Don Winslow - A Cool Breeze on the Underground

So there was a place to start. Find the dealer and you have a shot at finding Allie. A long shot, indeed, but you’ve seen them hit before.

Just to encourage him, Guidry threw a curve that didn’t, which the batter pulled right and put over the fence as the base runner trotted contemptuously home.

Neal consoled himself with chapter seven of The Making of the English Working Class and another scotch.

Neal spent a very boring day and a half waiting for the FedEx package from Graham to arrive. He killed time with chapters eight through fifteen, Travis McGee, and Mr. Ed reruns. The desk rang him when the package came.

In it were three Xeroxed pages from a rag called the London Daily Leveller. the classified ads for May 7, the night that Scott Mackensen and his friend had let their fingers do the walking. Most of the ads were of the “for a good time, call” variety, but there were a number of specialty acts: mother/daughter teams, B amp;D mistresses (“Imelda knows you’ve been a bad boy”), a wide world of ethnic specialties (Neal wondered what a “full treatment Bulgarian hour” could possibly entail). There were bad little girls who wanted to be spanked first, some who wanted to be spanked afterward. Many had cute names. There were three Bambis, but to Neal’s intense relief, no Thumpers. A goodly number had French names, and not a few had threatening ones. Neal thought that any man dumb enough to call up a woman named Stiletto and invite her into his room deserved whatever he got.

There were also a lot of agency listings. Most used sophisticated names like Erotica and Exotica, and Neal yearned for an agency of frigid hookers called Antarctica. His personal favorite, though, was Around The World In Eighty Minutes. Of course, there was no listing for “Ginger and Yvonne: Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll,” because nobody ever got that lucky.

“You said last time was it,” Scott Mackensen protested over the phone.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Will this really help Allie?”

“Could.”

There ensued one of those long, irritating silences Neal was getting used to on this gig. And not a grape in sight. He settled for a bite of his Hershey bar-the healthy kind, the one with almonds.

“I have a test tomorrow,” Scott said.

I know the feeling, kid. “On what?”

“Macbeth.” He sounded mournful.

“I’ll help you with it. I’ve taken a few exams on Macbeth myself.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. The witches did it.”

Scott stared at the ads laid out on the counter in Neal’s motel room. He moved his index finger slowly down the page, then shook his head.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Try again.”

“I can’t remember!”

“Jesus Christ! How many call girls have you been with?”

“I was drunk!”

Attaboy, Neal, he told himself, browbeat a witness who’s really trying. That’ll help.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re both tired. Try it this way. In your hotel room in London, where was the phone?”

Scott pointed to a spot on the counter. Neal moved the phone there and put a chair in front of it.

“Okay,” he said. “Sit down. Where was the paper? Okay. Which hand do you dial with? Good. Now look at the paper. Don’t think. Just point.”

“Somewhere around here,” Scott said, pointing toward the lower third of the first page.

“Good. Now was it the name of an agency, or just a couple of girls?”

“Just girls.”

“Good.”

Good, not great. But it was progress. Something to work from.

Scott sank back in his chair and let out a long sigh. He was an exhausted kid. He looked at Neal and smiled.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” he said.

Neal went for the brass ring.

“Hey, Scott. Did you take any pictures of these girls?”

Neal watched the kid’s spine stiffen.

“You mean dirty pictures?”

“No, I mean you tell your friends what you did and they say ‘Bullshit,’ and you whip out a couple of Polaroids of the girls.”

Scott looked him right in the eye and told him the God’s honest truth.

“No way.”

“Just a thought. When’s your test?”

“First period.”

Neal whipped through a few of the big themes in the old Scottish play, discoursed on how many times the word man was used, and for extra credit threw in a few notes on the uses of color in the imagery. Then he sent Scott on his way and phoned Joe Graham.

Neal was at scott’s school bright and early, first period. The kid’s dorm-room door was a breeze, one of those spring-bolt locks that yodel, “Come on in, pardner.”

The room was your typical boys’ school hovel with a sort of dirty laundry Cristo effect. Neal found Scott’s desk and went straight to the top right drawer, the locked one. It was a little less friendly than the door lock, but opened up after a little persuasion.

The usual collection of bullshit was in there. A bunch of letters from a girl named Marsha, another bunch from a Debbie. Lots of pictures: Marsha or Debbie with Scott on a beach; Marsha or Debbie with Scott at a dance; just Marsha or Debbie on a boat; just Scott on the boat, taken by Marsha or Debbie; Marsha or Debbie posed romantically under a willow tree. Neal didn’t see any of Marsha and Debbie pounding the crap out of Scott. He leafed through a couple of Penthouse magazines, a passport, and a brochure on Brown University before he came to a thin packet of pictures secured by a rubber band. Bingo. Scott and a friend with arms around two girls who were neither Marsha nor Debbie-in a hotel room. Hello, Ginger. Greetings, Yvonne.

Neal took the best picture and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He locked the desk drawer and walked out of the room, whistling a happy tune, wondering how Scott was doing in class.

Joe Graham, listening from the stairway, heard the whistling and left by a side door.

They met in the parking lot of the post office. Neal slid into the passenger seat of Graham’s car.

“So what do you have so important I have to come to Connecticut to hold your hand for?”

“I have Allie hooked up to a dealer, name unknown, naturally, who has friends in the ‘love for rent’ business. I have two working girls, names unknown, naturally, but narrowed down to about twelve phone numbers, who know the aforementioned dealer. I have skit.”

“You’re doing okay.”

“Yeah, right. Do you want to lay the odds on our finding Allie Chase in London?”

“About the same as Jackie O peeling my banana at Lincoln Center.”

Neal laid the photo on the dashboard.

“Visual aids, very nice,” Graham said.

“I’ve been thinking about something.”

“Hard to believe.”

“Allie Chase ran before.”

“So?”

“Twice to New York.”

Graham pretended to study the picture.

“If I’d have picked her up, I would have told you about it,” he said.

“So you didn’t, and I didn’t, and-”

“There’s nothing about it in the file.”

“At least not in the file we’ve seen.”

Graham perused the picture some more. “Nice-looking girls.”

“What’s going on, Dad?”

“Son, I don’t know.”

I hope you don’t, Dad. Goddamn, I hope you don’t.

A few weeks and a few jobs after Neal had started working for Graham, he answered a knock on the door, to find the gremlin standing there, his arms full of packages and a brand-new mop and broom clutched in one hand.

“What’s this?” Neal asked.

“I’m fine, thank you. How are you? Your mother home?”

“Not lately.”

Graham brushed him aside and stepped in.

“You live in a toilet. A toilet.”

“It’s the maid’s year off.”