Unmarked Man Read online

  She slanted her gaze. “Mama had my old number. My cell got stolen a few weeks ago. I meant to call and give her the new number…”

  He glanced up. No sympathy, no reproach and she was grateful.

  “Mama always called the apartment anyway.”

  He wrote on the card. “On the front is the station house number. This is my cell and my pager number on the back. Call in your room number when you get one. I’ll bring Jo Jo to you.” He stood. “In the meantime, hang out at the hotel, order some room service and a chick flick and paint your toenails. Nothing worse on a woman than ugly toes.”

  Damn if he hadn’t done it again—ordered her around. She was getting steamed even if the things this man did with toes were almost worth excusing his arrogance. “She’s my mother, Nick.”

  “Whatever happened, it’s not your fault, Cissy.”

  “I know that.” But it sure felt like it.

  “Have any recent pictures of your mother on you?”

  “And you almost had me guilt-free here.”

  “We’ll need one. I’ll start looking for Jo Jo, stop by your stepfather’s bar and talk to Eddie. C’mon.” He touched her arm with a carefulness she didn’t remember. “I’ll walk you out.”

  “Besides being a righter of wrongs, got any other good surprises for me, Fiore?” she asked as they left the station house, crossed into the parking lot. “Married?”

  “I’m not that much of a changed man.” He spotted the Thunderbird. “You’re driving your mother’s car?”

  “I’m borrowing it.” They reached the car. She slid into the driver’s seat.

  He moved between the open door and the car. “What about you?”

  “What about me what?”

  “Married?”

  “Once. Until he broke my jaw. So much for true love.” She shrugged. “Like mother, like daughter, huh?”

  He shook his head, telling her no. Mercifully the black of his eyes stayed hard, flat. She wouldn’t accept otherwise from him.

  “Well, I did take the Limoges vase we’d gotten from his Aunt Georgine as a wedding present and gave him a concussion.”

  “You always did have a classy way about you.” He smiled, a compatriot, and she remembered why she’d let him get into her pants.

  “A cop and a Wall Street wheeler-dealer.”

  She didn’t correct him. “Who’d have thought it when we were young?”

  For a second, the black eyes softened. “We were never young, Spagnola.”

  He looked at her so long her insides hummed like a hive. He was a crazy-maker.

  “You ever have a cop before, Spagnola?”

  Bless him. She shook her head, straining to hear him above the purr.

  He closed her door. “Yeah, you did.”

  “That didn’t count.”

  He ran the back of his finger down her cheek. “Yeah, it did.” He grinned, shut the car door.

  She fastened her seat belt.

  LOWER DOWNTOWN had once been a wasteland of low-income housing, abandoned buildings, small inner-city businesses with bars across their windows. But a revitalization fueled by district representatives eager to get one step closer to the governor’s mansion sitting high in the distance and an influx of single young professionals had made the area fashionably urban in the past few years.

  Now town houses alternated with crack houses. Hookers complained to city hall about the lack of decent parking. Still, the renewal had not reached to where Cissy was headed. The warehouses were flat brown or a sad yellow and had the look of abandonment whether they were or not. The barges sat heavy and still in the gray-green water and the smell of fish and fruit and longshoremen’s sweat wafted through the car’s vents. Despite the heat and lack of air-conditioning, she’d left the top up and only the back windows cracked. She hadn’t spent two hundred clams on a haircut to let nature have its way. Still the sweat trickling down her sides was from more than the summer heat. No one knew except her and an overpriced therapist, even fewer would believe it, but she hated to drive.

  She parked in a lot several streets over from the docks, locked the car and started toward a squat, flat-roofed building with a neon Miller sign in one window and Mother’s in faded blue letters above its door. She had changed her clothes from well-heeled Wall Street to denim and one-hundred percent cotton, charged at B. Lodge’s uptown. She figured that concession was close enough to obeying Nick’s orders to stay away from the port.

  She stepped into the bar, stopping to adjust to the darkness after the day’s bright sun. For that second, she wished she didn’t always feel compelled to do the opposite of whatever she was told to do. Even in common denim and white cotton and Keds, she was as conspicuous as a hungry starlet.

