Everyone Pays (4 page)

CHAPTER TEN

DONNER

Hendricks was late Tuesday morning, so I went to evidence myself to check out the pictures from Farrow’s studio to compare them with Piper’s.

I took both sets to a white-walled interrogation room and laid them out in front of me on the scratched table.

At Piper’s, the number of pics was precise, a lineup on his shelf of girls he had hurt. I studied one of the tech’s pics, the one that showed how the shelf looked when we arrived. One spot stood empty, as if one of the girls had been removed. The very middle picture. She was gone.

With Farrow, the stack had no order, no way to tell if any pictures had been taken. His collection was just a mess spread across his desk.

The murders were so different: Piper meticulous and calculated, Farrow carried out in anger and with strength. It almost looked like two different killers but with too many coincidences. I was starting to believe in the connection of the girls.

I started putting together matches of pictures, finding the few girls who were the same. There weren’t a lot of these. Many more of the pictures didn’t have matches, but in all there was a similarity of taste, something that told me there was more here than two dead guys.

Of the few girls who matched, the first was a blonde with shoulder-length hair and streaked mascara. I put the two shots side by side and stared at her. She had aged maybe six months between the two pictures, but that could’ve happened in three weeks on the street. Her eyes were tough in the first, hardened in the second. Perhaps at that point she was already beyond help.

The next girl to match stared back at the camera, trying to look sexy-mean, wanting to project a sense of anger that might hide her fear, maybe even protect her. In the first picture, her fear was still there, then less in the other. Fear was now apathy. She could’ve been eighteen or as young as fifteen. Her shoulders were narrow enough to fit through the neck of a dress.

I wondered if I had ever been that frail. Not since junior high, if then.

Farrow’s set was harder to put into a chronology. I spread them out to get a better look. He’d had more girls, been at it longer; he was less selective. Some of the pictures were yellowing around the edges, starting to curl. They weren’t Polaroids, which meant he went to the trouble of having them printed. Or maybe he had a color printer somewhere in that craphole. I almost admired them both for going to the trouble of making tactile products of their efforts—physical pictures, instead of just looking at everything on a screen. It showed some kind of dedication to a connection with the physical world. Or maybe I was kidding myself; the real pictures were probably just better for beating off.

I tossed the ones I was holding down onto the table, glad I was wearing gloves. My disgust for these scumbags rushed back.

Studying these could wait. I needed to sit it out for a while and settle my stomach, figure out what I was trying to do.

Working in homicide had always been my goal, ever since my father told me it was no place for a woman. But that was in high school. Now, here of my own accord, I still carried my hurt and prejudices from vice.

I stood up and stretched my shoulders and arms.

My dad had been a homicide investigator himself in lower Manhattan in the eighties, should’ve been forward-thinking enough to imagine a woman doing the job. He would’ve pushed me toward this it if I’d been a son. But a daughter? Not ever.

Here I was then, essentially in the career I had because of him—a man who never thought a woman officer should be anything more than a meter maid.

A parking ticket maven.

That wasn’t me. Never was.

I stacked the pictures, clapped them down a few times on the table to organize the piles, and put them in their bags. They could go back to their shelf in the evidence cage and wait.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Hendricks came in around ten thirty. He could tell by my face I’d had more than enough coffee and wasn’t working on either the Piper or the Farrow murder.

He came around to look at my computer.

“That went off the board last week.”

“Paperwork,” I said. “Got to be done. You might try it sometime.”

He sighed and dropped himself into my extra chair. “How long you been in already?”

I lied, told him fifteen minutes so he might think I’d slept well and stayed in bed like a normal person.

“I got a few ideas about our killer. Mind I run them by?”

I saved my work. “Go ahead.”

“For some reason I thought you’d resist this. I don’t know why. I think it’s the girls. We trace it back through them, we find who’s pulling strings.”

“How do you mean?”

“What if one of them came into some money? I know the work on both vics needed muscle. What if it was a hired job? One of these girls starts hiring killers.”

“It’s possible. Why a girl though? What if a pimp starts hitting his johns?”

“Why would he be taking out his customers?”

“For damaging the merchandise.”

