Lady Midnight (15 page)

“The police just left my apartment. They said that they want to talk to you about the shooting.”
 

“I’m sure they do. We’ll talk, all right. I’ll tell them everything. But not yet. Nookie, listen. Call the police again, and send them over to Randy Cross’s apartment.”
 

“Is Randy—” She stopped before she could say or perhaps even think it.
 

“Randy’s dead,” I said flatly.
 

“Oh, no.” Her voice sounded utterly lost, now.
 

“I need you to tell me where Big Daddy lives. He and Vince have Connie, and they are the ones who did this to Randy.”
 

“Are you going after them? Vince and Big Daddy? Maybe it wasn’t them.”
 

“It has to be them, Nookie. The rest of them are dead.”
 

“Denise.”
 

“What?”
 

“Don’t call me that . . . Nookie anymore. Denise is my real name . . . Denise McManus.”
 

“All right then, Denise. I need you to tell me how to get to his place. I have to go help Connie. Quickly, now tell me how to get there.”
 

“I don’t know why you keep mentioning Big Daddy. He’s just Vince’s flunky.”
 

“Come again? I knew these guys a few years back, and Vince was just hired muscle for Big Daddy.”
 

“That’s weird. Vince is the money man, now, though. I’m sure of that. He’s the boss. He set up the whole business, and as far as I know, Big Daddy just hangs around and helps. He comes here and tells me where the next job is, and Vince pays me. Vince has a mansion out in Great Neck, and Big Daddy has been staying there since he got out of prison. He actually seems pretty nice. Let me tell you how to get there.”
 

That was interesting, and it changed the cosmos a little, but ultimately not a lot. The two of them were still operating together, and were still at the bottom of this mess, and I still needed to find them. Denise McManus, nee Nookie Uberalles, gave me the directions and I hung up and immediately called Baucom. He answered on the first ring.
 

“Mr. Baucom. Have you been doing any thinking since our last talk?”
 

“Yes. Roland, I have. I just got a call about Grant. What in hell’s going on?”
 

“We’ll have our chance to talk. I just wanted to let you know that I think I might be able to help Connie still, but I need you to do one thing for me.”
 

“All right. Whatever you need from me, just name it.”
 

I told him, and when we finished talking, I headed for the part of Atlanta called Great Neck, where Big Daddy and Vince lurked in their own special gloom, waiting for me.
 

* * *

It wasn’t a hard place to find. It was the kind of house that would make you do a double take from the highway, if there had been a highway close to this neighborhood. But these houses cost enough money to ensure privacy for the people who inhabited them. Like many suburban areas in the South, this area was the farmland of the Great Depression re-imagined into a trendy living development.
 

Vince and Big Daddy had set up shop in a secluded green valley that looked as lush and fertile as Napa Valley wine country, though no crop of any kind was grown anywhere nearby, anymore. A few ritzy houses dotted the landscape, each centered on enough property to enforce privacy from one’s nearest neighbor. Carefully landscaped ornamental trees and strategically placed privacy fences completed the artificial isolation.
 

A straight line of poplars stood at attention along one side of the long driveway, and I drove straight up to the house. I knew that anyone watching would doubtlessly have spotted me from a long way off, but I had no other option.
 

The car threw up a plume of dust visible for a mile and a half in the clear weather of a late Georgia spring. Vince’s place was an expensive house, in a very expensive area, but money can’t buy everything. A crazy drunk writer can write a book that sells well enough, and with the proceeds, he can move in right next door to an old moneyed family like the Harcourts and throw wild parties where people run around naked, and the police get called. This neighborhood was no different.
 

Here, Vince had bought a house with the money that he had made off selling images of some of those same young bodies that frolicked around Carter Britton’s pool. He’d made his millions and moved right in, and the concerned homeowners of Great Neck had done absolutely nothing to stop them. It seems they’d rather have millionaire criminals for neighbors, than poor honest folks. I smiled bitterly at the irony of that. But it was like that everywhere, I knew.
 

I reached the house and didn’t see a living soul stirring. I went up wide stairs to the front of the house, and it was all glass. I tried the door and found it unlocked. In what was becoming a very familiar action, I pulled out my .45 and stepped inside. I heard Elvis Presley’s “American Trilogy” playing at a medium volume from somewhere in the house, on a very good sound system.
 

The King was singing:
 

Glory, glory hallelujah
 

His truth is marching on
 

So hush little baby
 

Don’t you cry
 

You know your daddy’s bound to die—
 

The front door opened onto a stairwell. The house had an unconventional layout, with the main room split in half by a central sunken corridor. The stairs confronted whoever opened the door. One had to cross to the end of the short corridor before encountering stairs back up. I guess that drew oohs and ahs from the coeds who walked in for the first time, but it was way too open if you were a guy with a gun in his hand, walking into a possible ambush.
 

I walked quietly down those stairs. What I confronted was totally unexpected: Big Daddy, the man I hated most in this world, wearing a burgundy bath robe, pin-striped pajamas and flip-flops.
 
I brought up my gun, expecting trouble, but the other man put his hands up quickly and his eyes widened.
 

“Roland Longville. I knew you’d find us sooner or later,” he said softly.

“Where’s the girl?” I asked, expecting anything. I was surprised when he let out what seemed to be a huge sigh of relief and nodded down the hall.
 

“She’s down there, doped up pretty bad. You’ll get her out of here, won’t you?”
 

I looked at Big Daddy intently. “What’s your game?”
 

