As he watched her work her latest sucker, hips swaying in a seductive bump and grind, eyes half-lidded, lips slightly parted, slightly puckered, slightly quivering, in a convincing parody of ecstasy, James found it amusing that so many moral activists thought it was the women in these places who were used and exploited. All he ever saw were the visually stimulated sex-drives of countless men being exploited to the economic advantage of the women and the people who employed them.
James shook his head and chuckled to himself as yet another hundred-dollar bill slipped from the man’s wallet into CC’s underwear. He couldn’t help wonder just how much these women made a night. He’d heard stories of women who made a thousand, up to two thousand a night. He thought those figures were just exaggerations and rumors started by the owners of these clubs to lure more girls into the profession. Now he wasn’t sure those numbers were so farfetched.
James was so engrossed in the parade of glistening, perfumed flesh, that he didn’t notice the shadow sitting motionlessly in a corner, a shadow darker than the other shadows, more substantial. A shadow that tensed and flexed, anxious, but cautious, watching and waiting, smiling a savage silver smile.
XX.
Malcolm watched the old black detective scan the crowd of jiggling naked bodies with a lust that seemed strangely similar to his own predatory hunger. He watched as time and time again the detective’s eyes fixed on the blonde with the voluptuous ass and his hunger doubled and redoubled.
Malcolm smiled. It was the same choice he would have made were he in search of that particular type of game. Not because of her ass, but because she looked like a victim, like prey. He noticed that the stripper was looking back at the detective, a less than inconspicuous smile playing across her lips. There was a connection. That was something he could use. The techno-rap song thundering through the small club ended and the blonde slipped from the lap of the overweight suit she’d been grinding. She stashed his money in her G-string and walked off with a practiced wiggle that looked too deliberate, too unnatural, and too rehearsed to be sexy as she made her way over to the detective. The oblivious stripper passed Malcolm as he sipped club soda, grinned, and licked his lips, imagining what her heart would taste like.
XXI.
James was so focused on CC that his eyes passed over the grinning shadow eyeing him from the corner without registering a thing. He was off-duty and his alarms were all shut down for the night. The only thing James was aware of was his own need, his own lust, and what he needed, what he lusted for, was CC. She flowed across the room toward him like something smooth and creamy that someone poured out of a jar. Something poured across chocolate. James was pleased to see the same hunger in her eyes that he knew was in his own. She took his hand, then dropped it, and wrapped her arms around him instead.
“I’m glad you came to see me.”
“I’m glad I came, too. You didn’t have any problems with your old man about the other night did you?”
“He doesn’t care if I’m home or not as long as I keep money in the bank account so he can afford to sit on his ass and do nothing all day.”
“Yeah, that’s about the type of man I’d figured him to be.”
CC’s face turned sad for a moment. She seemed to grow weary and depressed all at once. James instantly regretted his comment.
“He was a good man once, ambitious, motivated . . . I spoiled him. I made things too easy for him. Why be a man when no one expects you to be? When you have a wife who lets you lay around drinking and smoking pot like some rebellious teenager, who lets you take her for granted, take advantage of her? I’d be the same way if I were in his shoes. You know, I started stripping to help pay his way through law school. He got his BA in Legal Studies, enrolled in Law School at University of Penn, and dropped out after the first semester. He keeps talking about going back, but why should he when he has a fool like me to keep paying all his bills for him?”
“You didn’t make him that way, CC. Just because this asshole took your kindness for weakness doesn’t mean it was weakness and not kindness. Some people would appreciate your sacrifices, not take advantage of them.”
“Unfortunately, I didn’t marry one of those type of people.”
James was trying his best to sound loving and supportive, but everything he said just seemed to make her more depressed. Her arms were still wrapped around his waist, her body still pressed against him, and he couldn’t help feeling guilty for the erection that was poking through his pants into her stomach. Not very sensitive of him. His hands kept straying down her backside and lightly rubbing her buttocks, cupping first one cheek then the other and softly squeezing. James wasn’t the “Alan Alda-shoulder-to-cry-on-best-friend” type. He was the “face-first-into-the-pillow-banging-against-the-headboard- smacking-your-ass-‘Who’s-your-daddy?’” type.
