Al took the ride with me because I didn’t feel it was okay yet to leave him alone. With the forty-five-minute ride, the company wasn’t bad as long as he kept the flatulence to a minimum. Al’s new habit of playing with the power windows and power locks was getting on my nerves. On long drives, he’d throw a big, fat paw up on the switches and then watch with fascination as the window went down or the locks clicked up and down. He tried sticking his head out the window like he had before, but lately his ears kept slapping him in the face, which would make him howl as if some evil force in the universe was doing it.
I pulled into Eagle Heights at 10:40, giving me plenty of time to watch Stephanie’s arrival. The clinic was on Ninth Street, which was a busy street, and I parallel parked a block and a half away. The Eldorado was no doubt conspicuous, but the narrowness of the street made it difficult to spot. I waited for Elvis to finish up the last verses of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” a song most people would be surprised he did, and I turned off the eight-track.
I distracted Al and got him to turn around and have his head face me so he would stop with the window deal. He settled in, happy to drool on the velour elbow rest. At exactly eleven, the white pickup truck pulled up on ninth from the opposite direction. I fumbled around to adjust my seat to get the video camera in position.
My shuffling around got Al to sit up and look in the direction I was looking. He started to whimper and shift his weight from side to side in what appeared to be some sort of nervous fit. He scratched at the passenger door and tried to get at the window switches. I grabbed his head and tried to calm him down. He had remembered the white pickup.
I got the camera pointed at the truck and, though we were down the street and it was being shot from a distance, it was very clear that Stephanie and Tyrone were getting out of the truck, which was driven by Baldy. Tyrone and Stephanie headed into the clinic and I was relieved when Baldy took the right turn on the side street before passing Al and me.
That was what I needed. I had the connection between Tyrone and Stephanie together with the bald guy. When I turned this over to the authorities it would be a piece of cake for them to wrap this up.
I didn’t waste any time getting out of Eagle Heights. I drove about eighty home and stopped just once along the way to let Al do some business and to call Kelley from a pay phone. I got lucky-Kelley was there and available. I set up a meeting over lunch at AJ’s.
Al was sleeping so I left him in the car and went in to meet Kelley. Kelley was already there sitting at the bar. He didn’t look pleased.
“Look, I only got a half an hour. Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that this is going to involve your new private-eye bullshit?”
“Kel, you’re right, but let’s put that aside for now, this is too important.”
I set down the video camera so we both could view the playback screen. I hit play and watched as it showed the white pickup pulling up in front of the Eagle Heights clinic.
“That bald guy is the asshole who paid Al and me a visit and probably the same guy doing the park beatings. The black guy is Tyrone, an old perverted boyfriend of Walanda who always wanted to get weird with Shondeneisha. The woman is Stephanie and she’s one of the women I told you about from the jail.”
“Geez… Duff, slow down. What the hell are you talking about?”
I pulled out the webpage printouts I had made at Jerry Number Two’s.
“Here’s the porn webpage they’re running with underage kids, and this is what they’re planning for this Saturday night.”
I explained all the security stuff that I went through with Jerry Number Two. I explained the relationship of the three characters on the video and how they came to go to the Eagle Heights clinic. I knew I was going at a frenetic pace, but I couldn’t control myself.
“Whoa… All right, all right. I see what you got. I won’t lecture you now about getting in over your head, as you clearly have, I’ll save that for later.”
“Kel…”
“Don’t interrupt, Duff. We have the bald guy on an assault. We have Stephanie on a porn site, but she’s not doing anything illegal. We have what we think is ‘Tyrone’ going to a clinic and promising to be involved with child porn on the web page.”
“Right.”
“Where does Tyrone live?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s the bald guy’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is this webcast going down?”
“I don’t know.”
“So what we have connecting this trio is the video tape shot from what looks like a hundred and fifty feet with a guy that could be the guy on the website, a guy who is most probably your assaulter, and a woman who we can definitively say is the woman from jail and the website.”
“Yes.”
“If we could find the bald guy we could arrest him. Busting Tyrone immediately will be harder because any task force will want to be sure that what they got him on sticks. He hasn’t done anything worth arresting him for yet. Stephanie is a creep, but I don’t see what we can bust her on now.”
“Kelley-C’mon!”
“Duff-I’m telling you how it works. The images on the tape are shot so far away any lawyer will have it thrown out. You can’t read the license plate number on the truck and even if we could, it’s probably stolen or untraceable in some other way. The child porn stuff is awful, I agree, but those task forces move slower so that collars stick.”
“You’re telling me nothing can be done?”
“I’m telling you what will happen. I’ll bring the information to my supervisors, but they’re going to tell me the same shit, only less politely.”
“Shit. This sucks.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“The other thing-and I have even less proof of this one-but I think Dr. Gabbibb is financing the whole thing.”
“Duff, you are out of your league. What the hell am I supposed to do with that kind of information?”
“Kelley-I don’t know, but this just can’t be allowed to go on.”
“Look, I’ll do what I can, but this isn’t how this stuff works, you know,” he said.
Kelley left to get back to his job and I sat there for a minute or two thinking. I had no idea what to do, but I was going to do something. I didn’t blame Kelley; he was just being real and giving it to me straight. It meant that if this webcast was going to be stopped, I was going to have to do it. I thought for a while about just going to the police and telling them exactly what I had found out and being a good responsible and safe citizen.
I also thought about Walanda. Her whole life was one big shit sandwich and the cruelest and coldest things in this world had eaten her up. She asked-no, pleaded with me-to help her not have that happen to Shony. Shony had already been subjected to the scummiest of the earth and was about to go through a trauma that she would carry with her forever.
Fuck being a responsible citizen.
30
The next morning the lead story on all the news broadcasts was that with the anniversary of 9/11 coming up in the next couple days, the Department of Homeland Security had raised the warning level around the country to orange. They noted that “chatter” had led to “specific and credible” threats and that all Americans should be “cautious.” That and, oh yeah, no “need to change your daily plans” but be “vigilant.”
Like everyone else, I found that this type of announcement did little except make me feel creepy. Lately, there wasn’t much that could make me feel any creepier. I decided I was much better off listening to Elvis and put
