Bloodshot (21 page)

(I do have auto insurance, believe it or not. Over the years I’ve stolen the identities of a few people—none of my victims, that’s too close for comfort, but I’ve got paper trails leading back to tombstones here and there. My insurance is listed under one of those identities, and it all looks legit. But that doesn’t mean I jump at the chance to hand it out.)

The Poppycock Review was a two-story building that somehow managed to look short and squat, regardless of its peaked red-and-white roof. The wall that faced the main street was painted 1983 Prince-Purple, and the side wall where the front door was located was bright yellow, with giant rhinestone sparklies rimming the door frame like salt on a margarita glass. Curtains were artfully draped, covering the window and obscuring the interior view. These
curtains were rainbow-themed, with gold and silver threading giving them a touch of added shimmer.

Here’s to truth in advertising.

But all its aggressively bad trappings aside, the Review looked like an aging hooker—tarted up real pretty, but starting to break down beneath the cosmetics. The windowsills had all been painted over recently, but that didn’t hide the fact that they were warped and splitting with age, and the glass in the window was clean but scratched all to hell. I got it. The place had seen better days, and this wasn’t the top-of-the-line destination it might’ve been thirty years ago.

But if the warm-up music inside was any indication, the joint was still ready to hop. I heard a house-style remix of something funky from the late seventies kicking inside, though when I tried the front door it was locked. A tiny, peeling sticker on the inside of the window to my right said that things got started around ten o’clock, so yes, I was plenty early despite the traffic.

But I wasn’t the kind of girl to be deterred by a locked door, so I pulled out my kit, took two of my most basic tools to the ancient and wobbly lock, and had the door open in ten seconds or less. I shoved the tools back into the little roll and jammed them back into my purse, in case anyone saw me stroll inside. If they saw me with lock-pick tools, they’d know I was up to know good. If I turned the knob and acted like I owned the place, I could always swear it’d been unlocked when I got there.

I didn’t see anyone in the foyer area, so I shut the door behind me and made a point to leave it unfastened, to bolster my story.

The carpet under my heels was worn but not sticky, so I thanked heaven for small blessings. I wasn’t really dressed for clubbing, but I wasn’t really visiting the Poppycock Review to see the show, so that was fine. I’d gone with something understated and gray, with ankle boots that had a low heel for easy running away,
should the situation call for it. I’d stuck to maroon accents for a little color, but I hadn’t gone nuts with it or anything—just a leather bag and a belt. I’ve never been one of those women to coordinate everything from my lips to my toenails. It’s just too time-intensive, and it gives you more goop to smear on a crime scene. Forget it.

The lights were all dimmed except for the dance floor, which I could see on the other side of a big beaded curtain that looked like a varsity cheerleader’s chest at Mardi Gras. Someone was in the DJ booth, tweaking settings and laying out a playlist, I guess. I couldn’t really see what was going on back there, just that there was a person-shaped shadow behind the Plexiglas.

I stood away from the curtain, so that I couldn’t be seen any better than I could see.

The light from the dance floor augmented the low-lit party lights in the foyer, so there was plenty to see by. Costume masks and rainbow schwag was posted up on the walls, over the windows, and all across the wood paneling that no doubt originally came with the building. It was awful, but it was being handled cheerfully, to the good-natured credit of whoever was in charge of the decorating.

I didn’t take too many pains to be super-quiet as I wandered down first the right corridor (where I found a glass-and-neon bar) and down the left, where I found a series of doors that were mostly shut and often locked—except for the unisex restrooms all lined up in a little row.

One of the shut doors that wasn’t locked revealed a dressing room stacked from floor to ceiling with large and glittery high-heeled shoes, tackle boxes overflowing with makeup, halters, corsets, feather boas, and the occasional pink sheer dressing gown. I admired the dressing room owner’s commitment to fabulousness and kept on snooping.

Down at the end of the corridor I heard voices, low and male, but with a flourish. I considered how best to play the situation—should
I walk up, introduce myself, and ask questions, or finish my reconnaissance?—but the deliberation took too long and a leggy blonde stepped into the corridor.