Try as he might to stay focused on CC’s problems, he was already wishing he could change the subject to something a little more likely to lead to them doing more in the bedroom tonight than cuddling and talking. Not that he was against cuddling or talking. He just preferred to do that after messing up the sheets a little.
“Look, let’s just forget about your husband and go have some fun. I’ll make sure you have no reason to think of any other man for at least an hour or two.”
CC smiled.
“That sounds good to me.”
“I’ll meet you outside.”
“Fuck it. I’ll walk out with you. You’re a cop. What the fuck can they say? I’ll just tell them I’m helping you with a case,” CC giggled and took James’s arm as they walked out the door.
“And you are, believe me. You’re just the type of help I need right now . . . the perfect medicine.” Once they were outside the club, James reached down and squeezed her butt again.
XXII.
Inside the Star Bar, the darkness in the back of the club stirred. Malcolm rose and moved with the shadows surrounding him. He watched the pair slip from the club arm in arm and was pretty sure he knew where they were going. This was his chance to find out where the detective lived. He’d been following the man all day, learning his habits, studying him. That other detective, Baltimore, was fairly uncomplicated, predictable, and would be easy to deal with. He knew what made the man tick.
Detective Baltimore was full of illusions. He believed in right and wrong, good and bad, in justice, and he was fighting hard to hold onto these illusions even though his own chosen profession was so perfectly designed to dispel them. He’d convinced himself that he and the rest of the police force and possibly the church and the little old lady who lived down the street and baked pies and cookies for the neighborhood kids on Christmas and the nurse who bandaged his booboo when he was ten and fell off his skateboard and the little kids who rode the school bus that he passed every morning on the way to work, were the good guys. They were all part of his world, the world of all that was good and just. They were what balanced all the horror he witnessed on the streets. They were what he was fighting to protect, even though every day he discovered the kids on the school bus carried guns to class and sold dope behind the jungle gym. His fellow police officers were robbing drug dealers, raping prostitutes, brutalizing suspects, manufacturing evidence, and taking bribes. The nurse was stealing morphine from her patients to feed her own habit. The old lady who baked the pies was luring kids into her home and sexually abusing them.
Baltimore was the type of cop who could see all the sickness and corruption inside of people and still hold on to his illusions because he needed them. Without them he could not function. He needed to believe that there were monsters like Malcolm, and there were the innocent people the monsters preyed on, and then there were the heroes.
Reality, the way Malcolm saw it, was that they were all monsters, everyone. They were all evil and corrupt and they all deserved to die. That punk-ass detective was weak and stupid and would soon be dead.
Malcolm didn’t believe that Detective Titus Baltimore could pose him any real th
reat. He didn’t believe any man could, but the detective’s nuisance factor was rising. Right now, Malcolm was sure that Detective Baltimore was harassing Reed again. After James dropped Titus at the station, Malcolm watched him head over to the expressway, and he could guess where the man was headed. Baltimore held no surprises for him. He would be easy prey.
James was the more difficult man to figure. He held no illusions, no grandiose ideas about morality or justice and he possessed the same type of hunger that burned in Malcolm. It was in his eyes when he looked at the stripper. He could see the violent passion burning like funeral pyres in the detective’s dark irises. Malcolm wondered what kept a man like that from becoming a man like him. But he was pretty sure he knew the answer. There was no Reed in James’s life, no huge traumatic event to wrench away his most integral, most necessary illusions, to take away the very beliefs that told him every day that the next breath was worth taking, worth the effort of inhaling and exhaling. That life was worth the struggle to acquire the commodities of existence. Reed had made Malcolm the man he was and James had no Reed. But he did have a Malcolm and that was even better . . . or even worse.
