Strings

by Dickson, Allison M.

  Italians, debt, turning tricks. The most obvious place to look was the Weeping Willow. Jenkins told Janie to send her a picture of the girl and any other information she could provide in an email, to which she promptly told him she didn’t spend no time with her damn head stuck in a ’puter box, so she’d have to make a trip to the libarry in the morning.

  A born and bred New Yorker, Jenkins could only take so much quaint language before he started to get a headache. “That sounds good, Missus Quick.”

  “That’s Mizz to you, sonny. I ain’t been a Missus since you was in short britches.”

  He clamped down on the sarcastic remark wanting to fly from his lips and instead just said, “Sorry, Miss Quick.”

  “Now how much is this all gonna cost me? All I need you to do is track her down and give her a damn message. I don’t much care if she comes back here or not, but if she’s gonna, I need to know when so I can tell Bernie to hold that slot open one more week or so. After that, she’s on her own.”

  Jenkins squeezed the bridge of his nose in anticipation of the inevitable shit storm to come. Folks like Janie Quick didn’t like parting with their money even under the best of circumstances, and this was sure to make the sour bitch even more sour.

  “My standard fee for this sort of thing usually runs about five hundred. This covers gas and travel expenses, paperwork and mailing expenses, surveillance time, research, film or computer paper, and any other incidentals. However, since it doesn’t appear you want pictures and I have a pretty good idea where she might be, I can bump that down to three hundred.”

  Truth was, he could have bumped it down to even half that. If the girl was up at the Willow, it would take him twenty minutes to run up there and knock on the door and tell the girl to call her goddamn mother, and he could even get it done before breakfast. But Jenkins always liked to leave a little wiggle room in opening negotiations, and if the girl wasn’t there, if this turned into an actual hunt—one which often started and ended in one of the city’s morgues—he wouldn’t have to come back to the bargaining table asking for more money.

  “Three hundred dollars for you to take a damn note to a whore at a whorehouse? You have got to be jokin’. I could fly out there right now for that price.”

  So why don’t you, you miserable hag?

  “Look, Miss Quick, if your daughter isn’t where I think she is and I have to do a little more detective work, then you can be rest assured your fee will cover it. And, chances are if you haven’t heard from her since you last spoke, I’m going to have to look into things a little more. She may have run into trouble in transit to Des Moines, for all we know. I can look into all of that for you.”

  Chances are the girl changed her mind about coming home. And I can’t really blame her. Five minutes on the phone with you, and I’m already thinking of relocating my office to Kabul.

  “You gotta understand somethin’ here. I’m on disability. I don’t got a lot of money.”

  Jenkins wanted to ask how she was working and getting disability at the same time, but he’d tracked down enough deadbeat dads for welfare moms to know that story. She was likely working at the diner for cents under the table so she’d have enough money to pay for her weekly case of Natty Light. On more than one occasion, he’d been offered foodstamps as payment. But the fact was he needed the money too. This was the first business call he’d taken in over a week.

  “You can pay me half upfront and half at the end, if that helps.” He wiped away the second hundred fifty in his mind. He’d never see it. That was the nature of a business like this, and it was even more the nature of people like Janie Quick. The horrible woman acquiesced and the next morning, Jenkins received an email with an attached picture and another note that read:

  Now this picher is a few years old. Only had one from her senior year in high school, and we wasn’t camera folks, anyway. But if she hasn’t been hittin a crank pipe for the last few years, she ought to still look bout the same. Her name’s Nina Ann Quick. Five-six or seven, a buck thirty, brown hair, blue eyes. She’s got a little mole on her temple, if that makes any difference. I express mailed your money order this mornin.

  That was it. Nothing about “please let me know as soon as you find my daughter.” Or, “please tell her I love her and want her to come home.” Jenkins felt like he was searching for the emotional equivalent of a missing sock, and he didn’t think he was doing Nina Ann Quick any favors.

