by Greg Aunapu
"I'm sorry, Sue," he told her. "I really am. What's happened is Pompano Red has disappeared, and that's what's holding everything up. But I'm going to take care of it anyway. The big thing we have to offer the person in New Jersey State prison who knows Amy is in my services as a lawyer."
While he didn't name names, Sue got the feeling that the New Jersey prisoner was "Loco" who she thought had been transferred from Virginia.
A couple of days later Red appeared, and Blitzstein called Sue to tell her the two of them were traveling to New Jersey to talk to Loco. He wouldn't let her accompany them.
She didn't hear from Blitzstein for weeks. Ina Shepard was sick, and the FBI was having trouble locating what prison Loco was in. Sue sat down at the phone and called the Department of Corrections in every state down the East Coast from New Jersey until she found out that Loco was actually locked up in Richmond, Virginia. At that point she scrawled in bold, angry script in her journal:
It has now been 1 and 1/2 months since Blitzstein said it would be two days before I had Amy back!
On August 22, Sue wrote a letter to Loco promising to find him legal help if he could provide information about Amy.
Three days later Paul called Rex at midnight. It was such a surprising call, with new information, that Rex woke Sue up as soon as he hung up with Paul.
"Sue," he said. "Branch says he's calling back in a few days, and to get your questions ready for him. He also said to tell you to get yourself ready to travel."
-13-
P aul should have said "Hurry up and wait." Maybe he was trying to get the Billigs to appreciate him, or he simply went off on some long bender. But he did not call again for an agonizing six weeks. Sue phoned Rex daily, asking, "Have you heard from Paul? What could have happened? Have there been any biker shootouts where he might have gotten himself killed?" Paul had become increasingly unreliable, but this was extraordinary even for him.
During this time, Sue, who had never stepped foot in a topless club before Amy's disappearance, became an expert in Dade County strip joints, tracking down yet more topless dancers who swore Amy had worked in a club called the Apartment in North Dade three and a half years earlier.
It was late afternoon, and dancers undulated on circular stages, while slavering men gaped at their breasts and shoved dollar bills into their G-strings. Some patrons wore work shirts or business attire and would soon go home to their wives and make excuses for being home late for dinner. The female manager brought Sue into the back room, where half-naked women with large, perfect breasts sat on break, cigarette smoke swirling around young, pretty faces with old, tired eyes.
Sue shook her head in amazement, thinking how surrealistic and unbelievable her life now seemed, and wondered if it would ever be normal again.
One girl scanned the picture of Amy and blew out a long stream of smoke. "Sure, I knew her," she said. "A biker used to bring her in with a half a dozen other chicks, belonged to Big Jim Nolan. The biker would come in after their shift and take all their money. One of the girls, I remember, was Denise. She's fat, with hanging tits and is hooked on smack. Wears thick glasses. The last time I saw her, even the bikers didn't want her no more. She was like living in cars or something."
Sue sighed. These poor girls, she thought. “But the girl who might be Amy—she wasn't that bad, was she?”
The girl brushed a stray hair from Sue's face and frowned. "Bikers don't treat their girls very well, sweetheart," she said. 'They really break their girls so they don't know anything but working for them. Give us your number and we'll call you if anyone knows where Amy is. What will you do if you find her?"
Sue smiled wanly. "Love her."
The girl nodded. 'That's what she'll need. Listen, try a couple places in Fort Lauderdale—the Playmate and Take One."
The manager also agreed that Amy's picture looked like one of Nolan's girls.
It was maddening, all the loose ends, close calls. Could Amy have been living so close to home, when half the city was looking for her?
When Sue checked the Lauderdale clubs, no one remembered Amy. The turnover was high, and there had been several generations of management and dancers since the time in question.
Sue came home exhausted, late in the evening. She, Ned, and Josh ate dinner together, and Sue told them about her frustrating day. "I'll go to the dance bars with you," Josh said, too eagerly. Sue and Ned laughed. Sue gripped Ned's and Josh's hands and took a deep breath. "Promise me we'll never lose our sense of humor," she said.
