I
got breakfast at an outdoor café in the Cross, keeping my eyes low over the bacon and egg roll, a little worried I might see someone I knew. I’d spent some of my younger years as a cop here on transfer nights, Mardi Gras and New Year’s and Christmas Eve when the evening air would awaken under the setting sun, become electrified with impending trouble. Busting heads and throwing transvestites off their heels, pulling drunk girls apart and sending them sprawling in the wet with hands full of other girls’ hair. It had been a fun time.
I used to have a good little side business in those days of ripping off the right kind of nobody dealers for a little smack every now and then. I’d sell it out in the suburbs to my neighbors, good people who only wanted something to make the backyard barbecue with the in-laws a little more bearable. This was when I lived with my first wife, when I didn’t know she was pregnant yet, when I was sort of happy. As happy as I had been up until that point, I suppose, but when you’re young you can fool yourself pretty easily into thinking you’re happy. First time you have money, you’re rich. First time you live alone, you’re cool. First time you sell a neighbor a gram, their awe at what you do. You’re a double agent, a fucking gangster.
I wondered about it for a while, how stupid I’d been. I ordered another coffee, waited for someone to come along. In a little notebook on my knee, hidden from the eye of passing junkies, I doodled and made notes and underlined things I’d found out about Sunday White. Pulled little photocopied pictures of her out from where I’d stuck them between the pages, mug shots I’d managed to dig out of the Jane Doe files and more blurry group shots a librarian had found in the public records. About ten photographs of Sharon Elizabeth White existed in total. I looked at her face. She looked like a fun girl. A fun and dangerous girl. Little smirk, like she knew I was looking for her and thought it was a game.
I put Sunday away after a while and thought about other woman-shaped bags of trouble I knew. I settled on Eden as the sun rose over me, cast its gaze on the empty public library, the clouded front windows of the injecting room. I worried about her, then didn’t. That seemed to be how it was going to go from now on.
Around ten a guy came and sat near me. His belly was hanging over his crotch in two distinct bulges side by side, as though he’d been stitched in the navel to keep the fat bundle from collapsing at his feet. Purple feet, ankles flaking, yellow toes. He fished in his pockets for a cigarette lighter, legs spread wide to accommodate the bulge, and after watching him for a minute or so I reached into my pocket and took out my own, tossed it onto the table in front of him. I don’t smoke anymore but I meet a lot of people who do. He grunted thanks, held the flame dangerously close to his gray beard. A junkie girl shuffled into the little outdoor area with us, greasy black hair raked up into a bun above her pinched face. She held out a curled hand for change and whined like a cat, lip snarled in discomfort.
“Yeah, yeah.” I cut the speech short and filled her hand with silver. The old man watched, looked after her as she dragged herself on.
“Wastin’ your time,” he growled after a while.
“Ah well.”
“Anyone feeds those lot gets scammed. Would have thought you’d know better than that, being a fucking heeler.”
I smirked. Half at his picking me for a cop, half at my own good fortune at finding someone in my first couple of hours of waiting who was street-smart and ancient enough to have been around when they still called cops blue heelers. Maybe this was the guy I had been waiting for.
“I gotta keep myself in business, haven’t I?” I said. “Spend money to make money.”
“She’ll make you money. Maybe she’ll make the council money when they use her for landfill.” The old man nodded after the junkie girl as she lurched too fast down the other side of the street, completing the circuit. “Gonna put that straight in her arm like she’s playing the slots.”
“What else is new?”
“Nothing.” He eyed me for a while. I sat back and sipped the coffee.
“What is it then?” he asked. “Those Lebs again? Those drive-by Lebs?”
“Nah.” I shifted my chair a little closer, not too close, because I didn’t want to smell him and he didn’t want to be seen with me. “Cold case, actually. An old thing. From way back.”
“You’re a bit fresh to be lookin’ at old things from way back.”
“Maybe.”
The old guy snorted. Spat. The Asians running the café all frowned in unison.
“You might call this a private venture,” I said. “A freelance job.”
“Freelance . . . private . . . bullshit. You jackos talk a lot of bullshit, y’know that?” he coughed.
