Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3) (8 page)

“Pepsi, get your ass out of bed.”

Pepsi was a short Asian man with accountant glasses but a salesman smile. He’d been a major player for the Mann brothers before the changeover. Now he handled our talent. His tax returns listed him as a modeling agent, and he did do a half-hearted job of running an agency that supplied talent to local newspapers, social events, and Internet video companies. But the time he spent on the tax cover was insignificant; most of his efforts went into handling the bookings for our ladies of negotiable affection.

He lived with his parents in a terraced house on Bilston Road, one of the main routes out of the city. Usually when I visited I would show a lot of respect to his parents and act like a visitor in their home. Today was not one of those times. This was Pepsi’s place, and I needed him.

“Open the fuck up, Peps.”

Finally I heard chains being moved behind the door, and then the lock turned and the door opened inward. Pepsi stood there in a T-shirt, tight across his beer belly, and boxers. He was running his hand through his hair and squinting out at me, like he’d been down in a mine for years and was only now seeing daylight. “What’s up?”

I stepped in toward him and he moved aside, letting me through. He shut the front door and for a moment we were plunged into gloom until he flipped the light switch. It was an odd sight, his parent’s cheaply but ornately decorated living room littered with pizza boxes and empty Cobra bottles. The large plasma TV on the wall was tuned to some cable channel with a message onscreen saying programming didn’t resume until midnight. There were a number of smells in the room, none of them good.

I stepped to the front window and pulled back the curtain, letting daylight in, then cracked it open to get some air. In the new light I saw for the first time that there were other people in the room, asleep on the floor and furniture likes sacks of potatoes.

Pepsi stood there looking around us and scratching his balls. He shrugged. “Family’s away in India, innit, so I’ve been having a birthday party.”

“I thought your birthday was in November?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re in April.”

“I’m practicing.”

I cut to the chase. “We got a problem, Peps. Business problem.”

Any cobwebs in his head were pulled away at the mention of business. He led me upstairs, stepping over a few more sleeping men, to a back room that had been converted into a cut-rate office. He shut the door and locked it. Then he switched on the laptop that was on the desk and waved for me to sit on the fake leather swivel chair while he logged on.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know yet.” I gave him a half-truth. A quarter-truth, since I knew only half of it myself. “First, you heard of a company called Studio Noir?”

He rubbed more sleep out of his eyes as he nodded. “Sure, Jelly’s thing. I supply some of the talent.”

“You know where they’re based?”

He nodded and rummaged through a stack of papers on the desk, handing me a business card. It was matte black and designed in the same fake Deco style as the website. It had an address in Wednesbury.

I slipped the card into my notebook. “You know Jelly was with one of our girls at the hotel last night, right?”

“Jelly? Nah, can’t be. He never booked with me. He didn’t use the hotel, either. If he wanted girls he always just called me directly. We supplied for his videos sometimes. Don’t think he ever checked into the hotel.”

I changed the subject fast to keep him on his toes. “Drugs, Peps, you still selling?”

I’d always half-assumed Pepsi had been the secret drug dealer who’d infiltrated our prostitution set-up the year before. I’d let it go since the problem had gone away on its own, but now I needed to push. I watched his profile as I asked the question, judging his reaction. Shock is one of the hardest emotions to fake, and few actors onscreen ever really pull it off. I remembered reading about a film director shooting off a gun next to his actor’s head to get the right reaction. The shock on Pepsi’s face looked genuine enough as he turned to me with wide eyes.

“I don’t sell. I don’t even take. Except for weed, you know. What happened?”

“I don’t know yet, but I need to know which girl you sent to The Hound last night. Russian-sounding, or Polish, whatever. Blonde. Said her name was Maria.”

“Yeah, don’t they all. Half our list goes by that name.” He opened up a few files and spreadsheets and started scrolling through them. “I don’t think we had anyone there last night. Everything was over in West Brom, some footballer party. There was—wait—yeah, we had someone there. She was due to meet them in the bar, texted me to say they had changed the plan and she was heading to their house.”

“You allow that?”

“They’re regular customers. No problem.”

“They?”

“Yeah, there were two of them.”

“She go by the name Maria?”

“Not that she’s told us. And she ain’t Russian. Wait.” He clicked on another file and waited for a database to load up. It was labeled as his talent list and was laid out like a social networking site, complete with head shots of his models. He scrolled through the thumbnails until he stopped at a brunette’s photo and clicked on it. The next page that opened showed her glamour shot as well as her profile information. “Here you go.”

