Drunk Driving

by Zane Mitchell

  I heard her sigh. “She’s dead, Danny. The girl we found is dead.”

  My heart froze in my chest. “What?”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you. I know this isn’t the outcome you were hoping for.”

  “But if you’re not sure that it’s her—”

  “There’s a chance that it’s not,” she agreed. “I was hoping you could come down here and ID the body.”

  “How’d it happen?” I asked, climbing out of bed. I pulled some clothes out of my drawer.

  “I’d rather not talk about it over the phone. Why don’t you just meet me down at the coroner’s office? I’ll tell you what I can.”

  “Yeah. Gimme an hour. I have to shower, round up Al, and get over there.”

  “Okay. See you in an hour.”

  “Thanks, Frankie,” I said, my heart heavy in my chest.

  “I’m sorry, Danny.”

  * * *

  “It’s her,” I said, my head hanging low between my shoulder blades. I swiped a hand in the air and spun around. “Fuck.” I couldn’t even look at the bloated blue face in the stainless-steel drawer without feeling sick to my stomach. I hadn’t thought for a moment that we were going to find Jordan like this. Giselle was going to lose it.

  Al walked over to me and put a hand on my back. He gave me a little pat. “Come on. Let’s get some fresh air.”

  Seconds later, we stood outside on the sidewalk beneath a frangipani tree. The soft, fruity scent settled over us, providing me with a sense of calm. It was over. There was no more rush to find the missing girl. She was dead. Now it would just be a question of figuring out what happened to her.

  “I’m really sorry, guys. I know this isn’t the outcome any of us wanted.”

  “How did it happen?” asked Al.

  “Drowning,” said Frankie. “Of course, that’s pending the autopsy results.”

  “Where’d you find her?”

  “A fisherman found her. Near a boat launch not too far away from Sandy Bay Beach. It’s popular with the younger crowd.”

  “You think it was accidental?” I asked, running a hand against the back of my neck.

  Frankie looked up at me and shrugged. “Until we get the autopsy results back, I really can’t say. It could’ve been suicide.”

  “Or foul play?”

  She nodded. “Maybe.”

  “I assume there will be a full investigation?” I asked.

  “Unless it’s ruled accidental death or suicide.”

  I shook my head. “I have a hard time believing it was suicide,” I said.

  “Did you know her personally?”

  “No. I didn’t, but from everything Giselle’s told me about her, I have a hard time believing that.”

  “Can you tell how long she’s been dead?” asked Al.

  Frankie shook her head. “We’ll know more after the autopsy. I’m sorry, I don’t have a lot of answers yet, but I’ll let you know if we find anything else out.”

  “Okay, thanks, Frankie. Hey, can you answer a question for me?”

  “I can try.”

  “Do you know who owns Club Cobalt down in the District?”

  Frankie nodded. “That’s easy. Kip Dalton. He owns Cobalt and several other bars in the District.” She shook her head. “Why?”

  “You know anything about him?”

  “I’ve just heard rumblings. He’s—uh—” She lifted a shoulder. “I guess you could say he’s quite the ladies’ man.”

  Al looked up at me. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “So I’m assuming that means he’s not married?”

  She frowned. “Not as far as I am aware.”

  “You have any idea where he lives?”

  “Not right offhand.”

  “Think you could find out for me?”

  “Yeah, I can probably do that. Care to explain why you want to know?”

  “Just something Al and I are working on. I’ll let you know if we find anything else out.”

  Frankie smiled. “Fair enough.”

  “So are you going to notify Jordan’s aunt?” asked Al.

  “Yeah, we’ll try and get in touch with her now that we know it’s Jordan.” She looked up at me. “I assume you’ll take care of telling her friend that was looking for her?”

  I sighed. It was something I knew I had to do, but I wasn’t looking forward to it. “I don’t want to,” I admitted.

  “Drunk—” began Al.

  “But I will,” I finished. “It should come from me.”

