The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(2)

Jud snorted. “Artie Kaufman. Calls himself ‘Daddy Warbucks’ when he’s filming that filth. Turned Stacy into his star performer.”

I sipped my mai tai and shook my head.

“Problem there, Mr. Pankow, is you just took away his motive. If Stacy was making money for this guy, why would he kill her?”

“Have you seen the kinds of movies he makes?”

“No,” I said, “don’t think I have.”

“You’d remember if you had. They aren’t right, Mr. Faust. The things he does…he’s not right.”

I tapped the envelope again and thought about my overdue rent. Whether Artie Kaufman was a killer, Jud looked about a heartbeat away from going to see him with a gun in his hand. I didn’t want to get involved. I also didn’t want the old guy to spend the rest of his life in prison because he did something stupid.

“I have some ground rules.” I picked up the envelope. “Are you staying in town?”

“Got a room at the Value Lodge on East Tropicana. Until Friday, anyway. Can’t afford to stay longer than that.”

“I’d rather you went home tonight, but if you’re going to be here, I want you in that hotel room doing absolutely nothing. You don’t go within a mile of Kaufman. And if I look into this and find out he’s got clean hands, that’s the end of it. I want your word.”

Jud nodded slowly, and I wondered how much I could trust him to hold to that.

“Next,” I said, leaning in and giving him a hard look, “I’ll check into Stacy’s death, but that’s the extent of what I’m offering. If it was murder, and if I find the person responsible, anything that does or does not happen next is at my discretion. You will not be involved. This is for your protection and mine. Understand?”

He chewed that over. Jud was the kind of man who thought out his sentences before he spoke.

“I heard about you. On the computer. Traded mail with a lady named Jenna Rearden. She told me what happened to her ex-husband.”

Jenna. That explained it. I was going to have to tell her to stop tossing my name around. I’d done a job for her, all right. I normally don’t get my hands that dirty, but the ex in question had been paying visits to their six-year-old daughter’s bedroom at night. I took exception to that.

“She said he’s locked up in the nuthouse,” Jud said, eyeing me cautiously. “Said they have to keep him on happy pills or all he does is scream until his throat gives out. Doctors can’t reckon why, neither.”

“I told you, I’ll look into your granddaughter’s death. Past that, I don’t make promises.”

Jud studied me.

“Jenna Rearden thinks you might be the Devil.”

“Yet here you are.” I finished my drink. “Lucky for you, I only take payment in cash.” I folded the envelope into my pocket, rose, and shook his hand. His grip was firm, with calluses like lunar rocks.”I’ll call you,” I said and made my way out into the afternoon sun.

It wasn’t hard to see that Jud Pankow was dying slow. He’d lost the only person he cared about, and I knew he was filling the hours listing every regret, everything he should have said and didn’t, and everything he did say and shouldn’t have. It was a familiar song and I knew every note of it. I had one asset Jud didn’t, though: a clear head.

I figured Stacy’s ending would be the best place to start. I’d have to go where I knew the cops wouldn’t. Underground.





Two



Home, when I was there, was a second-floor walk-up just off Bermuda Road. It was a tourist-trap motel before it got converted to apartments sometime in the sixties. A painted concrete cactus and a dusty parking lot welcomed me back under the shade of a dying palm tree. A pale lizard on the railing watched with lazy eyes as I jogged up the stairs and jiggled my key in the door for room 208.

My furniture was mostly vintage, straight from the old motel days, spruced up with the occasional estate sale treasure. The combination lock built into the closet door, though, that was new. I clicked on the desk lamp, leaving my curtains closed, and dialed up the numbers by touch. Half the closet was for dress shirts, ties, and my one nice suit. The other half was for business.

Books with faded covers jostled for space on a pair of built-in shelves, from Eichmann’s Treatise on Renaissance Alchemy to a first edition of Balfour’s Cultes des Goules. The next three shelves hosted a clutter of pouches, vials, and sticks of chalk—everything for the working sorcerer on the go. Up top, a pair of shoeboxes kept my tools neatly stowed.

I stocked up on a few odds and ends and checked my rummage drawer for a working flashlight. I was in the middle of tugging on a pair of old black jeans, something I wouldn’t mind getting dirty, when my cell phone rang. I held it to my ear with one hand, fumbling at my belt with the other.

“Danny boy!” boomed the voice on the other end, a woman with a Creole accent thick enough to cut with a knife. “Where you been hidin’? Everybody’s asking about you.”

“Mama Margaux, hey. I’m okay, just been a long week. Dealing with some stuff.”

“Goin’ on two weeks, more like.”

I looked over at my rumpled bed and the three empty bottles of Jack Daniels gathering dust in the wastebin.

“Huh, guess it has. Look, I’ll come out and see everybody soon. Just haven’t been feeling real social lately.”