Heat Wave

 

      The air was dry that Tuesday afternoon. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The sun was beating down on my shoulders as I knocked on the tall mahogany door in front of me. After my third knock a woman my age wearing expensive jewelry opened the door. Sweat beaded at her forehead. The heat wave had made her hair damp and unkempt.

      “Are you the private investigator?”

      I was the private investigator. Jack Neilson. Here I was fifty-three years old, and desperate for a good case. Lately jobs, like the air, had been running a bit dry.

      I walked in the house, looking around. It was expensive, but not real classy. All the walls were covered with paintings and models, sculptures and memorabilia. A melted phone sat on a glass coffee table. A narrow spiral staircase went down to the basement. From below it, I could smell what had to be the den of an adolescent. Probably a boy. Thick with marijuana and rock and roll music. The woman, whom I figured to be the mother, led me to the bar. It was a pullout cabinet from a wall of ancient Egyptian prints.

      “I’m having Bloody Maries. Do you want one?” Her hair was graying at the roots. But who was I to judge. I didn’t have much hair to speak of.

      I took a Bloody Mary, and we went to her porch. Her backyard was rampant with shrubbery. Dozens of old statues of queens and goddesses were overgrown with vines. I could tell from the whole scene that, however rich this woman was now, she was not born into her money.

      “This was the last place I saw him.”

      “Saw who, ma’am?”

      “Well, Jeffery! Hadn’t I told you, Mr. Neilson?”

      “Ma’am, you haven’t even told me your name.”

      “Oh! I’m sorry! I’ve been a wreck without him! My name is Muriel. Muriel Jones.”

      “Any idea why your husband would have left, Ms. Jones?”

      “Husband? Mr. Neilson, my husband left a long time ago.”

      “Call me Jack. If Jeffery isn’t your husband, who is he?”

      “Why, Jeffery’s my Afghan purebred! He’s a woman’s best friend!”

      “He’s a dog?”

      “Dog is such a nasty word, isn’t it?…”

      “On second thought, don’t call me anything. I’m no pet detective, Ms. Jones.” I put the Bloody Mary down and headed to the door. She suddenly tried to grab at me.

      “Wait!” she screamed, “Jeffery’s my only friend in the world! Not even Kyle will talk to me! Won’t you help me?”

      “Try calling the pound.” I left through the front door. On my way to the car, a young man walked towards me from a shiny sports car. I took it him be the son, Kyle. He gave me a confused look as he locked his Maserati with a push of a button and a loud BEEP. He slammed the door behind me.

* * * 
 

      I drove through the Caldecott Tunnel, watching the opening to Highway 24 get bigger and bigger. This was the last time. I wasn’t going to put up with another weak case like this. I couldn’t take it. They just weren’t coming like they used to. Maybe I was too old, but I wasn’t ready to give up all the action. Not yet. All I could do was head to the Oakland Police Department. It had been twenty years since I’d worked Homicide, and still I cringed at the thought of it. I hated cops. 
 

* * * 
 

      “Jack Neilson! You sonofabitch, what happened to your hair? Ah, my god, you look terrible! What’ve you been doing to yourself, huh?!” That was Steve Grabowsky. Twenty years ago, he was my partner in Homicide. Now he was the Deputy Chief of Police in the City of Oakland.

      “I try to keep myself busy.”

      “Me too, Jack, me too. So what’d you want to talk to me about, what can I do ya for?!”

      Grabowsky always was a jackass.

      “Look, Steve, I’ll just come out with it. I need to come back to the force. I need Homicide.”

      “Jesus Christ, Jack, you’re kidding. Twenty years of P.I. work, and you want to come back?”

      “Private cases aren’t biting so much anymore. And the ones out there are all busts. I need something more than a lost dog, Steve. I need bodies.”

      “If it’s bodies you want, I can put on you morgue guard duty, but I can’t just give you Homicide after twenty years outside! After that amount of time, all I could throw at you’d be Missing Persons.” He laughed.

