The Voice Inside

23

“Are you the one who called me?” Jess asked the Asian bartender in the downstairs bar in Japantown. He had plucked eyebrows, and his eyelashes were as full as any model on the cover of Vogue. She thought about asking him what shade of lipstick he was wearing, because she wanted it for herself.

“I called you?” he replied. “Who are you?”

“You said a guy named Rudy had a message for me.”

He checked her out, and his lips bent into a smile. “Oh, you’re the girlfriend. Oh, sure. Well, sorry, your ex is long gone, and he’s not coming back. He left with a horny little thing.”

“When did they leave?”

“I don’t know. I lose track of time in here. An hour ago? It got busy, so I didn’t call you right away. Hey, as long as you’re here, you want to cry into a martini? I make a pretty sweet cosmo.”

Jess dug in her back pocket for a piece of paper, which she unfolded on the bar. “Is this the guy?”

The bartender picked up the file photo of Rudy Cutter. His soft eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What’s this about? Are you a cop or something?”

Jess reached for her badge by instinct, but her badge wasn’t there. The reality hit her for the first time that she wasn’t a cop anymore. That part of her life was over. She didn’t even know what she was doing here, putting herself in the middle of an investigation that no longer had her name on it.

“Do I look like a cop?” she asked him.

“Yeah, you do,” he replied, as if it were finally dawning on him that he’d made a mistake.

“Then answer the question. Is this the guy?”

“Yeah, that’s him,” the man replied.

“Does he still look like this?” Jess asked, stabbing the photo with a finger.

“Pretty much. He had a clean shave. No stubble. He was wearing a trendy fedora with a double brim in yellow. Sunglasses, too. Little rectangular sunglasses and a leather jacket.”

“His full name is Rudy Cutter. Does that mean anything to you?”

The man picked up the photo again and stared at it, and he looked as if his powder makeup were going to dissolve in a soup of sweat. “Oh, shit. That guy? That’s him?”

“That’s him.”

“I thought he looked familiar. Damn it, I knew I’d seen him before.”

“What did he tell you?” Jess asked.

“He said his girlfriend dumped him, and he was looking to hook up.”

“Did he?”

“Yeah, I told you, he left with a girl.”

“You also told me that you were the one who fixed him up,” Jess reminded him.

The bartender squirmed. His eyes darted back and forth. “Look, he asked for my help in finding a girl with the right attitude, you know? Someone looking for a party. He gave me fifty bucks to make an introduction.”

“And you found someone for him?” Jess asked.

“In here? It wasn’t hard.”

“You slip her anything?”

“What, like drugs? No! I may have made her drinks a little strong, but nobody complains about that.”

“Who was she?” Jess asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her before. She’s not a regular.”

“Did she give you a name?”

“Maggie, I think. Or something like that. No last name. She paid cash for her first couple of drinks, and then this guy picked up the rest. No credit card. I’m telling you, I don’t know who she was.”

“Describe her,” Jess said. “How would I pick her out in a crowd?”

“You wouldn’t. She looked like a hundred other girls. Long brown hair, too much makeup, little black dress.”

“Did you eavesdrop on their conversation?” Jess asked. “Where were they going when they left?”

“A concert at the Fillmore. He had an extra ticket for Japandroids, and he was looking for someone to go with him.”

“Japandroids. Is that a real group?”

“Hell yes. Great rockers.”

“Did you actually see these tickets?” Jess asked.

“Yeah, he showed them to me. It wasn’t a con.”

“Do you remember anything else? Anything that would help me find this girl or where she lives?”

The bartender shook his head. “Look, if I’d recognized this guy, if I knew it was this psycho, I wouldn’t have helped him.”

Jess wanted to believe that, but she knew that money talked. A fifty-dollar bill erased most moral objections. She left the bar and jogged back up the steps to Post Street. Japantown was crowded with traffic and pedestrians hunting for sake and sushi. Across the street in the plaza, the Peace Pagoda was lit in green, looking like a giant laser weapon in some sci-fi movie. The night was cool, and drizzle gave a wet sheen to her trench coat.

She studied the faces around her, but she knew that Cutter was long gone, and he wasn’t coming back. Maybe he was at the Fillmore, or maybe the tickets were just a ruse to lead her in the wrong direction.

