Burn- pigeon 16 (21 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

Anna woke just before eleven. It had been years since she'd slept past seven in the morning and, most nights, she was in bed by ten. The 5:00
A.M.
quitting time and the long morning's sleep, so reminiscent of her college days, left her with a not unpleasant sense of walking on the wild side. Following on the heels of this taste of youth was the realization of age: Time was running out. She snatched her shorts from the floor, wriggled into them, and cinched the belt. Pattering down the narrow stairs, she pulled on one of Paul's old sheriff's shirts, the patches cut off, and buttoned it before she grabbed her laptop and let herself out of the courtyard.

At CC's, a hot latte on the table beside the laptop, she hooked into the Wi-Fi. Frederick had come through. She downloaded the files he'd sent and was home before noon. Sitting at the little patio table in the courtyard, she called 411 on her cell phone and got the number for Les Bonnes Filles. Clare had undoubtedly given Jordan not only a last name but a full history when she was creating the character. Anna had no idea what it was, so she made the reservation in the name of Jordan Sinclair. Maybe it was the name Clare that suggested it, but Anna thought it sounded like the name of a rich man, and she wanted the concierge to smell money.

That done, she called her husband and let his love and the magic of the Arabica beans of her second latte bring her gently into the mellow spring in Geneva's courtyard. Mackie, Jordan's color-assisted dog, was outside and amused himself by watching turtles watching him.

As she was saying good-bye to Paul, the complaining of the rusted gate on Jordan's side of the house cried across the bricks. By Mackie's exultant rush down the walkway, Anna guessed it was Clare returning from wherever she'd spent the morning.

"Back here," Anna called.

Clare, wearing Jordan's clothes but having cleaned up for her morning's work, came into the courtyard dragging a rolling suitcase with several bags hooked around the handle riding it piggyback. Her arms were filled with more bags, all with the Brooks Brothers logo on them.

"Holy smoke," Anna said. "Brooks Brothers? You must be hemorrhaging money."

"Five thousand six hundred forty-three dollars and eighty-seven cents," Clare said, dumping it all to the bricks and dropping her cheaply polyestered rump into the chair across the table from where Anna was nursing her coffee.

"There was no way around it. Concierges at the better hotels know more about men's clothes--and some women's clothes, too, for that matter--than a lot of tailors. What they know is money: what it costs, how much the guy wearing it is worth. If this guy Tanya turned us on to is procuring for high-end swingers, then he'll have an eye for who can afford his services. Would you believe I paid sixty dollars a pair for the boxer shorts in that sack?" Clare nudged one of the bags with the toe of her beat-up Payless shoes.

"You plan on showing the concierge your underpants?" Anna asked with a laugh.

"Maybe. I doubt he'll bother checking out the rooms of his customers, but you never know. He might be canny enough to rifle through a few suitcases and closets to see if he's being set up by whatever vice cops might be conducting investigations in the area, things like that. If he did, and my boxer shorts were from Walmart, he'd know something was up."

Anna felt like a fool for not thinking of that herself. "You're good at this," she said honestly.

"It's all theater," Clare said wearily. She leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees, and rested her head in her hands. Malnutrition, stress, and the fatigue of the weeks since the fire were evident in the curve of her spine. "You wear an eighteenth-century corset and woolen drawers, you move more like a woman of that era," Clare mumbled. "Clothes make the man in more ways than people think."

"Or the woman into the man," Anna said. She sipped her coffee and watched the actress. Jordan burned, and that fire, though consuming him, gave him the energy to move forward. Clare's energy was derived from another source. She was not so much moving forward of her own volition as being driven by horrors that filled her waking--and, undoubtedly, sleeping--moments. If she didn't sleep and eat and do a few self-sustaining chores, she wasn't going to make it many more days. Anna considered suggesting food and rest but knew she'd go unheard. Clare might last long enough to find her children. If they were alive, they'd cure her. If they were dead, it wouldn't really matter.

All Anna could do was keep her company and lift heavy objects. "Come on," she said. "Let's get that stuff put away, then see what you can hypnotize out of Candy."

Standing, she reached down and hooked her fingers through the loops on the nearest sack. She'd gathered up two more and was reaching for the suitcase handle before Clare struggled up out of the chair. As if dazed by the sudden change in altitude, she stared vacantly around her. Her eyes lit on Anna's laptop.

"You want I should bring that?" she asked, sounding like a lost child.