      “Missing Persons? Are you shitting me, Grabowsky? I saved your life.”

      “Hey, you’d be able to work yourself up from there. You’d just have to spend a year, two tops, on these guys.”

      I already knew I’d hate the department. I knew I’d hate the whole damn station, but I also knew I’d take it. It was all I could do. 
 

* * * 
 

      Grand Foods was a liquor store on 21st and Market. I stood in its parking lot, littered with broken bottles and cigarette butts. A chain-link fence surrounded the lot, as if separating the store from the residential area around it. The smoggy silhouette of the bay peeked from behind the rooftops ahead. The skyline squirmed in the rising heat. He came walking out of the store – a bald, stocky black man in torn overalls. He panted, holding himself as if walking through water. He clearly carried a great deal of worry.

      “Mr. Clark?”

      “Yes, officer? Are you here about my baby girl?”

      “My name is Detective Neilson. I’m with Missing Persons. Could you point out the last place you saw your daughter.”

      The daughter was a twelve-year-old girl named Teresa Clark. She was my first case in the new department. We’d got the call last night. Mr. Clark had called, telling us it had been two days since he’d seen his daughter. He’d sounded drunk, so we decided to talk to him in the morning.

      “She left the store around ten, Wednesday night. She was walking home.”

      “Carrying anything?”

      “Just her backpack…”

      The interview turned no new leads. The case was coming up clueless. That was what I hated about Missing Persons. That and the cops. 
 

* * * 
 

      When I got back to headquarters, I snagged a porno mag from the officer sitting across my desk.

      “Don’t you have work to do, Wallace?”

      “Look, Neilson, I know you’re new at this and all, but I been at it for four years. I know what I’m doing. And what I’m doing is waiting for a callback from social services. Now give me my goddamn Hustler back, will you?”

      Wallace was a typical grunt pig. No inspiration. No personal fulfillment. He waited for callbacks rather than doing real police work.

      “I suppose you’re doing quite the job with the Clark case, right. Looking under rocks and pulling up gold?”

      He had a sly fucking smile. All I could do was fume.

      “I didn’t think so. Try social services.”

      I stormed out, forgetting why I’d ever sat down. I headed to my Volvo, and drove back to 21st. I’d go looking under rocks if that was what needed to be done. Teresa Clark wasn’t going to end up on a milk carton. Not my first case. But there were so few leads. She could be in one in a million places. In any one of these houses’ basements, tied up. Cut into pieces in a dumpster. Raped and murdered. She could have been picked up by pimps and sold on the streets.

      As I drove past a familiar narcotics corner, I saw the age-old sight of children hustling from their school backpacks. Suddenly I thought of another scenario. Teresa could have been abducted by drug thieves. The way kids carried stashes on their backs could have led a couple of thugs to pick her up for her school bag. I pulled over. The little dealers scattered. I chased one down and forced him to a wall.

      “You know Teresa Clark?!”

      “I ain’t no snitch! Lemme go!” The kid looked about thirteen.

      I tightened my grip. “I’m not asking you to snitch on anyone. But I know you must have seen my girl come down this way everyday from Grand Foods up on Market.”

      The kid’s silence told me he did know her.

      “We’re going downtown.” 
 

* * * 
 

      After a couple of hours of interrogation the kid fessed up. He had seen Teresa walk by every day until Wednesday, when he heard she had been picked up by a white boy he knew to be a customer of Snitchin’ Randy.

      Snitchin’ Randy was an old friend of mine. He sold weed and hallucinogens to a wealthier crowd. In return for the police’s protection, he gave us information on what we needed from the streets. I was surprised he was still at it.

      “Anybody know where Snitchin’ Randy’s living now?” I asked.

      Wallace shrugged. Another officer yelled out the address. 
 

* * * 
 

      He was staying in a small apartment on 18th and Filbert.

      “Snitchin’ Randy,” I said to him after he cracked the door open behind a chain lock.

      “Who’s asking?” His voice was cracked and aging. His dreads were turning grey.

