Chapter 5

I wasn’t providing progress reports to Bobsy Atwater because there wasn’t any progress to report. Frustrating.

Funny, though, I wasn’t bored. I’ve never minded stakeouts and now I was doing them almost every day in California. Even though I didn’t charge for weekends, I was still following Nelson employees. When they took a rare weekend off work.

One advantage of casting such a wide net was there was usually someone for me to tail. They can’t all work 24 / 7, even if they find new jobs. And since I had their home addresses, they were easy to find.

Misty Raines was a typical Nelson techie. Well, being female meant she was in the minority, but she also worked the same long hours as the boys. And lived in the City. She didn’t own a car, commuted on the company bus. Which irritated the hell out of a lot of San Franciscans.

Custom buses for the elite Silicon Valley crowd. Who were driving up real estate prices, transforming neighborhoods, squeezing out the middle class. The poor? A lot of them already gone, others living in shelters.

Misty lived in the Marina, posh these days. It was on the Bay, built mostly on landfill in the 1920s. She rented the upstairs of a duplex on Francisco Street, just a block away from the restaurant / shopping mecca, Chestnut Street.

She was relatively easy to keep track of, since she didn’t drive. I spent seven unproductive nights following her around the Marina. She spent one night in the Mission District with a fellow Nelson worker. A boy. Other than that she brought home deli food, shopped for groceries, saw a Mamet revival -- “American Buffalo” -- and, mostly, didn’t leave her apartment.

And Misty Raines was typical of the headway my four other investigators and I were making.

Through it all, the stakeouts, the tailing, writing reports, there was a constant thrum of unease running through me. It was more than the money I was burning through, more than the lack of progress, the dearth of new approaches to try.

It was the fact that I knew about as much about the tech side of the search for the God Pill as I knew about string theory. Which has something to do with pole dancing if I’m not mistaken.

Someone, somebody on the domestic front, purchased, brought home, and poured into a horizontally-striped Hive bowl, a large packet of Peanut M&Ms.

In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I conducted blind taste-examinations to determine if different colors produced different flavors. The results are quite nuanced and further investigation may well be required.

But fuck! What MARS marketing genius decided white M & Ms would boost sales? Probably some P&G washout.

I’m sorry. Those white globules look diseased. Mealy. Washed out.

“Pulp Fiction.” Every time Travolta goes into a bathroom something bad happens -- a coke overdose, a shooting, a diner robbery.

That’s sort of the way I was feeling, minus the bathroom part. When I was in Kansas City, I felt I should be back in California. Vice versa.

I wish I had a Winston Wolfe to solve my problems. I did have, sort of, access to Bulldog Bannerman. But this wasn’t a movie. Nobody to hose the blood off me.

I was pretty sure I knew why he had brought Robert ‘Bobsy’ Atwater to me. Bulldog knew I was no techie, but the techies hadn’t been able to make very much progress. And Bulldog knew I was a decent snoop, make that investigator. And that I had the ability to come at things from a ... an oblique angle. A different lens, a different filter.

So far though,

Mystery 1 Winter 0

Lina, now that she was married and she didn’t depend entirely on her hostess income, put Pilar on an allowance and told her to pay her share when she and Walker went out.

When I’m not worried about going to jail for aiding and abetting teen sex, I sometimes compare Pilar with Walker’s first girlfriend, Mindy.

No contest, not really. Mindy is a child of privilege whose only real hardship, a few weeks with the cult that couldn’t shoot straight, was self-inflicted.

What Pilar and her mother went through to reach where they are in life is and extraordinary tale of courage, grit, determination.

Pilar rules. Now if she’ll just keep her knees together for a while longer...

“Maybe I’m crazy Maybe you’re crazy Maybe we’re crazy Probably”

I started soft-approaching two different Nelson-Eamons employees. Both guys in their 20s who sometimes hang out at bars. Even though the female competition is stronger in San Francisco than Kansas City, I didn’t have trouble getting them to chat me up.

I played into my KC life, my lack of tech understanding. Of course when the conversation drifted around to our jobs, I lied. I was a sales rep for Merck. And no, I’d never heard of Nelson-Eamons, something to do with cars? Or washing machines?

