Jon Talton - The Night Detectives

Focus, Mapstone. “Why didn’t AFP get her addicted? That’s the usual M.O. for a pimp.”

“She convinced him she’d be worth more clean. She was good at convincing people. AFP sees himself as a businessman. She paid him straight, every week, until she disappeared and came to be with me.”

“Did it bother you that she’d fucked all those men?”

I phrased it as crudely as I could and he stared at the carpet. He was a natural suspect. Jealousy was always a prime motive, wronged spouses and boyfriends always prime suspects.

“All those men, their dicks inside her.” I spoke tawdry fluently. “It would sure bother me. It would bother me to find that my wife had been fucking even one man other than me.”

Trust me. Only every second, splinters under my skin. But the splinters didn’t want to make me kill her.

I said, “I know you’re a nice guy, Tim. But didn’t it get to you? Did you ever think about killing her when you thought about all those men…”

“No!” His face flushed apple-red.

I took my time, studying his expression and body language, and letting the silence work for me, having watched Peralta interrogate many suspects.

Finally, Tim drew up his wiry frame. “That was in the past. She regretted it. I loved her. I’d rather die than hurt her.”

I believed him. He didn’t have murder in him.

“Did she ever talk about a man named Larry Zisman? He used to be a pro football player. Owned a condo downtown.”

“Was that one of her clients?”

I didn’t answer.

“The name doesn’t sound familiar,” he said. “And she didn’t talk about those men. I didn’t want to know and she didn’t tell me.”

“So you guys lived alone here. What about friends?”

“We’d say hi to neighbors. It’s that kind of place. Grace stayed in touch with Addison…”

“Who the hell is that? A man or a woman?”

“A woman. She was her best friend.”

“Did she visit?”

Tim said that Addison had visited several times, but they never left O.B.

“Addison didn’t know anything about Grace’s, you know, business.”

“I need her contact information.” Then I asked when he had seen Grace last.

“The morning of April twenty-second. I had classes. When I came home, she was gone. I never even got a text goodbye. All her stuff is still here. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Are you afraid she’s gone back to the life?”

He shook his head. “She said she was done and I believed her. She got rid of her old phone, even. We were good together.” He sighed. “I wanted to save her from the past.”

Tim Lewis looked like a weak reed of a white knight, but his sincerity was obvious. I had gone through my white-knight phase. Now I was covered with tarnish. I made him go through the day she disappeared in detail. He had gone to classes at eight-thirty that morning. Grace was with the baby at home. When he returned around three that afternoon, she was gone. All she took was her purse and cell phone. She always carried pepper spray and a knife in that purse. Nothing had seemed unusual in their apartment.

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“I filed a missing person’s report the next day. The cops made me wait twenty-four hours and even then they didn’t take me very seriously. I could tell. They thought she’d left me. They said she was an adult and there wasn’t much they could do unless I had evidence of foul play. Of course, I couldn’t tell them she used to be a call girl.” He shook his head. “Anyway, AFP pays the cops off. Grace warned me. I was sure I’d eventually hear from her. I called hospitals for a week. Nothing.”

Grace would have been dead by the time he went to the police. But things fell through the cracks in every police department.

“Where’s her family?”

“They lived in Arizona.”

I asked him to get me their address and he did.

“What about a brother? Big guy? My size with close-cropped hair and a prosthesis on his lower leg?”

“She was an only child.”

I looked at the skinny kid with the cat crawling up his leg: I thought, dear old dad . I said, “Who is this Edward that the pimp was talking about?”

“I have no idea. I swear!”

So I told him she was dead and waited as he cried. It was a long wait. He said over and over that Grace would never kill herself, especially after the baby came.

Finally, I asked if he had any place he could go.

“My parents live up in Riverside. It’s a boring hellhole.”

“My advice is to go there. Right now. And stay awhile.”

He nodded, but it was obvious he was descending into a fog of grief, in addition to being beaten up. I made him repeat what he would do.

Go.

Now.

I handed him my business card.

“Private investigator,” he said quietly. “Are you trying to find out who killed Grace?”

“Yes.”

“I want to hire you.”

“We already have a client.”

He repeated his request. “I’ve got to know what happened to Grace. And I want the bastard who killed her to burn.” Misery shone in his watery, pale eyes.

“Okay.”

He reached under the cushions of the sofa and I tensed.

“Here’s five hundred.” He handed me a wad of cash. “Is that enough for a start?”

“Sure. But I’ll do this pro-bono.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t want your charity. I want you to work for me, and cash talks. Grace taught me that.”

I realized it might be good to have a living client, especially because the man who had hired us yesterday was dead and Peralta had lied to the Phoenix Police, saying he had never even come into our office. I took the cash and wrote out a receipt for it on a blank sheet of paper.

He rooted around in the kitchen and returned with a flash drive. “This has her client list. The regulars.”

“Have you seen it?”

He shook his head. I could understand why he wouldn’t want to look.

I took it and told him we’d be in touch, but that he should call me when he got to Riverside.

His voice stopped me as I was halfway out the door.

“Thank you again for changing the baby. Do you have kids?”

I didn’t answer.

“They totally change the way you look at life.”

Personal history: the day I arrived in San Diego to take an Assistant Professor of History position at the same university that Grace Hunter would later attend, I drove all the way to the end of Interstate 8. It put me in Ocean Beach. I had never been there before. Unlike today, when I was growing up Phoenicians didn’t go to San Diego every summer by the tens of thousands. I had visited the city a total of one time before, staying at Hotel Circle in Mission Valley. I had no idea of this magical enclave called Ocean Beach.

But that day I had taken the freeway as far as it would go. After growing up in the desert and then spending several years completing my Ph.D. and teaching in the Midwest, it was as if I had landed in my own little paradise. Ocean Beach immediately felt like home. That evening I walked the 1,971 feet to the end of the municipal pier, turned around, and looked at the neighborhood as it rose up to the spine of the Point Loma Peninsula. The lights in the houses looked like Japanese lanterns and I made a vow out loud:

“I’ll never leave.”

A few hours before, I had rented my apartment a block-and-a-half from the ocean. I was neither a surfer nor much of a beach person. As a native Phoenician, the idea of tanning went along with the promise of ruined skin soon and melanoma later. But I loved O.B. The only thing that could pry me out was that I loved Patty more.

Patty.

I met her at the ugly main San Diego State University library. We both reached for the same book at the same time, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory . She was an English professor and, with the Sharon Stone jaw line, classic Wayfarers, and lush wheat-yellow hair, you might mistake her for another shallow Southern California beauty. With the millionaire developer father and house in La Jolla, you might assume she was spoiled, too.