  The girl’s picture was old and probably useless, especially if she’d been all the way out here for the last few years selling skin and who knows what else, but she was beautiful. The picture showed a well-tanned young woman sitting on a porch swing with a little white dog in her lap, smiling like a kid who had a smartass joke ready to come out of her mouth. Jenkins saw a kid who looked like she thought she was too good to be where she was, and given his recent interactions with the girl’s mother, he thought maybe she’d been on to something. How the hell did she get herself mixed up in the Cassini debtor’s prison, though? She was smart, but not smart enough, apparently.

  He waited outside the Willow to see if he could catch the girl coming or going. A few women did walk down the street and enter the premises with men on their arms—a clever way to disguise johns as dates—but he wasn’t here on a prostitution sting. His sting days were long gone. Police work had never really been his cup of tea. His old sergeant used to say Jenkins had a problem with moral relativity; he was missing the moral part.

  Time to go and earn your hundred fifty, Detective.

  Jenkins groaned and stepped out of his Taurus. A gust of wind pushed at his back, like an invisible hand urging him toward the enormous Brownstone, the only place on the whole block without a pumpkin on the stoop or some sort of tacky witch or black cat decoration hanging on the door. He crossed the autumn-silent street and climbed the steps. A bad feeling was stirring around in his stomach. He wanted to turn around, climb back into his car with the bad tires and squealing serpentine belt and go back to his office, call the horrible woman from Des Moines, tell her the girl wasn’t there. Maybe he’d say she moved to Canada and then tell her to keep the check. There would be a better job along soon. There was always a better job.

  Yeah, good call, Captain Courage. Maybe on the way home, you can stop and pet some bunnies and get yourself a box of tampons for your brand new vagina.

  He sighed and pressed the button on the little intercom.

  A few seconds later, a little click and then a woman’s voice. “Hello?”

  “Hi, my name is Chris Jenkins. I’m a private investigator. I would like to speak with the proprietor.”

  A long pause and then, “Okay. Just a minute.”

  Jenkins put his hands in his pockets and waited. He looked up and saw a small surveillance camera mounted next to the porch light. Unsurprising but still unsettling. What must have been about five minutes later, the door opened to reveal a young blonde woman in a pair of jeans and one of those off-the-shoulder sweatshirts regurgitated by the movie Flashdance. He didn’t notice a bra strap. The girl was maybe twenty, if Jenkins was feeling generous, and looking at her tits made him feel like a dirty old man. He pulled his eyes away.

  “Can I help you, Mister?” she asked.

  “I guess you’re not the proprietor?”

  She shook her head with a grin. “Nope. She’s been out a lot lately. Car accident.”

  Jenkins had a feeling that wasn’t true, but he wasn’t here to cross-examine a high-school dropout trying to fuck for a buck. “That’s unfortunate. Look, I don’t really need to speak with her, anyway. I’m here for one of the, uh, tenants.” He showed the girl the picture. “Her name is Nina Quick. Have you seen her?”

  The girl’s eyes went wide and glassy and Jenkins knew he had something. If they’d been looking for someone to tell a lie, they sent the wrong girl to the door. “I, uh . . . No, I can’t say I have. I haven’t been here all that long.”

  “Well, surely there’s someone here who could h
elp me out. This girl’s mother is very worried, you understand? She doesn’t want to involve the cops, but if I can’t find the girl’s information, I might have no choice.”

  “So you’re not a cop?”

  “Nope. Just a private dick. Frankly, I’d rather not deal with any police on this matter. I’m trying to make it a light morning for myself.”

  “Look, I can’t let you in. The girls here have to be protected, and they don’t take kindly to seeing strange men at the door.”

  She was playing the women’s shelter card. He wasn’t going argue with her. “Yeah, I bet.” He pulled a little notepad and a pen out of his jacket pocket. “Can you give me a number where I can reach the woman of the house at another time?”