One guy, Josh Emmonds, seemed, more than the other boyo, promising. Barely promising. He was tightlipped about work, but like many of us, he grew garrulous after a few pops. The first interesting tidbit I learned was that several tech firms will pay to put their female employees’ eggs on ice. It’s not inexpensive either. It can cost around $10,000 to remove the eggs from ovaries and freeze them for later use.

It’s not the God Pill, but it’s indicative of how science and tech and forward thinking and money pervade the Valley. Bobsy told me, “Tech companies have always studied the future. Think Mafia knowing Prohibition was coming. Except tech thinks bigger, faster, further.”

On our third ‘date’ -- a date was that I would meet Josh at his favorite watering hole, The Treasury in the Financial District -- I let him get a little pawsy. Just boobs, just briefly. No bra, he seemed to approve. Surprise, surprise.

Josh could hold his liquor pretty well. Unfortunately. I’d have to see about making a tonic-only contract with a bartender. But that could be tricky, Josh is a regular. The Treasury is within walking distance of his apartment.

He did talk a little about some lab work he found interesting. Mice. Gene splicing. At least not those fucking naked mole-rats which I made the mistake of Googling.

Being cool, almost, I waved away the topic, “Over my head, Josh.”

Playing the long game with him. We’ll see.

I once overheard a client, Red Lonnigan of AAA, talking on the phone, “Winter’s pretty good. A Miss Marple with boobs.”

“My bitch a choosy lover, never fuck without a rubber / Never in the sheets, like it on top of the cover / Money on the dresser, drive a Kompressor, Top notch hoes get the most, not the lesser.”

Zebra babies can run, full speed, within an hour of being born. If they couldn’t they’d be dead.

Back in Kansas City, I went with big. Six feet, eight inches, 325 pounds, big.

Bear. My friend, my buddy, my pal. With long, bright, platinum hair that would be the first thing everyone noticed if he weren’t so fucking huge.

I’d been so busy on The Globe and out in California that I’d drifted away from hanging with him. So I started taking Walker, sometimes Walker and Pilar, sometimes Pilar, to his restaurant for dinner. He always made time to visit with us, sometimes to fit himself, gingerly, into our booth and eat with us.

Our friendship goes back over 15 years. Before I married Richie, after he left me, before I married the woman who ran BEAR on Broadway, Vanessa Henderson.

Bear and I ... well, we just fit. Our conversation flies along whether it has been a day or three months between get-togethers.

He continues to be a strong male influence on Walker. Along with Daddy and, occasionally, Bulldog Bannerman. Richie less often, he’s sort of meandered out of our day to day lives. And Phillip Montgomery had moved to New York. So I made a special effort to keep Walker in touch with Bear.

Pilar isn’t quite sure what to make of my large pal. She knows he’s gay and is a little puzzled at our closeness. I didn’t tell her I don’t have to be fucking a guy to love him. She’ll probably figure that out for herself one of these days.

Then a shock wave swept over Brookside. Over Kansas City really. Brookside is a solidly middle / upper class KC neighborhood. Quiet, comfortable. Sedate, almost. There had been a bank robbery on 63rd street a while back, but that was so unusual it generated widespread attention.

Brookside is mostly white, more for cost of living reasons than segregation policies.

A little girl, one year younger than Pilar Paloma, one class behind her, disappeared during the 10:30 AM recess. The school went into instantaneous lockdown, the police swarmed the area in minutes. Seconds, for the very first patrol cars.

Vanessa’s restaurant, Euforia was two blocks away. Daddy lived two and half blocks the other direction, west.

This just did not happen, not in Brookside.

Mayor Tom Lynch didn’t bother with a media scrum, within an hour, he tasked Sergeant Finch’s boss, the head of the Special Operations Squad, “Find that little girl. Now!”

Elizabeth Warner was around four feet, ten inches. About 85 pounds. Dark hair, wearing her school uniform -- plaid skirt, white blouse.

Parents, including Lina Paloma, rushed to pick up their kids, take them home, lock the fucking door. It’s sad, but I guess good too, that the school had prepared for something like this. They already had all the doors locked with a police guard at each entry.