"Yes," Anna said. "My bro--" She cut herself off. Had she told Clare that the FBI agent helping her was her brother-in-law? Anna couldn't remember. She hoped not. If the proverbial hit the fan, and Clare told anyone he'd helped them, he could be up on charges regardless of whether or not he'd officially known he was aiding a suspected murderess. Because he was FBI--even retired FBI--he would be held to a higher standard of conduct than an ordinary citizen.

"The guy who was looking into things for me e-mailed what he'd found. It's all on there. I haven't had time to go through it yet," she said. Leading the way, she took Clare's keys from her and unlocked and opened the door to her apartment. Taking the one chair from its home in front of the computer, Anna sat down and read through what Frederick had found while Clare unpacked the trousers, shirts, socks, shoes, and half a dozen other items of wearing apparel she'd dropped over five grand on.

Frederick had paraphrased what he'd discovered. For that Anna was grateful. Plowing through the agent-speak of official reports was time-consuming. "Daoud Suliman, name legally changed to David Sullivan June 2003," she read aloud.

"After 9/11 he thought it would be better for business and the girls if he wasn't so obviously Mideastern," Clare said.

"Ah. Wife, two daughters, under investigation from 2006 to 2009 for human trafficking. Suspected of illegally importing garment workers from Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Nepal, and Lebanon. Suspected of procuring garment workers for factories in New Jersey, Seattle, Washington, and Los Angeles. Suspected of using undocumented workers in two of his own manufacturing plants. Suspected of paying below minimum wage, not providing health care, limiting workers' freedoms, and--oooh," Anna said. "Here's where he's getting into big trouble. Evading income taxes and channeling money to Muslim charities thought to be a cover for terrorists."

Clare had stopped moving and stood in the middle of the unfurnished bedroom holding a shirt by the collar with one hand, the other on its cuff out to the side as if she stood in the arms of an invisible dance partner.

"That sound about right?" Anna asked.

"Yes," Clare said without hesitation. "I chose to think he was rescuing women from situations that were worse than what they'd face here. For some, I think that was true, women accused of a crime or on the outs with their in-laws or breaking some religious taboo. Others, I suppose their families sold them."

Anna looked at her for a moment, not judging, but wondering what it was she, Anna, chose to believe that was untrue, what she hid from herself so effectively she didn't even suspect she was doing it, what rules she lived by that were arbitrary and destructive.

"And Jalila," Anna said. "The second wife?"

"She was from Saudi. David felt Saudis were superior to people from other Muslim countries. He wouldn't marry a Pakistani, and never anybody from Afghanistan. Too
uncivilized.
"

Anna forgave her the sneer. Until a country treated its women equally and fairly, it wasn't going to climb all that far up on Anna's list of civilized places either.

She went back to the screen. "The investigation stopped three months ago; that's interesting. No disposition, nothing. Frederick thinks that means, to keep himself out of jail, David went to work for the FBI, either by rolling on his buddies or by working undercover in whatever scheme they had pinned on him."

Clare began moving again, hanging up the shirt she'd been dancing with.

Scratching Mackie's back absently and letting her mind float, Anna let the new information find and mate up with the other fragments she'd been told by Clare or gleaned from the gutter punks. It wasn't much, but it did hang together.

Clare took a wicked-looking knife from her trouser pocket, and Anna tensed, waiting to see if Jordan had sinister plans, but Clare began neatly cutting off price tags. "Best guess," Anna said. "Do you think your husband was selling kids into the sex trade--or women?"

"Best guess? No. David was a religious man. I don't doubt he'd stone a woman to death for adultery without blinking an eye or losing a night's sleep afterward, but he wouldn't prostitute her."

"Not even if she was sold to him because she was an adulteress or whatever?" Anna asked.

"Maybe, but I don't think he would. For men like David, death is one thing--and not all that bad a thing, really--but desecration is another. Even if a woman had, by his standards, been desecrated either by choice or force, I don't think he'd want to have any part of it. He wouldn't save or harm her. She'd be dead to him."

"Same for children?"

"More so, probably." Clare snipped off the last tag from the clothes she'd hung in the closet and turned to Anna, knife open. "But then I thought a lot of things. And didn't bother to think a lot of things. So I could be dead wrong." Anna could see the choice of the phrase flashing like lightning in Clare's mind as it did in hers. If Clare had been wrong, it wasn't her own death she'd earned.

"You are sure the corpse carried out of your house was David?" Anna asked.

"It had on David's pajamas," Clare replied. Back against the wall, she slid down until she was sitting on her sleeping bag, knees up to her chest, expensive men's undergarments scattered around her. Gathering the stuffed dog to her chest, she buried her nose in its back.

Anna waited.

