The Dead Detective (7 page)

“Is Jasmine here?” Harry asked.

“Yeah. She’s in back.” He inclined his head toward a black velvet curtain between the stage and the bar. “She’s doin’ a private lap dance.”

“Get her,” Vicky ordered.

“Hey, that’s a fifty-buck gig for her. Maybe more, you know what I mean? She ain’t gonna be too happy I break it up.”

“Guess what, Jack? We’re not here to bring sunshine into your lives,” Vicky said.

“Get her,” Harry said. “Get her …
now
.” As Jack moved away Harry leaned in close to Vicky. “While we’re waiting, check the parking lot and make sure Darlene’s car is there.” He jotted down the plate number the DMV had given him and handed it to her. “If it’s the right car, call the CSI unit and tell them we have another job for them. Then give Tampa P.D. a call and tell them we need backup. At least four uniforms. When we get through with Jasmine we’re gonna shake this place down.”

Jasmine was dressed in her thong, a white see-through rayon beach robe, and a sour expression when she came to the bar a few minutes later.

“You just cost me money,” she snapped.

“Life is hard,” Harry said. He matched Jasmine’s stare. “Sit down,” he ordered.

Vicky returned from the parking lot just as Jasmine eased herself on to a stool. Harry moved to one side of her, Vicky to the other, effectively pinning her between them.

Harry glanced at Vicky. “You find it?”

Vicky nodded. “The team is on the way. So’s the backup.”

They both turned their attention to Jasmine.

“Now, you’re going to answer some questions,” Harry began. “And if I think you answered them straight you get to go back to work. If I don’t think you answered them straight that cute little butt of yours is going to be sitting in the back of a patrol car headed for the Pinellas County sheriff’s office. You got that?”

“I got it,” Jasmine said.

“Be sure you got it,” Vicky said. “Because if you screw with him, you’re gonna find out
this
policeman is not your friend.”

Jasmine raised her hands and let them fall back to her lap in a gesture of surrender. “Alright, alright. You ask, I’ll answer. I just wanna get back to work. It hasn’t been a very good week, okay?”

Jasmine was a beautiful woman, hard around the eyes and with far too much makeup, but someone who would be eye-catching if she cleaned herself up. She had a lean sensuous body, with full breasts and long shapely legs. Her hair was short and black, and her eyes were a vivid blue and seemed to jump out of a sharply defined face. She was also chewing gum with her mouth open, snapping and popping it with each movement of her jaw, which for Harry destroyed whatever sensual effect she hoped to achieve.

Harry showed her the picture of Darlene Beckett. “You know her?”

“Yeah, that’s Darlene. She was here last night.”

“What time did she get here, and what time did she leave?” Harry asked.

Jasmine shrugged, then seemed to think better of it. “When she comes, she usually gets here around nine and stays for about an hour. She has a curfew, you know … because of her … because of the trouble she had.”

“You know who she left with?” Vicky asked.

“No. I mean I can’t be sure. I was in the changing room when she left. But she was askin’ me about this one particular guy. Askin’ if I knew him, if I thought he was safe.”

“Did you know him?” Harry asked.

Jasmine shook her head. “I mean I saw him. He was young, kind of cute, not like most of the creeps we get in here. But I never met him or nothin’. But I got the impression from her that he’d been watching her.” She shrugged to confirm her uncertainty. “Darlene liked it when guys watched her.”

“Has he been in tonight?”

“No, I haven’t seen him tonight. In fact, I never saw him before, either.”

“Tell us about him,” Vicky said.

“Like what? I told you I never met him.”

“Start with what he looked like, how he was dressed,” Harry said.

“Well, like I said, he was cute. He had short hair, what I could see of it, ’cause he was wearin’ a cowboy hat, you know? But no beard or mustache. He just looked kinda clean, kinda neat.”

“What was he wearing with the hat?” Vicky asked.

“He was neat that way too. Nothin’ special. Just jeans with a big ol’ silver belt buckle and a T-shirt. But the clothes were good, expensive, you know, and real clean, like everything had just been washed and ironed.”

“What kind of shoes?”