Big Daddy shrugged. “No game, just take her and go. But not to her old man. She’d be better off where she’s at.”
 

I had no idea what to make of Big Daddy’s compliant and reasonable behavior. I was willing to go with it, for now, though, if it meant getting Connie Patrick the hell out of this place.
 

“Which door?” I kept the gun on Big Daddy. “No tricks.”
 

“No tricks. Last door on the left.” Big Daddy kept his hands calmly elevated, looking like some kind of monk with his purple robe and serene expression.
 

I went down the hall. When I came to the door Big Daddy pointed me to, I pushed it gently open.
 

Vince got me by surprise. He came out of the door across the hall and behind me, quick and silent, and brought up a brown tattooed fist and caught me a blinding jab on the corner of the jaw. I was bigger but the punch had oomph, and I felt my knees go out from under me.
 

Vince kicked at my gun hand, once, twice, and the .45 spun away from me. Then he brought something down on the back of my head, what must have been a sap, because I felt its weight and a single quick slap from it made me see stars and brought darkness to the edges of my vision.
 

Vince’s foot caught me under the chin, and I tasted coppery blood in my mouth. I rolled back and tried to catch my breath.
 

I heard Vince run away a few steps and I knew he was going for the .45, and I knew that I had about two seconds to stop him or I was a dead man. I shook my head and tried to get to my feet but my vision stubbornly refused to clear, and my head was a watery weight on my shoulders.
 

When I finally struggled to my feet, Vince was standing at the end of the hallway with my .45 in his hand. He had a smirk on his face, but something else was behind it. He looked like a man who was trying hard to figure out his next move.
 

I wiped the blood from the corner of my mouth. I thought back to a girl named Lena, dead in a filthy alley, years before, dead with a needle in her arm, and how Vince had walked away from all of that, just to come here and make victims out of other girls, and now he was going to make a victim out of me, too.
 

Suddenly the quizzical look on Vince’s face cleared. He’d figured out his problem, and he explained his solution to me.
 

“I caught you in here, doing drugs with the girl.” He was thinking out loud. “We fought and I had to shoot you.”
 

“It’ll never hold up,” I said. “Too many people know why I came here. Too many people have helped me find you. People who now know where Connie Patrick is.”
 

“Those people can be hushed up. You ain’t gonna be around to tell your end of it, anyway. The little bitch is a junkie, and junkies die every day—as I am sure you recall.”
 

Vince smiled. I stood for a moment and glowered at him, despite his words, he still didn’t raise the gun.
 

“I owe you,” was all that I could manage to say, before my voice became a murderous animal growl. Then, with a cry of rage from deep within my being, I rushed him. He reacted too late, and I was on him. We came together with a bestial ferocity, and we both knew that only one of us was going to walk away alive, because one was going to make sure the other ended up dead.
 

Vince swung the .45 like a club and caught me on the temple, as we both crashed into the wall. I was still somewhat stunned, and the sharp blow brought wavering ripples of darkness back into my vision. Vince dropped and rolled, got back on his feet, the gun still in his hand.
 

“I’m through messing with you,” he said, and leveled the gun at me. I was on all fours on the floor, shaking my head. He had me; there was nothing more I could do.
 

Then someone shot Vince. He took one round in his meaty torso, and another high in the left shoulder. He turned and looked upward, to where Big Daddy stood on the stairs, a little automatic held tightly in both hands.
 

“You stupid son of a—” Vince growled and fired the .45 into Big Daddy, one, two, three times. Big Daddy slid down immediately, but he brought the little gun up, and shot Vince three more times. Then it was deathly quiet in the hall for a few moments. Both men lay there. Vince started making a horrible snoring sound as his lungs began filling with his own blood.
 

I got shakily to my feet and went over to where Big Daddy lay. Here before me was the man I had dreamed of killing a million times. I wanted to kill him for what he had done to a lost and helpless girl, more than five long years before. Now I looked at the dying man and wished I could help him. I didn’t understand what had happened, why he had tried to help me. I knelt beside him, but I could tell there was nothing I could do.
 

Big Daddy looked down at the bloody place on his shirt that was growing larger by the second. His eyes were glowing glassy. His lips moved, mouthing words, and his eyes rose up to look into my face. I realized that he was trying to say something, and I bent close, still expecting to hear curses pour forth from the dying man’s mouth. There were tears in his eyes and a strange smile on his face. Instead of curses, I heard Big Daddy say faintly, “Goodbye, Shangri-La.”
 

I went to Connie then. I untied her bonds and stood over her, tried to hear her breathing. But I didn’t hear anything. I detected a faint heartbeat, but that rapidly grew weaker until it was gone. I gathered her in my arms, this lost young woman whom I had never met in life, and my heartbeat slowed in my chest and my breath would not come. Connie Patrick was dead, used up and lost and cast aside and ultimately dead, just like the nameless girl who had been found dead in the Cahaba River, just like another dead girl from years before, and the world was full of the lost and the misused and dying, and that wasn’t the way it had to be, but that was the way it was. Then I, Roland Longville, big tough private detective, held the dead girl, and cried.

Chapter 22

It was raining when I got back to Mountainbrook I punched in the code that I had gotten from Baucom over the phone and drove up to Senator Patrick’s house. The door was open and I went right in. There was no one in the front room as I entered, but I didn’t expect there to be. I went to the Senator’s office, expecting to find him there, but it was empty. It was then I heard the music coming from upstairs.