A Spill of Blood Ch. 01

I wondered about that envelope, how much the john had put in it. Not because I needed a new putter. I golfed as regularly as I went to an ob-gyn. I wondered how much I'd been off on that crack about fifty bucks. I'd never know.

I made up my mind and gestured toward the still-visible red spot on her cheekbone.

"I figure he paid for the privilege." I tore my peripheral vision off her tits and opened the door behind me. "Do the manager a favor and leave by the side door. And..." I gestured to her cheek again. "You know that'll probably happen again someday? Or worse?"

Both the anger and resignation were gone. In their place was a wary surprise. She nodded. "Yeah. Um, you know, maybe it's time for me to try something different. Thank you"--she glanced at my name tag--"Officer Morgan."

It wasn't time for something different, of course. She was just playing me until she could get gone.

I saw her once more before my coworkers decided they couldn't quite trust me to be part of the team the way they played it, and once more a long while after that. The first time was on the street. I was going east. She was going west. West was inside the Hilton lobby. She froze.

"Miss Cartier," I said politely. Names I was good with. I stepped out of her path. I wasn't the least surprised at her destination. The job had wised me up some. Enough, for example, to know I'd been turning down a freebie that day because my partner was collecting a couple of C-notes to forget the whole thing. "Have a nice evening."

"Um, thank you." I could feel her eyes tracking me down the street.

The second time I was at the bar of a restaurant, deep into my third. She was at a table, deep in conversation with an older gentleman whose tailor probably owned a pretty nice brownstone. I noticed her, but my drink was more interesting.

"Officer Morgan." The quiet voice at my elbow had lost the flat Midwest and picked up a hint of southern molasses over the years.

I looked sideways from the now-empty rye to a view that hadn't gotten any less in the intervening years, although now it was more demurely framed in expensive silk and pearls, and traveled up to an expression that was polite and pleasant.

"It's not officer anymore. It was agreed I should seek a new career."

If I'd thought that would surprise her, I would have been mistaken. I hadn't thought it, though. Even the first time we met, she'd known how some of the world worked.

"And your new career is whiskey taster?" She gestured at the row of dead soldiers in front of me that I hadn't let the bartender clear. I wanted to keep track.

"No, that's 'cause I'm also no longer..." I held up my left hand and wiggled the ring finger.

"Ah, that happens." There was no sympathy in those eyes. Comprehension, yes. A hint of that hardness I'd looked for back when. But no derision either. "I was mistaken that first time, wasn't I? Maybe I can do better this time." She pulled a card out of the tiny clutch she carried.

"Cartier's" in flowing gold italic on a black background. Beneath that, "by appointment" and a phone number. The trailing flourish of the "s" curved in an unmistakable shape.

"You'll find the morning after requires much less aspirin than those," she said with a nod toward the empties. "And one can have their drink of choice in things other than single malts."

"It's rye," I said automatically.

"Spicy. I know just the type for you."

At my raised eyebrow, I finally saw a glimpse of humor break through. "I'm more into management now." She glanced over at the back of her distinguished companion. "Though I still have a few old friends." She signaled to the bartender.

"Karl, put"--she looked over the shelf behind him--"an LSB 16 on my tab for Mr. Morgan here." She turned back to me. "And now, I need to powder my nose and get back to my friend."

All that was by way of saying that I had an entrée. It wasn't a gold mine, but it was a start.

• • •

"Cartier's."

The tone spoke of dim lights, oysters on the half shell, and rich red wine. It spoke of bed sheets and lace and skin on fire.

"It's Harry Morgan," I said when I recognized it. "Maybe Officer Morgan to you."

The voice grew warmer. "Officer Morgan! I'm surprised. It's been... what?... over a year. I decided I had misjudged again."

"No, you didn't. Truth be told, I would've, but I knew I couldn't afford it. I never believed that crack about the fifty, you know."

She laughed. "No, after I got over my nerves, I knew you didn't. I irritated you and you paid me back. We might have reached some kind of arrangement, though. I owed you one."

"Well, see, I'm glad to hear that."

"Oh?" The warmth banked down. Caution ruled.

"I have a picture. I need some names and contact info to go with it."

"Officer Morg--"

"Just call me Harry. You know I'm not with the force anymore."

