EXTRACT FOR
A Case of Gone - A Nick Case Mystery
(Author Unknown)

Chapter 1

    

    My name is Nick Case and I'm the best black private eye in the state.  Maybe the whole country but modesty prevents me from bragging about it.  No, I have no information as to how many black PIs there are.

    I had known Sammy Parks for well over fifteen years.  Sammy was a bookmaker and one of the more successful bookies around.  He worked out of Capitol City and as far as I knew had no affiliations with any other bookie. 

    Some bookies would bet on anything but Sammy was a specialist.  He only took bets on college sports so if you wanted to bet on football or basketball at the college level, Sammy was your man.  His office, if it could be called one, was located at the Bulldog Tavern.

    Over the decades the Bulldog had undergone several owners and a name change or two but the one consistent was Sammy Parks.  He occupied the back booth and that was where I knew I'd find him.

    "You rang, sir?"  I asked sitting down across from him.

    "Thanks for coming, Nicolas," he said in a deeper voice than one would expect from such a scrawny little man. "Beer?"  I told him I could be persuaded to imbibe and he held up his nearly empty mug and two fingers. The bartender nodded and went to fetch our beer.

    "I got a problem," he said when the beverages had been delivered. "My daughter-in-law is missing."

    "Did you report it to the police?" I asked taking a sip of the draft beer and once again marveled at that first sip of beer of the day. 	People who drank all day would never know just how great that first delayed sip could be.  Neither could teetotalers for that matter.

    "Yes, of course," he answered.  "Four days ago but you know how much importance they place on an adult who goes missing."  I knew there was more so I sipped, continued to marvel at beer, and waited.

    "Lisa is...was married to my son, Calvin.  You remember Calvin was killed in a traffic accident about two years ago."  He drifted away for a few moments to someplace I couldn't go or even wanted to.  I recalled how devastated Sammy and his family were after the accident.  He mentally shook himself.  "Anyway, we considered Lisa family even thought they were only married a few months.  We treated her like family.  She always came by our house for Sunday brunch.  She never missed even after she started dating.  Like clock-work Lisa came for brunch until last Sunday.  She didn't show-up and she didn't call.  I went to her apartment but it was locked up tight.  We had to wait three days before the police would take the report.  Nothing, Nicolas. The cops are doing nothing."

    "I'll need some information Sammy," I said. "I guess the first one is...how's business?"

    "I can afford to pay you, if that's what you mean," he said and slid a thick light brown envelope across to me. "Here's two grand.  You call me if you need more."  He took some printed pages out of his briefcase and handed them to me.  He had to slide a laptop computer out of his way.

    When I first net Sammy he used a special type of paper to keep his records on.  If the cops came all he had to do was dunk the papers into a glass of water he kept handy.  The paper turned instantly into a pasty mush.  The computer indicated Sammy Parks had turned to technology to conduct his business.

    "I can dump it and clean the hard drive with the flick of a finger." he said noting I had looked at the laptop.  "You read the information we put together and if you got questions, you call me.  You got my cell number?"  Since I seldom bet, I didn't.  He gave it to me and I entered it into my little jim-dandy cell phone.  If they get any smaller we all will spend all our time looking for a damned phone.

    I left Sammy and the Bulldog Tavern and went to my favorite eating place for lunch and the opportunity to read what my client prepared for me.  I was driving a new car.  The first brand new one ever.  I splurged and bought a new Lincoln Navigator.  A honking big SUV gas hog and I loved it.  It was silver with black leather seats and dash.  It was a thing of beauty and forty-five more monthly payments and it would be mine.

    I am not typical of my race.  I've long recognized that fact and have learned to live with it.  For example I love country music and some bluegrass. The sounds of the electric steel guitars and a well-tuned fiddle give me chills.  Rap gives me stomach cramps. Charlie Pride, a black country singer from Sledge, Mississippi, is my musical hero.  His smooth baritone gave him over thirty number one hits. "Kiss an Angel good morning" among them.

    My preference for country music was the cause of many heated discussions with my partner, Tony De Angelo, back when we were both with the police department.  To him it flew in the face of "natural".  I was supposed to prefer rhythm and blues or God forbid, rap.  I recognized whenever any pop singer needed a hit they would look to Hank Williams or Willie Nelson for a song to record.  It must be said that I do like a rousing Negro spiritual now and again.  Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

    Rock and roll?  I like 50s and 60s rock and roll back when it was new and fresh. Back when rock music did, indeed, roll.  Sometime in the mid to late 60s it took a sharp down-turn for me. Rock on Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke, and all the other old-time greats. 

    I don't consider myself African-American because my folks came over ten generations or so ago and that makes me an American-American who happens to be dark skinned. Just an American, if you please.

