The dumdum tore into her back, the spreading mass transferring its deadly
momentum to her stationary body, lifting her off her feet, spinning her, driving
her back into the dark alley behind the restaurant. She rolled like a rag doll,
arms and legs akimbo, coming to rest at the side of the building. Her eyes
turned to the man facing her, his legs spread, his smile hard and triumphant.
The word why was forming in her mind when the second bullet's sound filled the
night.
I was on a stakeout in the greater Northwest, checking out a likely insurance
fraud. With my strange gift of sight, the colorless view of night was only a
darker version of my day world, a little tougher to discern, but all there in
black and white and gray. One doctor told me that my retina had the normal
number of cells, but no cones, so maybe I see in the dark like a cat, but be
that as it may, I see a lot. And there's nothing wrong with my hearing.
It was a typical Friday night in Portland's premier yuppie center, residents
as well as tourists clogging the sidewalks on the warm summer night, jaywalking
between the swarm of cars which were looking for parking spots that didn't
exist. A couple of drunks were yelling at each other in front of the bar where
my target was parked. In another twenty minutes he'd have a snootful and would
rise from his wheelchair, tired of waiting for the waitress I'd paid to cut him
off, and walk with an unbelievable steadiness to the bar. I fiddled with the
digital camera to pass the time.
The shot reverberated off the buildings and the evening tableau stopped, like
the pause button on the VCR, then a couple got down on their knees, just in case
it was a drive by shooting. Yeah, right, in this traffic. I grabbed my pistol
from under my seat and was moving towards the alley when the
second shot rang out. As I moved through the frozen crowd it seemed to melt in
my wake, slowly following behind me.
She was propped up against the wall of the restaurant, her lower body at a
strange angle to her torso. Blood ran black across the front of a pale white
blouse, over her right hip and onto the pavement. I knelt down and cradled her
pretty head as blood-enfolded air bubbled from her lips. When she died, the
muscles relaxed and the pretty face smoothed into a doughy semblance of the
original. I sat hard and let her head rest on my blood soaked knee. I know she
didn't care, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
The uniformed female cop helped me disengage from the dead girl. She asked me
what I was doing with the gun, and I told her. She asked if she could have it,
and I gave it to her. She pushed back the crowd and we waited for Homicide. We
knew each other, had dated once, but she kept things professional. Diane Simpson
was a good-looking blonde, about five-eight, one-twenty, three years on the
force, an efficient woman making it unapologetically in a man's world. I think
she found me a bit too loose with the rules, but who knows what women think.
When Homicide arrived, it was Carter and Dandridge, the shortest cops on the
force. They gave me the evil eye; if I was there, I must be guilty of something.
Dandridge, the ugly one, smelled the barrel of my revolver, then dumped the
shells into his hand. He put them in his pocket and tossed the gun back
to me. I could see it in his eyes, he was considering the political value of
taking me into custody, if only for a few hours, curry some friendships at the
executive level. The idea was transitory, they were good cops, and they had a
job to do, and I might know something, and if they hassled me, I'd
keep it to myself. I'm that kind of guy, and they know it.
They did their thing for an hour as a veritable phalanx of uniformed cops
under bright halogen lamps set up their yellow tape and scoured the pavement for
evidence. Simpson and another female cop worked the crowd looking for witnesses,
or anyone who knew the girl. Carter extracted a wallet from the dead girl's
purse. I listened hard. Her name was Jessica Long, and she was seventeen. Ten
minutes later one of the uniformed cops said there was a missing persons on her,
she'd been gone two weeks. The parents lived in Gresham.
* * * *
They were questioning me for the third time, like some kind of training
exercise for rookie cops, when the parents arrived. They'd been to the morgue,
their eyes were wet. The woman dabbed her cheeks dry with a tissue. She was a
carbon copy of her gray-haired daughter, and from a distance looked more like
her sister. In a way she looked the younger of the two, more immature, less
worldly, less certain. The husband stood six-four, eye to eye with me, fifty
pounds heavier, but not fat. His black hair was thinning and I could see his
scalp. His skin was deeply lined, as if he was the picture of Dorian Gray for
his forever youthful wife. They held hands like lovers.
It was two in the morning when they shuffled out of the police station. I met
them at the bottom of the stairs and introduced myself. Even up close the
woman's face was smooth, and the transparent wispy gray hair was the real thing.
Her voice was soft, blurred, his was firm. I said I was sorry about their
daughter. I gave them my card and asked them to call if there was anything I
could do. He took the card and put it in his pants pocket, then they shuffled
on, almost as if I hadn't been there.
Two weeks later the mother called me. There was no vague blur to her voice,
she was angry. The investigation was going nowhere, and as far as she could see,
the police didn't care about a runaway girl. I explained the cops go where the
evidence leads them, and cases like this often take a long time, sometimes years
until a serendipitous lead put them back into the hunt. She said she knew who
killed her daughter. I met with the parents, Janis and Doug Long, at their home
that night.