"Harry... and please call me Lauren. Harry, you know that this is a world where confidentiality is the sine qua non."

I don't know if I was more impressed she knew the term, or that she used it so effortlessly in actual conversation. Neither, I decided after a moment. Polishing up was as much a tool in her trade as an iron bladder was in mine.

"Look," I said. "I'll lay it out straight. It's not the johns. I know you'd never give them up, and besides, I know who they are anyway. It's the girls. And I don't care about their real names. I'm not looking to get them in a twist. A conversation any place they choose. That's all."

There was silence, then a sigh, like she truly regretted saying it. "I owe you Harry, but I don't think I owe you quite that much. I'm so very sorry."

I needed this. Keeping everything close to the vest I didn't wear wasn't going to help.

"Lauren. I'm going to put it a different way, a way that might not make you happy."

"Well, Harry, go on." I remembered her reaction back in the hotel room when she thought I was going to shake her down for sex or the cash or both. A merest hint of that was in her voice now, but years of cultivation had smoothed the edges until it said she was resigned to disappointment rather than anger.

"There are a number of people going to be looking for these women. You're going to prefer I'm the one that finds them first because I just want to ask a few questions. The others won't ask; they'll insist."

She lived in the shadow world. She understood what I was saying. I waited, and waited some more. Tick-tock, Lauren.

"I'm meeting a friend... no, not that kind of friend, a real one... at seven at Molto's. I'll meet you at six thirty in the bar there. You can have fifteen minutes." The polished tone slid a little. In a way, it made it even more personal, like I was truly her intimate rather than a man who called Cartier's. "I hope you're not fucking around with me, Harry."

I was on one of the stools at six fifteen. She arrived at six thirty, just as she promised.

"A glass of the Fevre Champs Royaux, please, Margot," she said to the woman who walked up. "Still drinking rye, Harry?"

"Yes, though not as nice as that glass you bought me once upon a time."

She smiled at the memory, but I could see the wariness lurking. I waited until she had her wine and the bartender had walked away before sliding a picture onto the counter. It was the one Jess had looked at with the four women.

"No guys in this one. I'm trying to be as discreet as you," I said. Her finger touched the robed figure almost hidden by the lamp. "He doesn't count. You can't see anything except he's got dark hair, but that does give you an idea about what type of party this was." She nodded in agreement. I slid a second, carefully folded. It had the fifth woman in it. The fold hid the face of the man whose lap she was on.

"Something disappeared during that party. The owner wants it back. As in, wants it bad. He's not thinking the girls took it... yet... but that doesn't mean he won't think they saw something. And if he gets tired of waiting for me to produce results, he's got a semi-tame pit bull that will have no problem asking until he gets answers he likes. And then maybe he'll ask a few more times just for kicks."

Again, she understood.

"None of them work for me, Harry--"

Fuck! It was my best shot.

"--but she did for a few weeks some time back." She pointed at the blonde. "I let her go. She looked the part, but she couldn't quite act it."

I got pinned under that gaze again. The long stare came from a woman who read men for a living. The best cops on the force probably didn't do it any better.

"I'm guessing your client isn't hurting. Are you on an expense account?" she said.

I nodded.

"Having hired her once, I'm also guessing he's not one for moral outrage at certain expenses." She pulled out her phone. I watched her scroll several times; I bet that list held a lot of numbers.

"Sasha? It's Lauren Cartier. How are you, dear?" She gave me a polite smile and slid off her stool to walk far enough away that I couldn't hear. Five long minutes later, she slid back up beside me just as I was finishing my drink.

"Margot says you can take that booth over there for the next hour or so. Make sure you tip her well. Sasha will be here in about fifteen. It's five hundred for forty-five minutes, Harry, and that buys you questions with no guarantees of answers, nothing else."

"Jesus! I don't carry that kind of cash."

She laughed, real mirth this time. "Everyone takes credit cards these days."

She sobered and the veneer slipped again. It was deliberate. That didn't mean it wasn't effective with someone like me. It meant it was.

"If you are fucking with me, better lose that card I gave you, and I won't pass up an opportunity to return the favor someday. If you're not, then good luck, and maybe... just maybe... there's still an arrangement to be had if you ever call."

