Cat's-Paw, Inc.

by L. L. Thrasher

  As soon as her picture hit the front page, I wanted to put her in the car and drive straight to Mackie without passing Go. But I couldn’t leave Portland until I found Jessica. If the cops ID’d Allison before I found Jessica, I might be able to stall for a day or two if I could keep Allison hidden and keep her from running. I could claim I had been so busy searching for Jessica that I didn’t read a newspaper or hear a news report. No one would believe it but it didn’t matter what they believed. It only mattered what they could prove.

  There was also the problem of Allison having a very memorable face. Once her picture made the six o’clock news, people were going to start calling the cops. It didn’t matter how many people remembered seeing her as long as they couldn’t connect her with me or with the motel. Allison had been skulking about being sure no one at the motel got a good look at her.

  If someone who saw us together gave the Mackie cops a halfway decent description of me, it would all be over. I thought over the places we had been together. Downtown Portland was no problem. Neither was the Clackamas Town Center. The salesclerk in Penney’s clothing department had customers three deep around her register and had barely glanced at me. The shoe salesman had been busy trying to talk Allison into going out with him and didn’t realize I was with her until I paid for the shoes. He was so embarrassed he never looked at my face. The café in Hood River was no problem either. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time but I remembered now that Allison had let me order for her and had made a point of looking out the window whenever the waitress came to the table. We had been in a corner booth with a wall behind my head. I was pretty sure none of the customers got a good look at the face behind the tangled hair.

  Some people would remember seeing Allison with a man but I had questioned enough witnesses to know that I would be remembered as a tall white male, period. Without a picture of me to jog their memories, I was faceless.

  Allentown was the big problem. No one at the café knew me and no one would remember me being there after this many days. But Sarge knew me and knew I was interested in the mysterious blonde. If he mentioned my presence to the Mackie cops, Phil Pauling would jump to the right conclusion in two seconds flat. I was going to have to do something about Sarge.

  When I came out of the bathroom, Allison was chatting on the phone so animatedly that I thought for a moment she had called whoever she had in Connecticut. Then I realized she was in the middle of a what-to-name-the-baby conversation. She handed me the phone and I said, “Hi, Delly.”

  I could hear the smile in Carrie’s voice as she said, “Hi, Dabby. What are you so cheerful about?”

  “I’m always cheerful. It’s part of my not inconsiderable charm. Are you in labor?”

  “I just called to warn you that Mom and Dad are coming up for our birthday and they’re throwing a party for us.” After a long pause, she said, “If you don’t show up I’ll never speak to you again. I don’t like birthday parties either but we are their only children and this is our only thirtieth birthday. It won’t kill you to be civil about it. I told her to put ‘no gifts’ on the invitation.” She waited a while, then said, “I mean it, Zachariah. I’ll be eight and a half months pregnant and if I can do it, you can do it.” After another wait, she said, “Who is she?”

  “She who?”

  “She who answers the phone while you’re in the shower.”

  “Oh, her. That’s Allison Wonderland. I found her down a rabbit hole.”

  “She sounded like an external force to me.”

  “Bye-bye, Delly.”

  She was smiling again when she said, “Bye-bye, Dabby.”

  I hung up the phone and said to Allison, “My sister, in case she didn’t tell you.”

  “What’s her name? I thought she said Carrie.”

  “Carrie, short for Carolina. We’re twins. We didn’t learn to speak English until the speech therapist got hold of us in grade school. We had our own little language. She was Delly. I was Dabby, but don’t you dare tell anyone.”

  “Twins.” Allison barely breathed the word, as if it were a secret incantation. “I wish I had a twin.”

  I thought it might be a little late to arrange. “You can have Carrie.”

  “She’s going to have a baby,” Allison informed me as if it might have escaped my notice. “I’d like to have a baby,” she added.

  “You’re too young.” And in too much trouble. I put my holster on and pulled a tan sport coat on over it. Allison was looking faintly worried. She did something to my shirt collar and then smoothed my lapels.