He turned the laptop so that the screen was facing me. I pulled it closer and scrolled through the page he’d selected. It was a listing for a Joanne Rhys, who lived nearby in Tipton. It listed her occupation as full-time student, and her model names as Paige, Lucille, and Sloane. There was a list of hot links that looked like they’d bring up another page on the database with headers including
classy, secretary
, and
posh.
Her photograph matched these descriptions: she had sleek brown hair, proud, angular features and a cool expression. There were other photographs as I scrolled down, of her in different outfits, each one a variation on a theme.

I copied her address into my notebook in case I wanted to talk to her, see if she’d seen anything at the hotel that might help, but she wasn’t Maria. I shook my head and turned the laptop back to Pepsi.

“How about the guys who canceled?”

He blinked for a second. “Not
guys
. It was a husband and wife—like I said, they’re regulars. Never canceled before, always been good for it, you know?”

“You got a database for regular customers?”

“Contact details, yeah, but not something like this with profiles and head shots. Hang on, I can probably—” He pressed a few keys and then scrolled around with the mouse. “I think the guy’s on Facebook with me. Yeah, here.”

He turned the laptop back to me and pointed at the screen. It was the profile page for Craig Cartwright. The name rang a bell, but not the face. He looked like any number of thirty-something men in the area: a tight black shirt, a little too much weight in the neck and shoulders, and far too much fake tan. But it wasn’t Cartwright who was holding my attention. I was staring at the woman pressed up against him in most of the photographs. The two of them caught in loving embraces, holiday snaps, family occasions. She was slim and attractive, if a little haunted looking.

Her hair color ranged from auburn to dark brown in the photos, but it wasn’t hard to picture her as a blonde. It wasn’t hard at all.

I’d seen it last night.

This was Maria.

Pepsi gave me the couple’s address. He said he didn’t usually keep track of customers in this much detail but they were very open about their lives and kept inviting him round. He’d never taken them up on it.

I drove out to the pub, one of the few in the area I’d never tried myself. It was in the outskirts of Willenhall, a town that bordered Wolverhampton and was about a five-mile drive from the city center. Historically it had been known for its locksmiths, but like the rest of the area it was now known for discount stores and pubs. I found The Bridge Tavern at the junction between a bridge over the river and the main road. It was a large freestanding building, painted butterscotch blond and adorned with football flags and the cross of Saint George. The pub had its own parking lot to the side that overlooked the canal. I parked at the far end, near the water, and then made my way back to the building, looking up at the rear windows as I passed, trying to spot any sign of life in the living quarters upstairs.

Inside the main bar it was more cramped than it looked from outside. All of the wood was dark and glossy, and the bar had a brass rail running around it. I felt like I was on the deck of the Titanic. The early afternoon trade was limited to the usual suspects: old men and the unemployed. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light, I stepped up to the bar and waited to be served by the woman across the counter, who was chatting with a regular. She was in her early twenties, with bottle blonde hair and a fake tan; he was in his sixties with a flat cap. His words carried the whistle of the toothless. I didn’t fancy his chances.

When she finally turned to me I was treated to the full beam of her bright smile, which probably worked a treat on anyone other than me.

“What can I get you?”

I asked for a Coke, and as casually as I could make it sound, said, “Is Craig in?”

She frowned while pouring my drink, “No.”

Her tone said there was something there, bubbling beneath the surface. I just had to find the right way in.

“Shite.” I made it sound like I was mad at myself. “I must have got the time wrong. Know what time he’ll be back?”

She handed me my Coke and took my money, running it through the till before returning with my change. “No, and I’m not sure I want to know.”

Almost there. I played it easy. “Oh, what’s he done this time?”

She peered at me for a second, and I could see the cogs spinning. Was I really an old friend of Craig’s? I sounded like it. Why would someone come in and pretend like that? She shrugged. “I’m meant to be off today. Only had to come on for an hour to do some cleaning and get the sandwiches made. But when I get here? No sign. He’s not in to open the pub, and the regulars are outside waiting. They say he closed up early last night, too. Just kicked everyone out without a reason.”

“He didn’t call you?”

“Nope. No texts, nothing. I bet him and her ladyship have jetted off somewhere again. He never bothers to tell us lowly workers.”

I jumped on the reference to Craig’s wife. “She’s really done a number on him, right under the thumb.”

“I know, right?” She was on my side now, and I got a different kind of smile as she leaned in closer. “But fuck ’em. I’m going to charge overtime for this. I had plans today, going shopping with my sister. We were going to get a train down to London, really blow off steam.”

“That’s a long way to go to blow off steam.”

She smiled again. “We have a lot to blow off.”

One of the regulars approached the bar and mumbled something in the thickest accent I’d ever heard, and she turned to him. It was his turn to get the full force of the smile. There was a time when I worshipped barmaids. They had the power of the beer, and that was enough for me. I wondered if feeling drawn to them was something you grew out of and then back into, if so, were these old men at the bar my future?