"It was when I found Jalila murdered that I knew it was David on that stretcher," Clare said finally.

"Couldn't David have murdered Jalila? Maybe she was going to leave him, or turn him in to the law. Maybe she was having an affair."

Clare thought about that for a while. "Oh, God," she said, and, putting her hands to her head as if it was about to explode, she groaned. "I guess he could have. But there was Aisha . . ." Her voice trailed off and she appeared to be shrinking before Anna's eyes.

"Pack," Anna said to keep her moving. Clare heaved herself to her feet, using the wall for support, and dragged the suitcase to the middle of the room.

Anna went back to the report Frederick had sent. "It looks like David had at least two business partners, one in L.A. and one in New Orleans. Both port cities. The one in L.A. was known only as Big Fish and the guy in New Orleans as the Magician. You got that right," she said to Clare. The woman needed to be reinflated somehow.

Clare said nothing, just kept folding and stowing.

"Maybe because he could make people disappear?" The thin nature of the information they had was disheartening. Anna wanted to ask Clare if she'd run off to New Orleans on the strength of a Cajun accent and the words "Bourbon Street Nursery." She wanted to ask her why, if she believed the body on one stretcher was that of her husband, who she claimed had not been in the house when she'd come back from her night run to the pharmacy, she did not believe the two smaller corpses were those of the daughters. Why she was so certain the girls had been taken for the sex slave trade and not just killed and dumped. Knowing those questions might well render Clare useless, Anna changed tack.

"Let's get on with the hypnotism," she said and closed the laptop.

"Candy won't be up," Clare said dully.

"We'll get her up."

TWENTY-EIGHT

Candy was up but only just. She was still in her pajamas, a loose top and shorts, childlike in pink with white poodles. Her room, attached to a rambling old apartment shared by Delilah, Star, and their son, was cluttered to the point few of the original surfaces were visible beneath the tossed-off clothing and, to Anna the saddest and most poignant paraphernalia, dozens of Beanie Babies that looked much loved and played with.

"Hello,
Mrs.
Jordan," Candy said when Delilah let them into her bedroom. The baby stripper had yet to forgive Jordan for lacking family jewels. Sleepily, she combed the fine blond hair off her face, still puffy from the pillow, and stared at them with a look of anticipation and alarm. "You come to hippopotomize me?"

"Hypnotize, baby girl," Delilah said.

"I changed my mind," she said sulkily. "I don't want any hippotizing." She swung her plump legs over the side of the bed, planting her feet on yesterday's Levi's.

Clare shot Anna a desperate look.

"You'll like it," Anna said. "It's fun."

Candy looked unconvinced.

"It's like knocking back three beers in a row," Anna said, feeling a twinge of guilt. For what, she wasn't sure. Maybe appealing to alcoholism in a minor crossed some internal line between right and sleazy.

Candy thought about that. "Can I have a beer first?"

"How about after?" Anna said. Again the twinge. "It'll be more fun that way."

Delilah had a sour look on her face. "With lunch," she said firmly.

One couldn't but respect a woman who wouldn't let the children drink before noon. Anna put aside her judgment. At least Star and Delilah looked after the girl; that was a whole lot more than anyone else had done.

"Okay," Candy said resignedly. "Do me."

Coming from a child stripper and, once, prostitute, the phrase jarred.

"Okay, then," Clare said. Her sweet motherly voice coming from Jordan's black-clad frame, a tattoo of thorns across his brow, seemed almost like reverse demon possession.

Clare settled Candy on the rumpled bed, her back comfortably supported by the headboard. She sat tailor style in front of Candy.

"Just relax, sweetie, and listen to my voice. We're going on a walk together, okay?"

"Don't you need one of those gold watch things on a chain?" asked Star, who'd come to stand in the doorway to view the proceedings. "You know, to swing back and forth?"

Clare shook her head, her eyes never leaving Candy's. Star took the hint and kept quiet.

Clare raised her index finger and said, "Look at the tip of my finger. See how pink it is, and the lines on it? Keep watching it." She began moving the finger in smooth arcs back and forth in front of Candy's face as if drawing a big smile in the air. As the finger moved she spoke in a near monotone, her voice low and soothing.

"You're snug in your room, in your own bed. All your friends are here. You feel so safe and so loved. The bed is soft and comfortable, and you can feel yourself sinking into it deeper and deeper."

Anna was fascinated. Candy's eyes were drooping and unfocused after less than a minute of the process. Even Delilah and Star were looking a little hazy. Other than interest, Anna felt nothing.

