“Okay, tough guy. You get your ass out of here and tell Porky to leave me alone or I’ll call the cops.”
“Ho! Wait a minute. Porky? You mean Porky Johnson?”
“Don’t get cute, I know a goon when I see one. Now turn around and get the hell out of here.”
I couldn’t help laughing and apparently had enough surprise on my face to convince her I wasn’t a threat.
“You just told me more than I expected to hear,” I said.
The girl in jeans was watching from down the corridor. Seeing a five-foot woman confronting a six-foot-three man must have looked comical. I might have laughed, but I didn’t.
“I just came here to ask a few questions,” I said. “I know Porky, but I don’t work for him.”
“What questions?”
“He’s mixed up in something he’s trying to hide. Did he threaten you?”
That got a stubborn nothing.
“Did Gina Spalitro call you?”
“That bitch.” She drew back. “Who are you?”
“Eight years ago a policeman was murdered on the rocks below your cottage on Brackett Shores. That man was my father.”
She gave that some thought, studying my face. “Yeah,” she said. “Your picture was in the paper. I remember.”
“I used to think he was there checking on your operation. But I’m beginning to think he was there looking for Porky Johnson.”
A wariness came into her expression. “Let’s go inside.”
When she turned, the girl down the corridor scampered away.
Calysta brought me through a large room, past an old man and two women clustered at a table playing cards. One of the women, in a wheelchair, winked at me.
Calysta took my arm and led me through a doorway into an office, pointed me at a chair and walked around a desk and dropped into a high-backed swivel chair that dwarfed her.
“So what do you want?” she said, leaning forward, resting folded hands on the edge of a black plastic surface saver. “This about Gina Spalitro?”
“She important to Porky?”
“Used to be one of his favorites.”
“He was a regular john?”
Calysta laughed. “We never called them that. We called them ‘clients.’”
“But he came regularly to the cottage? Just for women or for drugs?”
“If you’re trying to hang something on him, don’t expect me to be a witness. I’ve put all that behind me. I don’t give a shit about Porky Johnson or Gina Spalitro. They did me dirty, but that’s all in the past.”
I showed her the picture of Dixie Hardaway. She admitted he bought cocaine from her. Whether he was at the cottage the night of the murder, she couldn’t say.
“But Porky was,” she said.
“Want to talk about it?”
She cocked her head to one side. “Sure you’re not a cop? You act like a cop.”
“Used to be,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. Not representing a client. I’m here on my own.”
“And no friend of Porky Johnson.”
“Right.”
She leaned back in the chair, folding jeweled hands across her belly. “I just got a call from Gina. But I’m sure she was talking for him. Must be they’re back together.”
“Warning you to keep your mouth shut.”
“Yeah. Other people got that call?”
“A few.”
“It was a threat. I don’t like being threatened,” staring at me to be sure I got that straight. “Okay. You want to know about that Saturday night.”
“Anything you can tell me.”
As though relieved to finally get it out, she told me about Porky’s affair with Gina. “It doesn’t happen often, but they got something going. She was the only one he wanted. It was like every week he came over. You could see her face light up when he walked in. Then it stopped. One night she ran up to him like she always did, arms outstretched, expecting a loving hug, and he shoved her aside and went for a different girl. Gina couldn’t believe it. She thought he was kidding. But he wasn’t. She went after the other girl and Porky knocked her across the room and told her she bored him. That was Friday night. Saturday night I found her in a corner crying. She wouldn’t talk to me. I never found out what happened. A couple of days later, I was in the tank. I never saw her again until the trial.”
“Who was the other girl?”
“She called herself Aurora Borealis.” Laughing, she added, “I don’t think it was her real name.”
“And you don’t know where I can find her.”
“Maybe Porky does. But those kids disappear.”
Mike’s wife Laura and their daughter were coming out of Mike’s office when I entered the squad room at the police station. Laura gave me a wet kiss while her daughter giggled.
“Where you been keeping yourself?”
“Here and there,” I said. She had put on a little weight but was still easy to look at with her abundant dark hair and playful eyes.
“When you gonna get married?”
“Come on, Laura. I’m too young.”
She punched my arm and walked away laughing, the daughter skipping along at her side.
“Means, motive, and opportunity,” Mike said, leaning back in his chair, tapping something on the keyboard of his computer. “All I’ve had until now is motive and means. She’s sure he was out there that night?”
“Friday and Saturday night.”
“But just for the women. Not drugs?”
“You told me not to talk about drugs, remember?” I smiled. “Is that what you’re trying to pin on him?”
He ignored the question. “So it doesn’t give us much.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for? I won’t take it anywhere.”
Mike sighed, glanced into the squad room through opened blinds on the glass walls. “There’s something in his file from years ago. What we know that’s relevant is that he frequented that cottage. Now we know he was there that Saturday night.”
“Relevant to what? Your investigation?”
He didn’t answer, and I didn’t repeat the question. But I was getting closer.
Next day at a little luncheonette on Congress Street I sat for an hour with Nora Murphy. She’d called asking to meet me. We were eating quiche. She looked worried, said she hadn’t slept, said she was frightened for her son.
“The reason I called,” she said, “I didn’t tell you everything,” moving a spoon around her coffee mug, not looking at me, giving me a chance to examine lines of worry in her face.
“What’d you leave out?”
“That I caught him in the bathroom leaning over a few lines of white powder.” She poured salt on the Formica and drew circles in it with her finger. “Something else,” she said.
“About that Saturday night?”
“He was gone for about two hours. Not unusual. He often did that, and I never asked where he went.” She glanced past me at something across the room. Making this “confession” was obviously difficult. “I spent this morning at the newspaper library going over accounts of that weekend. I don’t know how I missed reading about your father.”
“You had other things to worry about.”
She tossed her head and looked squarely at me. “If you say he went to Brackett Shores that night to buy cocaine, I couldn’t deny it. I didn’t question things he did. I was afraid of losing him,” and that brought a smile of irony.
“Look, it’s a fair assumption that Porky Johnson told his girlfriend to call Florida and threaten Dixie. He wouldn’t want his fingerprints on that phone call. He must believe that Dixie knows something that can hurt him. And it’s fair to think Dixie might have told you what it is.”