Hendricks shook his head. “I don’t see it. No. But if a girl came into money, say . . . maybe she found a guy she liked, someone who put her up with some dough? Say she wanted to get back at her johns. What you think?”

“Sounds too much like
Pretty Woman
. There’s no Julia Roberts here. We’re talking about some teenage runaway on drugs. She’s going to care about revenge? Don’t think so. She just wants another fix.”

Hendricks sat back in the chair, crossed one leg over the other, his boot almost touching my desk. “It’s an idea,” he said. “I don’t know about the money. Maybe she robbed it. Maybe not a benefactor.”

“Maybe I should finish this paperwork.”

“These girls could turn themselves around, you know.”

“I’d be the first one to say that, if I believed it.” I stared at my screen, grinding my molars. Anything to keep from getting further into this. For these girls, it was all one direction: down. “Or maybe they do clean up. You think they’ll care about these turds? No. They’re long gone.”

Hendricks stood up. “I’ll look over the pics from the scenes then. Maybe find some matches.”

I sat listening to the buzz of the station around me. Hendricks could piss me off, but his heart was in the right place. He cared about the girls, the vics of both sexes. The job meant more to him than the pay. He cared about the families of the victims, the ones left behind.

No one could last at what we did if it was only about the pay.

I finished with my paperwork and then went down to evidence to see if I could help.

I found Hendricks in the file room, staring at the same pictures I started on earlier.

“Who you care more about?” I asked him. “The girls or the freaks?”

“You mean the vics.” He flopped a handful of pictures down on the table. “Farrow and Piper are the vics here. They’re both dead.”

“Yeah.” I leaned against the wall. “Vics, freaks, whatever. Look at those pictures and tell me they’re not both.”

“That’s fine,” he said, “both. What difference does it make?”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. We were quiet under the hum of the fluorescents.

He pushed back from the table. “I hear you, Donner. I do. Just promise me we keep things right on this one, don’t let anything get out of hand. Like on Terranella.”

I nodded. He could’ve just said “that time” or “the other,” and I would’ve known what he meant.

Now I wanted a drink.

“I hear you, Daniel.”

Using his full first name was a good tactic for stopping Hendricks cold; he’d once told me it made me sound like his mother.

Terranella was a mistake, one I wouldn’t make again. I’d just given a bad man a little of what he needed. My father would’ve done the same. In his eyes, it was part of the job.

But those were different times. Doctors, police, firemen, all of us now operated in a new world of liability and litigation. Not that it helped.

“I get it,” I said. “By the book here. Strictly.”

“What happened to these guys is wrong. Even if what happened to
them
is wrong too.” He waved at the pictures. “We’re here to stop murders and put murderers behind bars. Someone did Piper and Farrow. We need to stop him before he kills again.”

“Any new theories then?”

He shook his head. “There’s nothing here. But something tells me there’s a link.”

I sat down, shuffled pictures into order, showed him the matches I’d found earlier, the chronology I made at Farrow’s place. You could see the progressive buildup of grime on his walls.

Best I could, I put them in order of what I thought was time, judging by the condition of the prints and the color of the wall. A few had dates printed on the back by a developing machine, but not all.

When I finished, I had twenty-four pictures laid out in front of us. A catalog of what a disgusting man had done with his life.

“So what do you make of that?”

Hendricks swore. “Not much. I think we track down these girls. Maybe one tells us something.”

I held up my hands. “Let’s do it.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

We took to the streets to canvass the girls, found them using connections I’d made working vice and from volunteer work I did at a battered women’s shelter in the Tenderloin.

We started on the corners they usually worked, but it was too early in the day for them to be out on the job. I knew a couple of coffee shops they frequented, found a handful of them talking over breakfasts, coffee, having just woken up from a night’s work. It was just past noon.

Three girls I recognized sat in a back booth at It’s Tops, hair unkempt and makeup-free, not yet ready to work or even dress for the job.

“Hey, Shane,” I said, walking over to them. I nodded at Hendricks for him to hang back, grab a stool at the bar, and enjoy a cup of the diner’s weak black joe.

“Here’s Clara Donner,” Shania said, “our avenging angel.” She seemed underwhelmed.

The girl sitting across from Shania, who had a side of the booth to herself, didn’t make room for me to join, so I slid into the booth adjacent.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Same old same old. Just the work, the life. Makes me tired.”