Malcolm slid into a stolen Jeep Cherokee, fortunate that none of the blood from the man he’d car-jacked was still on the seat to ruin his new Armani suit. The leather had cleaned up well. He’d finally ditched the Impala. Now that both his and his car’s description were all over the airwaves, he wouldn’t stand a chance driving around in that thing. It would draw cops faster than a twenty-four-hour donut shop.
Malcolm watched the detective drive off. He cradled the Mossberg pistol-grip, pump shotgun that hung down in the extra-long right pocket of his Hugo Boss trench coat, put the Jeep in gear, started up the engine and followed after James. Malcolm tried following several car lengths behind, but after nearly losing him twice, narrowed the space between them until he was directly behind the detective’s car. The detective was too caught up in the stripper to notice him anyway.
Malcolm brought the Jeep to a halt and parked it down the block from the detective’s house. He watched the detective pull the Dodge into the driveway and practically sprint into the house with CC in tow. He imagined the two ripping off each other’s clothes with a passion that resembled fury, never making it to the bedroom, their last strips of clothing hitting the kitchen floor as the couple followed them down. Their bodies crashing into each other in a violent maelstrom of flesh against sweating flesh. Then he imagined what he would do to her and his thoughts filled with blood and screams.
Up and down the block, lights burned bright behind drawn curtains and blinds, but Malcolm knew the residents had long since gone to sleep. They left the lights on so that potential burglars would think they were still awake. It was an old trick that no longer worked. Criminals no longer cared if people were awake or not. He guessed the detective’s neighbors had never heard of home invasion robberies.
From bedroom windows, the flickering blue light and muffled canned laughter of TV sets played for sleeping viewers. Somewhere down the block, a stereo blared. Cats stalked through the bushes and shrubs in front of the neighboring houses hunting rodents. An occasional car passed.
Children’s bikes and toys were strewn at random on several of the small patches of grass and dirt that passed for lawns in Philadelphia, although, as lawns went, Mount Airy did tend to be a bit more lush than other parts of Philly. Dogs yapped behind fences sensing something fierce on the wind, a coming storm.
Malcolm crossed the street and walked over to the detective’s house. He cursed to himself as his boots sank into damp earth with each step on his way to the back of the house. He’d just gotten the damned things shined and now, with all the heat around him, he’d have to shine them himself this time. He couldn’t risk getting caught over muddy boots. A rose bush had grown wild on the chain link fence that separated the detective’s house from his neighbor’s and Malcolm grimaced in anger as the thorns snagged his trench coat and the front of his new suit. He was getting sick of Armani anyway. The next suit would have to be another Hugo Boss. They just seemed to fit his build better. Malcolm knew it wouldn’t take the cops long to figure out that he was still buying suits with Paul’s credit cards, but he wasn’t about to walk around in rags. He’d have to use the cards once more and then destroy them before the cops could use them to track him down.
Malcolm crept up to the back door, making hardly a sound despite his muddy boots. Raccoons, possums, alley cats and stray dogs called to each other beneath the moonlight. The racket was nerve-wrenching in the otherwise still night. Malcolm froze for a second, cursing the damn animals silently before peering through the small window in the backdoor. There were no lights on in the house, but Malcolm could still make out the entwined forms of the detective and the stripper coupling furiously on the vinyl floor just as he’d imagined it, minus the pain and the blood.
James was not as dangerous as Malcolm thought, not like him at all. They never were. They all had weaknesses, and Malcolm was witnessing Detective James Bryant’s. He could smash through that flimsy kitchen door and kill them both if he wanted. But he had other plans. He would deal with the other detective first, the white boy, Titus Baltimore. Once the white boy had been dealt with, this one would drown his sorrows in pussy and leave Malcolm free to deal with Reed without interference. Malcolm smiled and slipped back into the shadows, just as James looked up at the little window in the kitchen door and convinced himself that he hadn’t seen a face there.
