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“Tell me something.”
“What?”
“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked this to stop thinking about the tumble of names in my head.
“I thought you were never gonna ask me questions like that.”
“I wasn’t,” I said, “when I thought you were a working girl.”
“I still took your money.”
“At the old rate.”
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. Don’t I sound it?”
“I was up worryin’ about you,” she explained. “You have never called me askin’ for friendship before now.”
“Thank you, honey, but I’m fine. I lost it there for a minute and I needed someone who understood to hear me out. So you can go to sleep now and I will call you for coffee one day soon.”
“Joe?”
“What?”
“Nuthin’,” she said.
Sitting there in the early hours before the sunrise I was grateful for Effy’s call. There was nowhere to go with Adam or Hugo right then, so I decided to pay attention to some other aspect of my humiliation and demolition.
I had turned off the burner phone Stuart Braun knew. I did this just in case he had resources that could locate an active number.
There were two people who knew the number and two messages.
The first was from Braun.
“Mr. Boll,” he said. “I went to the Liberté Café and you never showed. This is a very serious situation and I really need to speak to you and your clients. If you were to go public with your suspicions, many people would suffer.”
Especially you, I thought.
“Please call me and let me know when we can meet,” Braun said. Before disconnecting the call he paused a long minute, hoping I’d been listening and was just about to pick up.
The second message was from the devil.
“Hey, King,” Melquarth Frost said. “Just thought I’d call and tell you that I’m closing in on the name you asked me to get. I’ll tell you when I have something.”
I like detective novels. The dick is either smarter, braver, or just luckier than his nemeses. He, or even she, works pretty much alone, sticking out his jaw whenever there’s a blow coming. If he gets arrested that’s okay. If some pretty young thing needs sex, it’s probably not the right time for him, or her, just then.
The literary PI usually takes on one case at a time and he stays on the trail until it is solved, whether or not justice is done.
Sometimes I liked to pretend that I was a detective out of a book.
With this thought in mind I went back over the things I knew, details that might open an unexpected door. What might Tecumseh Fox think about Willa Portman? If I were Watson peering over Sherlock’s shoulder, what odd detail might he be considering?
Outside the window it was still dark, but the workers were on the street tramping off to jobs that would never earn enough to pay their bills.
And as I watched, the name Chester Murray floated to the surface.
Henri Tourneau’s access code revealed Chester’s long record with the NYPD. He’d been arrested for theft, pimping, assault, and even rape. He was on-again, off-again as a CI with various officers I didn’t know. I copied down the names in case they came up later.