I had the cure for maudlin thoughts and dead-end leads in my pocket, so I pretended to have forgotten where the toilets were and followed the barmaid’s directions round to the other room, a larger bar with a flat-screen television and a schedule of televised football matches stuck to the wall beside it. At the end of the bar was a single door with a sign saying
T
OILETS
.
I pushed through into a narrow corridor. Both the male and female toilets were to the left, side by side, but to the right I saw the corridor led to the bar I’d been sitting at, and the blonde was facing away from me, talking to the customers. Just behind her, a few feet between us, was a staircase leading up.

I stepped quietly along the passageway, my feet sliding across the vinyl floor, and then put my weight on the bottom step, testing to see if it would creak. When it didn’t, I stepped up onto it and climbed the stairs, bracing myself against the walls on either side to take as much of my weight off the steps as I could. The stairs led straight up to the living area and opened out onto a landing with five doors. I slipped off my shoes and left them at the top of the stairs. I tried the door straight ahead of me, but it opened onto the bathroom. Sleek and modern with shiny white fittings. It smelled strongly of bleach and air freshener. It felt like a bathroom that would look down on you for being dirty. I don’t like judgemental rooms.

To the left was a small bedroom, with a single bed pushed up against the wall beneath a window on one side and three overstuffed wardrobes along the opposite wall. Next up was the kitchen, modern and fitted, with a silver double-door fridge bigger than my car. In the sink, a few dirty dishes sat in cold water. I remembered why I’d left the bar in the first place and rummaged in my pockets, laying out two small plastic bags on the counter. I pulled a small round pill out of one and popped it into my mouth. Out of the other I took a small capsule that was divided into two sections. I broke it open on the counter and tipped out the powder, then lined it up and snorted it. My head shook with a brief aftershock; then my neck grew cold and distant. I stood and waited while the numbness settled. Then I pocketed the bags and went on exploring.

On the other side of the landing the first door opened onto a large living room, with windows looking out onto the road. There was a dining table in the corner and a full Ikea living room set in the middle, all arranged around a flat-screen television that was almost as big as the one downstairs. There was the same smell of bleach in here. On the floor by the sofa was a deep stain, and the smell of bleach was strongest there, like something had been scrubbed out of the carpet. I knelt down and touched it, rubbing my fingers in before smelling them, but the only odor that was sticking was the bleach. I pushed the cream-colored sofa back a couple of inches, but the damp patch didn’t go any further.

I went back into the bathroom and looked more closely at its insane cleanliness. Was the room judgemental, or was it screaming out for help? I smelled the sink and the bath, and both carried the thick scent of bleach poured down the drain.

I tried the next door and found the master bedroom. More overstuffed wardrobes lined the wall. These were a varnished pine, and a queen-sized bed stuck out into the room from the far wall. There was a chest of draws beneath the window, lined with trinkets, jewelry, and framed photographs—Craig and his wife in many of the same pictures I’d seen on Pepsi’s Facebook page. There was a small pile of mail on the floor beside the bed, and I bent down to flick through it. Bills, circulars, and a few catalogues. All were in the name of Maria Cartwright. One of the bills had a different surname: Maria Boruc. I guessed it was her maiden name. That meant she’d given me her real name at the hotel, and her accent had been genuine too. No faking, no covers.

That was a bad sign.

I’d been assuming she was experienced, that she was a pro at lying and probably killing. But if she’d given me her real name it suggested she was all in, she’d had nothing to lose and no escape plan. Maybe the drugs weren’t an act, either. Every time I thought I had a grip on what was going on, I turned out to be pulling on another loose thread.

I read through some of the letters, hoping to find something I could use, something that would leave a trail to where they might be, but there was nothing. I went back into the living room and picked up one of the cream cushions, dropped it onto the stain and then stood on it. After a moment I picked it up and turned it over. The bleach had seeped into it, bringing along with it the charming smell. But there was something else, something that no amount of scrubbing had gotten out completely. A smell I’d become familiar with the night before, and the faint traces of a stain, a watered-down dark reddish-brown. Back in the bathroom again I opened the cupboard beneath the sink and found the plumbing. I wrestled with the plastic piping that attached to the plug hole for a few minutes until it started to loosen; then I unscrewed it and pulled it loose. I held the tube upside down over the toilet as its content dribbled out, and it confirmed what I already knew.

Blood.

Blood can be misleading. A tiny cut in the right place can fill a bucket. A large gash somewhere important can be ignored until it’s too late. But blood that someone had worked this hard to cover up?

Definitely more than a paper cut.