“Exactly. Jim wouldn’t want to show his face to anyone who might turn him in, but he would want to get laid.”
Unfortunately, he hadn’t been at the first place I tried, so we moved down the road to the next one. It was also a bust.
The third was an old brick ranch with a sputtering orange neon sign that showed an outline of a cat and the words “The Cat House” below it. Small ceramic cats filled the interior space between the windows and the blackout curtains behind them. A woman named Shirley ran the business for the Durham biker gang that controlled the low-rent half of the prostitution business in the area. I had done some work for her when she lived in a monstrosity of a house on a golf course in Cary with a husband who was a bigger monster than the house. R.C. and I had found their teenage daughter and returned her before we learned why she ran away. The next time they called us to find their daughter, we never called back. The time after that it was just the husband calling, and this time he was seeking Shirley. For her, not for him, we went looking and found her at Duke Medical, tubes down her throat to help her breathe while she healed from the repairs to her shattered cheekbones and broken nose. We never told him where she was, but we didn’t have to; she went back on her own. When she grew old enough and damaged enough, he left her and she ended up here. Nothing new about the story, but nothing good about it, either.
“How are you, Shirley?” I asked after they buzzed me in and she took me back to the office, a smoke-filled room where a TV always ran and the women dozed or doped between visitors.
“You know, Stark,” she said. “Same old thing.” She plopped into an overstuffed chair that had last been comfortable around the time I was born. She lit up a cigarette. “That Beemer you’re driving tells me you haven’t sunken low enough to be shopping here, so what can I do for you?”
I showed her the picture of Jim. “Has he been here in the last week or so?”
She didn’t even look at it. “You know I don’t care about stuff like that. They’re all just men. The faces don’t matter.”
I walked to her and bent over her chair so I could whisper. With my right hand I held the picture in front of her face, and with my left I fanned out five hundreds. “I can afford to be generous here, Shirley. Have you seen this guy?”
She stared at the money longer than she looked at the picture, but she did finally look at it. “Yeah,” she said as she grabbed the half of the bills not in my hand, “he was here.”
I held onto my half as our hands touched. Her hand was cool and dry. “When?”
“A week ago today. He bought a couple of sessions, one with two girls. Generous.” She looked up at me. “Like you, right?”
I let go of the bills and she quickly tucked them into a pocket in her grayish housedress. “Right,” I said. “Now, I need one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I need to see your parking lot videos for that day.” The bikers who ran the place didn’t invest much in the girls or the building, but the steelwork over the doors and the surveillance gear that ringed the building and sat in some of the nearby trees were both solid. Their places were never successfully raided, because by the time the cops could get inside everyone was just watching dirty movies and talking.
“You know I’m not supposed to even look at those, Stark.”
I held out five more hundreds. “I know. But I need to spend some time with those videos. I’ll do it here so the disks never even need to leave the building.”
She grabbed the money. “You know, Stark, with this and maybe a little more, I could get out of here, start over, maybe even find that daughter of mine again.”