She smirked. I returned it weakly.

• • •

Her shoulders were a touch too wide, "swimmer's shoulders" my mother would have called them. The hips were just a hair too narrow for a runway strut. But there was something feline about the package, something that prowled and growled and didn't have a lot of stop in it.

She wasn't dressed for Molto's. The skinny jeans, the white wifebeater stretched taut, and the Converses were as out of place in the sea of business suits and dresses as pom-poms, but nobody frowned during the cool saunter through the bar. There were some jealous glances. There were more that were acquisitive, not all of them from men.

She made a beeline for me. She knew where I was sitting or what I looked like.

"Sasha?"

She nodded and slid in opposite me, ignoring my move to rise. "Martini, two olives," she said to the server. She turned back to me expectantly. Her eyes went to my credit card sitting on the table next to my drink.

"Go ahead."

"You know that once I run that, I can leave at any time? That's the deal."

I nodded. She pulled out her phone and one of those Square readers from the tiny purse slung over her shoulder. A minute later, she pushed the phone toward me. I did my thing, and Regan was going to be five hundred poorer if he paid my bill.

"You bought yourself forty-five minutes. In this bar, I mean."

For one second, I was tempted to say, "So, we use the men's room here?" but I resisted. I wasn't a funny guy, and I didn't want to antagonize the only starting point I had so far.

"I'm sure Lauren told you that I have some questions. They're about a party a week ago at Jordan Regan's place. Richard, Charlie--"

She cut me off. "I don't talk about clients."

I kept a grip on my patience and went on. "--Larry, and Anders were there." Regan had told me they had used their real names in front of the girls. "You know which party I'm talking about?"

"I don't talk about clients."

"I don't have the slightest interest in juicy tidbits about who did what with whom. I already know who the clients are in real life, maybe more than you do. And I'm certainly not looking to get any of you or any of the others in trouble."

That didn't even merit a verbal response. It was getting harder to keep that grip. Did she think I shelled out five hundred to ask about salmon recipes?

"Okay... then you don't talk. You just listen while I tell my story. That's part of the service you provide, right? I read that in aGQ article about why men call escort services.

"There was this party. Five guys were at it and five girls. A good time was had by all, from what I'm told, but maybe that's biased. But after the party, the guy who paid the bill found out something was missing. He didn't like that. So, he asked people to do something about it. Some of the people he asked are nice. They go about it with questions in upscale bars. The others go about it with questions too, but they aren't asked in upscale bars. They're asked in places where the consequences of wrong answers don't disturb the upscale people."

I had her attention. I gave it a long second to sink in.

"The end. Now, shall we have a cigarette? A drink before and a smoke afterward are the three best things in life, right?"

She was paying attention, but I didn't have her.

"Listen, does Jordan Regan strike you as the kind of guy who's going to let something like this go?"

She shrugged. The expression was somewhere between thoughtful and apprehensive. It was close but not enough.

I decided to give it a little nudge. "Have you met a man named Mitchell?"

That did it.

"What do you want to know?"

Her tone oozed petulance. I'd take it. I laid my packet of pictures on the table. She'd been there, so no need for secrets.

"Like I said, I want to know anything that might be relevant to two pieces of paper that went missing. And before you tell me that you don't know anything about it, you might not know that you do. Give me a rough outline of the day. Who was where when?"

Regan had given me that, but I wanted outside confirmation. It wasn't that I figured he'd lied, but it's astonishing how much people forget when they describe something they think they remember well.

"Start from when you arrived. I'm told two cars came at almost the same time. Did everyone go right to the dock, or did anyone go in the house first?"

"Luiza and I got there at two. Gia and Emerald right after. The cars took us right down to the dock. Jordan and Larry and-- You know, your numbers are off. There weren't five girls at the party." Her eyes turned distant for a second, counting. "There were seven."

It surprised me that I was already finding a hole in Regan's account. I didn't let that get to my face. "Go on."

"So, Jordan and Larry and Nikki were already there. I don't know if they went to the house or not. Then Charlie and Anders arrived a few minutes later, then Richard with two other women. They all came straight to the boat. We went out. The guys fished for a while, some of the girls too."

"What did the rest of you do?"