  20

  “I got your text,” said Giselle, standing on my front porch. “What’s up?”

  I’d waited to text her until the end of her shift. I didn’t want her having to try and go back to work after hearing the news. “I’ve got news about Jordan,” I said, my heart heavy in my chest. I glanced over at Al, who was seated on one of the barstools in my kitchen. His glum face didn’t make me feel any better about what I had to do.

  Giselle’s face lit up. “You found her?”

  I gestured towards the living room. “You should sit down. We have some things to talk about.”

  Doe-eyed, Giselle bobbed her head. “Okay.”

  When we were both seated on my rattan sofa, I took a deep breath. There was no point in beating around the bush. It didn’t matter if I tore the Band-Aid off fast or slow; either way, it was still going to hurt like hell. “Giselle. We did find Jordan.”

  She sucked in her breath, a huge smile covered her face, lighting up her eyes. “You did? Oh, Drunk! I owe you so much, thank you!” She threw her arms around my neck and squeezed. Then, just as suddenly, she lifted her arms off of me and sat back, her spine straight. “Where is she? Is she at her apartment? I gotta talk to her!”

  “Giselle, I hate that I have to tell you this. And there’s really no easy way to do it, so I’m just gonna be honest with you. It was the police that found her.” I could see it in her eyes. She wanted to rail on me then. She inhaled, preparing to let it out, but before she could, I finished what I’d called her to my cottage to tell her. “She’s dead, Giselle. Jordan’s dead.”

  With her mouth agape, Giselle’s eyes widened. She froze in place, absorbing the information I’d just laid on her. Seconds later, her head began to shake from side to side. “Nnnooo,” she said. “My Jordan’s not dead. They found the wrong girl.”

  “Giselle, Al and I went down there earlier. It’s Jordan. I’m sure of it.”

  “B-but—” Tears sprang up into her eyes.

  Al hopped off his barstool and shuffled into the living room. He put a hand on Giselle’s shoulder. “I’m really sorry, Giselle. If there’s anything we can do, we’re here for you.”

  “This isn’t happening,” she whispered, as tears began to roll down her cheeks. “How? How did she die?”

  “Drowning, from what we understand. A fisherman found her over by the Sandy Bay Beach.”

  Giselle stopped sobbing long enough to sniffle and look up at me. “Sandy Bay Beach? Drowning?”

  “Yeah, they’re thinking either accidental drowning or maybe even a suicide. But they’re waiting for the autopsy results to come back for a more definitive answer.”

  Her head shook as she took the tissues Al handed to her. “Why would she have been in the water? Jordan hated the water.”

  “It might’ve been accidental.”

  “How do you accidentally get in the water?” asked Giselle, her voice one part hysteria, one part demanding. “She never intentionally went in the water.”

  “Did you ever go to that beach?”

  Wiping her nose, Giselle shrugged. “I mean, yeah, we’ve been there before. But it wasn’t exactly a place we went a lot. If anything, we just laid out, maybe played volleyball. I don’t think either one of us ever got in the water. But I haven’t been there in months. I’m sure Jordan hadn’t been there in months either. So I don’t know how it could’ve been accidental.”

  “Maybe it was suicide.”

  Giselle’s h
ead stopped shaking long enough to look me in the eye firmly. “No. Jordan would never commit suicide, Drunk. There’s no way. She loved life. She was literally the most fun-loving, happy-go-lucky girl there was. It’s one of the reasons I loved her so much,” she whispered before breaking down into a fit of sobs again.

  I draped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her in for a hug, letting her cry on my shirt. I patted her hair and did my best to comfort her. Both Al and I felt her misery and pain to our very souls that day.

  When Giselle had tired slightly, she sat up. I handed her a wad of paper towels and let her mop up her face. “Drunk, Jordan didn’t commit suicide, and I don’t believe for a second that she went in the water and accidentally drowned when she literally hates the water.”

  “Then what do you think happened?” I asked her. While I had some opinions of my own, I wanted to know if there was anything Giselle was keeping from me.

