did a damn fine job on the bitch.”
“Seen your parole officer lately?”
“Tuesday last,” Gilly Boy said as he placed the first photo on the table and picked up the second. His faded jeans grew tight and he made no effort to disguise his pleasure. “She’s young.”
Lieutenant Castellano retrieved the photos much to Gilly Boy’s disappointment and returned them to the folder. The wiry blond watched until the folder snapped shut. The room remained silent save for Kowalski’s heavy breathing and the tick of the Lieutenant’s index fingernail against the table.
Finally, Gilly Boy asked, “Got any more pictures?”
Lieutenant Castellano pushed himself out of the chair and looked down on the wiry little man. Gilly Boy’s prison pallor had disappeared after six months on the outside, but he still bore the crudely etched tattoo of a prison gang on the back of his left hand.
The sergeant cleared his throat. When the Lieutenant looked up at him, Kowalski said, “He says he spent the night at his mother’s. She said the same thing.”
“Anybody else see him there?”
“The next-door-neighbor came over, spent about fifteen minutes in the same room with him.”
Gilly Boy smiled. His alibi had held.
“Cut him loose.”
CHAPTER 3
“Care for a drink?”
“No,” Rickenbacher said as he straddled a red leather and chrome stool at the far end of the bar. He’d never finished the beer he’d ordered the previous night. “Thanks.”
“On the wagon?”
“That’s twelve steps to hell,” he said as he dropped a slim file folder on the worn and stained wood before him, still remembering how his head had felt that morning. “I’m just not in the mood.”
Carlos, the Muff Inn’s regular bartender, shrugged and continued cleaning with the dirty towel he’d pulled from his belt a few minutes earlier. He jerked one thumb over his shoulder at the runway stage behind him and said, “The girls don’t start until noon.”
“Didn’t come for the show.”
“No skin off my nose.” Carlos lifted both hands in mock-surrender. His English was good, but not his green card, and he didn’t need any trouble with the big man.
Rickenbacher sat in silence for almost twenty minutes, watching as the now-mute bartender rearranged bottles, refilling nearly-empty name-brand fifths from generic gallon containers. Finally, a slightly overweight woman in her early forties entered the joint and made her way toward Rickenbacher. She hefted herself onto the stool next to him and ordered Jack Black straight up in a frozen shot glass, her sensuously low and throaty voice completely at odds with her appearance.
She had a temporary beauty, applied carefully each morning, then scrubbed off each night with Noxema and a cosmetic sponge. Beneath all the make-up existed one of the homeliest women Rickenbacher had ever met, but she could do things with her mouth and her tongue that most men couldn’t even imagine until she did it to them for twenty bucks. Colette had semi-retired from the street and made most of her living describing sexual intercourse to lonely men who dialed a 900 number and paid $2.50 a minute to masturbate to the sound of her voice. A hooker with a heart of gold is a fiction perpetuated by television cop shows, but Colette was the next best thing.
She owed Rickenbacher a favor.
Rickenbacher pushed the slim file folder toward Colette. She lifted the cover and carefully examined a series of grainy black-and-white contact proofs. Two of them had been circled with orange grease pencil, and Colette’s eight-year-old niece, her thin lips wrapped around the fat head of a rubber dildo, stared up at her from each of them. Then Colette thumbed through the strips of 35mm negatives used to create the proofs, assuring herself that all were accounted for. When she finally closed the cover, Colette griped the folder so tightly it began to crumple and her knuckles turned white.
When her drink arrived a moment later, Colette wrapped one handful of ring-encrusted fingers around the sweating glass. Before she lifted it to her lips, she said, “I saw this morning’s paper.”
“Yeah?”
“Poor Mr. Johnson did a nose dive into the sidewalk outside his office.” Colette lifted the shot glass to her heavily-painted red mouth, pressed the rim against the poorly-camouflaged cold sore on her bottom lip, and tilted her head backward as she lifted the glass upward. The auburn liquid disappeared down the back of her throat. When she finished, she said, “I figure I have you to thank for that.”
“He tripped.”
Colette turned to consider Rickenbacher. The brim of his baseball cap shadowed Rickenbacher’s eyes and she could read nothing in them. He slid a copy of Katherine Cove’s high school graduation photo from his shirt pocket and laid it face-up in front of Colette.
Carlos eased down the bar with a bottle in one hand and tried to refill Colette’s shot glass while she stared at the young woman’s face. She waved him away. “One’s enough, honey.”
“Ever seen her?” Rickenbacher asked.
“Seen dozens like her,” Colette said. “They come and they go. They just don’t come too often in my neighborhood.” She laughed at her own joke, but the sound disappeared when she realized she laughed alone. “Haven’t seen her.”
Rickenbacher slid the photo down the bar toward Carlos. “You?”
Carlos shook his head.
Rickenbacher told them both, “You do, you’ll let me know.”
“Honey, come up to my place some night and I’ll give you something you’ll never get from some young pussy.” She smiled.
Rickenbacher pushed himself off the stool and towered above Colette for the moment it took him to adjust his baseball cap securely over his bald spot. Then he headed toward the door.
“Hey, Big Dick,” Colette called to his back. “You know how I’m gonna die? Hearing aids!” she shouted. “From all you pricks who think oral sex means talking about it.”
Carlos stood behind the bar laughing quietly. He refilled Colette’s glass with imitation Jack and told her the drink was on the house. She watched Rickenbacher until he stepped through the door, then she upended her drink on the file folder. She reached into her purse for a disposable lighter, flicked it to life, and held the flame to the corner of the folder.
“Jesus, lady!” Carlos swore as he swatted at the burning folder with his bar towel. “You trying to burn the place down?”
The folder, the contact proofs, and the negatives had turned to ash and melted plastic before the bartender put the fire out. He managed to save only the photo of Katherine Cove, and he slid it under the cash register.
* * * *
Rickenbacher had never actually cruised the information highway himself. Instead, he traveled the back alleys and side streets, where information cost him a five spot, a drink, or a favor, and he
