by R. A. McGee
Down the hallway, Porter found more rooms, most with the doors shut. Toward the end of the hallway, the rooms had paper signs taped to the door.
Social Chair, said one. Risk Manager another. There were signs for the treasurer and secretary, and pledge master. Porter poked his head into the pledge master’s. It was a single room, with a double bed, a dresser, and a larger desk. Apparently it paid to be the pledge master.
The hallway dead-ended at a doorway. The paper on the door said President, but in Sharpie scrawled on the door underneath was the word ‘Prez’ and an inked list of names and years, back as far as the sixties. Those names were faded with age, but the last dozen or so were legible. The name at the bottom, in fresh black marker, was Todd James.
Porter tried the handle and found it locked. The door was flimsy and the handle old. Porter cranked the handle as far as it could go, then shouldered into it. The combination of his size, his strength, and the ravages of time on the door let Porter easily into the room.
Sunlight filled the room through a large window. On the bed, a blanket covered a sleeping body, blond hair sticking out of the top, head facing away from Porter.
Porter grabbed the blanket at the bottom and pulled it off, revealing a topless redhead and a boy in his boxers.
“Wake up,” Porter said.
The redhead opened her eyes, saw Porter, and yanked the blanket back up to cover herself.
The young man pushed himself up, eyes almost shut, and turned to Porter.
“You aren’t Todd,” Porter said.
“Neither are you,” the young man said. “What the hell are you doing in here? Can’t you see I have something going on?”
“You know where Todd is?”
“Todd? No. He left sometime last night. Said his face hurt or something. Said he didn’t care if I used his bed.”
“Sanitary,” Porter said. “You get back to it. Don’t let me stop you.”
The young man looked at the pretty redhead. “You wanna?”
“Am I going to get mine this time?” she said.
“That’s my cue to leave.” Porter laughed and left the way he had come, closing the door at the end of the hallway, walking down the runner on the stairway and out the front door.
He stopped laughing when he realized that his hopes of finding Todd the easy way had evaporated. He needed to do some research.
Driving around the areas close to the college, Porter eventually found what he was hoping for: an old-fashioned café.
Porter didn’t care much for chain breakfast places. Lunch and dinner were easy to get anywhere, but a good breakfast was hard to find. He had yet to eat one at a major chain that left him with a warm feeling.
“Welcome to the Prose Café. My name’s Violet, can I get you something?”
The girl behind the counter was light-skinned and had her hair in tight braids. Huge, expressive brown eyes that seemed to smile when she greeted him. She was beautiful.
If I was ten years younger, Porter thought. He said, “Can I get one of those O’Connor sandwiches, without eggs, and the wi-fi password?”
“Yes sir,” Violet said, flashing an enormous smile at Porter. “The password is 2-4-6-8. I’ll bring your Flannery O’Connor out to your table.”
“So, I gotta ask about the name,” Porter said. “Flannery O’Connor?”
“We name all our sandwiches after writers. It’s just something the owners like.”
“Why Flannery O’Connor?”
“She wrote Southern gothic. Your sandwich is a biscuit with fried chicken on it. There’s your Southern. It also has bacon on it. Pigs are actually very intelligent animals, but we still slaughter them like they’re nothing. Talk about a tragedy. Eating meat, there’s your gothic.”
For once, Porter was glad he wasn’t ten years younger. He couldn’t commiserate on the tragedy of the swine.
Porter pulled his old laptop from his bag, turning on the wi-fi and signing in. From his pocket, he fished out the address Jamie had given him the night before. The address to Todd’s family’s house. Porter had a smartphone, but always found it easier to manipulate map and direction websites from a larger screen.
He punched in the address of the house and waited while the website acquired its target. If he was going to talk to Todd at his home, Porter wanted to see what he was getting into.
The overview of the house showed it to be large, in keeping with its expensive zip code. A house like that in any other city would be locked away in some gated community, but in California, it was right off the road. A road with other pricey homes, but the road nonetheless. Porter switched to a street view and saw a large metal gate that blocked off the driveway, then continued around the perimeter of the home. The metal bars were woven with a black mesh to make it difficult to see past, affording more privacy.
Porter’s stomach rumbled and as if on cue, Violet appeared with a large biscuit, fried chicken steaming from inside it. “Anything else I can get you?”
“Ketchup?” Porter said, and the girl scampered off to locate a bottle.
Once she dropped the ketchup off, Porter didn’t see Violet for an hour.
It was just as well. He spent every bit of that time looking at Todd’s family house on the map websites. He went to the county GIS look-up and saw the exact lot line and shape of the property. In the tax records, he found out how much the house was worth, who had built the house, and who’d bought it most recently. He found the website of a local magazine which had done an interview with Todd’s dad, Steven, complete with a tour of his beautiful home.
Porter wasn’t up on the latest architectural designs, but the house was nice.
He finished the last of his water, folded a page full of notes he had scribbled down, and cleaned off his own table.
“I would have done that,” Violet said.
“That’s okay. You guys cooked, the least I can do is clean up after myself,” Porter said.