Bouffant B-52s hair was fluffed and cascaded to such a size that it could’ve stuffed a couch cushion, and beneath an orange terry-cloth robe a pair of crimson stilettos peeked. The wearer was probably not six feet tall in bare feet, and had both suspicious shoulders and a far finer grasp of cheekbone shading than I, personally, have ever possessed.

She came up short and startled. “Well pardon me, Sunshine,” she said, and I’m going to go ahead and use the feminine designation here for convenience—the Adam’s apple be damned. If she was going to go through all that trouble to look like a lady, I was not going to disrespect her by insisting on my own pronouns. Also, I kind of liked being called “Sunshine,” and I decided on the spot that I was going to steal it.

I stood up straighter and forced an injection of confidence and total I’m Supposed to Be Here into my voice. “Hello. My name is Raylene Jones, and I’m looking for Sister Rose.”

“Raylene Jones, looking for Sister Rose. Is this some official business? Because sister, it is
too soon
to party.”

“Official business, yes.” Because it’s always better to let them think you’ve got some kind of authority backing up your right to be present. “But not,” I hastily clarified, “the strictly bad kind. Rose isn’t in any kind of trouble.”

“You look like a cop,” declared a second girl, from around the corner of the door they’d been chatting behind a moment earlier. The newcomer was going for an Elvira thing, and it was comical, but I couldn’t say it didn’t look good on her.

I nodded and pulled out my badge. “I
am
a cop. I’m a cold-case detective from the APD, and I’m looking into the disappearance of a teenage girl a few years ago. Rose might have a little
information for me. Or then again, she might not. But I’m low on leads, so here I am. Can you point me in the right direction?”

“The right direction’s right around the corner, baby,” the blonde said. “First door on the left. She shares it with a couple of other girls, like we all do—you know how it goes. But she’s working tonight and her shift starts in half an hour. She’s in there.”

“Thanks,” I said, and did a stiff little half bow that implied I was finished here. I navigated the narrow, claustrophobic corridor with all its dense, dark wood and deeply piled but matted carpet until I’d passed both of the ladies and reached the indicated door around the corner.

I planted myself in front of it, feet splayed and ready for action, and I knocked. Twice. Real loud, very authoritative, if I don’t mind saying so myself. “Sister Rose?” I called, hoping I came off as less Itchy Trigger-Fingered SWAT Team than Concerned Authority.

“What?” came the answer from inside. It sounded irritable, impatient, and somewhat aggravated—at the world in general, or maybe at me in particular. “What do you want?”

“I’m looking to have a word with Sister Rose. My name is Raylene Jones; I’m a cold-case detective working for the Atlanta Police Department,” I said, laying out my story and my pseudonym, since it’d served me well so far. “You’re not in any trouble, I only want to ask you a few questions about someone else.”

The door opened swiftly and violently, before I’d heard anyone within make a peep or a step toward the knob. Inside the room, with one rather intimidatingly beefy arm slung lazily over the door’s latch, stood the most insistently innocent drag queen I’d ever set eyes upon.

She was tall—taller than me by nearly a foot, which would put her around six-four or six-five—and she was wearing a mermaid-inspired blue-sequined dress that left little to the imagination, and much to the imagination’s Department of WTF? I knew she was
packing under that bikini bottom with the dangled sparkles, but I’d be damned if I could tell you where she’d put it. On her head sat a black Amy Winehouse wig that was just as tall as the British singer’s do, but less cracked-out and more tidy. Around her neck was a flamboyant fake necklace that would’ve been worth seven figures if it’d been real.

With a diva voice that neither matched nor contradicted her appearance, she asked, “Someone else?”

I was so taken aback I only stared for a second before asking, like an idiot, “What?”

“Someone else. You said you were here asking about someone else. Not me?”

“Not you. No. But …” I looked over my shoulder and saw nothing, but I didn’t trust that the walls had no ears. “Could we have a moment in private? Is it private in there?”

“As private as anywhere.” She shrugged. “Come on inside, if you’re gonna.”

I let her hold the door ajar while I passed into the inner sanctum, where it smelled like talcum powder, wax, and hair spray. I waded through knee-deep piles of stockings and playbills before excavating a seat in front of the largest mirror with the smaller set of lights. The smaller mirror had brighter lights, and Sister Rose took the seat there.