XXIII.
Reed was barely coherent when he called his attorney, ranting about police harassment, a field in which business and entertainment lawyer Jacob Lanski was not at all experienced. Jacob Lanski had been Reed’s lawyer since he sold his first novel and was excellent at negotiating contracts to get both him and his clients the most money possible. But Reed doubted the man had ever been in a courtroom or been before a judge standing next to a client in handcuffs, which sounded exactly like where Reed was heading. Guilty or innocent, when the Philadelphia Police Department decided they had a good suspect, that suspect quickly became a defendant. Evidence got misplaced, witness’s testimonies changed, and innocent men went to jail. Reed was certain the man wanted no part of this and would try to find any excuse to avoid getting involved in what was about to become a very complicated drama, but leaving Reed hanging now could mean loosing a very lucrative client. Like it or not, the man was stuck, if he still wanted Reed as a client.
“Calm down, Reed. Calm down. Just tell me what’s going on.”
“These cops, they’re treating me like I killed my own family. They think Malcolm and I did it together or something. Every time I turn around they’re showing up on my doorstep. They’ve got me so pissed off I can’t even grieve! Jacob, my family’s dead! Doesn’t anybody understand that? It’s like my whole life just ended and these bastards are treating me like I’m a damn criminal!”
“Give me the two officer’s names and we’ll get a restraining order right away.”
“Detective Titus Baltimore and Detective Bryant . . . uh . . . James Bryant, I think. I’m not sure. He’s the quiet one. It’s the other one, Detective Baltimore. He’s the real asshole. Oh fuck! You’re not going to fucking believe this! I can’t believe this sonuvabitch! He’s back! That fucking detective . . . Baltimore . . . He’s walking up my fucking driveway right now!”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ll take care of this. Let me make a few calls. Be cooperative. Don’t give him any reason to distrust you. You’ve got nothing to hide. I’m on my way over there.”
“I don’t want to say shit to this guy. I think he’s trying to frame me or something.”
“Then don’t. Just wait for me to get there.”
XXIV.
Immediately after he was dropped off at the police station, Baltimore decided to double back for one more shot at Mr. Cozen. He knew he’d blown it earlier and, if he didn’t get to him tonight, there’d no doubt be a restraining order against him by the morning.
Before he drove back to Reed’s house, he made one more call to the Cozen’s marriage counselor, a psychiatrist named Doctor Elliot Berkowitz.
Baltimore spent nearly half an hour negotiating his way through the doctor’s tedious message system before he finally managed to speak to his equally tedious receptionist. His lips were nearly exhausted from kissing the secretary’s ass by the time he spoke to Dr. Berkowitz.
The doctor’s responses were predictably guarded. Over and over, the doctor reiterated his stance; even in capital crimes doctor/patient privilege still applied. But Baltimore was persistent. In a last ditch effort, Baltimore described the condition of Jennie Cozen’s body.
“Her attacker stabbed the knife in so deep that it went straight through her. Her ribcage was bisected. She was cut from her collarbone down to her pelvic bone, stabbed half a dozen times with a bowie knife nearly as big as her. He nearly split her in half. And she was alive through all of it. Can you imagine what that must have felt like? How terrified that little girl must have been? How much agony she must have been in?”
The doctor’s voice choked with emotion.
“Stop. That’s enough.”
“Then help me, doc. I need your help.”
“Talk to the babysitter.”
He hung up before Baltimore could ask another question or thank him. Baltimore already had the girl’s name and address in his notebook. He decided not to bother with a phone call and drove to the girl’s house instead. The house was just around the corner from where the Cozens lived, on an identical cul-de-sac, in a nearly identical home.
Every new home development was filled with cul-de-sacs. It made them all mazes that were impossible to navigate without a GPS. Even with his Garmin, Baltimore got lost twice before he found the babysitter’s modest single-story home, tucked at the end of yet another dead-end street.
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