Т Паркер - The Fallen

“I like that,” I said.

McKenzie sighed and sat back.

April looked at each of us. “My turn to ask you a question. Why do you think Jimmy would help someone as lost as me?”

“Why do you think?” said McKenzie.

“Because he was lost, too. It was the first thing I noticed about him. That’s why it was so good to see him looking forward to something that evening. Whatever it was. Whoever it was. And that’s why when I saw the news the next day it felt like somebody had ripped out my heart and thrown it off a cliff.”

I thought of something my mother told me once when I was a teenager.

Robbie, a person needs three things to be happy: Someone to love. Something to do. And something to look forward to.

Maybe he was looking forward to his twice-monthly date with Stella, I thought. Did he always look forward to it that much, or was there something else?

“Had you ever seen him eager like that before?” I asked. “Looking forward?”

April thought for a moment. Knocked the toes of her boots together softly. “No. I think he was onto something special.”

April showed us the kitchen and her bedroom. Her room was girly and not very neat. She’d brought home a big cardboard stand-up of a killer whale jumping out of the water and it took up most of one wall. She’d bent out some of the bottom teeth to hang necklaces on. Her bed was pink and there were clothes everywhere.

The second bedroom was Jimmy’s. She said he’d asked her not to go in there, and though she’d stuck her head in a few times she had never gone in and looked around. Not that there was much to see.

I pushed open the door. Just a card table and two folding metal chairs over by the window. A gold tie over one of the chairs. On the card table was a printer, a CD burner, and a laptop. On the wall under the window was a picture of what looked like a stream or river.

Pay dirt, I thought. The other half of Garrett Asplundh.

McKenzie sat, looked down under the table, and pushed the “on” button of a surge protector with her toe. The machines whirred to attention, green lights blipping. She had worked fraud a few years before I did, where she had specialized in computer crimes. And she’d taken special department classes in computer forensics. She can figure out or bypass a password in a matter of minutes.

She opened the laptop and smiled.

“Oh,” said April. “He brought the laptop with him that evening. He did that pretty often, left something here and picked it up later.”

I asked her if anyone else ever came over and asked for Garrett, or maybe to pick up something for him.

“No. He was always alone.”

McKenzie glanced up at me, then back down to poke at the keyboard with curious authority.

“You have no idea what’s on that laptop? No idea what Garrett did in here?” I asked.

“None. That was Jimmy’s stuff. I didn’t mess with Jimmy’s stuff. That was the first rule of the house.”

“What was the second?”

“He said if I ever turned a trick, I was out.”

“Now what are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m taking over the rent as of the first. Got a roommate maybe coming in from the park. You’re welcome to take these things if they’ll help you.”

I thanked her, even though the computer and peripherals weren’t hers to give away.

“I’d like to ask you one favor,” she said. “Please get me invited to the funeral if there is one.”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

April excused herself, said she had to get ready for work but to make ourselves at home.

McKenzie watched her go then looked up at me. “I’m in.”

Garrett Asplundh and Carrie Ann Martier had kicked ass and taken names and put it all on his laptop. He had Captain Chet Fellowes from Vice with three prostitutes. Three different girls, three different times. It was surreal to see the naked, ununiformed version of a superior I’d worked around during my almost ten-year career. It was interesting that Fellowes didn’t pay, though he was very specific and sneering about what he wanted the girls to do.

Garrett also had a young Motor Patrol officer on film, though he did pay — one hundred dollars. I knew little about him other than his name was Mincher or Mancher or something and he was a recent hire.

There was also a fire department sergeant whose name I didn’t know but whose face I recognized. And City Councilman Anthony Rood and his aide, two-fisted Steve Stiles.

All caught on video, having the times of their lives with Squeaky Clean girls. Some paid and some didn’t.

“This is bad,” said McKenzie.

“Bad enough to get you in serious trouble,” I said. “If you did the wrong thing with it.”

There were three men that neither McKenzie nor I could identify, though a couple of them looked familiar to both of us. One looked eighty. One looked terrified. One was young and dark-haired and wore a shiny wedding ring and a dog-tag necklace that dangled into Carrie Ann Martier’s face as he looked down at her with an air of entitlement.

We skipped through most of the videos. It doesn’t take much to get the point across. The money part — when payment was required — was direct and explicit. The action itself was strenuous and somewhat comic. It’s odd for a man to watch recorded fornication with a woman beside him, partners or not. None of the comments I might have made to a buddy seemed appropriate.

It saddened me again to see Carrie Ann Martier with the married councilman. He paid nothing. She rolled her eyes at the camera as he did his thing. She got a two-hundred-dollar tip from him when it was over and Rood told her he had a decent apartment she could rent cheap if she needed a place to live. Maybe trade some partying for some rent, he said.

April came into the room, fresh in her SeaWorld uniform. Luckily, a print file was on-screen by then. She looked so innocent and young and I suddenly fully understood what a good thing Asplundh had done for her. She handed me a key and asked me to give it to Davey on our way out.

“I hope you get whoever killed Jimmy,” she said. “I’ll do anything to help. You can call me anytime if you have more questions.”

“Call us if you think of anything,” I said. I wrote down her cell phone and driver’s license numbers. She took my card with a nod and walked out.

I sat back down next to McKenzie in front of the laptop.

Garrett had collected more than just dirty videos. Print files on his laptop included names and numbers, addresses, job descriptions, biographies, even financial and medical information on the johns. I wondered if he’d hit up Hollis Harris for a few free hidden threat assessments to help protect America’s Finest City. Holding together these informational paragraphs were Garrett’s own comments and notes and questions, easily identifiable in a large, bold typeface. Some of the pages looked like the Bible with Christ’s words in bold type that my parents gave me when I was twelve and baptized. There were thirty-two print documents and some of them went on for almost a hundred pages.

Into one file Garrett had scanned phone bills from the Squeaky Clean girls, apparently trying to close the loop between them, the johns, the spot callers, and the madam herself.

Tough job, because none of Jordan Sheehan’s six phone numbers appeared in any of the girls’ bills, although the numbers of three spot callers did. But there was no way to prove what any of them were talking about without a wiretap, and Garrett had noted caustically that Abel Sarvonola says the city doesn’t have the money to buy the Ethics Authority one piece of phone-intercept equipment, but it can pay for empty seats at Chargers games.