“Do you like Flannery O’Connor?”
“I don’t mind her. ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ is good. Dark stuff, I guess.”
Violet handed him a paper flyer. “If you’re into that, you should come to our reading tonight. Lots of writers and poets.”
“Thanks, but I think I’m a little too old for that sort of thing. It doesn’t seem like my scene,” Porter said, trying to be nice.
“I, like, don’t have a problem with older men or anything.”
Porter recognized the smile she gave him for what it was and smiled back, turning and leaving the café as quickly as he could. When he rounded the corner and was out of the line of sight of the window, he crumbled up the paper and tossed it in a sidewalk trash can.
Chapter 7
Porter followed the GPS on his phone. According to the graphic on the bottom, it was a solid forty-five minutes to Steven Jones’s house. Forty-five minutes of misery in the cramped rental.
Johnny Cash helped pass the time, singing to Porter about creeks and floods and General Motors automobiles. It was the cars he saw as he got closer to his destination that caught his eye. Mercedes and Porsches dominated the driveways. Porter wasn’t much of a car guy, but thought he recognized a Bentley.
The final few turns filtered out of the GPS and Porter was there.
He rolled past the house, to make sure he had the right place. All of his research had been good. Same metal gate, same black mesh. It all looked the same as it had on the satellite pictures.
Porter found street parking a couple of houses away from the Jones’s. He turned the car so the nose was facing the main street. If he needed to leave in a hurry, doing a three-point turn to get out of the dead-end street could be a problem. Porter stepped out of the car and stretched, then leaned into the passenger’s side and put his phone, wallet, and polymer knuckles into the glove box. Locking the door with the key fob produced an u
nsatisfying chirp. He sat the keys on the front tire.
This was not the neighborhood Sarah lived in, not by a long shot. The manicured lawns and clean streets gave the impression that there was no crime. Porter knew better.
In each of these houses was a criminal of some type. People who cheated on their taxes with fancy accountants. The ones who cheated their employees with shitty salaries. Some hid money in offshore accounts to cheat the government. Some just cheated.
Porter wasn’t mad at them for any of that. He wasn’t interested in being the morality police. All he wanted was to find Evanna Blanchard and get his money. And the clock was ticking.
The gate at the Jones’s was closed. There was a silver-colored callbox set into the side of a brick column. Porter pushed it and held it for a few moments.
A few seconds later a monitor blinked to life, revealing the face of an Asian man. “Help you?”
“Sure. I’m here to see Todd. Is he around?”
“Go away.” The face blinked off.
Porter pressed the button again. The screen blinked to life.
“You don’t hear well, do you?”
“I hear just fine. I have a new question. If there is no Todd, how about Mr. Jones?”
The monitor blinked off again.
Porter exhaled and looked at the gate. There were several large bolts where it attached to the other brick pillar framing the driveway. Porter wondered if his size-thirteen shoe would fit in the little space and allow him to use it as a ladder, to scale the gate.
Just as he was sizing his foot up, the gate whirred to life and rolled backward. Porter stood and watched until it completed its contraction.
Three men walked toward Porter, and he sized them up as they came. Their hands were empty, but Porter knew the bulges in the fronts of their cheaply-made suit jackets weren’t stuffed animals.
Three right-handed men, three shoulder holsters, the butts of three pistols poking the jackets outward near the breast pockets.
Two of the men were large, hovering around six feet and stout. They had the kind of new muscle a man puts on in prison when there isn’t anything better to do than lift weights and eat calorie-laden commissary food.
The stout men were a contrast in hairstyles, one with long black hair pulled back into a ponytail, and the other completely bald with a long goatee.
“Hands up,” the thinnest of the men said. He was shorter than the others by a couple of inches and had closely shorn black hair, and a colorful tattoo on his neck, poking out above his suit collar.
Porter obliged and the thick men patted him down, being less than gentle in their effort.
“Walk,” Thin Man said to Porter, pointing to the front door.
“Glad to,” Porter said.
The driveway was fancy cobblestone, laid out in an intricate sunburst pattern. In the middle, spelled out with gray cobblestone, was the word ‘Jones.’ Porter’s eyes flicked down to a large brown spot near the letter ‘S.’ He didn’t have to wonder too hard what would leave a stain that color.
The group passed an old car whose make Porter didn’t recognize. It was shiny and the wheels were clean.
His chaperones fell into a well-rehearsed formation, one in front of him and two behind. Baldy in the back kept putting his hand on Porter’s shoulder to spur him along. Every time he was pushed, Porter made note of exactly where the man behind him was, what side he was on, and how far away he was. An amateur move. A bad move.
Porter said nothing as he walked through the right side of an enormous, glass double door. Inlaid into the door was the word ‘Jones.’
Slick marble ran throughout the home’s foyer, which was flanked by two curved staircases ascending to the second level.
Porter followed Thin Man through the living room, with its plush couches, into a cavernous kitchen. At the head of a large wooden table was a man eating from a large spread of brunch staples.
Thin Man disappeared from view, into another room.
