Jane considered her words carefully before she spoke. “What do you know about Chesterfield cigarettes?”
“God, that’s an old brand. When I think of Chesterfield cigarettes, I think of how they used to sponsor radio and TV shows back in the 50s and 60s. You know, the face of Chesterfield that I remember the most was Jack Webb from
Dragnet
. Didn’t Jack used to come on at the end of the show and tell you to buy a carton or two?”
“That was before my time. I’m a child of the 70s.” Jane stood up.
“I won’t hold that against you. What’s a thirteen-year-or-so age difference, anyway?”
“Less than twenty-five,” she said with a knowing smile.
“See you later, Chopper.”
“Chopper?”
He held his palm over the bar. “You hover like a helicopter. I think it fits.”
The familiar aroma of catnip doobie wafted across the backyard of the B&B. Jane’s heightened aromatic sensors started detecting it when she was outside the front gate. She walked through the backyard and followed the sweet smoky smell to the strip of land shaded with trees and bushes. Seated on the ground with her back against the tree and listening to her iPod, Mollie didn’t see Jane as she moved toward her. Jane lightly tapped the girl on her shoulder, causing Mollie to jump.
“
Oi
!” she yelped, quickly removing the earbuds. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that!” She dropped the catnip joint on the wet earth.
Jane recovered it and snuffed an errant ember with the toe of her cowboy boot. “I see you’re still self-medicating,” she said and handed the catnip back to Mollie.
“And I see you’re still mud wrestling on the side,” Mollie motioned toward Jane’s shirt. “How does all this
shmuts
find you?”
She looked down at her shirt and realized that she had two identical ones upstairs in a pile. “Your parents have a washing machine?”
“It’s broken. Should be fixed Monday or Tuesday.”
“Is there a cleaners nearby?”
“Twenty miles south. And they’re only open half a day on Saturday and closed on Sunday.”
Jane figured she’d be using her bathtub that night to wash clothes. “How well do you know the Van Gordens?”
“Wow. That was an abrupt shift. You should try
schmoozing
with me before you yank me under the third-degree light.” Mollie took a quick puff on the herbal cigarette.
“Just answer the question.”
“I know them well enough to know I don’t want to know them.”
“Because of what Jake told you or because of what you experienced?”
She took another hit of the catnip. “Mostly what Jake told me. But I wasn’t too impressed by what I saw of them. Carol’s a dr one…”
“She didn’t know you and Jake split up.”
“No shock there. She’s not very connected to the earthly plane. She’s a white-bread
shikseh.
She wasn’t rude or anything. She just wasn’t…”
“Aware?”
Mollie looked at Jane. The kid was warming up to her. “Yeah. Exactly. As for Jake’s dad… he’s a
schmuck
. A
shmendrik.
A tool. I don’t trust him.” Mollie sat back down on the ground.
Jane followed her lead, if only to mirror the kid’s actions and make her feel more comfortable so she would possibly divulge more info. It was a classic manipulative move and it usually worked. “Why don’t you trust him?”
“The few times I’d go over to Jake’s house and bump into his dad, he was too involved in his own little world to even say ‘hi.’ When he wasn’t checking to see how many people were admiring his YouTube clip of their house and returning emails from prospective clients, he was either checking himself out in the mirror or driving off to meet a customer.”
“I got the impression he wasn’t interested in generating tons of work for himself. Kinda like if it happened, it happened, but he wasn’t going to break a sweat.”
“Yeah. They have tons of family
gelt
.”
Jane didn’t understand. “Is that like family
guilt
?”
“Family
money
.”
“Who’s side has the
gelt
?”
“Jake’s dad.”
“Where’d the money come from?”
“Not sure. I think it was like architecture or design. The artistic gene is in Jake’s blood… just like his dad.” Jane wouldn’t call Bailey “artistic.” Maybe gaudy and garish, but not much artistry there. “But even though he didn’t have to work, his dad was always acting like he had some big deal that he had to follow up
on.”
“You ever see Bailey working on any of those deals?”
“I wasn’t there that much.”
“What did Jake tell you?”
“Why are you asking me all this?”
“Because I have to work every angle there is.” There was no way Jane was going to tip her hand to the kid, not knowing how well she could keep her trap shut.
