“I’m not sure. I guess I don’t want to stir things up until I know what I’m stirring.”
“It’s still about Billie Bishop, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a theory?”
Jesse drank a little Coke. It had caffeine in it. It tasted like it should give him a pleasant jolt. There was none.
“Alan Garner is almost certainly recruiting runaway girls to prostitution. He doesn’t seem like your standard street pimp. He treats them nice, doesn’t come on to them, puts them up in a cheap apartment, and rents them out on a call basis. Maybe to a specialized market.”
“Men who like very young girls.”
“Yes. Alan works for a mobster named Gino Fish. Gino is an acquaintance of Norman Shaw, the novelist Shaw lives in Paradise.”
“Do you think that Garner recruited Billie Bishop?”
“Maybe.”
“For this Fish person?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think that Gino Fish is supplying adolescent girls to Norman Shaw?” Lilly said.
“I have no idea. I’ve met Mrs. Shaw and she would certainly be sufficient for me.”
“You know that has nothing to do with it,” Lilly said.
“I know.”
“Do you think he might have sent Billie Bishop to Norman Shaw, which is how she ended up in Paradise?”
“In the lake,” Jesse said.
“Yes. Do you think?”
“What I think,” Jesse said, “is that I’m not going to jostle any of them, until I’ve got enough to get them all.”
“Do you know who they all are?” Lilly said.
“Not yet.”
Chapter Fifty
“I had a thought,” Jesse said to Suitcase Simpson.
“Excellent,” Simpson said.
“Wise guys don’t make sergeant,” Jesse said. “What I was thinking was that if Norman Shaw was banging kids like Billie, where would he do it?”
“His house?”
“You think Mrs. Shaw would have a problem with that?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“So if he’s doing it, it must be someplace else.”
“You really think he’s involved?”
“No. I really think he isn’t,” Jesse said. “But I don’t know he isn’t. I want to know. It’s where the chain of connection stops.”
“Billie Bishop to Alan Garner to Gino Fish to Shaw,” Simpson said.
“Sort of.”
“Not much of a chain,” Simpson said.
“Everybody’s a critic,” Jesse said. “If you had a teenaged beauty you wanted to score, where would you go?”
“Not my high school,” Simpson said.
Jesse smiled.
“I guess I’d take her to a motel,” Simpson said.
Jesse nodded. “You want to learn several things,” he said. “You want to learn if a guy named Norman Shaw has registered there, in, say, the last six months, whatever they got for records.”
“Would he use his real name?” Simpson said.
“Probably not,” Jesse said. “So he couldn’t use a credit card. Try to find who registered and paid cash.”
“Hotels keep records like that?” Simpson said.
“Some do. Some don’t,” Jesse said. “Sometimes you can be lucky. You’ll get a clerk who remembers.”