“Who was joking?” Josh asked.
The phone rang at four A.M.
Sue groped for the receiver and groaned a sleepy "Hello." Four A.M. calls, while annoying, were pretty common.
"It's Paul," came the familiar, gritty voice.
"Paul?" Sue said.
'That's what I said," he grumbled, obviously drunk. The word "said" sounded more like "shed." But after six weeks Sue wasn't about to put him off now.
"You want your daughter," he said. "She's a long way away. Harry Kramer split from Tulsa last summer and brought her to Seattle."
Sue turned on the light, reached for her notepad and sat up in bed, instantly alert. Ned glanced at her and closed his eyes again. He'd seen this a hundred times already. It wasn't that he had given up looking for Amy, but he'd long ago stopped listening to any of these late night crank calls, and he was completely over Paul by now.
"'A guy who knows Harry Kramer in St. Pete said Harry claims he hasn't left Florida in ten years," Sue said.
In the condition Paul was in, it took him a while to process information. "He's lying or it ain't the same guy," he said. "Kramer's about six feet with dark brown hair. Got a panther tattooed on his arm? That the guy?" Sue admitted it didn't sound like him.
Despite the early morning hour and his inebriation, or maybe because of it, Paul was more garrulous than usual. He volunteered information that conflicted with his previous testimony. Earlier, he had claimed he bought Amy from Bracket, which Bracket had denied. Now he volunteered that he had actually bought Amy from Kramer in Orlando, and left her with someone else—a Puerto Rican guy. He didn't say who, but from that description it sounded like Loco.
When Sue questioned him directly, he said she was right.
None of it mattered anymore, though, because he said, "She's in Seattle now, dancing at some dive two blocks above where the ferry lands, fucking a bunch of Injuns and niggers for money."
Sue cringed. "I don't want to hear that kind of derogatory talk about people from anyone, even you!" she admonished the biker.
He laughed in his scary, guttural, voice. "Fuck 'em!" he said. "I talk to them like that right to their face. If they don't like it, I'll kill 'em. Anyway, she's real burned out and looks old. Don't look for anyone under thirty. Now you hear this, this clears any debt I have to you. This is it. You're never going to hear from me again.”
Sue didn't know what to believe anymore. Now she had conflicting information that placed Amy simultaneously on opposite sides of the continent. So, while she and Ned figured out how to pay for a trip to Seattle, Sue waged the war on two fronts, formulating a brilliant plan to check out the dancers in every club in Miami.
She called Ina Shepard to inspect the "health cards" for every woman dancing in Miami clubs. Shepard thought that was a great idea, and said she would notify the records department. A clerk called back and said such a review would have to be cleared with the FBI first.
Sue called the local agent, Peter Fleitman, who had been handling her case. As so often before, individuals in authority who had once been helpful suddenly decided there was no upside to continuing the case. Fleitman surprised Sue by saying, "The Bureau has done all it can to help you. Amy's probably dead."
Tears sprang into Sue's eyes. From day one, officials had downplayed the case and shuffled their feet, rather than sprinted. Police had labeled her a runaway and said she'd come home in a few days. There were no fingerprints on file because no technician was sent to
dust Amy's room. Police were afraid to go into the biker area in Daytona to search for her. Again and again leads had been dropped.
"Please don't abandon me," Sue pleaded.
"Well, we consider this a missing persons case," Fleitman told her. 'From here on you should find help in the private sector. Face it, Sue, it's time to quit."
Sue's heart started beating in a strange pattern, and she was suddenly out of breath. "I can't quit," Sue said. "I love my daughter, and love never quits."
The next morning a Lieutenant Storms called from the North Miami Police Department to tell her there were thousands of pictures, but he had put a girl on detail to pull information on the ones who had worked in the Apartment.
"This is really wonderful," Sue said. "When can I see them?"
"You can come up and look at some of the cards this afternoon," he told her.
"You don't know how grateful I am," she said.