Another half minute and Candy was clearly transported into another state. Her facial muscles grew slack, and what few years she'd racked up were erased. She looked no more than ten and as innocent as if she hadn't seen the ugliest the world had to offer.

Gently, Clare led her back to Dick's, then to the streets where Delilah and Star had found her. At the strip club, Candy was happy, and the images were clear and detailed. The same wasn't true for her time on the streets, and Anna wondered if her mental disability carried with it a hidden strength, the ability to forget the bad times.

As Clare and Candy regressed through the fog of the girl's streetwalking days and closer to the information they sought, Anna's agitation began to make itself felt. Had she been sitting, she would be on the edge of her chair. Clare remained cool and measured, and Anna was impressed with the woman's self-control. She'd seen so little of it, it came as a pleasant surprise.

From the fragmented history Clare was eliciting, it looked like all of them had gotten Candy's timeline wrong. Unless there was much she had forgotten or blocked, it sounded like she'd been on the streets no more than a few months, a much shorter time than Delilah and Star had supposed. They knew for a fact that she'd been a dancer at Dick's for four months. If she had been cast out of the "fancy house" when she turned eleven and her period started, as she'd intimated, that made her not thirteen but twelve, and the child she carried the result of hooking or rape.

Twelve and retarded and pregnant; Anna pushed a chunk of sadness aside and was surprised at how heavy it was.

"Come on, Candy, honey, let's leave the streets and go to the fancy house. Ready?"

"Yeah," Candy breathed, and the smile of a child expecting a treat teased the corners of her mouth up.

Clare glanced at Anna. Both of them were tense. Too much was hanging on the memories of a mentally challenged girl.

"Take my hand and take me to the fancy house," Clare said. She folded her fingers lightly around Candy's hand where it lay palm up on the wrinkled sheet. Candy's fingers twitched but didn't close. "Where are we going?" Clare all but whispered.

"To the fancy house," Candy murmured.

"Are we walking?"

"Uh-huh."

"Tell me what it looks like."

The description was sketchy and could have fit any street in the Quarter. Candy was not agitated about walking to the fancy house; she just wasn't observant. She came up with only one detail, and that was a big pile of dog poop in the middle of the sidewalk that she got on the edge of her shoe. Though that, in itself, wasn't of use, it was heartening to know she was in a specific time, the day she had dirtied her shoe, and not merely wandering.

Clare continued to let her lead her down streets, not hurrying, just softly interjecting a question when Candy slid off course or deeper into the trance. Anna clenched her jaw to keep from blurting out questions of her own. Delilah and Star were transfixed; evidently this was more information than they'd ever heard from their lodger in the months they'd known her.

Clare led Candy to the fancy house, but the girl was unable to describe it any better than big and nice and blind. Whatever that meant. Anna wondered if Candy had ever seen the outside of the house.

Likely as not, she hadn't. She would have been brought in through another building or a back door or gate lest she escape and be able to lead someone back to the place. That's the way Anna would do it if she were abducting children and keeping them as slaves. She suspected Candy was still in the time of being a streetwalker.

Finally Clare gave up on the architectural aspects and said, "Good, good. Now we are in the fancy house."

Candy's voice lost the vague aspect it had when on the street looking for the building and perked up with, for lack of a better word, joy, the joy of homecoming.

What followed was a fairy tale, but one so twisted and sick that no self-respecting fictional ogres would dream of haunting it. The real ogres were too evil for those that merely consumed the flesh of princesses.

Candy described a bricked courtyard filled with fountains and lanterns. Wrought-iron benches were tucked into corners screened with blooming plants. The air was perfumed, and from somewhere music was piped in. The kind without words, Candy said, and Anna guessed it was chamber music or classical. All very high-class. All used to try to dress a heinous crime so it would seem a refined taste.

On one side of the courtyard was a vine-covered wall with a door but no windows. On the other was the fancy house. Three stories high with balconies where the patrons could smoke and drink and the girls could come when they weren't "entertaining guests." Flowers cascaded down one side in a curtain of "pointy pink"--bougainvillea, Anna guessed.

Inside, the fancy house was lit with "candles in boxes," and the walls were "red and fluffy" and the furniture "fat and soft." Probably a re-creation of somebody's idea of an expensive Victorian-era whorehouse. It seemed no men worked at the house, just girls and little boys and their "governess." The "governess," according to Candy, didn't get to wear nice things and went around in plain gray dresses and had to wear her hair pulled back.

Candy waxed nearly eloquent on the clothing she was dressed in. The dresses for the children were tiny versions of midnineteenth-century fashions, with low-cut bodices and lots of petticoats, lace, and cotton underthings. Their hair was piled up and decorated with feathers and bows, or covered with ornate wigs, and their baby faces painted. Candy was particularly enamored of the fans and the little gloves.