  “I think it was them,” she whispered.

  “Who?”

  She glanced over at Al uncomfortably.

  “He knows,” I said, my voice low.

  Giselle nodded and wiped her nose. “I think it was the people that Crystal works for. It has to be, Drunk. This wasn’t an accident. I think they killed her.”

  “Why would they kill her, Giselle? If she just went there to give massages, why would they kill her? I mean, I’ll be the first to say that I think what they hired you to do was weird, and really creepy. But I don’t think that’s against the law.”

  Giselle’s head dropped. “It wasn’t just massages,” she whispered.

  I took a deep breath and let it out. I’d wondered all along if there wasn’t more to the story. “Then what was it? Sex?”

  Her head bobbed. But then she looked up. “I didn’t—”

  “No judgment here,” I said quietly. “I just want the truth.”

  She held her hand up as tears continued to roll down her cheeks. “I didn’t, I swear! They wanted us to, but they said we didn’t have to. They said we’d get an extra two hundred for sex.”

  “Did Jordan?”

  Giselle shook her head. “No, she didn’t either. Neither of us did, but—”

  “But what?”

  “But the guy—” She began to cry again. She put her head in her hands, and her shoulders shook. When she finally got it together, she looked up, but her eyes focused on the television across the room, not me. “The guy, he—he sort of—took care of himself,” she explained. “It was disgusting. I never wanted to go back.”

  “Did Jordan want to go back?” I asked.

  “Not at first. At first she said she was creeped out too. But then the next day she kind of got a laugh out of it, like it was funny. But I didn’t really want to talk about it anymore. I felt dirty and ashamed that we’d been there to see that. He was this kind of old creepy guy. I just didn’t think it was funny.”

  “Did you recognize him?”

  She shook her head. “I’d never seen any of those people before in my life.”

  “So eventually you think she went back.”

  “It’s the only place she could’ve gotten that stack of money from.”

  “Giselle, do you think Jordan would’ve taken them up on their offer to make more money by having sex with the clients?”

  Giselle’s eyes swung down to the ground. Her lips mashed together tightly.

  “Giselle?”

  “I asked her,” she whispered.

  “What did she say?”

  The tears started again. “She told me it was none of my business. She told me girls were having sex with their boyfriends all the time for free, what difference did it make if she wanted to do it and get paid for it? I told her there was a big difference, but she didn’t see it. She didn’t say she was doing it, but I felt like she kind of implied it.”

  “Oh man,” I sighed, glancing back at Al.

  He looked miserable, like he was having a hard time hearing it all and watching Giselle break down.

  “Now what?” she asked, looking between the two of us.

  “Now, I guess we try and find out if this is what ultimately got her killed.”

  “Do you think it is?”

  “If you honestly don’t think she would’ve taken her own life or gone out on the water voluntarily, I mean, I don’t know what else to think.”

  “I honestly think she wouldn’t have killed herself or gone out on the water voluntarily. This was no accident.”

  My head bobbed slowly. It would have been quite the coincidence if it really was an accident. “Then we make the people who did this to her pay. Al and I are going to start by finding out where they took you that night. What can you tell me about that?”

  Giselle frowned and let out a heavy sigh. “Not much. Like I told you before, they put us in a limo and we couldn’t see out the windows. Then when we got there, they pulled us directly into the garage. I didn’t see the outside of the house at all.”

  “But it was a big house, right?”

  Giselle’s head bounced. “Yeah, really big. And there was this old guy there. I guess he was the butler.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “No. I don’t remember anyone saying any names.”

  “Were there any distinguishing features about the house?”

  “Well, the massage room that we were in. That was pretty distinguishing.”

  “Anything else?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. They didn’t exactly give us the grand tour. We literally went from the garage, down a hallway, and to the massage room.”

  “And there was nothing distinguishing about the hallway? What did the floors look like? What color were the walls? If I were standing in that hallway right now, what would it look like?”

