Hard News Page 12

  “Four innings. They got five hits off me.”

  McCarthy sat on the bed. “There’ll be another day.”

  Carlos bit at his lip, then said: “You know why I like to pitch? Not tonight, but most of the time?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Because my part in the game comes first. Everything else comes next. So what I do kind of begins it all, you know? The swing and the catches and the throws. I like that. That and the way everyone watches you.”

  “I think I understand.”

  Carlos looked past McCarthy at the ceiling. “You think she watches?”

  “She never misses a game,” he said.

  Carlos reached out and took McCarthy’s hand. “He was in the stands, I think.”

  McCarthy swallowed at the bulge in his throat. “Who was?”

  “My father. Tia Estelle told us what happened and Miriam asked to see his picture.”

  “Did he try to talk to you?”

  “No,” Carlos said. “He just watched.”

  They were quiet for a few moments. Then McCarthy said, “He wants to take you and Miriam to a baseball game in a couple of weeks. It will be all right, you know?”

  Carlos nodded, but didn’t reply.

  “It’s late. You should get some sleep.”

  Carlos nodded again and shut the book. McCarthy patted him on the head, then flipped off the light. The boy grabbed him around the shoulders and hugged him tightly.

  “I know,” McCarthy said, hugging him back. “I know.”

  He rocked the boy in his arms, glad that the lights were off because he knew the anguish on his face would scare the boy even more. McCarthy had always been a man who faced crises in a detached fashion, standing slightly apart as the chaos whirled, able to chronicle it for his readers. But he could not get off the line of this pain. It sucked at the bottom of his lungs and knuckled into his gut and carved out a dismal chasm at his center.

  He couldn’t imagine life without Carlos or Miriam or their eccentric great aunt. He rarely saw his mother anymore. She was bigoted and wanted nothing to do with the children. And he couldn’t bear to return to those days when the newsroom crowd was his family. The only thing that would ever fill the emptiness was in his arms.

  And yet he knew his odds of keeping Carlos and Miriam were slim. Especially now that his job hung in the balance. Owens’s attorney had already mentioned the plagiarism incident once. Wouldn’t he love it if McCarthy were fired?

  This story he was working on, this murdered whore who taped everyone she knew, was crucial. Figuring out who killed Carol Alice Gentry was the one thing that might keep his family intact. McCarthy clenched his jaw as he lowered the sleeping boy onto the pillow. He stood up, promising the shadows he’d solve this murder or die trying.

  Of Pierced Nipples and Murder …

  MCCARTHY’S STORY ON THE break-in at Gentry’s condo front page, lower left-hand corner. Rivers had a metro story about Gentry’s background. But she missed the break-in angle entirely. He was back on top. For today at least.

  After breakfast with Carlos and Miriam, he drove to the courthouse to examine the criminal indexes. Within an hour he’d determined that Delta Porter, the hooker who’d appeared in the sex video with Gentry and Billy Kemper, fit the journalistic cliché; she was a hard case.

  During the last seven years Delta Porter had been arrested for soliciting nine times, three the last year. Street whores like Porter knew the system was too overloaded to track down small-timers like herself. As long as she created false trails she could ply her trade with minimum interference.

  For instance, on each arrest report she gave her name a different way. Delta A. Porter. Del Porter. Delice Portman. Delta Portman. Sometimes the addresses matched. Sometimes the phone numbers. And the social security number was the same every time. McCarthy wrote it all down and hit the streets.

  McCarthy started with the most recent address. Empty. A street kid told him Porter had moved out four months before. McCarthy relied on an old trick to keep the trail fresh. He went to the closest post office, paid a dollar, and got a copy of the change of address form she’d filed. The Sunset Court, 5350 Waverly Ave., Unit 22.

  In Southern California dump apartment complexes sported perky names like the Sunset Court. This was a classic example of the species: two stories, faded pink doors, rusty iron railings, dingy curtains drawn against the sun, an empty swimming pool with four rusty beer cans floating in the green scum, not to mention the graffiti-defiled palm trees.

  McCarthy missed Porter by two days. A next-door neighbor told him she and her boyfriend, Eugene Friendly, had split in the middle of the night after two plainclothes police officers had paid them a visit. Friendly was a violent ex-convict who used the name “Tabor” because it gave him a nastier image.

