The Cold Nowhere (26 page)

‘If you get another text, I better be your first call,’ Stride said.

‘Yeah, sure, whatever.’

‘I’m hearing about STDs making the rounds among the Duluth one-percenters. Any of your girls need a doctor?’

‘You think they’d tell me about it?’ Dickes asked. ‘Most of the girls insist on condoms, but some of them will go bareback for a few extra bucks. I don’t want to know the gory details.’

‘I need names of the girls who went on the posh jobs,’ Stride said.

‘You already got two. Cat and Brandy. The other two are real private. College girls who don’t want to advertise, you know?’

‘Names,’ he repeated.

Dickes swore. He gave Stride the names of two more girls. ‘Are we done?’

Stride gestured at the cell phone in his pocket. ‘Your phone, too. Give it to me.’

‘Fuck, no! Are you crazy?’

Stride looked at Serena. ‘Did you hear him admit to solicitation a minute ago?’

‘I did,’ Serena said.

‘Hey, come on, you said you didn’t give a shit about that!’ Dickes protested.

‘I changed my mind. Now give me the phone.’

Dickes yanked it from his pocket and slapped it on the bed. ‘Here, fine. You’re killing me. Now get out of here while I still have a job.’

Serena sat down on the other side of him. ‘Not quite yet. We’re not done. First tell me what you know about Margot Huizenfelt.’

‘I had nothing to do with that! I don’t know what happened to her!’

‘You ever talk to her?’ Serena asked.

‘Yeah, once. That was months ago.’

‘What did she want?’

Dickes hesitated. He bit his lip.

‘Don’t start having memory lapses, Curt,’ Stride told him.

‘Look, she was asking about the same shit as you. Whether I knew about rich guys looking for escorts.’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘I told her to get the hell out of my face. I told her jack shit, that’s what I told her.’

‘When did you last see her?’ Serena asked.

Dickes squirmed. The blanket on the bed was wet now, because of his sodden clothes. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘Do you not get what’s going on here?’ Serena demanded. ‘Margot’s missing. She may be dead. If we find out you know something, and you didn’t tell us, do you have any idea what trouble is going to rain down on your head? It’ll make solicitation look like shoplifting a candy bar.’

‘I told you, I don’t know what happened to her.’

‘You know something.’

Dickes’s nervous eyes flicked to his cell phone. Stride didn’t miss the glance. ‘Who’d you talk to, Curt?’

The kid was sweating. He smoothed his hair, and it popped back up. ‘It was the truck, man! I saw Margot’s truck! I just wanted to make sure he knew who she was. That’s it. He told me not to worry.’

‘Who?’ Stride asked.

‘Lenny! I saw Margot driving a new SUV from Lowball’s place on Miller Hill.’

Stride looked at Serena, who nodded. ‘Margot bought a new Explorer a couple days before she disappeared. I talked to the woman who sold it to her.’

‘Well, we better talk to her again,’ Stride said.

‘I’m telling you, it’s nothing!’ Dickes insisted. ‘Lenny told me not to sweat it! Margot bought a truck. That’s all. She didn’t ask anything about hookers!’

‘So I take it Lenny is a regular client of yours,’ Stride concluded.

‘Oh, shit. Oh, shit, I am so screwed.’

‘Focus, Curt,’ Serena told him sharply. ‘When did you see Margot in the new truck?’

‘Like a month ago? I don’t know. It was a Saturday, I think. There was a big concert at the DECC. Lots of business.’

‘Jason Aldean?’ Stride asked.

‘Yeah, that was it.’

‘Where did you see her? What time?’

Dickes rubbed his face in frustration. His sweat mixed with his cologne. The combination was lethal. ‘I don’t know, in the evening. Six, seven o’clock? I was coming out of the Duluth Grill. I saw her in the parking lot, and I made myself scarce, you know? I saw the dealer sticker, though, so I called Lenny.’

‘Was Margot alone?’ Serena asked.

Dickes shook his head. ‘No, she had a woman with her.’

‘Who?’

‘Do I know every fucking woman in the city? I don’t know! She was short. Skanky. Fake blonde hair.’

Stride was pretty sure he knew who it was. He stared at Serena.

‘Dory Mateo,’ he said.