“I dunno. I didn’t see his shoes.”

“Glasses, anything like that?”

Jasmine shook her head.

“What color was his hair, his eyes?”

“His hair, I guess it was brown, what I could see of it. I never saw his eyes.”

“How tall was he? How heavy?”

“I remember that he wasn’t a big guy, but he wasn’t short either, kind of just above average I guess. Maybe five-ten, five-eleven.” She shrugged.

“Weight?”

“He wasn’t fat, or real skinny, but I don’t remember him looking real strong. Just kind of normal, you know? Like medium, maybe a hundred and sixty, a hundred and seventy pounds. I’m not too good with weight on guys.”

“Do you know what kind of car he was driving?” Vicky asked.

Jasmine shook her head.

“Did Darlene leave with him?”

“I dunno. Like I said, she left when I was in the dressing room. But come to think of it, I didn’t see him when I came out. So she could have, I guess.”

“Did Darlene usually pick up guys when she came here?” Vicky asked.

Jasmine gave them another shrug. “Sometimes. I mean Darlene liked to have guys look at her, liked to know they liked what they saw, maybe wanted her, you know what I mean?” She let out a little laugh. “Like that would be a surprise. The guys who come here are all horny. Hell, that’s why they’re here, to look at the dancers. But I think Darlene liked to have them want her even more than they wanted the dancers, almost like it was some kind of competition—her against us—you know what I mean?”

“That’s a little sad,” Vicky said.

Jasmine looked at her, thinking about what she had said. “Yeah, it is.” She shook her head. “God, if I didn’t have to come here I wouldn’t walk through those doors. But I got a kid at home who likes to eat, and she’s got a bum for a father who never sends his support checks, so I’m here doing what I have to do.”

Harry wanted to tell her there were other jobs, jobs where her life wouldn’t be at risk, but knew it would be a waste of breath. An uneducated woman could never find a straight job where she could make the kind of money she could in a place like this. At least until her body gave out. “Somewhere down the road I’ll want you to look at some mug shots, maybe a lineup, so I need your full name and current address,” he said instead. “I also want you to give a description of this guy to a police artist. You willing to do that?”

Jasmine nodded.

“Is your real name Jasmine?” Vicky asked.

“No, my real name’s Anita Molari.”

“Pretty name,” Vicky said.

Jasmine looked at her as though she had said something strange. “You think so? I never liked it.”

When the Tampa P.D. backup arrived Harry ordered the bartender to kill the music and turn on all the lights, then to bring all the dancers out to the main room. When that was done, and as the backups moved in to block all exits, he announced who he was and explained that everyone in the room would have to submit to a police interview as part of an official investigation. He also assured them that the stage shows would resume as soon as they were finished. Groans filled the room, but no one attempted to leave.

The interviews with the patrons and dancers proved useless. All the men sitting at the tables and the bar insisted they had not been there the previous evening, and while several acknowledged having seen Darlene on earlier occasions, none remembered seeing her with any one particular individual. The dancers also provided little information, although most said they had talked with Darlene over the past few months, with several commenting that Darlene clearly had her eye out for good-looking men. Harry was certain some of the men had lied to him about being there the previous night, but there was little he could do about that. He took down names and addresses in case any further interviews proved necessary. He also planned to run criminal record checks on everyone present. Any hits would be followed up with a more intense interrogation.

“Well, it wasn’t a complete loss,” Vicky said as they returned to the parking lot. “We know where she was last night; we have a description of a man she may have left with; and we found her car. That’s a lot of pluses.”

“It’s a start,” Harry said as they headed toward Darlene’s 2004 green Taurus, which was now cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape and bathed in portable high-intensity light.

They stopped outside the tape and watched Martin LeBaron dust the passenger’s-side door. When he saw them he beckoned them inside the tape. “We finished with everything around the car,” he said. “In fact, when I finish with this door, we’ll have done everything we can here. I’ll be towing it back to the garage to finish up there.”

“You find anything?” Vicky asked.

“Nothing that jumps out at me,” LeBaron said. “Plenty of prints inside and out, just as you’d expect. We’ll have to run them; see what comes up.”