    While I worked for the city police department, I made detective rather quickly because I learned to pay attention to informants.  Cab drivers, hotel employees including bellhops, desk clerks, and room service waiters, restaurant employees and the like proved to be great sources of information.  I call them the "unseen".  Whores and pimps always know what is going on in their part of town and are a good source of information. As a cop, I used my official position to exchange favors for information.  As a PI, I have to swap cash for information.

    I love to cook and I am good at it but sometimes you want to eat someone's cooking besides your own.  I pursued the data Sammy had prepared on the missing woman while a fry cook prepared my burger and side dishes.

    The missing woman's name was Lisa Parks, nee Wilson.  She just had a birthday and that made her twenty four...barely.  From the supplied photograph, Lisa was an attractive young woman.  The glamour photo was soft. Soft is just another way to say slightly out of focus but tends to make humans look better than they really are.

    From what I could tell from the other photos, candid snapshots, Lisa Parks didn't need any help looking good.  Someone that looks that good should be clear and crisp in photos.

    According to the information Sammy supplied, Lisa had only recently begun to date. Her current suitor was one, Michael Rhodes.  Clean cut young man, according to Sammy. We would just have to see, wouldn't we?

    I thought about the information while I ate my burger, French fries, and side of coleslaw. I washed all that down with three glasses of iced tea and had to use the restroom even before I left the restaurant.  I love iced tea but it goes right through me.  I knew I would need a pissery again before too long.

    I drove to the address where Lisa Parks lived.  It was a nice apartment complex with I judged about fifty units on eight floors.  Lisa lived on the third floor front.  It took me almost twenty seconds to slip the door lock.  I apparently needed to practice more.

    Once inside I saw that her furniture was modestly priced furnishings from a chain  buy-it-by-the-room store.  The TV was several years old as was the stereo system. In fact there was nothing to suggest that Lisa and the late Calvin Parks hadn't lived within their modest means.

    From the information Sammy had given me, I knew that Lisa worked in some office downtown.  She was called an administrative assistant to some guy peddling insurance. In a bygone day she would have been a secretary. 

    The examination of the apartment proved fruitless until I found two photo albums under the mattress.

    It was soon apparent that Lisa had been moonlighting as a photographer's model and she looked damned good, too.  The first album was full of about thirty, eight by ten photos in both black and white and color. All were professional quality.

    The second album was also professionally made but all the photos were raw.  From the array of fuck photos, I could see that Lisa apparently liked the brothers.  All the thirty or so photos were her with a variety of black men.  It was blatantly obvious that Lisa Parks like or at least indulged in group sex.  In one of the enlargements she had a black cock in her pussy and her asshole while she sucked yet another black cock.

    The last four photos were smaller maybe four by sizes and they were not of Lisa.  It was some dark skinned brother fucking and choking a very young white chick.  Some people like that near-death shit while fucking.  I had been near death too many times for that to be any kick.

    I studied the photos carefully looking for a clue.  Okay, I was enjoying looking at the attractive white woman being fucked by big black cocks, so sue me.  I would get around to looking for clues at some point.

    I found a plastic grocery bag and put the albums in it.  They would take a lot of study and I didn't want to spend too much time in a place I had no legal business. I gave the small apartment another quick look and let myself out. 

    At the elevator I waited for a petit attractive woman to get off.  I started to get on when I had an idea.

    "Excuse me, ma'am," I said. "Do you know the lady who lives in three B?"

    "Lisa?  Yeah sure," she answered.

    "Do you know where I might find her?"  I asked giving her the benefit of my charming smile.  Not full voltage because she might tear her clothes off right there in the hall.

    "Not a clue," the woman answered giving me a hard look.  Maybe I needed to increase the voltage of my smile a bit.  "Why are you asking?"

    "Lisa has been reported missing," I said and flashed my badge too fast for her to see it clearly.  "I'm attempting to locate her."

    "She left on a trip," the woman said. "Last Friday I think it was.  I was just coming in from shopping and I saw her getting into a car.  She had her overnight case with her so I assumed she was off on another out of town photo shoot.  Who reported her missing?"

    "Her father-in-law," I answered. "Did Lisa seem under duress?"

    "Under what?  Oh, you mean was she forced to go?  No, she smiled and waved at me like she always did.  She's a sweetheart, you know.  I didn't see what the driver looked like.  She hopped in and they took off."

    "Do you remember what kind of car?"  I asked knowing it was a wasted question but had to be asked.  Most people, especially women, do not notice vehicles.

    "Yeah, it was a new black Aston Martin DBS V12 coupe," she answered and then laughed at the expression on my face.  The expression I couldn't hide which was shock.  "I'm a James Bond fan," she explained. "And I like fancy cars.  Too bad some jerk fucked that one up by putting fender flames behind the front and back wheels.  How stupid is that?"  I told her it was pretty damned stupid. "Oh, by the way, it was a manual shift and the driver didn't know how to shift smoothly."  Hell, how hard could it be to locate a fucked-up $300,000 vehicle that the driver couldn't shift?

