And here was Kenneth Buchanan, white-shoe downtown lawyer.
He turned down two-lane State Avenue, going twenty-five. Will waited for the red light and sat, watching him slow. Then a truck passed, obscuring the view, and when it was gone so was Buchanan’s Mercedes.
Will turned left and cruised slowly down the street. Some large old multi-story brick apartments were on the left, and a few forlorn rowhouses stood on the right.
“Hello,” he said to himself.
Buchanan had parked in an empty lot next to a two-story brick rowhouse that had lost both its siblings. The front windows were boarded up with old wood and the paintless door looked barely on its hinges. Buchanan’s car was empty. Will picked up speed, went to the next intersection, turned around, and found a place behind a rusty pickup truck. He called Dodds.
“Guess where I am?”
“Hope it’s more interesting than my life, sitting outside a cop’s house.”
“Lower Price Hill. Buchanan drove over here. He parked and went inside a house.”
“No shit?” Dodds thought about it. “Maybe he’s a secret meth head.”
“Maybe.” Will watched a young man with mussed light-brown hair, hard-muscled in a wife-beater shirt, walk past giving him the eye. He ignored him. “It’s about the last place I’d expect him. You see anything around my place?”
“Nope,” Dodds said. “I’m encouraging my hemorrhoids.”
Will made a note of the address and waited. It took nearly half an hour before Buchanan stepped down on the crumbling sidewalk and walked purposefully to his car. He was wearing a light-blue shirt, tan slacks, and expensive tasseled shoes. His face was set in a hard look, and he didn’t even turn his head in Will’s direction. Then the expensive car’s backup lights flared and it was on the street. Will decided to stay.
It was another half hour before Will saw movement at the door. First a bicycle tire, then the whole bike being pushed by a woman. She wore blue jeans and a Bengals T-shirt, but what you first noticed was her hair, vivid red and flowing down over her shoulders. She swung a leg over the bicycle seat and pedaled north. Will let her go for a moment, then started the car and followed slowly. Her hair caught the sun and wind, making a lovely orange sail.
“7140, 7140.”
He muttered a profanity and picked up the mic.
The dispatcher came back: “Meet the officers, signal nine, Queensgate Playfield. We have a sixteen at large. Respond Code three.”
“7140 responding.”
It was a shooting with a suspect at large. He gripped the steering wheel tighter but stayed on the girl.
She stopped at Meisner’s market and went inside, bike and all. Will parked in front.
No more than two minutes later, she came back out, stuffing a red-and-white carton of Marlboroughs in her purse. She started to swing over the bike, when he tapped the horn. She looked him over and ignored him. He hit the emergency lights and she paid attention.
He flashed his badge when she came to the driver’s side. “Climb in.”
“What about my bike?”
“Lean it against the front of the car where we can watch it.” For all he knew, it was one of the few things she owned in the world. As she did so, he tossed his cane in the back seat.
Once she was in the car, he could see her more clearly. She was younger than he had first assumed, and her fiery hair framed a lovely face, the home to startlingly blue eyes. Her features were uniformly delicate and her skin was as flawless as Kristen Gruber’s. Put her in different circumstances on the east side and she would have worlds offered to her.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“I didn’t say you did,” Will said. Time was running against him, even if the call location was close. If Fassbinder knew what he was really doing, all his dreams of revenge could be quickly visited on Will’s head. He kept the agitation out of his voice. “You had a visitor a few minutes ago, well-dressed man, middle-aged.”
“So?”
“So, are you a pro?”
“No! I don’t turn tricks, don’t do drugs.” She pointed out the window at a passing man. “Why don’t you people do something about the niggers overrunning our neighborhood, instead of hassling me?”
East side, west side, race was never far below the surface in Cincinnati.
“What’s your name?”
“Jill.”
He asked her to show him her driver’s license and wrote down the information: Jill Evangeline Bailey and the addressed matched the shabby place she had come from. She was nineteen.
“You ever been in trouble, Jill?”
“No.”
“Not even a DUI?”
She shook her head.
“You have a job?”
“I’m a waitress at Tucker’s. I ride the bus.”
“So how do you know Kenneth Buchanan?”
She hesitated and ran her hands though her hair.
“Is that his name?”
“That’s his name and you didn’t answer my question. This is a homicide investigation.”
Her small frame went rigid. “I don’t know anything about any homicide.” Her voice became small and trailed off into silence. Finally, “He gave me some money.”
Will waited a few beats. “Why would he do that?”
“I didn’t do anything!” The blue eyes filled with tears. “I was raped last fall by one of these niggers and you people didn’t do anything about it. He dragged me right behind that church one night and raped me three damned times. Right there behind a house of God. This used to be a safe neighborhood. Now the white people can’t even go out at night. You people never caught him. You never even tried…”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t think I wouldn’t be gone from this shithole in a heartbeat, but after my momma died that house is all I have. I don’t even have a car.”
“Now you have some money from Mister Buchanan.”
She stared out the window.
“He wants me to get an abortion.”
“How many months along are you?” She wasn’t showing.
“Six weeks.”
“And it’s his baby?”
Again, her silence, and the clock tormenting him. He had to be an asshole cop. “Jill! Talk to me, right here, right now, or downtown and as long as it takes. I don’t care. You’ll only mean more overtime pay for me. Maybe your bike will be here when we get back, probably not. I guarantee you one thing: we’ll take as much time as we need to find out why you were screwing a big-time lawyer.”
“It’s his son, okay? His son and I had sex. One time. I got pregnant. How insane is that? One time and I’m pregnant. Now he wants me to go away.”
If it was the same son, Will thought of the foul-mouthed young man in the ball cap he had encountered at Music Hall.
“You didn’t ask for money?”
“No! I want to have this baby!” she yelled. “I won’t kill it.”
“Sounds like a case of blackmail to me. That’s against the law. You won’t look so pretty after ten years in prison, Jill.”
“His dad gave the money to me! I didn’t ask for anything! I didn’t want anything. I’m sorry I ever told Mike I was pregnant. After he found out, he never took my calls again. Then I started getting calls from his father. He threatened to sue me and take my house. He said I’d taken advantage of his son. As if! I was afraid.”
Yes, he was an asshole cop. He had never seen a human being look more helpless. And here was Kenneth Buchanan cleaning up his son’s casual disaster. He thought about John and his own cleaning up, the knife that he had stashed in his dresser drawer.
“How much did he pay you?”
She stared into her small lap. “Ten thousand dollars.”