“The missus is at a PiYo class or some such nonsense. Trying to keep her ass tight, I imagine. I have to eat by myself. Join me?”
Based on Todd Jones’s age, the man was much older than Porter had expected.
“Thanks, but I’d rather stand,” Porter said. “I need the stretch. Besides, I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”
“Please sit. I insist,” Steven Jones said.
Baldy stepped closer to Porter.
“How can I turn down such hospitality?” Porter said.
“Hungry? I have plenty.”
“No thanks. I’ve decided I need to watch my food a little. Easy to let yourself go,” Porter said.
“Bah. That isn’t a concern.” Jones sipped a Bloody Mary and cut neatly into links of sausage. “When I can’t get laid anymore, then I’ll have something to worry about.”
“Nice car out there. The black one. What is it?” Porter said.
Grease from the sausage dripped down Jones’s chin. Porter thought it might make it all the way to Jones’s chest hair, prominently on display in a poorly tied together robe.
“It’s a Rolls Royce. A Silver Cloud II. They don’t make them like that anymore. Collectable. Mind you, the Rolls isn’t the most expensive car I own—far from it. But that old Silver Cloud is something no one else in this town has. Mrs. Jones likes going shopping in it, after her PiYo. Makes her feel special. I ride along, trying to be supportive, letting her buy what she wants. I figure if I do, maybe she’ll give me some, you know?” A braying laugh accompanied the statement.
“Interesting. Now, you have to humor me for a second. What’s the difference between a Rolls Royce and a Bentley? Both are just really pricey cars, right?” Porter said, eyes on Jones, the rest of his mind on Baldy, behind him.
Steven Jones stopped laughing. “Bah. You don’t know anything, do you? A Bentley… a Bentley is a car a person drives when they’re new money. When they have more cash than taste and they want people to think they’ve dragged themselves out of whatever gutter they came up in. Bentleys are meant to be driven. A person is chauffeured in a Rolls Royce.” Jones punctuated the statement with a crunch of celery from his Bloody Mary.
Thin Man came back into view, wiping his hands on a white towel. Porter saw streaks of red. Thin Man leaned into Jones’s ear and whispered.
Jones was incapable of a whisper. “I don’t care what you do.”
The Thin Man whispered again.
“I know it can’t stay here,” Steven Jones said. “Use a barrel. Just get it done.”
“Bentleys are new money? I wish I had that problem,” Porter said. “Maybe one day.”
Thin Man caught the eye of Ponytail, and the two of them left the room together.
“I’ll tell you what—you make enough one day, you give me a call. I’ll hook you up with my guy. He can cut you a deal. All you’ll need is a couple hundred grand, then you’re in business.”
“I’ll remember that. You know what, I changed my mind. Care if I get some of those potatoes?” Porter said.
“Please.”
Porter reached across the table, collecting a saucer and fork, scooping a small serving onto his plate. He looked for, but didn’t see a knife.
Baldy stood close enough that Porter could smell his antiperspirant.
“What can I do for you, Mr…?”
“Smith,” Porter said.
“Very well. Mr. Smith. What brings you to my home? Unannounced, I might add.” Jones’s eyes flickered toward the room Thin Man and Ponytail had stepped into.
“I got a chance to meet your son yesterday, but I didn’t finish my conversation with him. I was hoping he was here and we could talk a little.”
“This wouldn’t have anything to do with the reason you smacked him around, would it?” Jones said.
“You know about that, huh?�
�� Porter said. He feigned interest in his potatoes.
“Easy to see the imprint on the side of his face. I ask him what happened, he tells me some big asshole slapped him around. I assume you are said asshole?”
“I am, although ‘slapped around’ makes it sound like it was more than it was. It was just once,” Porter said.
“I can’t say that makes me very happy to hear, Mr. Smith, but at least you’re honest.” Jones took another sip of his Bloody Mary.
“Todd tell you what I’m after?”
“He did. Said you’re looking for a friend of his. Something about a missing girl.”
“That’s basically it.” Porter slid his chair back a few inches as if he needed space to lean forward to eat. “See, I think there are some things Todd hasn’t told me. If you would just let me ask him, he could clear things up and I could be out of your hair.”
“As a father, I wouldn’t mind if you ask Todd anything you want. He’s a grown man, and frankly, I think it does him good to be in some uncomfortable situations from time to time. As his lawyer, however, I can’t allow it.”
“Why’s that” Porter said.
In another room, there was a loud pop. Porter heard it and recognized it for what it was: a poorly muffled gunshot.
“You may not speak with my son about what will undoubtedly turn into a criminal matter.”
“Undoubtedly?” Porter said.
“Yes. ‘Without doubt.’ Basic grammar,” Steven Jones said, continuing his meal.
“Why do you say that? Do you know something about the girl I’m looking for? Something that would remove doubt about where she is?” Porter said.
Jones took his time chewing. When he was finished, he spoke. “I know we live in a very litigious society, Mr. Smith. People get sued and brought in for questioning all the time. Even the innocent can get stuck behind bars. I find that distasteful and would rather avoid it for my son. So no, you can’t speak with him about your missing girl.