She took a moment to glance at herself, pick at a stray false eyelash, and pretend I wasn’t present, then she eyed me with an eyebrow lifted in an arch that Wolverine would’ve died for. Then she said, “Who are you looking for again? I don’t think you ever said.”

I ducked the question by asking another one. “You’re Adrian deJesus, aren’t you?”

Sister Rose froze mid-eyelash-investigation, and her whole body went rigid in a dangerous way. Without moving, and in less
than a second, she’d gone from casual interest to a defensiveness that was ready for violence. I didn’t want any violence, even if I was pretty certain of my capacity for coming out on top.

She said, “You’re a cop, are you? Just a cop?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you’re a cop, and I want you out of here, right now. Sooner than now.” She was standing again and looming, prepared to bully me if it came to that.

“I’m not here to make any trouble for you,” I babbled. “I spoke to your parents last night.”

“Get out.”

I stood up, too, since I wasn’t willing to be the only one with my butt that close to the floor, and I wanted to give her the impression that I wasn’t the kind of girl who takes bullying lying down. “I won’t get out, not until we have a chat about your sister,” I said, running with my practically-totally-obvious theory that I was talking to the estranged brother.

She was visibly thrown, for all she tried to hide it. Her breathing was suspended for a pair of shocked seconds, and beneath a trowel’s worth of cream shadow, her eyes widened, then contracted. “My sister?” she asked, committing to nothing, but not ordering me out of the dressing room, either.

“Your sister. Your little sister,” I added, extrapolating from the approximate age of the person in front of me. Sister Rose was in her late twenties or early thirties, by my best approximation. “Isabelle deJesus, who went missing about ten years ago.” I then parroted everything I knew from the closed and semi-sealed police report. “She never came home from school.”

Rose went from discreetly shocked to stricken. She wanted to know, “Why now? Why
you
? I don’t even know who you are. You say you’re a cop, but I’m sorry, I still don’t buy it, and I want to know what’s really going on. What do you want from me?”

“I only want to talk about your sister. I know you’ve had a falling-out with your family; I went there first, and it was your father who finally gave me this place, and your … your stage name, as a lead.”

“But why?” she demanded, more desperate than commanding. “Are there any new leads? Nobody cared a decade ago. Why now?”

I held out my hands and said, “Please, sit down. Let’s both sit down, and just have a little talk. I’ll tell you what I know, and you can tell me what you know, and maybe we’ll have a productive conversation, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, not certain that she meant it, I could tell. She descended slowly back onto her seat—a small, round vanity-style stool that didn’t look large enough or strong enough to hold her. “Okay, but you have to tell me the truth.”

I agreed and likewise backed down gingerly into my seat, being careful to keep eye contact. “Let me start over,” I tried. “My name is Raylene, and yours is Adrian—yes or no?”

“Yes.”

I was almost surprised. I almost expected a token denial, or at least an insistence that it
used
to be her name, and now it was Rose, et cetera. But no. All she said was, “Yes.” So I said, as a gesture of good faith, “You’re right, I’m not a cop. But I don’t work for the government, either, and that’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it?”

She didn’t really answer, except to flip her head in a disdainful shrug. She said, “Motherfucking meatheads.”

“Right now, those are my sentiments exactly,” I commiserated.

She countered loosely with, “Oh yeah? What have they done to you lately? Did they ever kidnap your little sister and refuse to give her back? Did they ever try to hunt you like a dog, and chase you into hiding?”

“The first part, no. The second part, actually
yes.
” I was already
out on a limb anyway; I figured I’d go in for a pound if I was in for a penny. “That’s how I ended up here, in a roundabout way.”

“Looking for my sister?”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?” It wasn’t quite a question. It was more of an accusation. “Who are you really, besides some very pale woman named Raylene?”

“I’m not a cop, but I
am
an investigator,” I said.

“What kind of investigator? And why won’t you tell me what you know about my sister?” Something funny in her tone made me wish I was a stronger psychic; I wanted to surreptitiously poke around in her mind while we talked, but I’m not good enough to get away with it. It’s not like walking and chewing gum at the same time. It’s like patting your head and tying your shoes.