Those to be Forgiven

Published: 21 Dec 2017

And you didn’t respond to the email? The one from this… TiCK ToCK?

It didn’t give me the option. It was strange. There was no return address… just the name. The button to hit reply wasn’t there. I asked Darnell to look at it when I saw him next but he couldn’t figure it out either.

You said that you felt nervous…

I was underselling it. My heart was pounding in my chest.

How do you think that this person got a hold of your email address?

My email is attached to everything that advertises the agency. It’s not difficult to find.

But they didn’t know that you were investigating the disappearance of young Donny Baldwin…

Darnell said that he thought the worm that the USB stick contained… the one that Thomas Baldwin gave me, fed the information back.

You mentioned that in your report a little later on. Is that when you spoke with Darnell Cooper about your laptop?

Yeah. There was more but we aren’t there yet.

Was there anything else that this TiCK ToCK would have found out about you from your laptop?

It was solely used for work. There was no personal email account, no details about me at all on there. I didn’t even keep financial information on it for use with the business accounts.

You had mentioned before that the song ‘The Hurdy Gurdy Man’ had played as a soundtrack to one of the video’s that you had seen.

Yeah…

With the quote from that song being the only text in the email, do you think that this TiCK ToCK character knew that you had watched that particular video?

That thought had crossed my mind. But there was no way that that information could have been fed back from my home computer. I hadn’t used the USB stick on it.

So you believe it to be coincidence?

I believe IN coincidence but I don’t think that this was a case OF coincidence…

And the photo of Donny that was in the body of the email. It was taken at the time of his disappearance? Like the ones that had been sent to the brother?

I would assume so. The shorts he was wearing were very nineteen-seventies. The wallpaper in the kitchen…

And why, at that time, did you think that it was sent to you? Why that particular photo? Why those lines from the song?

I took it to be a warning to drop the case. To stop investigating Donny Baldwin’s kidnapping. The significance of the lines from the song wouldn’t become evident to me until later. I thought that it might just have been relating to that film loop, although I didn’t know how.

And at that point… After receiving the email… you didn’t think about involving the authorities?

It didn’t even cross my mind… actually that’s a lie. It did cross my mind. But I disregarded it.

When you stayed up the night before and watched those videos… was there anything that you didn’t include in your report? Anything that you didn’t just mention?

No.

You go into great detail about the boys: their height, weight, hair colour… the number of them and the number of videos that they appeared in. You spent quite some time watching them didn’t you?

I told you that I did.

(…)

It was important information! If any of those boys appeared in anything else that I found relating directly to Donny Baldwin it would give me a lead. A connection between those videos and the boy. There was the location… the mosaic patterned wall and the pool that had been used in the clip of Donny and a couple of the Cine Boy’s Loops… But if I could find out more about the production of those films and then connect them directly to the case then I might be able to find a thread to pull.

Which leads to this other person you were going to see the following night? Roland Burgess.

Jesus Christ! Roland Burgess! Pickman wasn’t wrong about him. He was interesting. Not what I would have expected. At all.

That same day you also met with the former police officer? The one that had been the Baldwin family’s point of contact.

Yeah… Eddie Russo…

After speaking with my husband on the phone once he’d reached his hotel in Seattle; I’d arrived early for the meeting with Eddie Russo at the agreed coffee house, a block or so from one of his offices in New Jersey. Some hipster bullshit place where they tell you the entire history of every bean that made the eight dollar cup of coffee in your hand. It was good coffee and a nice menu… but you know these sorts of places… In their efforts to stand out from the crowd they try to be different from all the chain coffee shops but they all end up looking the same in the end.

I was sitting at a table in back, I thought best to avoid a view of the street incase the conversation became… intense, but I had a clear line of the door and my eyes shot up every time the sounds of the street became a little clearer. I was in the middle of reading another email from my father about his dogs when the old man came in through the door. I recognised him from a semi recent photo on his social media.

Eddie Russo had made it to seventy and he wore it well. He could have passed for a man twenty years younger. Trim but strong looking, thick head of black hair and a full beard with only a few flecks of silver. He dressed pretty well too. Not many men his age would try to pull off a pink shirt and beige and brown leather brogues.

I stood and waved when I spotted him. Shook his hand and accepted a warm open smile. As he sat I ordered him a coffee, Americano no cream, and put away my notebook.

“Gotta say… I was surprised to hear from a private detective,” he smiled, “I mean I don’t get much interest in my time in the force. It was relatively uneventful truth be told.”