The only thing she knew for certain was that Cutter had paid the bartender to call her. He wanted her to chase him.

Frost found Jess standing next to a stoplight on Geary Street, across from the yellow-brick building that housed the Fillmore. A cigarette leaned out of her mouth, as usual, and her lips tilted downward into a perpetual frown. Her hair and skin glistened with rain. She had eyes that never seemed to blink, and they were focused on the doorway to the theater, where mist blew through the glow of a streetlight.

For up-and-coming bands, the Fillmore was the ultimate high. It meant you were playing the same stage where ’60s music royalty had been crowned. Grateful Dead. Jefferson Airplane. Santana. Even hardened rockers felt the awe.

“Did anyone remember seeing Cutter?” Frost asked Jess.

“No, I showed his photo around the box office, but nobody could pick him out. When you’ve got a few hundred bodies shoving to get close to the stage, you don’t see the individual faces.”

“You think he’s really inside? Or is this all some kind of trick?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what his game is. But he flashed those concert tickets for a reason. He wanted us here.”

“Did you call Hayden?” Frost asked.

Jess exhaled something that might have been a laugh and might have been a snort. “Yeah, because I’m the person he wants to talk to. I’m not supposed to be here at all. If Hayden scrambles cops on my say-so, the new investigation’s already poisoned. Maybe that’s what Cutter is counting on.”

“Even if he’s inside, I can’t arrest him, you know,” Frost said. “He hasn’t committed any crime that we know of. We don’t have any probable cause to tie him to the murder of Jimmy Keyes.”

“Yeah, but you can put the fear of God in him. And you can scare off the girl he’s with.”

“Okay. I’ll check it out.”

“Thanks. I hope I didn’t pull you away from anything important. Like a date with Eden Shay.”

It was a joke, but a joke from Jess always had an edge. He knew what this was about. She’d put herself out there by offering to sleep with him, and he’d turned her down. She wanted to know if he’d done the same with Eden. Jess was as tough a cop as he’d ever known, but she was still a woman, and he’d hurt her feelings. She was also in a dark place and looking for reasons to feel bad about herself.

“I was with my parents,” he told her.

“Yeah? How are they?”

“Fragile,” he said.

“Well, I’m sorry to take you away from them.”

“No, I appreciate the rescue,” he said. “I wasn’t in much of a mood to talk right now. Why don’t you go back home? There’s nothing more you can do here.”

Jess shook her head. “I’ll keep watch while you’re inside. I want to be here in case he rabbits.”

“And then what? You can’t stop him.”

He saw the cloud on her face. She kept forgetting. Twenty years as a cop didn’t go away easily.

“I can follow him,” she said. “I won’t let him see me. At least we’ll know where he goes and whether he’s alone.”

It was pointless for him to argue. Jess was stubborn, and she was going to do whatever she wanted.

“Did you find out anything more about the girl at the bar?” Frost asked.

“Brown hair, lots of makeup, black dress.”

“That really narrows it down.”

“Cutter’s wearing a fedora. Double yellow stripes on the brim.”

“Just like half the hipsters in the city,” Frost said.

“Look who’s talking, Justin Timberlake,” she muttered sarcastically.

Frost laughed without taking offense, but he knew Jess was trying to be cruel. He was running out of patience with her. She was more upset than she let on about her life being turned upside down, but if she wanted to feel sorry for herself, he couldn’t do anything except let her wallow. She’d brought it on herself, and they both knew it.

“I’m going over there,” he told her in a clipped voice. “Keep your eyes open.”

Jess didn’t reply. She smoked, and she shrugged with false bravado, as if she didn’t care about anything. Her eyes were as cold as the rain.

Frost put his head down and crossed Fillmore Street toward the theater door. As he got closer, he could already hear the music trying to bust through the walls and the screams of the people inside. There was something animal-like about a concert floor. Pack the crowd together, turn up the volume, turn down the lights, and shatter your eardrums with noise. In a room like that, you couldn’t tell the hunter from the hunted.

The thought flitted in and out of his mind that he could shove his gun against Rudy Cutter’s heart in there, pull the trigger, and no one would ever know.

It was just a bad fantasy.

He went inside.