  The girl looked at him with her glassy eyes. She was afraid. Jenkins wasn’t sure if she was afraid of him or something else, but if he had to put his money on it, he would say there was a knife against her back. Figuratively, anyway. Finally, she said, “Give me your pen. I’ll write it for you.”

  He handed her the pad and pen and she jotted something down. “Here you go. Thanks for understanding. Sorry I couldn’t help more.”

  Jenkins was staring at the door again before another word could leave his mouth. He walked down the porch steps, reading the note on the way. However, there was no phone number here. In a shaky hand was the following: Meet me at the coffee shop 2 blocks up. 20 min.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” Jenkins muttered. He walked back to his Taurus.

  ***

  The girl hadn’t said which coffee shop, but Brews Brothers Espresso was the only place within two blocks, and Jenkins decided that had to be it. He parked the car across the street and waited out the next twenty minutes, per the girl’s instructions. He felt a little nervous about all the secrecy, and the fear in the girl’s eyes. The Willow was holding a lot more secrets than the obvious one, and he wished he wasn’t so damn curious. In fact, he thought it would still be a good idea to forget this whole thing and leave, but he’d already ventured into the fun house. The only option now was to just go through it and come out on the other side where hopefully daylight would be waiting.

  The girl emerged from the alley next to the building just as Jenkins was crossing the street. A black peacoat had replaced the Flashdance sweatshirt, and she wore a gray beanie cap over her bleached hair. Their eyes briefly met, and he jogged to catch up with her as she kept walking.

  “Don’t act like you know me,” she muttered over her shoulder. “Just keep walking and get in line behind me.”

  Jenkins, who was no stranger to undercover operations from his days on the force, nodded and fell into line a few steps behind her without missing a beat. The café was packed with commuters and students this time of morning. They would be waiting awhile, but that was to their advantage.

  “We’ll talk here and go our separate ways after we get our coffees,” she said, barely moving her lips as she looked at the floor. “I’ll probably get in trouble for leaving the house without permission, but when you mentioned Nina’s mom, I guess had to do something.”

  “Why is that?”

  She glanced up at him with an annoyed frown. “I had a mother once.”

  “Oh. Well, what do you know?”

  “Maybe you should tell me what you know first,” she said. “About the Willow.”

  “I know what it really is. Well, mostly.”

  “And you’re not a cop?”

  “Like I told you, no. Not anymore. I hunt down deadbeat dads and cheating husbands most days. Sometimes I get worried mothers who want to know what happened to their daughters, but not very often.”

  She sighed. “Okay. I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.”

  “You have nothing to worry about from me. I just want to know where Nina is.”

  She casually gazed at the menu. According to the artful script on the slate board before them, cranberry scones and pumpkin lattes were on special. Fall favorites. Espresso machines hissed out steam and hot milk while people rattled off their multi-syllabic orders in the pretentious java-yuppie lingo that always drove him a little nuts. Right now, Jenkins felt like he was in a bubble of intrigue and danger, looking out into a world full of mundane people and things. It was the one thing about police work that used to excite him.

  “I don’t know a lot about her. We didn’t talk much. None of the girls at the Willow do. We’re not really allowed to. But eventually, most of the girls get sent somewhere.”

  Jenkins frowned, but tried to maintain an unaffected stance. To anyone watching, he might have been trying to decide between the soy mocha java no-whip and the non-fat sugar-free double-shot Americano with extra tongue-lashings from his black Folgers soul.

  “Where do they go?”

  “There’s a special client upstate. He pays a lot of money to mess the girls up really bad. When they come back, they don’t work again. They’re done. Eventually, they’re just gone altogether. No one ever says where or why, but we all pretty much assume that they’ve . . . you know.” She drew a subtle finger across her throat. She might have just been scratching an itch, but Jenkins saw the intent loud and clear.

  It was her turn to order, and she stepped up to the counter and asked for an almond caramel something or other. Jenkins snapped out of his thoughts and ordered the Americano and paid for both.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said as they stepped aside to wait. “But, thanks.”