There was something real homely about him as he sipped at his oversized cup of overpriced coffee. I guess I could understand that. When I was looking into him I found that he had three kids; Two girls and a boy; six grandchildren; and was still married to the same woman after thirty-eight years. By all accounts he was a family man with a family run business (now primarily in the hands of his middle daughter Stefanie) and seemed to have a rather sweet disposition as we spoke about his life outside of the force. It fitted well with what Thomas Baldwin remembered about him from forty years passed.

“So what can I help you with Mr Quaid?” down to business after a little light chit-chat.

“I’m investigating a case that you were involved with while working Staten Island forty years ago.”

“Any way that I can help…”

“Donny Baldwin in seventy-seven,”

There was a brief twitch in the corner of his eye.

“Donny’s brother Thomas has asked me to look into it. He mentioned that you were the families primary point of contact during the investigation. He remembers you fondly Mr Russo: said that you were always very nice to him.”

“There’s something I’ve not thought about for a while.”

“I just have a couple of questions… clear up some of the facts.”

He sipped his coffee and nodded. “Please… go ahead.”

“I’ve spoken with a contact at Shaolin PD and managed to get my hands on the file.” I sipped my own. “It’s kinda… slim.”

“If I remember rightly we didn’t have much to go on. The last person to see him was the kid’s friend on the paper route and he didn’t say much.”

“Donny was believed to be a runaway right?”

“That’s what they said. It made sense. A lot of kids ran away from home at that time. They weren’t as coddled as they are now. You gotta treat them right you know? And remember that they’re not made of fine bone china. A little knock here and there with their peers, the occasional bruised ego… it does a kid good in the end.” He smiled a little. No doubt thinking of his own kids in their youth and how he treated them.

“Seems a little unlikely that the boy would run away mid paper route don’t you think? While he was with his best friend? Not say a word to that friend about any thoughts of leaving home?”

He rolled his shoulders and sat back in his chair. I wondered how many times he’s answered this question in the past. “It is what it is Mr Quaid.”

“You’re the second Shaolin blue to say that to me. I’m beginning to think that that’s the department’s motto.”

He shook his head and rolled his eyes. Considering how friendly he was being at the start there, I hadn’t thought that I’d need to get aggressive so quickly into the conversation. Particularly because I was beginning to like the guy. But he was holding out on me.

“You took the statement from Donny’s friend right? Mikey O’Hare?”

“Yeah. The black kid.”

“I spoke with Mikey a couple of days ago.” I let that hang for a moment. Watched him shift in his chair. “He says that a few key details that he reported were missed out of the report.”

“I don’t know about that…”

“He said that he believes that they were missed out on purpose.”

“I came here as a favour to a stranger Mr Quaid. If you’re going to accuse…”

“I’m not accusing you of anything Mr Russo. Just trying to ascertain the facts.”

“The facts are as I wrote them down.”

“But you skipped the details about the Iowa plates.” I took out a photocopy of the witness statement from my jacket pocket. Unfolded it and laid it out.

His eyes searching the sheet of paper on the table in front of him: “The kid never said anything about…”

“You skipped details about the drivers description.”

Sweat on his top lip: “I wrote down what was…”

“You didn’t even put your name to the witness statement.”

Eddie’s feet were scrambling on the floor under the table. He was making a move: “Just a clerical…”

“Mikey’s signature wasn’t put to the statement.”

“I’m not gonna be accused by some wannabe gumshoe!” He stood and slammed his fist on the table. The eyes of everyone in the coffee house suddenly on us.

“Why’d your uncle kill himself Mr Russo?”

He stopped dead straight and I watched the blood drain from his face. Those brown eyes disappearing somewhere – pulling away.

“Two years later… a year and a half… your uncle: Assistant Chief Raganella shot himself in the neck and bled out on his back lawn.”

He sat back down.

“It didn’t have nothing to do with…”

“He was being investigated by Internal Affairs wasn’t he Mr Russo?”

Eddie Russo put his head in his hands and wiped the years away from his faces across from me.

“I fucked up!” His hands were shaking and his eyes were growing wet. “I wasn’t the only one. But I fucked up!”

“On the Donny Baldwin case?”

“I didn’t follow procedure. I… It was a mistake. I didn’t believe the kid. The black kid. I thought he was making stuff up. Trying to cover for his friend… so I didn’t include it in the statement…”

“You telling me you falsified a witness statement because the kid was black?” Seems like Mikey O’Hare had hit the nail on the head with this guy.

