so obviously.