  “Do you think I’m normal?” she asked.

  “Normal? As in sane?”

  “No, as in… sexually.”

  “Uh. You seem pretty normal to me.”

  “If someone does something… well, the thing is… well, I did something once that wasn’t exactly normal.”

  Tears were threatening to spill over her lashes. She was going to confess. That grandfatherly son-of-a-bitch Vanzetti had forced her into some kind of perverted, incestuous relationship and she shot the bastard. I decided I needed to sit down for this. I sat on the foot of her bed and took her hand. “Would you like to tell me about it?” I asked. Dr. Sigmund Smith.

  She suddenly didn’t look at all as if she wanted to tell me about it. She fidgets and cleared her throat and made several false starts then she blurted, “I kissed a girl.”

  Wrong confession. I did not laugh. “I see. That doesn’t sound so bad. Kissing girls is one of my favorite things.”

  “You’re supposed to.” She blinked a tear down each cheek.”

  “Was this a girl your age?”

  “Yes. Well, it was two years ago. We were fifteen.”

  “Did you go to boarding school by any chance?”

  She nodded and I said, “I don’t think a little adolescent experimentation with another girl if you didn’t have any boys handy makes you abnormal. Probably makes you very normal. I don’t think it’s unusual.”

  She nodded, not looking very convinced.

  “When I’m kissing you, do you close your eyes and pretend I’m a woman?”

  “I close my eyes and hope you won’t stop.”

  I grinned. “I think that makes you certifiably heterosexual, babe. I know a couple lesbians. They also sleep with men and they enjoy… uh… I assume they enjoy it, strictly from a physical standpoint. But their emotional attachments, their falling-in-love feelings, are for women.”

  Allison’s smile was blinding. I read the mind behind those magnificent eyes. Her falling-in-love feelings were for me. And I had no one to blame but myself. I had encouraged her and now I had a seventeen-year-old murderess in love with me. I was going to have to cool the relationship somehow. She had enough problems without having to cope with an unrequitable passion for a man who was much too old for her.

  She sat on my lap. I was going to have to stop this. Her arms went tight around my neck. I rolled us both over onto the bed. I was definitely going to have to stop this. Her lips parted beneath mine. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’d think of a way to discourage her.

  I tore myself away a few minutes later, wondering fairly desperately if Virginia would have lunch with me. And dessert. No, I’d better skip it. I had to find Jessica.

  I went out looking but I had the feeling I was never going to find Jessica. I had spent so much time on the streets that the regulars greeted me like a long-lost friend and several people I didn’t remember talking to inquired about my progress.

  I wasn’t making any progress. In her latest call to Hank, Jessica had again said she was downtown. Hank was sure she was calling from a gas station because he heard the sound of the bell cars drive over to alert the attendant. He had given me the information triumphantly, as if he had just pulled off the coup of the century. I wondered if the kid had any idea how many gas stations there are in Portland. He’d been stuck in Mackie for too many years. So, was Jessica really downtown or was she hoping Hank would pass the information on to me so I woul
d think she was downtown? I didn’t know how devious Jessica was. I also didn’t have any idea where she might be if she wasn’t downtown, so I decided to believe she trusted Hank. Besides, she seemed to know I was still looking for her and I had spent the majority of my time downtown.

  When I checked in with the answering service in the middle of the afternoon I had a message to call Virginia. She invited me to have lunch with her.

  When I got to the school, an aerobics class was in full swing in the big room. Virginia took me by the hand and pulled me into a small office.

  She locked the door and locked her arms around my neck. When we came up for air, she asked if I had any objections to floors.

  “No,” I said, “but it looks a little hard. You’ll have bruises on your backside.”

  “No I won’t. But you might.”

  A while later I was back at the motel, delivering Chinese food to Allison. She gave me a second to set the food down before she put her arms around me, snuggling her face against my neck. I was definitely going to have to do something to discourage her. I nibbled on her ear. Very discouraging.