“I told you. I thought he was lying. If we’d have wasted resources chasing after made-up men in made up cars… When I realised what I had done Uncle Tony covered for me.”

“And that’s why he killed himself? Seems a little thing to provoke such an extreme reaction.”

“Like I said. I wasn’t the only one…”

“Any of the others have anything to do with Donny Baldwin?”

“No…”

“You sure?”

“Yeah… that was all on me.”

Through gritted teeth: “You know what you did… it could have cost a child his life right?”

It’s amazing! How much I hated this old man at that point in time. His casual racism had let a predator slip through the net. Someone who could well have done this sort of thing before, someone who could well have done this sort of thing again.

“I don’t think that…”

I slammed my briefcase on the desk and popped open the latches to cut him off. I reached inside while his eyes stayed focused on the back of the battered brown leather. I pulled out a copy of one of the photos sent to the brother and lay it on the table between us.

“That’s him! That’s Donny Baldwin! Thirteen years-old stripped bound and gagged on a bed. You’re complicit in what’s happening to him there.”

His whole body was shaking as he looked over the photo. He quickly turned it over so he didn’t have to look at it anymore.

“I… I…I didn’t…”

“You didn’t know? You’re not the first to say that Mr Russo. Doesn’t make you any less culpable. Why did your uncle kill himself?”

“He owed money OK… a lot of money…” He shook his head and folded his hands around his face. “It didn’t have anything to do with… with this!”

“Who did he owe too?”

“He had a gambling problem. Borrowed against his losses.” I could tell how painful it was to recollect the circumstances of his Uncle’s suicide. His eyes were still wet and somewhere near hollow. “There was no way that he’d be able to pay it back… The only direct involvement he had with the missing boy was to hide the fact that the report was…”

“False? To hide the fact that the report was false? That a little casual racism on the part of his nephew meant that vital information relating to the disappearance of a thirteen year-old boy would go uninvestigated? You might not have known what actually happened to the kid Mr Russo but as far as I’m concerned you’ve a share to pay for the cost of Donny Baldwin’s lost childhood.”

Eddie Russo sat silent – eyes on the back of the photo paper on the table in front of him. No. He wasn’t involved. And although I wasn’t prepared to completely rule out Assistant Chief Raganella’s suicide as having some sort of connection, I was inclined to believe that following this path would lead toward a dead end.

“If there’s anything you can tell me that I don’t know already… about Donny… then now’s the time to unburden yourself Mr Russo…”

“The car and the driver…”

“Go on.”

“After I took the statement… I mean at the time I thought the kid was lying… A little later I did some digging of my own… I looked into it.”

“What did you find Mr Russo?”

“A couple of weeks before the kid went missing was the Blackout… You’re too young to remember, probably wasn’t even born when it happened…”

Yeah… I wasn’t born for another three years but I had heard the stories. My father filled me in on what a powder keg the City had become:

By the Summer of nineteen seventy-seven The City had been in the midst of a heatwave of the likes it had never seen before. Temperatures would hit one-oh-four in the shade. If you had aircon: it was on. If you didn’t… well… tough shit! It’s not an understatement to say that New York’s ambitions had diminished and the City that never sleeps was bone tired for it. The manufacturing centre of the world had hit a major downturn and unemployment was topping around 12%… four and half points higher than the national average. Add to that 1.2 million on welfare.

During the nadir of this fiscal crisis, the city was spending five hundred million dollars a month just to keep it’s head above water. The whole “white flight” thing during the course of the last fifteen or twenty years had seen the middle class flee all but completely to the suburbs by this point; losing the City a fortune in tax revenue and leaving New York with only the very rich and the very poor in residence. When you’ve an income disparity so wide in such a tight space and no upward mobility you justifiably see resentment and jealousy breed.

The mid to late Seventies were also the ‘Fire Years’. Considering the economic climate and lack of paying tenants; the City’s landlords were given to burning down their properties for the insurance in numbers that seem unbelievable. They’d then sell the land to property developers and make off with all the money.