      “You don’t remember Jack Neilson?” I showed him my badge.

      He squinted at me, and replied, “No.”

      “I’ve been out the force a while, but I was in Homicide about twenty years back.”

      “I don’t know nothing about no murders today, Jack.”

      “That’s not why I’m here. It’s about a missing girl. Teresa Clark. She was snatched around 21st by one of your outstanding regulars, Randy.”

      He unlocked the door and let me in. Had Randy been a normal drug dealer, he could have had a nicer place, but being a snitch, he had to move around to stay alive. As it was, his home was dingy room with a mattress, a television and a bathroom. It was hotter than hell in the stuffy room. Even hotter than it was outside.

      “Couldn’t have been one of mine.”

      “Who’d you do business with on Wednesday?”

      “A couple sacks of weed to Piedmont kids, and a sheet of acid to some white boy from Orinda. Good sale; just threw his money at me like it was nothing. Burned the hell out of him.”

      Orinda. Who could have thought that my first case would lead me back there? But soon I found myself riding up highway 24 again. Air conditioning on full blast. 
 

* * *

      While searching through the Orinda P.D.’s records on upper class drug offenders, I came across a familiar face. Kyle Jones. Found guilty for possession of two ounces of marijuana in his dashboard. Bailed out on January 21, 2005. I smiled at the memory of the kid’s face when he saw me. He must flinch at any sign of the law these days. Suddenly I stopped smiling. What would it hurt to go check this kid out? It was a hunch, but a hunch had served me well in the past. 
 

* * * 
 

      Ms. Jones opened the door with a smile. She held a vodka martini and was rocking back and fourth ever so slightly.

      “Detective Neilsonnn… Have you found my Jeffery yet?”

      “Actually I’d like to your son, Ms. Jones.”

      She suddenly began sobbing, “OH NO, PLEASE! Kyle never wanted to hurt a soul. He’s YOUNG! We didn’t know what to do… Don’t you think we’ve been worrying enough?!”

      “Please just tell me where he is.”

      Just then, Kyle ran up the spiral staircase, spotted me and turned around. I ran downstairs after him as he stumbled into the backyard. It was pitch black outside. I reached for my flashlight and flicked it on. I was staring into the face of an overgrown statue. They were littering the yard, all seemingly looking at me. I heard a rustling from behind a Venus figure. I drew my pistol and yelled, “FREEZE, KYLE! You’re under arrest for the kidnapping of Teresa Clark!”

      Even at night, I could smell his sweat from the heat wave. I couldn’t imagine why he would abduct the little girl, but in this kind of heat, a man could do anything.

      His face was wet with tears as he let out a mixture of sobbing and hysterical laughter, “I… I don’t know how it happened! I just – I just found her here!”

      “Just tell me where she is,” I growled as I slapped the cuffs on the kid. He led me back to his basement and nodded toward the closet. I opened the door to find a dog kennel, surrounded by kibbles and bits. There were disturbing screams of help from inside. I broke the lock with my pistol and pulled Teresa out. Her braided hair was messy. Her eyes were terrified. She flinched incessantly. 
 

* * * 
 

      The kid confessed everything. His story was too unbelievable to be made up. He admitted to buying LSD from Snitchin’ Randy, taking five tabs and joyriding around west Oakland. He said he thought he had seen Jeffery on 21st Street. He chased down the dog and put it in his trunk, to take back to his house. God knows how he managed to drive all the way home. He didn’t remember. It took a whole day, he said, for him to realize the creature in his kennel was not his dog. Once he came to his senses, he and his mother didn’t know what to do for fear of being caught, and decided to keep Teresa until they had a plan.

      “Here’s your plan, Kyle,” I said as I slapped the list of his and his mother’s charges on the interrogation table in front of him. He could only snivel and hang his head.

      I knew solving a case like this would bring me up to Homicide, and I was looking forward to it. But what I anticipated most was the look on Grabowsky’s face when he heard. Solving it was mostly luck, I had to admit, but Teresa Clark was the case of a lifetime.