  After much cajoling the neighbor told McCarthy that Tabor was owed a lot of money. He and Porter were waiting for the cash at a motel out in Red Valley, a community that abutted the desert.

  Which made McCarthy shiver the entire drive out. Knocking on the hideaway of a man like Tabor was like petting a sleeping rottweiler. He might roll over, slaver, and show his belly. He might lunge for the throat. McCarthy tried to keep his mind off the latter possibility by studying how the city changed on the fifteen-mile drive along the Boulevard.

  Near Sixty-sixth Street the shops ran to honky-tonk wares: rattan furniture, adult paraphernalia, cheep booze, rolled tacos (three for a dollar), comic books, fast Chinese, New Age books, model airplanes, the odd plumbing or automobile supply store. Brassy in the sunshine, but benign.

  After dark, he knew, it took on a decidedly garish tone as women like Carol Alice Gentry strutted in the neon glow offering hoots to the bored, the frustrated, and the lonely.

  Farther out, near Ninety-first, the street shed its tawdry attire. Now ivy and ice plant bordered the sidewalks. Joggers ran by well-trimmed palms and eucalyptus. Upscale shops, too: specialty goods, fodder for the upper-middle-class neighborhoods that spread out through the canyons north and south of the street.

  Gentry had lived out there about a mile in a condo she shouldn’t have been able to afford. Karen Rivers’s story this morning said Gentry had grown up dirt-poor. Her mother left home when she was six. Her father died when she was twelve. She lived with her aunt and uncle until running away to live with friends at sixteen. Still no answer to where she’d gotten the $30,000 down payment for a condo and the cash for a purebred Arabian.

  Where the Boulevard became Route 93, the condo complexes and the upscale strip malls gave way to scrub brush, the odd twenty-four-hour store and battered trailer homes set back from the road. Here and there swayback horses stood unmoving in makeshift paddocks.

  He almost missed the Lantern Motel. The gray building with faded green trim melted into the screen of live oak that grew up on all four sides. He skidded to a stop on the shoulder, backed up, and pulled into the lot.

  A Korean man about twenty lounged behind the office counter thumbing a dog-eared edition of Penthouse. It was the pet of the year issue and the clerk was studying her plumbing with such intensity that he didn’t even look up at McCarthy’s request. Mr. Friendly, the clerk said, had rented unit fifteen.

  McCarthy thought about Tabor’s violent streak. The razor teeth and the soft flesh at the throat. He found a pay phone on the far side of the building near the ice machine. He called the Lantern. It took the clerk fifteen rings to break away from the pet of the year, answer, and connect him to Mr. Friendly’s room.

  “Yeah?” It was a woman.

  “Delta Porter?”

  Dead silence, then a whinny. “You got the wrong number, man.”

  “Don’t hang up. My name’s Gideon McCarthy. I’m a reporter with The Post. I’m outside your room at the pay phone. I want to talk about Carol Alice Gentry.”

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.” He heard the phone crash to the floor. The curtain in the window of unit fifteen fluttered. McCarthy waved.

  A man came on th
e phone. “Who the fuck is this?”

  McCarthy repeated himself.

  “She don’t want to talk, man.”

  “Look, Tabor. It’s Tabor right?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Tabor, I’m not a cop. I’m working on a story about how Gentry got killed.”

  “We know how she got killed, man. You think we’re sitting in this shithole for our health?”

  McCarthy’s heart skipped a beat. They knew who killed Gentry! He thought fast and spoke slowly. “If you know how she got killed, then we need to talk, don’t we? I heard some police officers came to see you, right?”

  Tabor didn’t answer.

  “Think of talking to me as insurance,” McCarthy said. “Something happens, I tell the world.”

  Tabor didn’t respond for so long McCarthy thought the line had been cut. Then, “Door’s open. Come in slow.”