The human cost of this was that death by fire in the City had doubled over the course of the seventies. As it was centred around The Bronx, a district filled with 1.5 million people, it became easy for white folks to blame the blacks and hispanics that filled the tenements: Arsonists and Hoodlums was what they called them. But it wasn’t the ‘Hoodlums’ that burned the Bronx. It was the bureaucrats. Fire inspections had been cut by more than 70%; the fire marshal program was gutted; rigs older than sin with worn wooden ladders were pressed back into service, and fire alarm boxes broke down in the dozens. No one was spending money on repairing the infrastructure… I mean… conservative estimates put the number of actual working fire hydrants down to two thirds of how many there actually were.

So with the purse empty, hundred of thousands unemployed and the City burning, Mayor Beame had gone cap in hand and begged for a bailout. President Ford refused. In the end tense negotiations got them a loan but only at the cost of extreme Austerity measures: Two thousand in the fire department were sacked; five thousand police got notice; Sanitation was ordered to stop issuing paychecks… Sanitation, Teachers and what was left of the Emergency services went on strike. Shit! It’s no wonder that the poor felt abandoned.

On top of all of that… the serial killer Son of Sam, who had murdered six and wounded seven others, was stalking New York’s streets.

You’ve got a heatwave, the City on fire, economic ruin around the corner, mass unemployment, emergency services cut back to the bone, trash piling head high on the streets and a serial killer openly mocking the police… Man… Shit has a domino effect.

It was July thirteenth that it all came tumbling down.

An electrical storm was the spark. The match that lit the fuse. Seven million people without power. All five boroughs. The Mayor didn’t know what was going on. The Police Commissioner called the five districts and ordered all police to their nearest precinct. The phones were still working and at least the hospitals that hadn’t been closed still had generators that kept those most in need alive. When it came to the restoration plan? Shit… That hadn’t been updated since sixty-five. The only lights in the whole city came from flashlights, candles and trashcan fires.

From lights to looting? Happened within minutes according to those who were there. Hundreds of people per block.

They’d say it was race thing. It wasn’t a race thing. It was class thing. Those abandoned by the city that they had called home.

For a period of about twenty four hours parts of New York became hell on earth. Looting, murders, rapes, arson… the bottom of the barrel for a blinded city in decay…

When the lights came back on over three thousand people had been arrested, one and half thousand business looted or burned to the ground… hundreds of millions of dollars in damage… I guess it kinda ripped the carpet out from under a lot of people: the fragility of urban life, how quickly social order can break down…

“Two kids went missing that night. A wetback and a ni…”

Eddie Russo caught my glare.

“A hispanic and a black kid.”

“I imagine a lot of people went missing that night.”

“Witnesses saw them getting into a silver Ford LTD.”

“Who were the kids?”

“Christ knows! I think they were twelve or thirteen.”

“So you had an eyewitness tell you what he saw happen to his friend AND two similar cases two weeks prior and you still didn’t include it in the report?”

“I thought maybe that the kid had read about it in one of the newspapers. That he’d made it up. With what had just happened…”

I flipped the photo of Donny back over on the table. “Does this look made up to you Mr Russo?”

His eyes fixed on the image of the boy bound and gagged on the bed. I stood up and grabbed my briefcase. I was done with Eddie Russo.

“Hey wait!” I’d gotten as far as the bar when he turned to me. “The photo.”

“Keep it! A memento of the lives you helped destroy.”

I walked for a couple of hours after that. Quietly fuming. Thinking about ways I could get Russo arrested or take his business down. I didn’t of course. The collateral damage that that would have caused wasn’t worth it: His family, the employees, the employees families.

Back at the office, over a couple of glasses of Strathisla, I looked online for reports from the night of the Blackout. There wasn’t much. Well there was lots, whole books had been written about it but there wasn’t a great deal relating to the two missing kids and the silver Ford. The two boys were: thirteen year-old Tre Vargas and twelve year-old Simon Gale. It wasn’t the parents who had seen the kids taken but two separate eyewitness. Both in the Bronx not that far from Yonkers. A quick check for surviving relatives didn’t turn anything up, both were only children from single parent families and neither parent was still alive. A dead-end. I at least had confirmation that Michael O’Hare was telling the truth and that the cops at the time showed no interest in actually trying to track down Donny Baldwin.

By the time I was done raking through the web I realised that I was going to be late for the meeting that Pickman had set up for me with Roland Burgess.

Grabbing a burger and eating it on the street, I arrived a few minutes late at his office in Soho and I wasn’t expecting what I was met by. In his late twenties, thick black hair and bright blue eye’s, Roland Burgess was model handsome. He could easily have been a young Clark Kent. Something about that easy smile of his with a flash of pearly whites as he took my hand had me doubting every assumption I had ever made about everything.

