Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3) (7 page)

I’d gone to bed with two leads: Jellyfish and Maria. I’d woken up with a third: the fire. That was more information than I was used to starting out with. I decided to start with Jellyfish, for old times sake. Back when I’d first gotten into the business, I’d started practically every investigation by finding Jelly and asking him what he knew. Now I was looking into his death, and this time above all others his knowledge would have been incredibly useful. I had to smile at the irony. There were two places to start looking into Jelly’s life.

The sex he was having.

The money he was making.

I picked the former.

A couple of years before, I’d been hired to find a missing university student. A young man named Chris Perry. His parents had been worried when he’d dropped off the face of the earth, but they’d come to me rather than the cops because the father was high up in the force and already had too many enemies in uniform.

Chris hadn’t dropped far. I’d found him shacked up with Jelly, living a more-or-less happy life in a flat in Walsall. I’d talked the parents into leaving them to it. Chris seemed to know what he was doing, and Jelly—for all his flaws—was a good boyfriend. Or so I’d thought. There were a great many things I was being proven wrong about. Although I’d lost touch with Jellyfish since the job with Gaines had taken me up in the world, I’d kept tabs on Chris. In my line of work it pays to have information on the family members of the local Police Commissioner.

I walked over to the library. It was only a few streets away from the flat. Chris had been working there for the past year, after I’d arranged for a good word to be put in for him. He’d never finished university and spent most of his spare time writing plays and/or novels he planned to self-publish. Cutbacks had kept him from claiming benefits, and he’d struggled to hold down work. His father didn’t want to be seen as having hooked his son up with a job, and Chris didn’t want any favors anyway. Father and son had a rocky relationship. They were too alike and too far apart. So I’d made a show of helping out by having a word with some of our contacts at the local council. Enough of a show that his father knew he owed me. Soon afterwards, Chris had found himself with a job that he’d been totally underqualified for.

The library was a large red brick building on the corner of a junction on the edge of the city center, in a part of town that was slowly fading away. Libraries had become an endangered species, and this one was already out of both sight and mind. Being out of pocket couldn’t be far behind.

I found Chris on the first floor, leaning over a young blond guy and teaching him how to fill in an application form with an expression that said he was loving every minute of it. When he looked up and saw me, the smile dropped from his eyes. He said something quietly to the guy and then made his way over to me.

“What’s up?” He said.

It was almost nice to be reminded that not everybody in town was scared of me. Some just flat out hated me. In Chris’s case, even though I’d been the one who talked his parents into leaving him alone, he only ever saw me as the rat who’d told them where he was in the first place. And the fact that I’d gotten him this job only made things worse. Pride can burn a lot of bridges.

Play it nice.

“Hiya. I’m looking for Jellyfish.”

“Fuck off.”

His eyes were sullen. Just a couple of years ago they’d been bright and hopeful, but real life has a way of taking that edge off. His hair was darker now, and his nose looked different, too. I wondered how much that had cost him. Too much for a librarian, surely.

Play it nice.

“New nose, huh?”

That took his edge off. Hit a person where they’re least confident and they soon take a step back. He smiled, his way of showing that he wanted to play it nice after all. He looked back at the blond guy, then over at his desk, where a cup of coffee was slowly going cold.

“Honestly? I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“Sorry to hear that.” I almost sounded like I meant it. “Falling out?”

“You could say that. Or pulling out, more like it. I got the sense he wasn’t fucking me so much as trying to fuck my dad.”

“You don’t mean—”

He laughed. The sound bounced around the room. I waited for the ghost from
Ghostbusters
to come and shush us, but it didn’t happen. “No,” he said. “You’ve got a filthy mind, you know that?”

“Comes with the job.”

“I’m sure. No. I just mean that he started showing a lot of interest in my dad, in his career. I figured he was only staying with me as a way of getting dirt on the old man. You know how he liked to hold information on people.”

“I may have heard that, in passing.”

“Uh huh. He got weird, basically. Like, we were together for a year and he was all sweet and nice and totally wanted to go at my pace. I didn’t ask who else’s pace he was keeping up with, didn’t care, I was okay as long as we were having fun. But then my dad wins the elections and all of a sudden it’s all, ‘oh, we should film ourselves having sex, that would be fun,’ and, ‘hey, we should invite your dad and his partner round for dinner, get to know them better.’ It wasn’t long before I wised up.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” This time I did mean it. “I really thought he was on the level with you.”

“Yeah, well, I thought so too. Not all bad though, he helped me come out, get over all that angsty stuff. I guess you helped, too. Forced me into talking to my parents about it, that was the hardest part.” He almost offered me a smile. “You’re still a wanker, though.”

“Totally. How are things with your parents, by the way? Your dad?”

His eyes tightened slightly at the sides. I could feel his defenses go up. There was no way to pretend the question was purely innocent. It never was. In so many ways me and Jellyfish were wired the same way. We’d just been swimming in different circles for the past couple of years. I’d graduated to the big pool, swam with the sharks. Jelly had tried that and been eaten.