“Maybe you can help me out.”
“Maybe you can go fuck a dog.”
“I’m trying to find someone who would’ve been around when Hades Archer was king of the castle.”
The old guy laughed, let his fat head loll to the side, raining skin flakes.
“You really are a fucking idiot. I thought you looked like one, but now I know for sure.”
“You could be right.”
The old man leaned close, hung a crusty arm over the stainless-steel table.
“No one on this street gonna talk to you about the Good Lord. You might be lucky if someone don’t disappear you through a back door just for asking. Bet you didn’t know they do magic shows here, too. One minute you’re poking the wrong eyes. The next minute . . .” He made a half-slurping, half-sucking noise. Plucked the air.
“What if I told them the Good Lord sent me?”
“You’d be telling a lie.”
I leaned on the table, causing it to rock back toward me on its uneven legs. “I’m trying to find Sharon White.”
The old man looked at me.
“Sunday.”
“Sunday?” He laughed, hacked, coughed, swallowed. Laughed again. “Oh son, you’ll kill me. You’ll kill me dead.”
“I’m serious.”
“You must’a been sent by Hades. Because ain’t no one else ever believed that black bitch went anywhere worth looking, ’cept for Hades.”
“So you knew her, then?”
“Everybody knew her. She was the town cat.”
“Well, where’d she go, then?”
“Oh Jesus, that’s funny.”
I took the lighter from between us. Put it in my pocket. The old man’s yellow eyes were leaking into the creases at the corners.
“Thanks for your help.” I stood.
“Look, boy-o, Sunday fucked off someplace up north. Years ago. Years and years and years ago.” He looked at me with pity. “I hate to tell you, but you’re on the tail of a wild goose you wouldn’t want to catch. If she hasn’t done away with herself simply by being a miserable little shit, she’ll be up in Darwin with her jigaboo people surrounded by sprogs and dogs. I just hope Mr. Archer ain’t paid you much to learn he loved a no-good mutt, because anyone coulda told him that. No one told him, though. Because you didn’t tell Hades Archer nothing, not back then.”
The old man considered his own words, rapped the tabletop with his knuckles. His smile sunk, slowly.
“Matter of fact, you don’t tell Hades Archer that sort of thing nowadays neither,” he continued rapping, looked at the street, looked at me. “You might try Pussy Cats. I don’t know. I gotta go. I got people to see.”
He got up and walked away on old bones. Before the Asians could chase him I waved to them, pulled out my wallet.
Pussy Cats smelled like pussy cats, which was kind of poetic, I thought. It had that sort of wet, milky smell a cat gives a house, tainted sharply with the acid that comes out of them, something loved turned vile. The crowd there, three men at the edge of the stage and a troupe of groggy Greek teens waiting to go into the private viewing rooms, were undoubtedly leftovers from the night before, leaning on the black walls, sagging in the plastic chairs.
The meathead at the door picked me for a copper and shut the gate between the reception and the rest of the bar before I could get in. He hit a buzzer to call his boss, stared me down, didn’t say hello. I wandered on the checkerboard tiles, slapped my notebook in my palm, and stared back. It took a long while for the boss to come down. There was no telling what he was trying to hide up there on the second floor. Guns. Drugs. Underage girls. Underage boys. Exotic animals. Bad cash. Boosted jewelry. Counterfeit sneakers. I was just about to bang on the desk when he popped out of a hidden panel behind it like a squat, hairy cuckoo bird.
“How can I help, Detective . . . ?”
“Bennett.”
“How can I help, Detective Benice?”
“I’m after a private word.”
“Got a warrant?”
“A warrant isn’t warranted. It’s just a private word.”
“Well, we’re all about privates here, aren’t we, Chase?” He looked at the meathead. The meathead didn’t look back. “Why don’t you come upstairs?”
I followed him through the invisible panel. I bent. He didn’t. I thought about Jackie Rye and just how many of the world’s degenerates were undersize, narrow-shouldered, bobble-headed. He was well-dressed at least. The square shoulders of a very expensive suit brushed the walls of the tunnel ahead of me.