  She said, “You smell like Charlie.”

  “Charlie who? I hope he bathes regularly.”

  “It’s a cologne. Charlie.”

  “Oh.” I pressed my lips to her forehead and stared across the room, trying to think up a good lie and then wondering why I thought I needed one. I finally just let it pass.

  Allison didn’t. “Do you have a girlfriend in Portland?”

  I smiled at her. “Not the way you mean it.” That should cool her off in a hurry. Let her think—well, let her know—that I was a no-good bastard with a woman in every port. Unfortunately, Allison appeared undaunted. She asked if I planned to eat with her and when I said no, she opened the small white boxes, asking what it all was.

  “It’s a number three on the take-out menu. Just eat it, it’s good for you.”

  When I left, she was deftly wielding chopsticks, looking as though she didn’t have a care in the world. Once she had caught up on her sleep and kept a few meals down, she seemed amazingly untroubled. She could get all worked up about a minor indiscretion but murder didn’t seem to trouble her. She had to be worried about being caught but she didn’t seem to be carrying around a heavy load of remorse. It occurred to me that maybe Allison wasn’t completely normal. As in sane.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I looked for Jessica again but my heart wasn’t in it. Neither was my head. The only way I could have found her that night was if she had walked up and kicked me in the shin.

  My thoughts were on a murder back in Mackie. I was digging myself a deep hole and it was likely to cave in on me. I was smack dab in the middle of an ongoing police investigation, a license-losing place for a PI to be. And not just some minor investigation—a homicide investigation. And not just any homicide investigation—the one both my best friend and my worst enemy were doing their damnedest to solve. I was aiding and abetting and withholding evidence and doing a few other things that added up to several counts of Hindering Prosecution, a Class C Felony. Well, I couldn’t worry about it now.

  Sometime after dark, while I was loitering outside a club featuring female impersonators, Nikki walked up behind me and slid his hand around my arm.

  “Hi,” he said. “You haven’t found her?”

  “Hi. No.”

  “I’m glad you’re still here.” He grinned wickedly. He was wearing lavender Spandex pants that made it obvious he was a boy and a top made of layers of drifting lavender chiffon. He extended one arm in front of him, moving it in a slow sideways figure-eight. Yards of sleeve floated in the air. “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “Enchanting. You look like you live under a mushroom.”

  His forehead creased. “An elf, you mean? I don’t think I like that. I’m trying to look sophisticated.”

  I removed his hand from my arm. “There is nothing at all sophisticated about a twelve-year-old—”

  “Thirteen-year-old.”

  “—boy dressed in a purple cloud.”

  His chin puckered and a tear-slid down on cheek. He sobbed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m in a bad mood. You look very… pretty.”

  The sobs got louder. I put my arm around him and pulled him close to muffle the noise against my chest. People were staring. I said, “Fuck off, shithead” to some passing asshole who thought smirking was the proper response to the sight of a giant macho stud with his arms around a little boy in lavender chiffon. Nikki giggled against my chest. I pushed him away.

  “I’ll forgive you for being mean if you let walk with you for a while,” he said.

  “Why don’t we get something to eat instead? I don’t want you walking with me.”

  His tears were gone, his makeup suspiciously undamaged by the crying bout. “I hear the girls are just dying to meet you,” he said.

  “Not funny. And if you know that, you know hanging around me isn’t a good idea. Where did you hear about it?”

  “Just here.” He made a sweeping gesture encompassing street life in general. “Everyone knows what you’re doing and they know about the girl who was shot at the fountain. You’re quite famous.”

  “If everyone knows so goddamn much, why don’t they tell me where Jessica is?”

  “‘Discover not a secret to another,’” he said. “That’s from Proverbs.”

  “‘Nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest.’ The book of Luke, I think. And if you say anything about the devil quoting scripture, I won’t buy you anything to eat.”

  He laughed and took my arm again as we walked down the street to a coffee shop.