Vicky turned to Harry. “What now?”

“Now we go back to the office, write up what we found, and get our murder book started. I also want to go back to DMV and have them send us copies of the driver’s licenses of all the people whose cars we ran earlier. I want to see if any of them match up to the description of the guy Jasmine told us about. If any of the photos fit that description we’ll show them to Jasmine tomorrow, see if she can ID him.”

We gonna see everybody on that list?”

“That’s the drill.” He gave her an amused half smile. “You thought homicide was going to be all glamour, huh?”

Vicky shook her head. “No, I’ve been a cop too long to think that.”

It was three a.m. when Harry slipped his key in the front door of his two-bedroom beach house off Mandalay Avenue on Clearwater Beach. He had bought the house ten years earlier, well before Clearwater Beach property had gone through the roof. He had put himself in hock to the tune of $200,000, and now found himself the owner of a “beach shack” worth five or six times that. It wasn’t the house of course; it was the property, sitting as it did directly behind a small dune with a clear view of the Gulf of Mexico. For the past five years he had fended off realtors with ever-escalating offers—each one representing a buyer who wanted to tear down his beach shack and build some glass-and-stucco monstrosity like all the others that now lined the beach. Harry told them all that he planned to wait for the hurricane that would eventually level the house, and then decide whether to rebuild or sell the land and the pile of sticks that sat on it. He was certain the realtors left hoping the next hurricane season would get him.

The house was a simple one-story wood-frame dwelling with a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bath. It had a screened lanai off the living room facing the gulf, and a deck off the master bedroom that also overlooked the water. If he left the bedroom’s sliding glass doors open he could go to sleep each night to the sound of the waves rolling up on the beach. The house was his private bit of heaven, the one thing that kept him sane.

He had been thinking about Darlene Beckett’s mutilated face when he found the annual letter from his mother waiting in the mailbox. Just one more bit of
EVIL
to end his day with, he thought, as he collected it and tossed it, unopened, on a small side table just inside the front door. He kicked off his shoes, also leaving them near the front door as he always did, just under the longboard and helmet that hung on a rack behind the door. He used the board—a longer, more elegant version of a skateboard—as a form of exercise, racing along the sidewalks and streets early in the morning, or late at night, testing the tolerance of pedestrians whose comments often followed him down the street. He loved the board, loved the exercise it gave him, loved how it brought back memories of riding alongside his brother Jimmy, on the battered skateboards they had as kids, always together back then.

Harry cut three oranges in half, squeezed a glass of juice, and went out on the lanai. It was high tide and a light breeze coming in off the gulf sent a steady line of waves against the shore. He took a deep breath to let the ugliness of the day drain away. He knew it wouldn’t work, not today. Darlene Beckett was too fixed in his mind, the image of her lifeless body with its catlike Mardi Gras mask, the seedy strip club she had visited so regularly, all relentlessly coming back at him, all unreasonably mixed together with the letter that waited in the living room.

“Hi, Harry.”

He looked toward the screen door of the lanai and found Jeanie Walsh standing there.

“What are you doing up so late, or early, or whatever?” he asked.

“Couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk on the beach.”

“Dangerous,” he said. “I’ve told you that before.”

“I know. Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

Jeanie entered and took a seat next to him, facing the water. She was a few years younger than Harry, five-five and slightly underweight, but in a pleasing sort of way, with short, curly blond hair and very soft, very gentle brown eyes. He had met her early one morning while he was terrorizing the neighborhood on his longboard. He had come around a corner far too fast, startling her and causing her to drop a container of coffee she had just purchased. He had apologized, walked her back to the coffee shop and bought her another. Within fifteen minutes they had become friends.

Jeanie lived in the blot-out-the-sun condo next to Harry’s house. She was a stockbroker, financially secure, recently separated, and lonely. Within a week they had become casual lovers, a matter of comfort and convenience for each of them—Harry who wanted no emotional commitment in his life, and Jeanie who was still in love with her long gone husband, even though he was addicted to sweet young things and had cheated on her repeatedly while they were together.