“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“I filed a missing person’s report the next day. The cops made me wait twenty-four hours and even then they didn’t take me very seriously. I could tell. They thought she’d left me. They said she was an adult and there wasn’t much they could do unless I had evidence of foul play. Of course, I couldn’t tell them she used to be a call girl.” He shook his head. “Anyway, AFP pays the cops off. Grace warned me. I was sure I’d eventually hear from her. I called hospitals for a week. Nothing.”
Grace would have been dead by the time he went to the police. But things fell through the cracks in every police department.
“Where’s her family?”
“They lived in Arizona.”
I asked him to get me their address and he did.
“What about a brother? Big guy? My size with close-cropped hair and a prosthesis on his lower leg?”
“She was an only child.”
I looked at the skinny kid with the cat crawling up his leg: I thought, dear old dad. I said, “Who is this Edward that the pimp was talking about?”
“I have no idea. I swear!”
So I told him she was dead and waited as he cried. It was a long wait. He said over and over that Grace would never kill herself, especially after the baby came.
Finally, I asked if he had any place he could go.
“My parents live up in Riverside. It’s a boring hellhole.”
“My advice is to go there. Right now. And stay awhile.”
He nodded, but it was obvious he was descending into a fog of grief, in addition to being beaten up. I made him repeat what he would do.
Go.
Now.
I handed him my business card.
“Private investigator,” he said quietly. “Are you trying to find out who killed Grace?”
“Yes.”
“I want to hire you.”
“We already have a client.”
He repeated his request. “I’ve got to know what happened to Grace. And I want the bastard who killed her to burn.” Misery shone in his watery, pale eyes.
“Okay.”
He reached under the cushions of the sofa and I tensed.
“Here’s five hundred.” He handed me a wad of cash. “Is that enough for a start?”
“Sure. But I’ll do this pro-bono.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want your charity. I want you to work for me, and cash talks. Grace taught me that.”
I realized it might be good to have a living client, especially because the man who had hired us yesterday was dead and Peralta had lied to the Phoenix Police, saying he had never even come into our office. I took the cash and wrote out a receipt for it on a blank sheet of paper.
He rooted around in the kitchen and returned with a flash drive. “This has her client list. The regulars.”
“Have you seen it?”