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"Lost me, Ray. "
"I've spent some time in strip joints, Charlie. I'm not proud of it, but it's sort of what you do when you're a cop. And you pick up on the pattern of stripper names. "
"Didn't know that. "
"Yeah, and there's sort of a progression going back to the fifties: Bubbles, Boom Boom, and Blaze begat Bambi, Candy, and Jewel, who begat Sunshine, Brandy, and Cinnamon, who begat Amber, Brittany, and Brie, who begat Reagan, Morgan, and Madison. Madison is a stripper name. "
"Ray, you weren't even alive in the fifties. "
"No, I wasn't alive during the forties either, but I know about World War Two and big-band music. I'm into history. "
"Right. So, I need to look for a stripper? Doesn't help. I don't even know where to start. "
"I'll go through the DMV and the tax records. If she's in town we'll have an address on her by this afternoon. Why do you need to find her?"
There was a pause while Charlie pretended to find a smudge on the glass of the counter display case, wiped it away, then said, "Uh, it's an estate thing. One of the estates we got recently had some items that were left to her. "
"Shouldn't the executor of the estate take care of that, or his lawyer?"
"It's minutiae, not named in the will. The executor asked me to handle it. There's fifty bucks in it for you. "
Ray grinned. "That's okay, I was going to help anyway, but if she turns out to be a stripper I get to go with you, okay?"
"Deal," Charlie said.
Three hours later Ray gave the address to Charlie and watched as his boss bolted out of the shop and grabbed a cab. Why a cab? Why not take the van? Ray wanted to follow, needed to follow, but he had to find someone to cover the store. He should have anticipated this, but he'd been distracted.
Ray had been distracted since talking to Charlie, not just by the search for Madison McKerny, but also because he was trying to figure out how to work "Do you have a penis?" casually into the conversation with his sweetheart, Eduardo. After a couple of teasing e-mails, he could stand it no longer and had just typed out, Eduardo, not that it makes any difference, but I'm thinking of sending you some sexy lingerie as a friendship present, and I wondered if I should make any special accommodations for the panties.
Then he waited. And waited. And granted that it was five in the morning in Manila, he was second-guessing himself. Had he been too vague, or had he not been vague enough? And now he had to go.
He knew where Charlie was going, but he had to get there before anything happened. He dialed Lily's cell phone, hoping that she wouldn't be working at her other job and would do him a favor.
"Speak, ingrate," Lily answered.
"How did you know it was me?" Ray asked.
"Ray?"
"Yeah, how did you know it was me?"
"I didn't," Lily said. "What do you want?"
"Can you come cover the store for me for a couple of hours?" Then, as he heard her take a deep breath that he was pretty sure would be propellant for verbal abuse, he added, "There's fifty bucks extra in it for you. " Ray heard her exhale. Yes! After graduating from the Culinary Institute, Lily had gotten a job as a sous chef at a bistro in North Beach, but she didn't make enough to move out of her mother's apartment yet, so she let Charlie talk her into keeping a couple of shifts at Asher's Secondhand, at least until he could find a replacement.
"Okay, Ray, I'll come in for a couple of hours, but I have to be at the restaurant by five, so be back or I'm closing up early. "
"Thanks, Lily. "
Charlie sincerely hoped that Ray wasn't a serial killer, despite all the indications to the contrary. He would never have found this woman without Ray's police contacts, and what would he do in the future if he needed to find someone and Ray was in jail? Then again, Ray's experience as a cop could account for his never leaving any evidence. But why, then, would he continue to pursue the Filipino women over the Internet if he was just looking to kill people? Maybe that's what he did when he went to the Philippines to visit his paramours. Maybe he killed desperate Filipinas. Maybe Ray was a tourist serial killer. Deal with it later, Charlie thought. For now, there's a soul vessel to retrieve.
Charlie got out of the cab outside of the Fontana, an apartment building just a block up from Ghirardelli Square, the waterfront chocolate factory turned tourist mall. The Fontana was a great, curved, concrete-and-glass building that commanded views of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, and that had drawn the disdain of San Franciscans since it had been built in the 1960s. It wasn't that it was an ugly building, although no one would argue that it wasn't, but with the Victorian and Edwardian structures all around it, it looked very much like a giant air conditioner from outer space attacking a nineteenth-century neighborhood. However, the views from the apartments were exquisite, there was a doorman, underground parking, and a pool on the roof, so if you could handle the stigma of residing in an architectural pariah, it was a great place to live.
The address Ray had given him for Madison was on the twenty-second floor, and so, presumably, was her soul vessel. Charlie wasn't sure of the exact range of his unnoticeability (he refused to think of it as invisibility, because it wasn't), but he hoped that it reached twenty-two floors. He was going to have to get past the doorman and into an elevator, and posing as an estate buyer wasn't going to work.
Ah, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. If he got caught, he'd just have to find another way in. He waited by the door until a young woman in business attire went in, then followed her into the lobby. The doorman didn't even look at him.
Ray saw Charlie get out of the cab and told his own driver to stop a block away, where he hopped out, threw the driver a five and told him to keep the change, then dug in his pocket for the rest of the fare while the driver pounded on the wheel impatiently and cursed under his breath in Urdu.