“All Jake ever told me was that his dad was too busy for him. And anyway, I’m not sure his dad liked me that much. There was a
broygis
between his dad and me.” Jane needed a translation. “We weren’t on speaking terms.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I stood up for Jake when his dad put him down. You know how Jake liked to dress? The vintage shirts and fedoras? I thought it looked cool. It’s why I liked him. He wasn’t afraid to look different. But his dad
hated
Jake’s style. Jake would put on one of those shirts or a fedora and his dad would get this disgusted look on his face and just
freak out
on him.”
“Freak out how?”
“Just totally go postal on him! It’s like it triggered something deep down. He’d tell Jake he looked stupid and how the shirts made his small stature appear more obvious. His dad was
always
on him because he was shorter and not as developed as other fifteen-year-olds…told him he should lift weights like he did.”
“So when did you stick up for him?”
Mollie took another hit on the dying catnip joint. “One day, his dad was on his case again and said, ‘I used to be small like you but look at me now!’ And I just couldn’t stand it any longer. I said, ‘Maybe Jake doesn’t want to look like you! Maybe he prefers to dress and think for himself!’” Mollie let out a sigh. “That didn’t go over well. Jake thought the comment was great. He thought I had
chutzpah.
But his dad, big
putz
that he is, totally acted like a damn woman. Got all uptight and stomped out like
he was on the rag. After that, he wouldn’t so much as say ‘hi’ to me again.” Mollie squashed out the catnip doobie into the dirt. “
Then,
the two-faced
drek
suddenly starts initiating conversations with my dad on the street… always just the two of them.”
“How do you know they were talking?”
“It’s a small down, Jane. Word gets around.”
“And then your dad tells you to break up with Jake?”
“Yeah,” Mollie hung her head.
“Because you were rude to Bailey?”
“Guess so.”
“You’re not buying that?” Mollie shook her head. “What do you suspect?”
“I think Mr. Van Gorden is threatened by me. I don’t get the sense that he respects women that much. I think he tolerates us…the same way he tolerates his mindless wife. I think he decided to punish Jake by taking me away from him. I think he told my dad that I wasn’t welcome in his home anymore and that it was best if we just broke up. And so my dad did what Mr. Van Gorden asked. But I know that when my dad sat me down to give me the news, he seemed kinda disturbed by the whole thing. When he said, ‘It would never work out between Jake and me,’ I knew he wanted to tell me more but he didn’t.”
“But you’re fifteen. You’re just friends. It’s not like you’re engaged.”
“
Exactly
. The whole thing seemed kinda blown outta proportion. I think it really sent Jake off the deep end. You can’t have someone controlling your life like that who you don’t even like and not feel like your life is fucked six ways to Sunday!”
“You think Jake wanted to hang himself because of you?”
“That would make me sound pretty arrogant, wouldn’t it? That a boy would want to kill himself because of me? Sorry. I don’t think I have that kind of power over boys. I mean, come on, look at me, eh? I think it was…something about his life he just couldn’t face.”
Jane thought of the sketchpad with the animated drawing
of the man in the prison cell hanging himself. Was Jake drawing a picture of himself in the process of killing himself to maybe see what it would look like before he did the deed? If so, why on earth would he draw himself as a middle-aged man with a somewhat jutting jaw wearing one of those vintage shirts? God, Jane wanted to show Mollie that damn sketchpad and see what she thought. But that was off the table for now. “What couldn’t Jake face?” Mollie licked her lips and turned away. Her jaw clenched. “What is it, Mollie?”
“How in the fuck should I know?!” Mollie yelled, her voice choked with sadness.
It was a classic reaction, especially for a kid—exercise a healthy, stressful pause and then snap back with an emotive response. It was the way a kid who knows something and feels the world on her shoulders reacts when she doesn’t feel she can expose all the cards on the table. “What do you know, Mollie?”
“I don’t know anything!” She looked Jane hard in the eye. “I only know what I feel.” She started off but Jane held her back.
“So tell me what you feel.”
She hung her head. “It doesn’t matter now,” she said sadly. Mollie shook off Jane’s soft grip and trod back to the house.
It was strange, Jane thought. In less than a few hours, two people closely linked to Jake told her they didn’t “know anything.” Jane figured that if they didn’t know for sure, they sure as hell suspected something big.