“Mmm-hmmm.” Her friends nodded.

“I could say the same,” I said.

She went on. “Even now, waking up at noon getting harder. Shit, we out till five last night. Girl needs her full eight hours.”

“We caught a bad one last night, kept me out until three thirty. Then I’m back at my desk at nine.”

The girl closest to me turned to regard my makeup and to see how I held up. I passed some kind of test. She went back to eating her eggs.

“So what’s up?” Shania asked.

I reached into my blazer for the pictures of Piper and Farrow, flopped them onto their table. Farrow’s was a shot of him blown up from his driver’s license—I wouldn’t ruin their meal with a pic of him from last night. “Know these guys? Any of you ever trick for them?”

They spun the pics around to all get a look, checked them out, shook their heads.

“No, ma’am. Honestly, I don’t think we his type.”

Shania was Latina, but her two friends were African American. “You can tell just like that?”

They nodded. “Just like that. They looking for something else.”

“What?”

The girl next to Shania smiled. “I could tell you that, I’d be working some other line, girl.”

“What about girls? You hear of anyone disappearing? Leaving the life?”

“Happens all the time here. What can you do?”

“People move on.”

Shania leveled a hard look at me. “Now what you gone do about helping us with this dickhead coming around from vice?”

I sighed. “Give me a name.”

“Owens. Steve Owens. He the one. Get him off our ass, girl.”

I reached to their table for the pictures. “You sure? Nothing?”

Same response.

I reached inside my jacket for my pad to make a note. “Owens,” I said. “Will do my best.”

“Better, girl.” Shania raised her coffee in a form of toast. “Or next time we won’t be so forthcoming with you.” She winked.

Getting up, I slid two twenties onto their table, enough to cover the breakfasts and a nice tip, told them the meal was on me. I’d get nowhere with Owens in vice, if I could even get time with him, so this was some consolation to that, a fact we all knew too well.

I walked back to Hendricks just as a BLT with a side of fries arrived in front of him. “Any luck there?” he said.

“No knowledge of our johns whatsoever.” I stole a fry and ate it. This wasn’t the place to worry about it being too hot. Here the oil and salt had already soaked in. For better or worse.

He poured ketchup onto the side of the plate farthest from me, so I moved around to his other side once I’d stolen another fry. I dipped it in ketchup.

“You know anyone in vice who owes you a favor? They got an issue with Owens.”

Hendricks laughed. “Old Squeaky-Clean Steve? Not much
anyone
can do about that jackass.”

I knew exactly what he meant; through most of my time on vice, the man Owens and I weren’t even on speaking terms. Call it a difference of opinion on how to enforce the law. Call it whatever you wanted. It was another good reason for me to find pleasure in the fact I’d moved on to homicide and had a new home.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A few other girls we spoke to either knew nothing or didn’t want to talk. Only one told me she knew the guys in the pictures. “They’re around, yeah,” was the depth of her response.

No, they hadn’t seen any strange john who might be hunting the others. Yes, some of these girls had disappeared of late; of course that was likely to happen; and no, they weren’t sure which ones. I tried to parlay some of the credit I’d earned on the corners, but mostly these girls weren’t having it. They knew I was a cop, and they didn’t want cops around. Even without Hendricks, I didn’t have any luck.

We found one girl down enough on her luck, needing a meal so badly that when we offered, she accepted it. She gave her real name as Jennifer Hathorn, but everyone knew her as Destiny.

She didn’t fit the mold of the pictures we had from Piper’s and Farrow’s: her hair was brown and not blonde, and she came in maybe a touch on the older side, but she was white and looked like she’d come from a good family somewhere, once.

She clearly used too. But not for so long that she was completely gone.

I bought her a burger and fries at one of the Chinese coffee shops that had a lunch buffet but sold mainly donuts and burgers. J. Georgie’s. There were a string of them, offering this strange mix: burgers, donuts, teriyaki. It never made sense or seemed right to me, but then I wasn’t the one eating the food.

The man and woman behind the counter fought in their native tongue. Hendricks sat next to me, drinking a greasy coffee. Mine was untouched, and Destiny had already finished hers—she’d put enough sugar and cream in it to satisfy a six-year-old’s sweet tooth.