  She made a beeline for the bar, inviting the men to go back to their dart games and their beer and their alcohol-induced sense that nothing was amiss.

  The bartender was beefy and bald with a beard that hung halfway down his chest in obvious overcompensation to the lack of hair on his head. He had the massive biceps of a weightlifter, and Cissy suspected that on two-dollar draft night, he doubled as a bouncer. She counted five tattoos on his left arm alone before he growled, “What can I do you for?”

  He threw a cardboard coaster on the cracked Naugahyde counter. She appreciated the attempt at ambiance. She slung herself onto a stool as if she were a regular and smiled to show him there was no reason why they couldn’t be friends.

  He folded his arms, crushing his beard to his chest. The rattlesnake inked down his right arm seemed to unfurl.

  “I was told I might be able to find Jo Jo Spagnola here.”

  “That right? Who told you that?”

  She hesitated and was instantly outed. The man’s eyes narrowed. Nick was right. She’d kept sharp dealing with the daily roller-coaster ride of Wall Street, the early-learned practice of trusting no one and showing no fear making her seem born to broker. But she’d been away from these streets too long.

  She had just matched the man’s mean squint when something flickered in his red-rimmed gaze.

  “Cissy?”

  She kept her own stare hard. “Maybe.”

  The man’s meaty lips smiled. “Cissy Spagnola.”

  Cissy concentrated on the man’s face, but nothing clicked.

  “It’s me, Billy. Billy Silverman.”

  “Billy Silverman?” She remembered a sunken-chested bean of a boy whose butt was kicked up and down Lansing ten times more than Nick and hers put together.

  The fleshy smile widened. “Actually they call me ‘Big Bill’ now.”

  “Makes sense,” she agreed.

  “A little Marines. A little steroids, and ba-da-bing.”

  “Ba-da-bing.” Cissy echoed.

  He wiped several sticky rings off the bar. “What can I get ya? It’s on the house.”

  It wasn’t much past noon and the strongest drink she’d had in the past ten years was a nonfat latte. “Double snakebite.” She wasn’t about to lose any freshly gained ground.

  “So, what brings you home?” Big Bill set the shot in front of her.

  She supposed if she’d ever really had a home, this city would come the closest. “What else?” She picked up the glass, her eyes crossing from the drink’s fumes. “Family.”

  “What always,” he agreed with a truly pained expression for a man with a dagger dripping blood down his forearm.

  “Hear, hear,” she toasted. Big Bill watched her closely. It was now or never. She’d been gone too long and too far to be trusted on the basis of old times alone. This one’s for you, Ma. She swallowed the drink in one gulp. She smacked her lips, released a satisfied “A-h-h.” She still had it.

  “Looking for little sis, huh?” Bill picked up her glass for a refill. Her pleasure at her performance waned.

  “The last number I have for her is no longer in service. I heard she hung here.”

  “She in trouble?”

  She told him the truth. “I don’t know.”

/>   “She never seems to stray far from it.” He set another shot in front of her and leaned against the back counter.

  Cissy recognized the challenge. In this neighborhood, proving yourself was part of the game. She eyed the drink. Two of these on an empty stomach and Gentleman George, who she’d seen still set up camp on the city’s corners with an almost elegant woven basket for change and a paper bag of Mad Dog 20-20, would be suave compared to her. Still, she needed info and she hadn’t gotten any. On the other hand, Big Bill could be calling her bluff. They’d both played the game. She reached for the drink. On principle alone, she never backed away from a dare.

  She had the glass to her lips when Big Bill circled her wrist with his callused palm. “‘Scrappy Cissy.’ You never could resist playing with the big boys, could you?”

  She looked up from the upside-down cross, signature tattoo of the motorcycle gang, the Lords, inked on Bill’s inner forearm. “Story of my life, Big Bill.”

  He downed the drink himself. “I heard you did pretty good. Jo Jo, she was always going on about you.”

  Compared to her younger sister’s mixed-up life, Gentleman George was a success story.

  Big Bill poured himself another shot. “Jo Jo was real proud of you.”