  Delta Porter sat cross-legged on the unmade bed, a too-thin, coal-black woman in yellow terry cloth shorts and a matching tank top. She smoked a cigarette. She watched him with a chill, hard expression. A radio playing rap music competed with the chug and wheeze of an air conditioner losing its battle with the midday heat. McCarthy stepped inside. The barrel of the gun set cold against the bone in back of his left ear. The door snapped shut behind him. The only light came from a small table lamp. The reporter swallowed hard. No one from the paper knew he was here.

  “The wallet?” Tabor said.

  “Front right pocket.”

  A thick hand rummaged for the wallet. The gun pressed hard against the back of his head. The wallet tumbled end over end through the air onto Porter’s lap. She fumbled through the billfold, found his press ID, looked at it, his driver’s license, and his credit cards. She took a twenty-dollar bill from the billfold and slid it into her bra. She tossed the wallet onto the table. “He’s who he says he is.”

  The hammer of the gun made a greasy clicking noise. Then the barrel wasn’t there anymore. “Sit down,” Tabor ordered.

  McCarthy took unsteady steps toward one of the two lime green chairs set around the beat-up table. “Nice way to greet your guests.”

  “We don’t get many,” Tabor said, coming out of the shadows to sit next to Porter.

  Tabor was as white as Porter was black. Just shy of six feet, his head was closely shaved. He had bad teeth. Three gold hoops pierced his left ear. A fourth pierced his right nipple. A jagged scar ran from that nipple five inches down toward his sternum. He wore black gym shorts. He had a huge upper body and scrawny legs. He rested the pistol on his thigh. The muzzle aimed at McCarthy’s stomach.

  “What do you know?” Tabor asked.

  He told them about Gentry testifying before the grand jury, about the break-in at her condo, about the videotape with Billy Kemper, about the second break-in and the beating the young cowboy had received. They listened impassively.

  When he finished, McCarthy asked, “What do you know?”

  Tabor elbowed Porter in the ribs. “Go ahead. You heard it.”

  She threw Tabor a dirty look. She had a husky, singsong lilt to her voice, as if once she’d lived in the islands. “First off, I didn’t know Carol Alice too much. She wasn’t what you call a regular, you know? I seen her on the Boulevard sometimes, but I wasn’t her friend or nothing.

  “Anyhow,” Porter continued, “one night she pulls up to my corner in a white Camaro with that cowboy. Asks me do I wants to party? I look at her and say, who’s paying this trick. She says she is. Said it was a present for the little cattle rustler. Whole night, $300. It was $200 until I saw the camera.”

  McCarthy wrote that down. “Go on.”

  “So after that I don’t see her for a long time. Nothin’ until she starts spouting off in the papers. I figured that woman’s crazy saying all that stuff. So a couple of uniform cops want a little head every now and then. It’s a cost of business.”

  Tabor got up from the bed. He crossed the room, reached into a bag, and pulled out a bottle of vodka. He leaned against the wall and sipped from it. “Get to it.”

  “Who’s telling the story here?” she complained. She turned back to McCarthy. “So she turns up dead out there in the desert where the other working girls were found, right?”

  “Right,” McCarthy said.

  “I figures she tricked the weirdo, that’s it. Until”—she clicked her fingernails together nervously—“until I sees Dusk on the Boulevard a few nights ago, in front of that Hop ’n Go Burger place near Sixty-ninth Street. Dusk’s a long-timer like me. She starts crying when she sees me, saying she just read the paper and she knows who offed Carol.”

  “Who?”

  “Like the papers said, maybe cops. Only it was.”

  McCarthy’s palms went clammy. “Did she say who did it?”

  “All she said was that during a sweep she heard cops talking about Carol getting killed.”

  “That’s all she told you?”

  “Isn’t that enough? I’m ready to pee my pants at any noise outside.”

  “What about the circumstances? Where did she hear it? Who said it?”

  Porter lit another cigarette. “I didn’t want to know, you know?”

  “Where’s Dusk now?” McCarthy asked.

  “Probably in a rathole somewhere like us. Told me she was going deep.”

  McCarthy looked at his notes. “Who were the cops who came to your place?”

  “Homicide,” Porter said. “They was looking for Dusk.”

  “How would they know to talk to you about her?”

  Tabor burped. “Because she’s got the biggest yap in town.”

  “Hey screw you, Eugene.”