We emerged into another foyer. The backpacker hotel next door. Ingenious. There were probably more tunnels for shuffling girls to and fro, shoving them into rooms rented by apparently legitimate guests from out of the country, rooms that couldn’t be busted into using the same warrant issued to search the strip club. The system was common knowledge to cops, but judges never issued warrants for private premises no matter what rumors there were of secret tunnels or magic doors. The trick had always been catching the rats before they fled.
“I should introduce myself,” the wiry old man said when we arrived in an upstairs bedroom. “I’m Bobby Springs.”
“I’m well aware,” I said. I hadn’t been. I sat in the wooden chair by the aluminum-foiled window. “A friend of mine tells me you might be able to help me with some ancient history.”
Bobby adjusted the sleeves of his coat.
“I can’t imagine what friend of mine might also be a friend of yours.”
“Well, friends are funny things.” I folded my arms. “I’m trying to chase down a missing girl.”
“I thought this was only a private word. I’m very friendly with Metro Missing Persons. And they always bring a warrant to see my girls.”
“The girl I’m looking for isn’t one of yours. She might have been one of yours, years ago, maybe. I don’t know. All I know is you seem to be the guy to talk to about girls who go missing in the Cross.”
A woman came into the room without knocking. White-skinned and bruised on her thighs, a redhead who’d tried to make herself more appealing with a bad black dye job and only succeeded in making her red eyebrows stand out like thin strips of fire. She had a cold sore the size of a baked bean on her lip. She put a glass on the table next to me and one in Bobby’s hand. Bobby didn’t look at her.
“When are we talking about?”
“Late seventies.”
“So around the time your mama and your dada knocked boots and made their own little man of the law? Why on earth would that interest you?”
“Let’s not bring anyone’s mother into this.”
“A bit of a blast from the past. Now I’m curious.”
“Good. Were you running girls back then?”
“I was running girls in the womb.”
“Remember one named Sunday White?”
Bobby thought for a long while, then laughed, slapped both his thighs.
“Who the hell is looking for Sunday?”
“Jesus,” I said. “Everybody seems to know this bird. ’
“Oh, she was a bit of a fixture I suppose. Iconic. A real sharp hustler. She was just everywhere, all the time—parties, bust ups, big news on the street. Not that anyone particularly wanted her around, you know?” He thought fondly for a while, looking at the floor. “If there was a spare lap she was in it, and it pissed people off, I guess. You always remember the ones who annoy you. Who wants her? Not the cops?”
“No.”
“Can’t be Hades.”
“It’s the finding that’s important, not the looking.”
“Lord have mercy, that’s a strange request. You know I never heard that girl called Sunday White. Didn’t even know she had a last name.”
“Well I’m glad you remember her.” I sighed, released steam. “Can we talk about where she went? I don’t have all day to shoot the breeze, believe it or not.”
“I wouldn’t have the faintest. Sunday wasn’t one of mine.”
“Who did she belong to?”
“No one.” Bobby waved a dismissive hand at the street. “You might as well ask who the fucking moon belongs to. That’s how Sunday was, like a moon. You look around. There she is. Where is she now? Oh, over there. Always somewhere. Drifting, drifting. Can’t catch her. Close, but miles away.”
“Bit of a wild card.”
“You couldn’t take her on. I always thought it’d be nice. There was a good market for darkies who had a bit of pretty to them but you can’t keep ’em, they’re not the sort. Can’t read a fucking watch. Go off for a fifteen-minute break and come back three weeks later expecting to be put right back on. Where were you? Oh, you know, walkabout. Walkabout my ass. It’s the same now as it was then. You want a girl you know’s going to be there when you wake up? Get yourself a Russian. Old World Russian girls. They forget to make the bed when they’re four years old and their daddies kick the shit out of them. That’s why.”
“Good to know,” I said.
“It’s all experience,” he sniffed and leaned back in his chair, sipped the drink. “You make mistakes.”
“What happened to Sunday?”
“I had to guess, I’d say she took a hot shot and someone bagged her.”
“You wouldn’t have heard about a thing like that?”
“It wouldn’t have been breaking news.”
“What did you do with your rubbish back then?”
“Oh, Christ, Detective, how long’s a piece of string?”