He welcomed me into his office which wasn’t much unlike my own but with a computer set up that would make Darnell Cooper a little jealous. The far wall was lined with filing cabinets under and around the windows; on the other two were rows of computer terminals but only the large screen at his desk in the middle appeared to be switched on.

Roland motioned toward the chair across from his desk and waved a bottle of single malt at me and I nodded.

“Peter mentioned that you’re a private investigator?”

“Peter?” It took me a minute. “Oh! Pickman! Sorry. I forget that he has a Christian name.” I sat across from him and smiled as he poured and handed me the whisky.

“I owe Peter a favour or two. He’s connected me with some very wealthy contacts over the years. So I’m waiving my usual consultancy fee for you Mr Quaid.” A sassy smile. “You need some information?”

“No offence.” I said looking around his office and I guess still a little stunned by how my own expectation seemed so far from the reality. “But you’re not what I was expecting.”

He laughed. “I know right? I get that when people first meet me. I think the assumption that I should be living in some hovel forever wrapped in a dirty raincoat is something that a lot of people have about guys in… my line of work.”

“What is your line of work exactly? Pickman wasn’t especially forthcoming?”

“I like to think of myself as a librarian or an… art historian. Of a sort.”

“A librarian?”

“I record, catalogue and deal in pornography. Legal and Illegal. Pre-internet stuff. The explosion in porno since the invention of the web makes anything post 1999 too much to handle. So I pretty much just focus on what’s called ‘vintage’ stuff.”

“Anything pre 2000 is counted as vintage? Way to make me feel old.”

He smiled at me and I wondered if he was single. No wedding band, no pictures of family or partners on the walls or on his desk… “You know what I mean. Laserdisc, VHS videos, Betamax, 8 and 16mm film loops, magazines and postcards.”

“That’s still a big area.”

“You’d be surprised how many collectors there are. Maybe I’m less a librarian and more an antique dealer.” He smiled again. “So what can I help you with?”

I pulled focus. “I’m looking for some information. The internet hasn’t been exactly helpful. Can you tell me what you know about the Cine Boys film loops?”

“Cine boys? Yeah… I think I know what you’re after.” Roland tapped out a few things on his keyboard and kept his eyes on the screen. “Here we go… The Cine Boys loops were produced by Genesis Films from the mid seventies into the early eighties. I don’t have any specific dates recorded for the individual films I’m afraid but it looks like they made about forty different features.”

“You have any idea who made them?”

“Yeah…” He read further. “Stephen Crops and Stephen Sisk were the company owners.”

“So it was a proper business? You know what the Cine Boys films are I take it?”

“Oh yeah. I know the MO. Young teens mostly, a few straying into what would be twink stuff today and few younger.”

“But they were a proper business? All legal and such?”

“Yep. Registered and everything. It wasn’t uncommon that these sorts of films were made and sold for home use. Advertisements in the backs of magazines would have been how most people would have gotten them into their homes but they were expensive by todays standards. Many of the Cine Boys films were shown in Gay Theatres across the country until sometime in the mid eighties when the law changed.” He was very casual the way he told me this. Like it was something that I should have known.

“You’re shitting me?”

“Not at all. Hang on a minute…” He pushed off from his desk and rolled his chair over to one of the filing cabinets against the wall before leafing through the suspension files in the third drawer down. Eventually he pulled out a folded piece of A3 card and handed it to me. He then went back into a second drawer and pulled out a magazine, flipped through the pages and placed it on the desk in front of me.

The folded card was a playbill for a long defunct New York cinema. Pink paper with black and white photos from six different Cine Boys films: ‘Genesis Films presents Cine Boys’ at the top; the number of each film followed by names like “Jack and Bobby” or “Scout Patrol No. 9” underneath. ‘Playing in this theatre now!’ The half page advert in the magazine was much the same – a couple of photographs from two different films that featured obviously early teen boys and a promise of a catalogue delivered with each order. The address to send your cash, cheque or postal order to was a PO Box in Florida.

“Different times!” Roland shrugged at me. It obviously didn’t bother him as much as it did me. But then I was only hearing this for the first time.

“You mind?” I asked as I took out my cell and motioned to take photographs of the playbill and advert.

“Go ahead.”

“So what else can you tell me?” I asked as I snapped off a couple of shots of each.

“About these films?”

I nodded and slid the magazine and playbill back across the desk toward him. He wheeled himself back over the the computer at his desk.