  The guilt was as familiar as it was keen. She’d stayed away with acceptable excuses but she knew the real reason she rarely came home. She was afraid—afraid of the helplessness she experienced every time she thought of her sister, her mother. Afraid of the small chant that came every time she saw them. There but for the grace of God… Now her mother was missing, her sister obviously still strung out, and she, the prodigal daughter, right back where she began—broke, frustrated, burning for more than her barely blue-collar roots. And, as illustrated by her earlier reaction to a man who had ruined more women than a cheap bikini wax, not one iota wiser.

  “Listen, I’ll tell you what I told Fiore—”

  “Nick’s been here already?” Not that it mattered, she reminded herself. Besides a moment of insanity when she’d married her slimeball first husband, she’d never let anyone tell her what to do.

  “You kept up with Nick?” He eyed her slyly. “You two used to cha-cha, no?”

  “It was once—”

  Big Bill lifted bushy eyebrows.

  “Hey—” She’d given up the virgin act readily long ago when she learned what awaited on the other side. Still, nine years of Sunday school and no patent leather shoes during her formative years was hard to break. “What do you know about it anyway?”

  Big Bill shrugged. “Nothing. Fiore ‘cha-cha’-ed every skirt I knew. Just checking to see if it’d been a clean sweep.”

  “Where’s my sister, Billy?”

  Her tone was too close to “cut the crap.” Big Bill’s gaze went into caution mode. She knew what he was thinking. Scrappy Cissy.

  Sunken-chested butt-kicked bean boy, she mentally threw right back.

  Big Bill heaved a sigh. The skull earring in his right ear shimmied. “All right.”

  One for scrappy Cissy.

  “I’ll tell you what I told Nick. Nick. A cop. Can you beat that?”

  “I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it. So where can I find Jo Jo?”

  “She worked here for about two months…when she showed up. Most of the time if she did show, she was too lit up to be any use to me anyway, but she’d start singing the blues and well, her and I, we go back some.”

  Cissy nodded. Like most addicts, her sister was a master of manipulation. It was a survival skill. Even aware of it, Cissy herself had let her sister work her over more than once.

  “She hung out off and on with a dude who worked the tankers. Name’s Saint-Sault. He’d come up from New Orleans but he was Canadian. Smooth dog. Threw a lot of money around whenever the ship docked in the port.”

  “He still around?”

  “He comes and goes. Haven’t seen him in a while. Haven’t seen Jo Jo either. Couple weeks ago, I caught her taking cash out of the register and pocketing it. Had to let her go. She got all huffy, as if I had some nerve firing her because she was stealing me blind. She’s a real piece of work, that one.”

  “She’s a classic. And you haven’t seen her since?”

  “A few nights ago, stopped by your father’s joint—”

  “He’s not my father.”

  The big man raised his hands, her point made. “Wednesday, I think it was.”

  “You talk to her?”

  Big Bill shook his head. “No, I stayed away. Your mother was serving that night. She and your little sister, they seemed to be having a ‘discussion.’ Then Jo Jo stomped out, not looking too happy. Nor too healthy.”

  “My mom was working a Wednesday? Last time I talked to her, she was only working Friday and Saturday nights.”

  Big Bill shrugged. “Maybe she was filling in for one of the other girls. Picking up a little spare cash.”

  For the new house? Or a new life?

  “What was Saint-Sault’s first name?”

  “Jacques. He busted a guy’s nose one night for calling him ‘Jock.’”

  “Sounds like a sweetheart. He and Jo Jo like to hang out anywhere else?”

  “Anywhere there was action, if they’re still hanging together. One of the regulars last week said they’d seen Jo Jo at a place uptown. The Golden Cue. But she wasn’t with Saint-Sault.”

  Cissy slid off the stool, pulling out the twenty she’d found stuffed between the car’s front seat cushions when she’d searched for the seat belt. “Thanks, Big Bill.”

  “Hey, I told you it’s on the house.”

  Cissy hesitated. She didn’t like accepting favors. Time come they’d be called in. But a perceived insult could be just as deadly. She worked to appear gracious.