* * * *
Jesse Parnham was twenty-two, a firefighter, married for about a month to his
high school sweetheart two years earlier. He had known Jessica since he was
fifteen and she was ten. She tagged along after him like a little sister until
he went away to college. He married and divorced during the summer after his
sophomore year. He went back to school but dropped out after a month. He came
home and landed a job with the local fire department. After his parents died in
a car crash last year, he took up residence in their house. At first it was just
like the old days, Jessica would be there every day, then one day she stopped.
Jesse called and left messages, but Jessica never returned his calls. Janis Long
recognized the look in Jesse's eyes. She did her best to keep them apart. I
asked why the police didn't consider him a suspect. Doug Long said Jesse was
supposedly asleep in the station house. They didn't believe it.
I started tailing Jesse when he left the station at the end of his shift that
night, eight o'clock. He walked, no, trudged is a better word, the mile to a bar
three blocks from his house where he took a stool at a tall table in the far
back corner. He was six-one, one-eighty, a good-looking kid with strong features
and thick dark hair. By eight-thirty he'd finished three beers, and by nine it
was six. I was still nursing my first, some kind of slowness record for me.
When he started on his eighth beer I pulled up a chair. His features were
blurring as the alcohol bloated his skin. I asked, "So, how're you doing?"
And he told me, in all the meandering haphazard detail of the slurring
talkative drunk, about the love of his life. I'd give it to you as he related it
to me, but that would be a bit too meandering. Briefly, this was his tale.
He was in love with a dead woman, or maybe just a girl, he hadn't
straightened it out in his head yet. Jessica went from tagalong kid to beautiful
girl, but she was only seventeen. I recalled that old song, "Young Girl", by
Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. So, he tried to keep her around him all the
time, until she got old enough. Jesse never told her he loved her, though
they discussed what it would be like if he was in love with her, like a
hypothetical problem, then she'd think about it, laugh, and they'd go on the way
they were. Then one day he broached the topic, seriously, said he might really
want to be in love with her. Jessica said she wasn't the kind of girl he could
love anymore. She picked out the most superficial of reasons, "Could you love a
girl with nipple rings?" He said no. She said that was just the tip of the
iceberg. He did some cogitating on it, decided he could stand the nipple rings,
and the rest of it. By then she was gone and he never got a chance to tell her.
Hell of a tale, eh? Simple, childish, even inane. But you learn a lot about
truth in my business, that often people lie even when they don't have to, just
because they can. Jesse Parnham, his face clouded by booze, had that
deer-in-the-headlights look. He spoke the truth, because it was all he knew, and
his pain was too great even to protect himself.
He worried me. "So, Jesse, you going to drink your way to forgetfulness?"
He looked at me with surprise, his features gathering strength to reassemble
the handsome lad who'd entered the bar. "No, but it makes grieving easier." He
looked within. "I missed a cue somewhere. Sure, I'm twenty-two, but I'm not
exactly world-wise. But I should have known more than Jessica. I should have
helped her. So I'll get plastered for a month, kick myself in the gut, cry
myself to sleep." He turned wet eyes to me. "And when I'm done, I'll go back to
being staid stable me."
He finished his beer and I drove him the three blocks home.
From the car I called Dennis Doyle, a homicide cop I know. He was working the
night shift, and, from the sound of his voice, he was deep into death. Even
after fifteen years he doesn't like murder and murderers, the presence of a dead
body lowers his timbre an octave.
"So, what do you want, shamus?" It was the moniker he'd put on me, his code
word for respect. "Calling me, you must think we're friends, or something."
I ignored the barb and asked him if he remembered the Jessica Long murder.
"Sure, nice girl, maybe a little wild, but who isn't these days. Not likely
we'll get the shooter." A pause, then, "You working for the parents?"
No need to lie. "Yes, I need some information." He was silent. I continued,
"Could you find out if the girl had her nipples pierced?"
"Don't need to check, shamus, I saw the file." He explained, "I had a murder
like it a year ago, except the shooter didn't use a dumdum bullet, so the
connection wasn't real solid. But, back to your question, yes, she did."
* * * *
I got some sleep, then called Janis Long. I rang her doorbell at nine. She
gave me a drawn tight smile and let me in. I asked where her husband was. She
said he went to work, that she didn't tell him I was coming. I asked why.
She poured me a cup of coffee and averted her eyes. "You've got to
understand, Jessica was his little girl," a pause, "but she wasn't a little girl
anymore. If you go looking for that little girl, you won't find her, or her
killer."
I nodded. She told me of a girl more troubled than the one she and Doug first
described to me. Mind you, still a good girl, but experimenting with a budding
adult body and non-standard ideas on how life should be lived. Still, her mother
believed she'd find her way. She had a good moral compass, she knew right from
wrong. When I asked about the nipple rings, she said she didn't know.