Had he always been using Chris to get to his dad? Michael Perry hadn’t been the Commissioner when the relationship had started. He’d been just another high ranking cop, someone with potential. Maybe Jelly had started out with his heart in the right place. Maybe plotting to use Chris was just another compromise that had been made on the fly along the way.

I left the library with the same unanswered questions I’d arrived with, but it had forced me to ask some new ones. Michael Perry had accepted that his son was gay. He’d had to, because Chris took after his father in that regard. But Perry was a politician, and whether or not he had accepted his son for who he was, the rules changed when politics was involved. It didn’t matter how
out
Chris was, he could still be used to create a media scandal that would hurt his father’s career.

My mind slipped so easily into the shadows now. Understanding the ways powerful people schemed and manipulated had become so effortless. Had it always been that way, or was it something I’d learned along the way?

Had I learned to swim with the sharks, or had I
become
a shark?

I’d learned to spend as little time in my own head as possible to avoid these very questions. I knew I wouldn’t like the answers.

Looking into Jelly’s sex life hadn’t turned anything up, so I went for his wallet instead. I knew just the man.

Matt Doncaster.

Back in the day, when I was working at the bottom of the food chain, Matt had been another of the people I leaned on for information. And he’d been close with Jelly. Mostly because Jelly leaned on him even more than I did.

Matt was easy to find these days. He worked for me.

I drove out to Whitmore Reans, a neighborhood northwest of the city center, on the other side of the ring road. This part of the city was heavy on immigrants, students, and irony. The terraced houses that lined the streets had gone unchanged for decades, but urban regeneration projects had filled in the unsightly gaps with new galleries, university buildings, and car showrooms. Little had been done to bring any wealth to the families who lived there, but plenty had been done to put shiny things in front of them.

In the heart of the area was the Community Center. Gaines had financed the square structure of metal and breeze block a few years before. Inside it had space for indoor football, plenty of seating for people who wanted to watch a game, and changing rooms. Making it a sports facility had been Veronica’s idea, but once it had been built, she’d given me free reign to run it on my own terms, coaching local kids at football and keeping them off the streets.

Since its opening, the place had expanded. Community grants and more of Gaines’s money had added extensions and upgrades to the building. She’d invested good money in quality equipment. There was a small gym, an Internet café, and a large common room with a television and sofas. Wolves, the local football club, sent their coaches and players to work with the kids a couple times a month, and adults from around the neighborhood came to volunteer their time.

The place had outgrown me. My name was still on all the paperwork as the manager, but my other work for Gaines took up too much of my time for me to stay involved with the Community Center. The grants and the media exposure generated plenty of paperwork; we needed qualified social workers in senior roles. At first, we’d gotten around this by offering internships to social work students from the local university, but we’d eventually been forced to hire two full-time staff members. One of them, Becky, had around a million qualifications in guidance counseling, social work, and healthcare. She was a middle-class bleeding heart, and somehow seemed oblivious to where the funding came from. She never even asked what her boss did with his time. Which worked for me.

My other full-time employee was Matt Doncaster. My project.

Our lives had run in parallel; as my life had fallen apart, so had his. He had once been a law student, one of the brightest and best at Wolverhampton University. He’d been one of the young hopefuls they parade out to smile for the press, pose in brochures, and talk at local schools. His developing drug habit had been a minor problem at first. Universities allow a certain margin of error among athletes and high academic achievers. Let kids be kids. But then Matt was cut loose when a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl blamed him for the baggie she was found with.

By the time we’d met, he was a drug dealer on the bottom of the food chain, living mostly on the streets and sampling more of his own product than he sold. He’d been quite happy sliding downward until something had stopped him, and he’d turned up at my door at three in the morning, clean and sober, frozen and shivering. I guessed he was asking for my help, but his eyes were fixed on the floor and all he kept saying was:

“Billy was cold.”

“Billy was cold.”

“Billy was cold.”

Then, and I’ll never forget it, Matt had looked me in the eye and said, “You look like shit.”

And that was that. For the rest of that night, and the few that followed, I heard him crying as he slept on my sofa, whispering names and apologies for deeds he’d never told me about. I didn’t ask. I paid for him to go to private rehab, and Gaines paid for him to finish university. He’d had high enough scores to have built up academic credits and was allowed to switch his major, so he added another year on to his studies and changed to social work. He split his time between classes and the Community Center, with us footing the bill and paying his wages.

When I finally pulled out of traffic and into the car park of the Center, Matt’s car was in my space, so I boxed it in. I found Matt in the office, reading through the mail and stacking the bills in a neat pile that I knew I’d ignore until the last possible moment. He was in my chair, behind my desk, but I didn’t mind because he pretty much did my job.

“Hey, boss.” He didn’t look up from the letter until he’d finished reading it. When he did, he played a familiar tune. “You look like shit.”

“I could fire you, you know, I really could.”

“But then who’d do your job for you?”

I raised my hand and held my thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart. “Seriously, this close.”