CHAPTER 18
The clothesline in Jane’s bedroom was starting to get crowded with the new clues she’d gathered. Directly after the mysterious
I BEARED MY SOUL AND STILL YOU IGNORE ME???
clue, Jane clipped one of the Chesterfield cigarettes to the
clothesline. Next to the notepaper with
1401 Imperial
written on it, she attached the short stack of info that Hank copied for her.
Jane stood back and read the clothesline like a book from left to right. Until somebody proved it to her otherwise, she was convinced that this was a story—albeit a complex one—and all she had to do to figure it out was to be as smart as the kidnapper and get into his skin.
Into,
not under. That’s the way Jane always worked. She could stare at a photo or a bloody crime scene and eventually, there would be that intuitive nexus that bonded her with either the perp or the victims. She’d feel things that didn’t belong to her. When she worked the tragic Stover and Lawrence cases nearly two years prior, the numinous nudges of the dead haunted her and drove her to dive into a bottle of Jack Daniels every night. The booze numbed the pain and darkness that enveloped those two cases. But now she was over fifteen months sober and she had to allow the heartbeat of the person behind the clues to resonate within her. She had to open her eyes and hear what he was desperately trying to tell her.
Desperate
. That was the word that Jane kept coming back to again and again. The desperation permeated each clue. She focused on one clue and then the next, and felt herself going deeper within herself. The world around her fell away as the tips of her fingers prickled. Yes, she was moving toward him. She didn’t budge an inch, not wanting to jar the connection. Without warning, a wellspring of grief engulfed her and tears fell from her eyes without any concrete emotion to support them. It was unmitigated sadness, fear and abandonment. Jane gasped and shot out of the moment.
She sat down on her bed, trying to sort out what just happened. From the way it felt, she wondered if she was sensing what Jake was going through. But the more she pondered that prospect, the less it felt true. That profound anguish belonged to the kidnapper exclusively. The idea was repellant at first because she was taught the black-and-white dogma of perp and victim.
But she’d learned through working the case with Kit Clark the year before that the perp can become the victim and vice versa within the same lifetime. It was an acknowledgment that Jane fought but had to accept, even though the comfort of black-and-white realities was easier to allow.
She stared at the Chesterfield cigarette on the clothesline and opened the desk drawer to reveal the rest of the cigarettes she found in the forest that day along with the vintage-style ashtray and crushed burgundy
Chesterfield 101
pack. Chesterfield cigarettes weren’t exactly her generation, and she was grateful that Hank gave her the hat tip about the celebrity history of the brand. Turning to her computer, she entered
CHESTERFIELD JACK WEBB DRAGNET
in the search engine and came up with a list of choices. It seemed that the actor was tightly affiliated with the cigarette brand when
Dragnet
was a radio show. While other TV and film stars such as Ronald Reagan and James Dean pimped the cigarette in ads and commercials, Jack Webb seemed to have a longer connection with the product. Jane easily found a vintage newspaper ad of Jack Webb promoting Chesterfield. She hooked up her portable printer that she’d thrown into her duffel bag and printed off the page that showed Webb in a grey tweed jacket, black tie and plastered trademark black hair holding a lit Chesterfield cigarette and smiling.
She clipped the page on the clothesline next to the cigarette and stared at the latest entry on the
clue line
. It was as if Webb was teasing Jane as he comfortably held the cigarette in his left hand. “Look at me,” she felt he was saying. “I can smoke, but you can’t.” Her eyes drifted momentarily to the lone American Spirit cigarette she brought with her.
The temptation
. The face of her struggle. Then she looked at the drawer, full of Chesterfield cigarettes. It was suddenly cigarette heaven. But the idea of smoking the evidence brought her back to reality. She picked up one of the Chesterfields and noted the clear black mark of a pen encircling each cigarette about one millimeter from the tip. Obviously, whoever took the time to draw on each of the
twenty cylinders wanted to make sure that whoever found the clues would clearly see this and do some research. Jane started entering everything she could think of that related to the black mark in the Internet search engine. But none of the websites proved fruitful. By chance, she entered,
MILLIMETER CHESTERFIELD CIGARETTE
and a cascade of results greeted her.