But from the time she had spoken to Fleitman, her heart wouldn't stop beating strangely. She had barely hung up the phone when a pain shot through her arm and made her drop to the ground.
Ned heard her scream, and came running into the living room from the kitchen. "Oh God, honey, what's wrong?"
The room came back into focus and the pain subsided. "I think it might be an attack of some kind," Sue said. "I'm all right now. I have to go look at photographs."
Ned wouldn't hear of it. "I'm taking you to Jackson Memorial right this second! Let's get you into the car." He kissed her cheek forcibly and helped her to the door. "I don't know what I'd do without you," he said. "We can't let anything happen to you."
Jackson was only ten minutes away. An emergency room doctor listened to her heart and said, "We've got to put you in intensive care immediately."
"No," Sue protested. "I have to go look at photos at the police department. Please wait until tomorrow. I'm feeling fine now, I really am."
"I'm not letting you out the doors, ma'am," the doctor said. "It's for your own good."
She stayed the night, but sneaked out the next morning and took a cab up to the police station. She went through a pile of pictures, none of them Amy. She left a copy of Amy's picture, as they promised to “pull more." She went back to the hospital, where a Dr. Gardener told her she had heart disease and needed a bypass operation.
"Are you kidding?' Sue said. "I won't have anything of the sort! I don't have time for this."
"You're going to have to make time," the doctor said. "Or you won't have any time left."
Sue spent a week in cardiac intensive care after the operation. While other patients might have watched television or caught up on their reading, she spent the time on the telephone making plans to travel to Seattle.
The Billigs sold some of their last treasured paintings by David Levine, Aaron Shikler, and other major artists whom they had known from New York, to pay for tickets to Seattle. Sue arrived in the early evening on November 16, 1977, with Artie Saewitz, the husband of one of Amy's friends. He was a nice Jewish boy, with thinning hair, but an athletic build, who worked in his family's fabric store business and had never consorted with bikers.
What a change from Florida! Almost as far away from Coconut Grove as you could get in the continental United States. While Artie went to check out the rental car, Sue was already in gear. A man with a ponytail and tattoos on his hand was picking up a girl on the same flight.
"Pardon me," she asked. "Are you a biker?"
The man looked down at her over a crushed nose and split lip from a recent fight. "What about it?"
"I just want to know some of the biker bar hangouts around here," she asked. "I'm looking for my daughter."
He picked up the woman's bag and said, “Check out the Blue Moon and Century Tavern." They walked away, but he slung another couple words over his shoulder. "Good luck."
A wet, icy Pacific breeze froze their cheeks the moment they walked to their rental car. She had requested a simple, unobtrusive car. What they found was a sporty red and white Mustang. "Well, this will be inconspicuous!" Sue said.
They checked into the Olympic Hotel and brought their bags to their room, but Sue wasn't the type to waste precious minutes settling in. She called the Seattle police to make an appointment for seven A.M. the next morning, then said, "Okay, Artie, ready to check the bars that Paul mentioned?"
The ferry was easy to find, and so was the area that Branch had told her about—a neighborhood along First Avenue with strip joints advertising "beautiful girls" and adult bookstores with XXX signs plastered over covered windows. The West Coast version of Times Square. Drug dealers dressed in black leather leaned against dirty walls, eyeing the traffic meanly— wary for cops or clients. Girls in tight clothes congregated on street corners and motioned to men who drove by.
"Park the car," Sue said.
"Here?" Artie said.
Sue pointed out a particularly nasty looking place, the Red Lion. "We're going in."
Artie gulped. "We could get killed in a place like that!”
"Don't worry, I'll protect you," Sue said.
The bar was crowded with bikers, hookers, pimps, and Alaskan Indians. An entire herd of cows had gone into making the black leather and boots worn by this crowd. Rock music blared and a basketball game showed on a television above the bar. A pinball machine clanged in the corner, and the sound of a billiard break shattered the air, followed by a yell of disappointment.
No one paid attention to the Miami couple as they wended their way to the bar. A giant bald bartender with an earring took a while to make his way in their direction. "What you want?" he shouted over the music.