I started out setting pictures of girls on our table—ones from Piper’s and Farrow’s.

“Yeah, I know them,” she said. “They all right?”

I told her they were, so far as I knew. “Any of them drop out of sight lately? Would you have reason to worry?”

She stared straight ahead, deadpan. “Can I have more coffee?”

I laid out the dead men’s pictures.

“How about them?”

“This one. Him.” She pointed at Farrow. “He comes around. You know. He dead now?”

I turned to Hendricks for a moment, then back to Destiny and asked, “You just guessing here? Or do you know?”

“Word gets around.”

“Anything you can tell us?”

“He went with the girls in those pictures, yeah. Much as I know, these the kind of girls he liked. I ain’t never been with him.” She gestured to her hair. “Guess I’m not their type.”

The chef rang a bell on the counter, and Hendricks got up to get Destiny’s food. I watched her eyes as he brought it back, aware she hadn’t looked directly at either of us yet. Whether we could trust her or not was still very much up for debate. That, and if she had anything interesting to tell us.

When Hendricks slid the plate onto our table, she smiled. Her teeth had yellowed, the gums pulled back in a sure sign of meth.

Her fries steamed in their grease, and I wasn’t tempted at all. Her burger looked just tastier than a hockey puck.

“Sure I can’t get you something else? Maybe a salad?”

She was already shoving hot fries into her mouth, her head down and hair hanging in front of her face. “Thanks. This good.”

“Anything else you can tell me? Maybe something that sticks out as strange in the last couple, three weeks?”

When she came up for air, or to let her mouth cool, she turned her head as if thinking it over. Then she said, “There was one thing this weekend. Girl got beat up, lost a piece off her tongue. Pissed a couple of us off.” She frowned, put down her burger, and locked her eyes on mine.

My trust and interest level shot up. “Her tongue?”

“Don’t matter what you pay, you don’t get to do that. Nothing that lasts. No way.”

She moved a mouthful of burger out of her cheek and resumed chewing. I hadn’t even known it was there. Maybe Squirrel would be a better name for her than Destiny.

I thought back to the piece of Piper’s tongue on his floor, the Achilles in his mouth.

“You saying a john did this? Remember his name?”

She shook her head. “Nah. Just heard this from her man. You know.” Her focus had gone back to the food, almost as if any sense of ire had never arrived.

“Her man?”

“Dub. Her pimp.”

Everybody who’d ever worked in the Tenderloin or vice knew Dub, a.k.a. Richard Webster, a.k.a. Richard Dubya, Dick Dub, Just Dub, or Dick D. He was as much a feature of vice and the ’Loin as the officers who worked there. Tall and white with long dreads, a scar slashed across his face that you never forgot once you’d seen it. The biggest surprise about Dub was his longevity, the simple fact that he hadn’t been killed in the game for as long as he’d been around. He worked alone, didn’t use muscle, and got to his women with the drugs he sold out of his apartment. Somehow he never got rolled or bumped off for his stash. He seemed immortal. The collective speculation had him as some kind of made man from an East Coast mafia family with enough juice to keep him safe by the implication of their might.

Hendricks tapped his fingernails on the table; I could feel his knee bouncing with more than the caffeine.

“Who was the girl?”

She shrugged, already lost to us but for the burger.

“She dropped out. Ain’t seen her.”

“But I asked—” I stopped myself; it wasn’t any use. Maybe the food had woken her brain.

“She gone now. Dub put word out. Ain’t nobody seen her.”

“You don’t have her name?”

She chewed and thought about it for a moment, then said, “Silver. That’s her name. Silver.”

Hendricks asked her a few questions while I thought it over. When it was clear she’d given us all she knew, I slipped a twenty and my card across the table. “This is in case you think of anything else, okay? Anything at all.”

She nodded. The burger was half gone, but her eyes had dulled like a light switched off. The money and my card just sat there.

“Anything else,” I said.

She waved like we were already moving on. So we did.

Outside, I asked Hendricks if Dub’s name rang a bell.

“You know it does.”

“Then I guess we go see the man.”

He jangled his car keys, spun them around his finger. “I guess we do.”