"Sunbathed, talked. Jordan says women lying around the deck sets the mood. We had a few drinks. Not much else. After they got bored of not catching anything, we came back, and Jordan told me to take the girls up to the game room. The guys were like three minutes behind. They obviously had something they didn't want us to hear." She shrugged. No skin off her nose.

"You take them up to the house?"

"I've been there before."

Another little detail I didn't get in Regan's account. My surprise showed.

"I'm the blonde."

Since she was obviously blonde, I didn't know what that meant.

With a faint look of explaining something to an idiot, she said, "When he has business associates there, he likes to have what he calls the tasting menu."

She touched her own face on the photo and another as if it should be obvious. "A blonde, a ginger." It swung over to the snapshot that showed a woman straddling Charlie's lap. "A brunette. Three White girls." Back to the first picture. "Nikki's Black and Luiza's Hispanic. And..." she pawed through the other photos. "No, I don't see a picture of Kimi here. She's Chinese or Korean or something. Like I said, he thinks it's funny to call it a tasting menu. He's been asking for me as the blonde lately."

Regan had labeled the men in the pictures, but not the women. There were five women you could see and five women's names on the list. I'd assumed the obvious.

"Tell me who's who. I know the men. I've got you, Nikki, Luiza of the women."

"Gia's the brunette. Emerald's the redhead." She peered at the one picture more closely. She pointed to the woman partially obscured by the lamp. "The one with Richard is Coco." It was a brunette, and I'd assumed the same one that was on Charlie's lap in the other picture. I was proving what they say about assumptions to be true. "I told you Kimi's not in any of the pictures."

Seven women, not five. A puzzle to be solved later. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing because it meant more eyes, but the pool of possibly greedy hands just got bigger. I felt a jolt of despair at the time limit. "Okay. You went up to the house. Then what?"

"We partied." The tone of voice made it clear what that meant.

"Did you see anyone leave the room?"

Again, the expression said she was talking to an idiot.

"There are bedrooms down the hall from his game room. Of course people left the room."

Given one of the photos appeared to show Richard enjoying Coco against a table, I don't know why I should have assumed that. For all I knew, this was a regular Roman orgy around the pool table.

"Okay. Then did you see anyone leave the room not headed toward one of those bedrooms?"

"For the first hour or so, nobody did. After that, I can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"Because I was the filling in a Jordan–Luiza sandwich, and he goes until he's had enough, which isn't quick." The smirk was supercilious. I doubt you're that type of man, it implied.

I understood what Lauren had meant now. Sasha was an eye-magnet. Hell, I'd only watched her walk twenty feet across the bar, but I'd already mentally had her on her back. So had every straight guy in the place.

But she didn't have the smooth it took for Lauren's clients. It wasn't just that she couldn't resist a jab. It permeated her attitude. Men were targets, someone to be taken down a peg.

"Couldn't quite act it," Lauren had said. I had no doubt that Lauren could do "predator" if that was what excited a man. She was a predator. But she was a predator whose prey was never conscious of the fact that it was bleeding out. She would have deflected questions with grace and regret and a deft touch that allowed a man to lead until he had gone exactly where she intended him to go.

With Sasha there was no velvet glove over the steel claws; she wanted you to see the blood she drew. I had a sudden hunch that she was "the blonde" more than once because Jordan saw that too. He would enjoy the body. He would enjoy breaking that attitude even more.

"What happened then?"

"Nothing. Cars came when the guys were done, and I went home and crashed."

"Tell me about the other women."

Her expression turned petulant again. I let my exasperation at her short memory show.

"Or the next person asking will be Mitchell."

I saw the flare of anxiety. She was a pissy brat, but she'd met Mitchell and glimpsed what I'd glimpsed.

"Luiza and I worked together sometimes. Never at Jordan's, he likes to change it up." The "except me" was unspoken but there. She probably took that as a compliment. I saw it as confirmation.

Sometimes, Sasha, it's not you hunting the tiger.

"The others, I don't know anything about them."

"Bullshit!" The tight eyes told me she didn't like that, but I'd realized that direct was the only way this one, and fast before her short-term memory went again. "Maybe you were partying once you were up at the house, but you spent hours lying around on a boat with nothing to do but talk. I want to know how I go about finding them."