    "If you think of anything, please give me a call," I said hand handed her my card.

    "Okay...anything?  No matter what?" she asked glancing at the card.  "Hell, you're a private detective.  Shame on you.  You didn't tell me you were private."  She didn't seem upset by her discovery.  "So if I have something that needs investigating, I should call you?"

    "You should," I told her. "Or even if you have nothing to investigate."

    "I might just do that," she said putting my card in her shirt pocket.  "Maybe I should find out what Lisa finds so attractive about black men."

    "Lisa likes black men?"  I asked as if I hadn't detected that.

    "Maybe I shouldn't be telling tales out of school," she said.  "My name is Nancy Gordon, Mister Case."

    "Well maybe telling tales out of school will help me find Lisa quicker and you should call me Nick."

    "There's no question about it," she said with a smile. "I should call you, Nick.  Lisa dated blacks now and again.  She told me her new agent was black so I would have to say she likes black men, wouldn't you?"

    'I would say so," I said.  Yet, according to Sammy her current boyfriend was white.  "Is there a Mister Gordon?"  I thought I needed to get some information about that before things got any hotter between us.

    "Not for a couple of years.  I lit a fire under his ass and showed him the door.  Is it true what they say?  About going black and never going back?"

    "I have not found that to be true," I answered.  "I personally know of several white women who went black and had no trouble going back.  I think that would depend on the woman and what she wanted and what she got.  If you see or hear from Lisa would you give me a call?"

    "I will," she said.  "Maybe I'll call anyway."

    I left Nancy Gordon before we started fucking right there in the corridor. I did have the feeling we would not stay apart for long.

    I knew more than I had but wasn't sure what it meant. I knew that Lisa Parks was into porn.  Not just any porn but interracial porn and she knew someone who drove a fucked-up Aston Martin.  Why oh why would anyone trick out a very expensive classy car with flame decals?  Okay, that told me it was someone with no class.

    I went home so I could study the photo albums.  Shut up!

    I live in a small apartment building a block and a half from the university campus.  There were six large apartments in the building when I moved in all those many years ago.  Now there are eleven apartments, one large, mine, and ten smaller ones for students to rent.  The old landlord was tickled to have a cop renting an apartment and he gave me a great deal and in return I watched out for his interest. 

    The old landlord sold out to a large corporation who was willing to divided all the apartments in half and appeal to student's budgets. I waved the long-term lease my old landlord gave me and they backed off and left my apartment alone.  At some point they wised up and realized they had a good thing.  A cop, even an ex-cop, living in the building meant some security they wouldn't normally have. They raised the rent, but not much and extended my lease so for now I was good.  I doubt the owners know I left the police department and I didn't see any need to tell them.

    My apartment is on the ground floor toward the back.  The other apartments are one bath and one bedroom while mine is two bedrooms and a bath and a half.  I have a living room, a dining room and a kitchen.  The kitchen is handy because I am somewhat a cook. I don't do fancy, but I do a pretty good job on the things I like. 

    Since I moved in, I made some unauthorized changes to the apartment.  I replaced the old door and casing with a casehardened steel door and frame.  Of course it can be knocked down?if you have a bulldozer handy. The spare bedroom was changed into a fortress.  Beefed up door and inside walls and a lock that would make the folks at Fort Knox smile with pleasure.  Why, you may ask, would I go to that extreme?  I have, over the years, collected a rather large assembly of weapons.  Some fit into the not-as-legal-as-you-would-like category. Okay some are as illegal as it's possible to be.  For example, some fully automatic weapons that happen to fall into my hands and not needed as evidence.  

    Many of my fellow officers both uniformed and detectives found out about my fetish for weapons and they contributed to it from time to time. I even have nearly a full crate of antipersonnel hand grenades and the crown jewel of my collection is four M72 LAW.  LAW stands for light anti-tank weapon and replaced the old bazooka sometime after the Korean War.  No, I don't know what I will do with them, but I have them and that pleases me.

    As I indicated, I'm single, but I haven't always been single.  I lived with a woman for almost a year right after I joined the police force.  It was a year of hell for both of us and after we wised up, she left for parts unknown to me.  Since that time there have been several ladies in my life.  Some came and stayed for a short time and some for longer, but in the end, they all left me. I was alone, but I was seldom lonely.

    I stopped at the grocery on my way home to get some pasta to go with my meat sauce I had left in the slow cooker.  I also picked up some beer and cabbage. I like a nice coleslaw with my pasta but sometimes I make a tossed salad.  Tonight I would have slaw.