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“Hi, Miz Markovic. I’m Jill, this is Kelly, and we’re looking into the women who have gone missing,” Luna greeted.
Her eyes got round, and without pausing to ask for ID or a badge, such was her desire to find her daughter, she instantly pushed open the somewhat rickety screen door for us. “Come in.”
This said a lot to me.
We went in.
We then both had no choice but to rear back when we were confronted with a living room of Barbie pink walls, a shrine to Christina making up the gallery wall of pictures over a puce-green couch situated dead ahead of us. In front of that was a round of glass on top of a ceramic elephant sitting atop a rug that was a hodgepodge of every bright color known to humankind. Two loud armchairs sat opposite the couch. And there was a big mirror on one wall that reflected all this so it seemed like it went on forever.
I was feeling the need to Tito this sitch by putting on my sunglasses when Betsy tardily asked, “Are you girls with the police?”
“No, ma’am,” Luna answered. “We’re with a kind of…underground organization that looks into women’s issues that we feel aren’t getting the proper attention.”
She planted her hands on her ample hips and snapped, “Well, I’ll say. They don’t even think my Christina is missing.” She tipped her head to the side. “You’re here to talk about my Christina, right?”
“Yes, we are,” I told her.
“Please, sit down,” she bid.
Luna took a bright-orange armchair. I sat in the dandelion-yellow one. Betsy sat on the couch.
I started it.
“We were told by an informant last night that Christina wasn’t engaged in her, erm, occupation for very long.”
“You mean, she wasn’t a hooker for very long,” Betsy stated bluntly.
“I believe they prefer the term ‘sex worker’ now,” Luna corrected.
Betsy flapped out a hand. “Whatever. She just did that to irk me. Christina was good at finding ways to irk me. She was running out of ideas. So she became a hooker. And thatJazzshe was seeing thought it was great. Now tell me, what man thinks his woman getting paid to have sex with other men is great? Hmm?”
I briefly entertained the idea of Cap in this same scenario.
My mind rumbled with an impending catastrophic earthquake, so I stopped entertaining that idea and again wondered how I’d blown it with our convo that morning so badly.
Luna was right. He was that guy.
He might not try to cave in someone’s face for having a crush on me because of my pudding, like Lucia’s husband would if he knew Byron had a crush on her (Lucia’s husband, Mario, was very sweet, but that was because he liked me and I didn’t have a crush on his wife, otherwise, he was a total caveman).
But I sensed Cap didn’t reside in a zone too far from that.
In my defense, this happened when I’d just woken up.
And I was going to stick to that defense when I spoke to him about it.
“Jazz, her boyfriend. Do you know his real name?” Luna asked, taking me out of where my mind had gone six thousand, nine hundred and seventy-two times that day.
To Cap.
“No clue. He was a waste of space. I told her to scrape him off, but did she?” Betsy leaned toward us and answered her own question. “No.”
I got my head in the game, and in doing so stopped myself from noting it might not have been a good idea to tell a twenty-year-old girl you often had conflict with to scrape off her boyfriend.
I mean, I wasn’t a mom, so even though that didn’t seem like a smart idea, what did I know?
Especially considering I knew one thing about this Jazz dude, that he was okay with his woman being a sex worker, and as such, he sounded like an asshole any mother worth her salt would tell her daughter to scrape off.
“We’ll look into him, but when was the last time you spoke with her?” I asked.