  “I don’t know. I guess the floors were tile. I couldn’t tell you what color the walls were. And there were pictures on the walls.” Her voice kind of trailed off.

  “Like what kind of pictures?”

  “Like models. Girls like me,” she whispered. “In lingerie.”

  I glanced over at Al. That certainly sounded familiar. When I looked back at Giselle, tears were rolling down her cheeks again. She’d had enough for one day, I could tell. I put a hand on her shoulder. “You want me to call your mom and tell her what happened to Jordan?”

  “My mom can’t know all the details,” she whispered. “I don’t want her to think badly of Jordan. Or me,” she added.

  Al chimed in then. “Giselle, this is no time for lies or withholding information. Lies are the enemy of truth. You have to tell your mother everything. You are her daughter. She just wants to be there for you. But she has a right to know the truth.”

  Giselle stared at Al, her face completely emotionless. Finally, she stood up. “Thank you for everything you’ve done so far, but I’ll take care of telling my mom. Please just take care of finding out who did this to Jordan.”

  I stood up too. “You have my word, Giselle. We’ll do our best.”

  21

  After Giselle left my cottage, Al and I agreed that Jordan’s death had to be a cover-up of the child prostitution ring they had going on over at Club Cobalt. And with Kip Dalton’s affinity for women and the fact that he owned Club Cobalt, it made sense that he was the benefactor of such a disgusting business arrangement and the man that we were after.

  Frankie phoned not long after Giselle left. She’d managed to score Dalton’s number as well as his home address. And after a quick Google Maps search, we discovered that he did, in fact, own a sizable mansion. I felt fairly confident that a search of his house would reveal the hallway with the pictures of girls in lingerie as well as the massage room Giselle had described. It was just a matter of finding a way inside so we could have a look around.

  The sun had just begun to set when Al and I hoped back into the Wrangler and headed into town.

  “So. We gotta figure out how to get inside Dalton’s house and have a look around. See if that’s where the limo took Gise
lle and Jordan. Once we know it is, then we can work on tying him to the underage sex ring and maybe even to Jordan’s murder.”

  “Yeah, I suppose that’s a start,” agreed Al.

  I clapped my hands, rubbing them together, anxiously. “So. What’s our plan? How are we going to get into the house?”

  “We could wait until he leaves, then sneak in,” suggested Al.

  “Nah, security alarms.”

  “Plumbers?” he asked with a smile.

  “I don’t think we can go to that well again.”

  “Publishers Clearing House? I do a pretty good Ed McMahon. Heeeere’s Johnny.”

  “You sound more like Jack Nicholson.”

  “Well, hell, kid, why do I always gotta be the brains of this operation?”

  “I’m sorry, you’d rather be the ass of the operation?”

  Al gave me a perfunctory head bob before turning to stare out the windshield. “You’re right. There can only be one of those here. And in reference to your first question, I don’t know what the plan is. I can’t think with all your yapping.”

  I shrugged. “Fine, then I guess we’ll just drive over there and confront Dalton about his club’s connection to an underage prostitution ring. See what he has to say. You know, shake him down.”

  “But what if he’s the one that had the girl killed?” Al shook his head. “Sounds too dangerous to me.”

  “Yeah? You want me to turn the car around and take you back home to Evie? You can make popcorn and watch CSI reruns while I do the dirty work.” I put my blinker on.

  Al sighed and waved his hand for me to keep driving. “I didn’t say I wanted to go home, kid. Jeez. I was just saying that this Dalton guy could be dangerous.”

  “So’s jaywalking. What’s your point?”

  “My point is, we can’t just go in there guns blazing. We need to finesse the guy.”

  “Okay, well, while you’re finessing him, I’ll be finding out what he knows about Jordan Lambert.”

  “I’m serious, kid, we gotta be smarter than that. Think with our heads, not our fists.”

  “What the hell do you want me to do? Send him a fucking singing telegram?”

  “Kid. I got it!”