We went to Jessica's room. I asked if she kept a diary. Janis said yes, that
the police had asked too, but it wasn't in the house. She left me alone in the
room.
I went through the drawers, the clothes she'd never wear again. She was a
neat girl. There didn't seem to be anything to find. I went back to the closet
and checked the pockets of her pants. It was mashed together and faded, like it
had been through the washer. I unfolded it on her nightstand, smoothing the
edges. It was a receipt, from a place called Holes-R-Us. She'd paid for four
N's, my guess nipples. And, deductive reasoning at its best, she wasn't alone.
The storefront sign said open at eleven, so I had some breakfast, then walked
back to Holes-R-Us. The store was run by a single body, maybe female, with
tattoos and studs everywhere. When she spoke though, she had a firm voice, a
radio voice.
She gave me one of those looks like I was too straight to be there. "Cop?"
she asked.
"Private," I told her, then I explained what I needed.
She searched through a log book. "I remember them. High school girls. Didn't
want their parents to know." She gave me a defiant look. "Not my job, you know."
I nodded. She continued her search. "Here it is. Jessica Long and Randi
Wells."
I called Janis Long and she said she'd have Randi at the house at
three-thirty. When I got there, she left us alone. I turned to Randi, equally as
pretty as Jessica, they must run in packs, or maybe everyone is better looking
than I remember.
I got to the point, "You and Jessica had your nipples pierced at the same
time?"
She blushed, then nodded, too embarrassed to speak.
I reassured her, "That's okay, Randi, I had to be sure it was you. I need to
know about Jessica, and the two of you were pretty
close." The girl nodded and I continued, "The police have hit a dead end, but
they don't know about you." I read alarm on her face. "If you help me, they'll
never know."
She had a high-pitched little girl voice that didn't match the woman's body.
She told me everything. Jessica had met a man, Gerry, about twenty-two, downtown
at Pioneer Square. She ran away to live with him. It was true love. Randi didn't
know where he lived, but she had a picture of him that Jessica gave her. She
fished the photo out of her purse and said she was thinking about telling the
police, but she didn't know how. She said Jessica had left a message on her
answer machine the night she was killed. She'd said she was coming home.
* * * *
I contracted two hip-type young operatives, Bob and Ray. I gave them the
picture. The next day they called me, said they were with Gerry at Pioneer
Plaza, that maybe I wanted to see him up close. I bought a mocha at the
Starbucks, then sat outside, on high, looking down. Bob and Ray were in a circle
of boys/men tossing a hacky-sack with their feet. Bob saw me, then flipped the
hacky-sack at a man with his back to me. The toss was too high, but he turned
towards me, caught the sand filled sack with his foot and tossed it back over
his head. The straggly beard and dreadlocks were new, but it was the same man as
the picture.
It was two days before I heard from the operatives again. They gave me an
address for Gerry, an apartment in the Northwest, paid for by a small string of
cut-rate hookers he ran. Bob assured me Gerry would be out all afternoon.
I picked the lock to the back door of the ground floor apartment and took my
time going through his things, such as they were. I found the gun in a ziplock
bag in the toilet tank, with Jessica's diary. There were two pictures, one of
Jessica, and another girl, even younger. They
weren't the kind they could show their mothers. The date stamp on the
second was from eleven months earlier. I
read the diary, then tore out the last three pages.
The words broke my heart. I stuffed the diary,
Jessica Long's life, into my pocket. I left everything else just as I found it.
* * * *
Gerry was arrested that afternoon buying heroin from an undercover cop,
arranged by my operatives and Doyle. While they had him in custody, the cops
questioned his friends. They found he'd known Jessica and corralled her into his
band of youthful whores. The cops got a search warrant, found Gerry's stash,
then charged him with two counts of murder, Jessica Long ... and Dennis Doyle's
unsolved case.
Doyle let me sit on the other side of the one-way glass for Gerry's
interrogation. I got to see the light dawn over the boy's head as his future became clearer. I didn't have any mixed feelings. It made
me feel good.
I straightened the crumpled three pages and
reread Jessica's last entry. "I can't
believe I did this, I'll never feel clean again. Never! As soon as it's dark,
I'm going home to where I'm loved, if they'll have me." She'd put little girl
hearts before and after the word 'loved.'
It takes a lot to make me hate. Maybe it's because I don't care enough. But
Gerry had done that, and no, there could never be enough justice in Gerry's
future.
* * * *
I met Janis Long for lunch. She wrote me a check.
I didn't want it, but she made me take it. I
gave her Jessica's diary. She opened it to the last page, the dated entry a
month previous. I told her that's all there was. She didn't believe me, but she
let it be. I think she knew she didn't want to
know.
I called Jesse Parnham, took him out to supper and told him the whole story.
He was strong, and he had a good moral compass himself.
Still ...