Dory slid her naked body into the bathtub until the scalding water reached her chin. Her skin felt like flame. She gripped the porcelain sides of the tub and endured the heat as sweat poured down her face. When she inhaled, moist steam coated her nose and throat. She kept the lights off in the tiny Seaway bathroom, and there were no windows to the outside. She liked to bathe in the dark. When she was there, she could have been anywhere. A fine hotel. A cruise ship. A house of her own. Not a flophouse toilet.

She pushed her fingers around the edge of the tub until she found a wafer of soap. She extended her arm and ran the soap along her skin, making it slippery. She did her other arm, then her legs, her breasts, her stomach, and her mound. Touching herself brought no arousal. Her desires were long dead.

The water slowly cooled as she lay there. She shivered. She wished Michaela were here with her, so they could talk. So she could explain. In the darkness, she imagined that she could hear the sound of her sister breathing. Her soft laugh. The rustle of her clothes.

‘I betrayed you,
bonita
,’ Dory murmured to the dark room.

Her sister spoke.

‘You? You could never do that.’

Dory was silent. She couldn’t say it, not even to a ghost. The secret was toxic. She’d confessed to Margot, and now Margot was gone, as if the truth were a deadly virus, killing everyone it touched. She half-wondered if it was Marty. Even dead, he was still destroying lives. Controlling those he hated. Wreaking havoc.

‘I wanted to tell you back then,
bonita
, but I was too ashamed. And then it was too late. You were gone.’

‘Tell me now, and I will forgive you.’

‘No. You won’t.’

‘Where I am now, there is nothing but forgiveness.’

‘No.’

Dory stood up, dripping water from her body into the tub like rain. She found the towel she’d draped over the sink and used it to dry herself. She stepped out onto the cold floor. Her face brushed the string hanging from the light fixture and she pulled it, squinting at the harshness of the bare bulb. She was alone. Michaela wasn’t there. When she looked down, she saw a millipede crawling near her toes. She kicked at it with her foot, and the bug slithered through the scummy grill of the floor drain.

She stepped into the same panties she’d removed before her bath. She pulled on her jeans and shrugged into a sweater that was scratchy on her bare skin. The leather of her boots was cold. Fully dressed, the fringes of her hair damp, she sat down on the edge of the bathtub.

She’d thought that telling Margot would ease her conscience. When they’d met for dinner at the Duluth Grill, she’d blurted out her secret. She’d told her everything. What she’d done. Why. Her shame, her guilt. Margot hadn’t been surprised at all, not one little bit. Like it made all the sense in the world. Like it was the key to a lock.

For Dory, her confession hadn’t changed anything. All she could think about were ways to wipe her mind clean.

She exited the bathroom into the hallway. It was empty, except for one old man, unconscious and smelly, sprawled in an open doorway. After a while, you didn’t even notice. You held your nose and stepped over them. There was no one else, just him and her. Mornings were quiet here, because everyone was sleeping off the nights.

Dory made her way down the hall. She had the last room, near the window, where gray light streamed from outside. All the doors around her were closed. She reached for the door handle to her apartment, but she stopped without touching it. She didn’t even know why she stopped.

She heard her sister whispering in her head, like a warning. ‘
Don’t go inside
.’

Dory took a soft step backward and held her breath. Her room was as silent as a church. Beside her, through the hall window, she could see the alley below her. Papers whipped along the street, pushed by a lake wind. That was the problem. Silence. When she went to take her bath, she’d left her bedroom window open to clear out the smoke. She heard no breeze moving about the room now. The window was closed.

Someone was inside, waiting for her.

She backed up from her door. She avoided the drunk in the hall. She passed the bathroom again, moving through the warm steam. She kept going backwards, and when she reached the stairwell, she finally turned around and ran.

In the lobby, she hugged herself and hurried onto Superior Street. She didn’t wait to see if anyone came through the doors behind her. She ignored the greeting from the blind beggar in the lawn chair. She dodged traffic and ran toward the bank across the street and then sprinted when she was out of sight of the building behind her. Behind the bank, she cut into a pothole-filled parking lot and zigzagged through the cars. She crossed Michigan Street and found herself in the dead fields under the freeway. The car tires over her head sounded like stinging wasps.

She kept running. She didn’t look back until she was lost among the railroad tracks near the harbor and she was finally safe. She had no idea where to go, but she knew what she had to do.

She had to tell Cat the truth. And then she had to disappear for ever.