They ordered locally brewed beer and sat on cracked wooden stools that had been polished by leather for many years. "What now?" Artie asked. "Are you gonna show people Amy's picture?"
"Not yet," Sue said. "I've learned a few things about doing this. We can't just come in and push too fast. We'll come back tomorrow and get a bit friendlier, buy some rounds. Tonight we just get them used to looking at us."
Sue could barely sleep, and woke up before dawn. She finished breakfast and decided to take a taxi to the station to let Artie sleep in, since their bodies were still running on Miami time. She arrived early to see Sergeant Skagen, with whom the night sergeant had arranged the appointment.
The shift was just arriving and the offices were still pretty empty when Sue arrived. Skagen was a bright woman in her late thirties with short-cropped hair. She wore civilian clothes and had a very cold demeanor. Sue was an invader from the East.
Billig sat beside Skagen's desk and was offered a cup of coffee.
"So, I understand you're looking for your daughter?" Skagen said. "She was supposedly kidnapped by bikers?”
"That's right," Sue said, sipping her coffee. "She may be with the Pagans or the Outlaws or being passed between both. We've had conflicting information about that."
Skagen clucked her tongue. "Well, I'm afraid you're way off base here. We don't have any Outlaws or Pagans in Seattle."
Sue just about spit out her coffee. "I saw bikers all over the place," she said.
Skagen leaned forward and rapped her knuckles on the desk. "Nothing organized. We don't abide that here."
Sue handed the sergeant photographs of Amy and Paul Branch. "That's my daughter, you can see she's no biker type. She was kidnapped. The man is Paul Branch, a Pagan, and he says he used to 'own' her. He says she's been brought here by a guy named Harry 'Dishrag' or 'Washrag' Kramer.' "
Skagen looked at the photos carefully. "I'll be happy to post the information, but as I said, we don't have any Outlaws, Pagans, Hell's Angels, or anything here. Can't keep people from riding motorcycles, though. I'll go show this to some of my officers and be right back."
She left the desk and headed into another room where some sort of roll call was taking place. Sue scanned the area, reading the duty roster on the blackboard, with crimes and names and codes she did not understand listed on it. Typical police room. Then on Skagen's de
sk she noticed a note, apparently written by the night duty sergeant who had taken Sue's phone call. Sue could read it upside down:
She seems nice, but drops names and will do anything to get her way. But she seems like a nice lady.
Skagen returned without the photos. "You have copies, right? I've posted them, and we'll make copies and have our officers keep a lookout, but I can't promise much."
Sue motioned to the note. "I couldn't help but see that," she said. "I don't appreciate the telephone analysis."
Skagan glanced at the note and grimaced. "Sorry about that, but you do seem like a nice lady. We will try to assist you if we can."
Sue could feel the brush-off as viscerally as if Skagen had pushed her out the door.
When she arrived back at the hotel, a flustered Artie was at the front desk trying to see if she had left a message for him. "I was looking all over for you! You had me worried."
"I thought I'd be back before you woke up," Sue said. "We had a long day yesterday." She told him about her reception by the police. "Looks like we're going to have to rely on ourselves."
No matter what had happened to Amy, Sue felt as if her daughter's basic personality could never be transformed. Amy would still be a vegetarian, drink herbal tea, and listen to Joni Mitchell. She would enjoy shops and art and music. Driving around, they happened on Pike Place Market, a large indoor and outdoor farmer's market and bazaar, with stalls, shops, and restaurants right on Puget Sound. It was aged, but brightly painted, and actually the oldest continuing farmers market in the United States. The weather had grown nicer and hundreds of people shopped, while musicians strolled the sidewalks.
"Here! Here, Artie," Sue said. "It's just like Coconut Grove. If she's in Seattle, she'll come here."
They parked the car and were walking across the street when Sue spotted a Native American woman. "Was that girl at the Red Lion last night?" Artie said she looked familiar.
"Great," Sue said, "finding a girl alone is the best way."