The boys had to wear "stupid pants that were short and stupid coats with buttons or diapers and nothing fun." Candy said she was glad she wasn't a boy.

The "guests" were "men who smelled good and weren't supposed to mark anybody." To Anna that suggested that some violence was allowed, just not the kind that would damage the goods.

"How did you 'entertain' the guests?" Clare asked.

Then Candy told them. As one horrible act after another was described, Anna felt sicker and sicker. Clare, her children undoubtedly on her mind, grew so pale Anna was worried she wouldn't be able to continue. Candy finished with "It wasn't so bad because I'd get ice cream after. Till I got fat. They liked me some fat but not real fat."

Pleasingly plump, Anna thought, and a tide of nausea threatened to send her running to the bathroom.

Blessedly, Clare changed the subject.

"Did you have any friends there?" she asked.

"Dolly was my friend," Candy said; then sadness aged her face. "She was real little and she got broke and they took her somewhere. A broke jewel got given away."

"Who were the broken jewels given to?"

"People. Sometimes to Dougie. He was bad. He sounded good, but he was mean."

At the name Dougie, Clare looked at Anna. That was the name the Cajun had called the pervert.

"I had a baby for a while. A real baby, and they let me carry her around and feed her, but she got broke so bad she was dead afterward."

Star groaned, and Anna thought of the infant Helena she'd cared for and was blinded by a white-hot need to kill somebody.

"Did you have any other friends?" Clare pressed on.

"No. Maybe Blackie. When I got broke he was supposed to give me to Dougie, but he said since I was a retard I could just go away and he wouldn't tell anybody."

Blackie, the Cajun; it was he who turned her loose on the streets to survive the only way she knew how. Charity of a kind, Anna supposed.

Interesting as this all was, it brought them no closer to the location of the house, if, indeed, it was still operating out of the same space it had been when Candy was there. Since it had been less than a year since she'd been turned out, it was likely, but not certain by any means.

Despite the hypnosis, Candy was growing restive under the questioning.

"Ask her if she could smell anything or hear anything from the outside world," Anna whispered.

Clare nodded and turned back to the girl on the bed. "We're nearly done, Candy. There's just one more thing I'd like to ask you. Let's go into the courtyard in the morning after all the guests have gone and sit by ourselves on a bench. Are we there?"

"I guess."

Anna didn't know if hypnosis wore off after a time or if people could get bored or annoyed or scared and bring themselves out of it, but it sounded like one or the other was happening. Candy's voice was a bit more distinct and her eyes active beneath the closed lids.

"Listen," Clare said. "What do you hear?"

Anna found herself listening so hard that, even with the low hum of the city, her ears were ringing. For a long time Candy said nothing. Clare's shoulders slumped. Then Candy opened her mouth and sang. "Da, da, da, da, da, da dah." Scales, sung in a clear sweet voice. She sang it again in a higher register. Then again.

"Anything else?" Clare asked.

"A piano." This time Candy sang low, using the word "dunk" to imitate scales being played on a keyboard.

Music lessons, singing lessons. For the first time since the hypnosis began, Anna had hope they might learn something after all.

"That's good. That's good," Clare crooned. "Let's listen some more."

Candy quieted but for a tiny voice in which she sang the scales again. Just when Anna thought that well had gone dry, the girl erupted with a great hiss.

Crawfish dumped into boiling water? A steam cleaner? An industrial-grade iron for pressing sheets? There were too many things it might be.

"Thunk, thunk, thunk like big darts hitting, or a gun with a silencer," Candy said.

A child who probably didn't know the world was round--or care--lived in a city where guns with silencers were common enough for her to know what one sounded like when fired. Anna longed for her parks, her mountains, and her quiet home with her kind husband, her soft cats and silly dog. Cities were too grating.

Clare looked at Anna, and Anna shook her head. The sounds, the thunk and the hissing put together, brought nothing to mind.

Clare rubbed her eyes wearily. "One last question," she said. "Do you smell anything?"

"Perfume," Candy said. "Nice kinds."

"Flowers?" Clare asked.

"Uh-huh."

"Anything else?"

"Other flowers."

"You've done so well, Candy. I'm going to count backward from ten, and you're going to come up slowly like you were floating, and when I get to one you are going to open your eyes. You'll feel real good and rested and happy."

Candy got her beer and her hundred bucks.

Anna and Clare got three vague clues and a memory of misery that would last a lifetime.