NO GOING BACK

Leonard Keck swung his Nike VR Pro seven-iron with a fierce chop and shot an imaginary golf ball through the tricky crosswinds toward the seventeenth green at Pebble Beach. In high-definition clarity on the eighty-inch plasma television hung on his office wall, the orange ball shot crisply across a California blue sky, shanked left toward the end of its flight, and dropped with a tiny splash into the surf of the Pacific Ocean. A groan of disappointment from the computer-animated crowd burbled out of the Bose speakers built into the wall.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Lenny shouted. He waved at Serena and Stride in the office doorway. ‘Hey, come in, guys, don’t stand on ceremony with me. Jeez, Pebble is an evil course. Doesn’t matter what kind of day I’m having, I always go in the water at seventeen.’

Lenny swirled the melting chips of ice in his drink and swallowed it down. He wiped his lips with his hand. ‘I guess you guys are too young to remember the ’82 Open, huh? Watson chipping in from the rough to beat Nicklaus? Best shot ever.’

‘I remember,’ Stride said.

Serena smiled. ‘Golf’s not my game.’

‘Oh, golf’s not a game, sweetheart,’ Lenny told her. ‘Golf’s a twenty-two-year-old black widow with big tits. You know she’s going to eat you sooner or later, but you can’t stay away. Now come on, sit, sit.’

Serena and Stride sat in two plush armchairs in front of Lenny’s desk. Lenny took several more practice swings with his club and then paced around the office with the iron braced behind his neck.
He seemed incapable of sitting still. He wore a chocolate brown tracksuit and golf shoes with cleats that left dotted impressions on the carpet. He peeled off a golf glove as he walked and stripped a tan visor from his head. He didn’t dress or act like a man with money, which told Serena that he had more than enough money not to care. The only luxury item she saw on his body was a gold diver’s watch.

Lenny was medium height, burly, with a modest paunch at his waist. Too many steaks and too much beer, she guessed. He had messy graying hair, a high forehead, and a tanned face freckled with age spots. His office at the back of his Miller Hill dealership showed off his influence and connections. He had framed photographs of himself with most of the state’s top politicians and one, in the middle, taken at the White House with President Bush. His credenza featured awards from the city and state chambers of commerce, sales trophies from Ford, and Lucite deal cubes celebrating the closing of multimillion-dollar real estate finance projects throughout the region. He had an oil portrait of his wife on one wall; she was a severe woman, small and thin, wearing a fulllength lavender ball gown, nose-bleed heels, a gaudy ring twisted with diamonds and emeralds, matching earrings, and blonde helmet hair that would have stood up to a Jared Allen tackle. Her pinched frown said: I’m a country club wife, and don’t you forget it.

Lenny finally sat down. He kicked off his golf shoes and propped his stockinged feet on the desk. When he pushed a button under the drawer, the thick curtains on the south wall parted, revealing a row of windows looking out on the auto showroom, where customers browsed among the trucks and hybrids. He studied the action on the floor.

‘One-way glass,’ Lenny said. ‘I like to watch my salespeople. They never know when I’m checking them out. Keeps them on their toes. Right now, I can tell you we’ve got two people ready to buy, that twenty-something young couple and the middle-aged black
guy, and the rest are browsers. After a while, you know it as soon as they walk in the door.’

The auto dealer picked up a signed baseball from his desk and tossed it up and down like a juggling ball. ‘Herbie signed this for me after the ’91 Series. Had it on my desk ever since. I got a box at the new stadium, so anytime you want tickets, I can hook you up. Ms. Dial, I like that Mustang you drove in here. If you want a new one, I can give you a hell of a deal.’

‘I’m more interested in an Explorer,’ Serena said.

‘Yeah? Well, great, I’ll bring it home at cost.’

‘Specifically, I’m interested in the one you sold to Margot Huizenfelt.’

‘Oh.’ Lenny frowned and pursed his lips like Mick Jagger. ‘Huizenfelt? She the lady who went missing last month?’

‘That’s her.’

‘Okay, sure. XLT, cinnamon metallic, comfort package. Fantastic ride. I remember the truck more than the customer. That’s the way it usually is. Real shame to have that vehicle sitting in an impound garage.’

‘The real shame is that its owner is missing and possibly dead,’ Serena said.

‘Well, yeah, of course.’

‘Margot bought the Explorer two days before she disappeared. Did you talk to her while she was here?’