  “Okay, well, thanks again.”

  “How long you in town?”

  “I’m not sure.” She looked into Big Bill’s eyes, the size and shade of rabbit pellets. “A while, I guess.” She scribbled her cell number on a cocktail napkin. “If you see Jo Jo, will you give her this? Tell her I’m looking for her.”

  Big Bill enjoyed watching her walk to her car. He watched as she got into her car, jumped right back out, her mouth working while she took down the car’s convertible top. Still talking to herself, she got back in, checked the side and rear mirrors, then drove out of sight. He waited another minute before he picked up the phone.

  Chapter Two

  Nick checked out the Golden Cue, noting windows, exits, alarms. The décor was uptown, but its roots were from down the line. Like Cissy.

  He scanned the people inside the pool hall, studied the man wearing arm garters behind the bar. All looked routine, but that meant nothing to Nick. He trusted nothing or no one, a trait that made for a solitary man but a great cop. He moved toward the bar.

  “What can I get you, sir?” The bartender slid an eight-ball coaster across the bar. He was medium height, 180 pounds, blond hair, blue eyes and an angle to his nose that suggested it’d been broken more than once.

  Nick flashed his shield. “I’m looking for someone.”

  The bartender looked at the badge, unimpressed.

  “Jo Jo Spagnola.”

  “What about her?”

  “Know her?”

  “She comes in here sometimes, shoots the breeze until her boyfriend arrives.”

  “Got a name for the boyfriend?”

  The bartender shook his head. “He stayed in the back at the tables.”

  “Jo Jo never mentioned his name?”

  “Someone wants to tell me something, I listen. They don’t, I don’t ask.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  The other man shrugged. “Not much. Thirty something. Suit-and-tie guy. Pale looking, like he didn’t get outside much. Kind of nondescript, you know. One of those guys that blends. Except for the hair. Guy had good hair.”

  “Good hair?”

  “Thick. Shone like mink under the table lights. Obvious dye job, but a go
od one. Must have had it done professionally. I figured the low profile for the fact he was married.”

  “That’s what you think was going on with this guy and Jo Jo? An affair?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Guy didn’t seem her type, but then, what do I know?”

  “Jo Jo ever meet anyone else here?”

  The bartender shook his head.

  “How ’bout her boyfriend?”

  “Yeah, he met somebody else.”

  “Another woman?”

  “Businessman.”

  “Let me guess. No name.”

  “You got it. Always came in late, after midnight, sat in the back. Sherry, waitress who worked the night shift, never left early when they walked in. They were good tippers.”

  “Sherry still working here?”

  The bartender shook his head. “Left last month. Moved with a cousin to California.”

  “This other businessman, what’d he look like?”

  “Dark. Thick waisted. Expensive suit. Respectable looking.”

  “And they came in late, sat in the back and that was it.”

  “Yeah, pretty quiet for a boys’ night out, except last time they were in.”

  “What happened?”

  “The jukebox was playing, but I could hear their voices coming from the back. They were arguing about something.”

  “You hear what?”

  “Not over the music. Neither looked too happy when they left, though. Haven’t seen the other man in here again.”

  “What about Jo Jo and her boyfriend?”

  “They were in last week.”

  “What day?”

  “Tuesday, Wednesday, maybe Thursday.”

  “That’s the last time you’ve seen either of them?”

  The bartender nodded. “Something happen to Jo Jo?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out. Thanks for your time.” Nick laid a card on the bar. “You think of something else or see Jo Jo or her friend, this is my number.”

  Nick walked to the unmarked sedan parked on the street, unlocked the front door. With the air conditioner going full blast, he pulled out into traffic and headed back downtown. Big Bill had been right. Jo Jo had been at the Golden Cue with someone else. According to Big Bill, Saint-Sault was tall, had a blond ponytail and hadn’t been seen in a while. Perhaps someone at the port had seen him. He neared Mother’s again on his way to the docks, saw a bright red Thunderbird, top down, pulling out in the opposite direction. The fact that the woman in the car looked beautiful with her long hair blowing only pissed Nick off more as he pulled a U-turn.