  After I left Nikki, I called Bundy. He wasn’t making any progress either. “You been watching for a tail?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I haven’t spotted anyone. Keeping tabs on me in town would be easy, though. All the street people know what I’m doing.”

  “The price of fame,” Bundy said.

  I checked in with the answering service next. No messages. Jessica Finney was getting to be a royal pain in the ass.

  It was close to midnight when I jaywalked across a dark street in Old Town to check out a group of kids who were about to sack out in a doorway. There were five of them, the youngest a boy who hadn’t hit puberty yet, the oldest a skinny girl with straggly brown hair who was dressed in layers of thrift shop clothing. She was the spokesman for the group.

  She looked at Jessica’s picture briefly, said they had never seen her, and turned her back to me. The others stood mute and motionless, colorless in the drab night light. They looked like a sepia still of Depression Era Appalachia. One of them, a fragile, pretty girl with long dark curls, had tears streaming down her face. More out of habit than anything else, I asked if she needed help. She said her contact lenses were bothering her. Maybe they were. I turned and walked away. I was tired of joyless, leaden-eyed children.

  I wandered aimlessly and soon found myself approaching the Skidmore Fountain. I skirted around it, walking through an opening between two buildings. I stopped when I was beneath the arching underbelly of the Burnside Bridge.

  On weekends the big space beneath the foot of the bridge would be bustling with the activity of the Saturday Market. On Thursday night it was eerily still, the occasional slapping whine of tires on the pavement overhead punctuating the silence. There was a soft continuous snore from somewhere in the shadows. The cavernous space was filled with a light mist, not quite a fog, that muffled sound and limited vision. My scalp prickled at the skittering of leaves or litter blowing in the darkness.

  “Sir?”

  I turned full circle before I saw her. She was thirty feet from me in the shadow of the stairway leading up to the bridge. She moved, seeming to float toward me through the mist.

  A rush of adrenalin sped up my heartbeat and switched the external world to slow motion. I jerked my gun out, yelling “Get down!” The snoring stopped. The girl began turning in a slow pirouette, seekin
g the source of danger. A shot shattered the stillness and the underbelly of the bridge exploded with echoes of the blast. At the periphery of my vision I was aware of the girl falling slowly to the ground as I fired two shots into the shadows where the muzzle flash had been. A darker shadow detached itself, staggered forward, fell. A rifle with a short barrel clattered across the ground, landing beside a big packing crate that suddenly rose straight up from the ground then flew toward me. The man who had been sleeping under the box ran toward light and safety.

  I shouted something after him as I ran to the crumpled form of the girl.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I was back in Bundy’s office, shirtless and shaking, with an empty holster slung over my shoulder.

  The legs of my jeans were thick with blood that had pooled around me while I knelt by the girl, frantically constructing pressure bandages from my shirt and T-shirt, tucking my jacket around her to try to keep the warmth of life in her body, compulsively checking and re-checking for a pulse. She was alive, but just barely, when they took her away.

  I had stood in the mist, bare-chested and freezing, while some young cop who seemed to be very far away told me my rights and asked questions I couldn’t quite answer, like what was my name. The few times he got through to me, I told him to get Bundy. He finally gave up and delivered me to Bundy in a patrol car, uncuffed but with my gun confiscated.

  Bundy handed me a cup of coffee. My teeth chattered against the rim of the cup. “Give me a minute,” I said.

  He nodded and sat on the edge of his desk. “A few years back,” he said, “my youngest boy had a birthday coming up so I asked him what he wanted. He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I want an evil whore.’ My first thought was to knock him sideways, but LuAnn—my wife—is big on child psychology and I knew knocking the kid through the wall wasn’t the way I was supposed to handle it. So I went and asked her what I’m supposed to do when my first-grader tells me he wants an evil whore for his birthday. Took her about ten minutes to stop laughing long enough to explain it to me. Seems it was a toy. The Evil Horde.” Bundy leaned heavily on the finally consonant. “One of He-Man’s enemies. I told Matthew he could have it when he learned to say it right.”