  “As long as it doesn’t get you in trouble.”

  She just shrugged as if to say, “One way or another, I’m probably fucked.”

  “Who’s this client?” he asked.

  “Some old rich guy named Hank Ballas.”

  Something stirred in Jenkins’ head. He’d heard that name before, but he wasn’t sure where. “So they go to this Ballas character, and they come back messed up.”

  “To say the least. They’re like the walking dead, except they can barely walk. Mostly they just stay in their rooms all day. Some of the others whisper about it, but no one ever asks questions. I think everyone knows that when you go up to the Ballas place, you’re done for. Apparently, Nina got her ticket up there a couple months back. I haven’t seen her since. She didn’t even come back for a little while, like most of the other girls do. She was just gone. Maybe she escaped, but I doubt it.”

  “Why do you doubt it?”

  “Because they would have found her and brought her back here by now. Cassinis always get what they want.”

  Jenkins swallowed. He felt a little sick to his stomach. No wonder the girl looked afraid. The secret of the Weeping Willow was much darker than he imagined. And that name, Ballas, nagged at him more than ever now.

  The guy behind the counter called out their orders. “Anything else you can tell me?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Don’t get involved in this thing. The Cassinis . . . I’ve seen and felt what they can do. It’s more than just the Ballas thing or the Weeping Willow. I’m sure you know that, having been a cop once and all.”

  That he did, but he had a feeling she knew a lot more than he did. “Why don’t you try and run for it”

  She gave him a sad grin. “There’s nowhere else for girls like us to go.” Her eyes strictly forbade him from prying any further. Let it go, okay? This isn’t about me.

  “You think you’ll go up to see Ballas eventually?”

  She shrugged. “My number will come up, I’m sure. But when it does, I’ll be ready. Some of the girls get pills from their clients. They’d be dead if the Madam ever found out. She inspects the rooms regularly. Or did before her accident. Anyway, I’ll swallow a handful of them and sleep forever before I ever go up there.”

  “Jesus . . .” He didn’t have any more words in him. His stomach felt like it had been on the receiving end of a steel-toed boot.

  “Hey, don’t let it get you down. It’s better than being locked in the pen, which is where most of us would be right now if it wasn’t for the Willow. If you e
ver want to visit me, just come up to the door and ask for Kelly. I’ll give you a great time.”

  Jenkins, who had no intention of procuring any such services, put on his most winning smile. “I may just do that.”

  She turned and left the shop. He watched her blow into her coffee lid as she walked back toward the prison with no bars and unlimited conjugal visits. He counted to sixty before making his exit, crossing the street to where his car sat ticking away its last couple minutes on the meter. By the time he was behind the wheel, he set aside the five dollar cup of coffee he didn’t want and looked in the rearview mirror. Kelly was long gone.

  ***

  Back at his office, he typed Hank Ballas into the search engine and started sifting through the pages of results. There wasn’t a whole lot of compelling information, but he was at least able to figure out where he’d heard the name before. Lady Ballas, the man’s wife, up and vanished about three weeks before she was supposed to give birth to their first child. A huge search went under way, but the woman never turned up. Some quietly suspected Ballas, but no one could prove anything without a body, and the case eventually turned cold. He was an oilman originally, but had later branched out into computer chips and other tech companies. Sometime in the late eighties, following the disappearance of Lady, he just dropped off the map entirely. No more public appearances. He’d sold off all his stock and cashed in his pension and holed up in his estate up north. By now, he would be well into his eighties.

  Jenkins had a difficult time imagining someone that old being a sexual deviant, especially the type who was capable of doing the things Kelly hinted at. Maybe there was someone else living up there off his fortune. There were stories that popped up from time to time about people who acted as caretakers for the elderly, but were really murdering scam artists that offed the clients and lived in their houses, collecting their social security and pension checks for a little while before moving on. He looked up county tax records and found everything still up to date and copasetic on the man’s property. No death certificates had been filed.