He smiled and put his hands up in mock surrender. I eased into the chair on the visitors’ side of the desk and scratched my nose, looking for a subtle way into the conversation.

“Seen Jellyfish lately?”

He shook his head. “Nah. I try and avoid mixing with guys who still use.”

“So he was?”

“As far as I know.”

I thought back to the drugs at the scene. “Is he still selling?”

“Don’t think so. He’s not as well connected since Marv and Letisha left town, but he still goes for it at parties and gets high himself.”

I’d never told Matt the truth about Letisha, and he seemed happy not to ask. His recovery had been a slow and fragile one, and there were certain things he still couldn’t deal with.

“And you don’t want to be around someone who’ll just casually get wasted.”

He nodded. “Right. Too much to lose, you know.”

I did, so I didn’t push it. I also didn’t tell him about the drugs in my pocket. “Do you know who he hangs around with? He seems to have fallen off the radar.”

“He had a job for a while, out at the speedway, but he got sacked. As far as I know, he’s hooked up with someone I used to know at the Uni—a media studies student named Simon. He and Jelly started making Internet porn videos and selling ’em on a website. You know, a fiver for a ten-minute clip, or thirty quid for unlimited access.” He paused before adding the expected joke. “At least I’m
told
that’s how it works.”

Would there ever, in the history of the world, be a conversation about porn that didn’t involve someone cracking a variation on that joke? I wondered if, even in the porn industry, people would stop between takes and say, “Hey, I’m told that’s how it works.”

Chris’s words were still fresh in my mind, about Jelly wanting to film the two of them having sex. “When you say he
makes
porn—”

Matt smiled. “Relax. He’s behind the camera. Well, he does handle the talent, too, if you want to call it that. As far as I know Simon handles the technical side. You seen Si’s girlfriend? She’s been in a few of the films and she’s hot.” Then he paused, and his face asked his next question before the words came. “Are they in trouble?”

I didn’t answer straight away. I waited just long enough for him to know I was lying, but not quite long enough to invite a question about it. “No.”

He knew enough about my line of work to know when not to ask questions. Many times in the past he’d been one of the people I’d muscled in on for information, so it made sense that now he liked staying ignorant.

“Can we view the website now?” I asked.

We had all manner of blocks and filters on all the computers in the Center, to stop the kids from doing the very thing I was asking to do. Matt had also come up with a way of blocking outgoing payments, so that the kids could visit online shops and look around but couldn’t buy anything.

Matt nodded, clicked a few things with his mouse. “Let’s take a look,” he said. “The filter on this machine is easy to switch off.”

He did a quick web search and then waved for me to come around the desk and take a look. The home page on the screen featured a woman dressed like a trashy gangster and a disclaimer that said you had to be over eighteen to enter the site. Below the woman were two buttons: one said
E
NTER
; the other said
N
O
T
HANKS
.
I wondered what happened if you pressed the second button. Would you be routed through to BBC news? A children’s TV channel?

I nodded and Matt clicked the first button, and the sound of movie gunfire came out of the computer’s speakers as the screen reloaded. The new page was modeled on 1940s Hollywood, done in silver and black with Art Deco styling. Written across the top, in some approximation of the Hollywood sign, was the name of the company:
S
TUDIO
N
OIR
.

Below the sign was a menu with links to a free tour, membership information, and contact details. There were also more pictures of scantily clad women, and a few men, all in campy re-creations of classic film scenes. I hoped there wasn’t a porn version of
The Maltese Falcon
, because I didn’t want to see what they did with the statue. A couple of the women looked vaguely familiar, and I decided they must have been dancers at Gaines’s strip club, Legs, before it burned down.

I pointed at the link for contact details but all that brought up was a formatted box for you to type in an e-mail.

“That’s not what I need. Where are they based?”

Matt nodded and clicked through to another part of the site. “Porn websites have to have registered contact details on display, though I think it’s more for U.S. laws than U.K.” He looked uncomfortable for a second. “I, uh, read that in the newspaper, I think.”

He eventually found a simple page with an address, but it was a P.O. box listing for Birmingham, nothing that would tell me where the office was or where I could find the people who worked with Jellyfish. I pulled my worn old notebook from my jacket pocket and thought of Claire. It once had a piece of elastic to hold it shut, but when that had snapped, I’d replaced it with one of her hair bands. I wrote down the address in case it proved useful, then waved for Matt to get rid of the page.

“Where’s Becky?”

“Field trip with one of our classes.”

“How things going between you?”

His mouth wobbled a little, and I smiled. They both thought they’d kept their little romance a secret. I didn’t mind it. Becky was at least eight years older than Matt and liked to mother people; she was perfect for someone as insecure as he was. And if there was anyone on earth who could put up with Becky’s earnestness, it was Matt. If he could sit through a twelve-step program he could put up with anything.

“We, uh—”

I stood up and waved it away. “I really don’t need to know. Just stopping in to tell you that I might be busy for a few days. There’s something I have to take care of.”

He didn’t ask.

I needed to find out where Studio Noir was based, and I knew a man who could tell me.