  Tabor raised his fist. “I told you don’t call me Eugene.”

  Porter jeered: “Hates his name, so he changes it. Tabor. Like he was a rock star or something.”

  “I told you not to dick with me about that!” Tabor yelled.

  “Then don’t call me no fucking big mouth, Friendly boy,” she shouted back. “I was trying to do the sisters a favor. When Dusk split, I figured I better tell some of the girls so’d they be cool around the cops. I mean one of them’s a killer, you know?”

  “Only half the working girls are snitches,” Tabor added, cooling down. “And they all start pointing at Delta.”

  “Did you know the detectives who came to the house?”

  “Never seen ’em before,” she said. “Us working girls know the vice boys.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “Told her to keep her big mouth shut until they checked all this out,” Tabor said. “Said spreading rumors like that could get someone hurt. And they wanted to know where to find Dusk. But it’s like we said, she’s in a rathole somewhere.”

  It took another fifteen minutes, but he got some information about Dusk’s unprofessional life. Dusk’s real name was Christine Evers. She was in her early thirties. White. Long brown hair. Hung with a guy named the Milkman. A biker.

  “A thin, wiry guy with a missing upper front tooth,” Porter said. “I know she takes care of his mama sometime. His mama’s brains is scrambled and Milkman don’t like her being in one of them nursing homes.”

  “Any idea where they lived?”

  Porter and Tabor shook their heads. “Moved around, like us.”

  McCarthy tasted disgust in his mouth. This world, with the nicknames and the aliases and the ratholes and the pierced nipples, was confusing and degrading. Which was how he’d come to view Carol Alice Gentry. “Any idea what the Milkman’s real name is?”

  Porter brayed, “Milk. His last name’s Milk. Get it? I don’t know the first name.”

  “Thanks,” McCarthy said. “You’ve been a real help.”

  “You ain’t going to print what we said, are you?” Porter asked.

  What was it about people? They know you’re a reporter. You talk with them for more than an hour and then they ask you if you’re going to write it.

  “If I find Dusk and she confirms what you said, you bet
I’m going to write it.”

  Porter looked at Tabor. “Eugene, honey, maybe we don’t wants to wait until your money comes to head for Dallas.”

  “The name’s Tabor!”

  Swingo …

  THREE HOURS LATER, THE Post’s chief political reporter was winding up to kick his desk chair. On impact, Kent Jackson’s big toe snapped. He didn’t notice. He wound up and kicked again. The right brace of his paisley suspenders popped. His oval, horn-rimmed glasses leapt off his nose. They broke on the floor.

  “That harlot!” Kent Jackson screamed. “That harlot!”

  Jackson’s face contorted scarlet like a toddler uncorking a tantrum. He tore at his copy of the metro section of The Beacon until it lay in shreds at his feet. He stomped on the pile, then stalked from the room, throwing punches at file cabinets as he went.

  Isabel Perez, dressed in black slacks and a white cotton sweater, sprinted toward Prentice LaFontaine clutching her own copy of The Beacon’s B section. “There is a God!”

  She spread the paper out on LaFontaine’s desk. The standalone picture in the middle of the page showed a pretty young woman drinking wine with a handsome man.

  “So?” News said, blanching at the sight of the wine. He still suffered the effects of last night’s debauch.

  “So!” crowed Perez. “She’s Patti Jackson.”

  “Kent’s wife?”

  “None other!”

  “And the guy?”

  “This is where it’s delicious. He’s their minister!”

  LaFontaine swooned. “Has anyone a hand fan? I believe I might faint!”

  Perez made a show of fanning him with an imaginary ostrich plume.

  News jerked upright to study the picture again. “Did he know?”

  “Given the meltdown that just occurred, I’ll bet he didn’t have a clue,” Perez gloated. “He made some remark a few weeks back about them having a few marriage problems. But nothing like this. I mean, the minister?”

  LaFontaine jiggled his knee, trying to see the gossip angles. This was the best vein of dirt to surface inside The Post in months. His mind raced: marital discord? Violence perhaps? No, no, Jackson was too much of a Christian. Therapy? Now there was a possibility. He’d call Gertie in personnel and put her on watch for a possible request for psychological counseling.