“Not a great deal about the films individually. The performers names that I have listed are incomplete and probably fake.”

“Anyone called Donny in that list?”

He scrunched his nose as his eyes moved up and down the screen: “Closest is a Danny who made appearances in three of the films.” Roland turned the monitor my way and showed me a picture of a red headed boy of seventeen.

“Not who I’m looking for… What else can you tell me?”

He kept scrolling through whatever database he had built on that computer – his eyes fixed to the screen as he spoke to me. “The two Stephen’s… Stephen Crops started out independent of Stephen Sisk. Crops made films, fairly innocuous stuff, under the Spring Harvest Films banner. You know the sort of thing, little more sordid than a few kids bathing naked at the beach or hiking through the woods. He sold photos of boys to physique magazines but then branched out and published nine issues of his own: ‘All American Boy Pictorial’.” He chuckled to himself. “Catchy name huh? They seem to have had a fairly successful run and by issue nine he was printing ten thousand copies for US and international distribution. Oh… I have all nine issues digitised and on file if you want them…” The smirk he shot me faded as I glared at him. “For your case I mean… I’m not suggesting anything.”

I nodded and handed him my card asking that he email me the digitised copies.

“Sometime in September of seventy-five he joined Stephen Sisk and formed Genesis Films.”

“Who was Sisk?”

Roland tapped away on his keyboard: “So whereas Crops was making naturist films and physique photos of underage boys it was Sisk, who came out of San Francisco and the early gay porn boom, he made hardcore films. Not very good ones but the market back then still allowed hacks to make money from poor quality productions. Mostly moustachioed men a little beefier than average fucking eighteen or nineteen year old twinks.”

“Do you have any information about the locations of the films?”

“The Cine Boys ones?”

“Yeah,”

“Looks like they were filmed in Florida and San Francisco. There’s no location’s listed but I wouldn’t be shocked that if you found Crops house in Florida or Sisk’s apartment in ‘Frisco you’d also find the locations of the films. I don’t have any more info than that. The original Cine boys films aren’t to be confused with the Ny Cine Boys films by the way.”

I squinted at him: “Ny?”

“Made in the late eighties and early nineties in Denmark they had a very similar MO but were filmed on VHS. The quality isn’t as good as the old 8mm films.”

“Aside from the name do they share any links with the earlier films?”

“No,” still looking at the screen in front of him. “The Danish producers were just trading off of the popularity of the older films. Other than that and an assorted bag of the films from both companies on file there’s not much more info that I can give you I’m afraid.”

“You’ve given me a couple of names and a state… I’m sure I can work with that.”

“Anything else?”

“You said that you had a list of some of the boys who performed in the films… Do you have photos of all of them on file?”

“I do. Screens grabbed from the films themselves mind you so not the best quality…”

I reached into my briefcase and took out a photograph of Donny Baldwin. The one of him playing with his tin soldiers on the floor of the family living room. “Can you tell me if this boy is featured in any of the films?”

Roland Burgess took the photo and smiled: “Cute kid.”

He turned the monitor so it was part way between the two of us and scrolled through a list of about forty kids. As he enlarged each picture for a better view there were a lot of the ‘performers’ who shared Donny’s look as we worked our way down the list of headshots: that all American boy sort of thing… but none were Donny.

He shook his head and turned the screen away from me – handing me back the photo.

“One more thing…” I asked. “Are you aware of any… ‘special’ films made by Crops and Sisk? They would have used the same locations maybe even a couple of the same boys but they wouldn’t have been for general release?”

“I don’t have anything on file but it wouldn’t surprise me. It was fairly regular practice for most porn producers at that time to film for… private collectors. Even more so I would imagine if their films were little more ‘specialist’.”

“How about current collectors? Do you have any that I could contact that might be able to help me?”

“Mr Quaid… I’m not about to give you any details relating to any of my clients.”

“But there is someone?”

“I didn’t say that!” He poured himself another whisky without offering to top up my empty glass. “You and I are bound by similar agreements of confidentiality to the people who use our services. I’m no more about to give out information relating to any of my clients than you are of yours.”

“I can pay.”

“Money is nice but I’m not in need of it. If I were to break the trust of a single client don’t you think that word would get around? I’d lose all my business and I can’t have that. No. I can’t help you with that I’m afraid.”

“Maybe you can suggest a way that I might be able to find the information that I’m looking for that doesn’t impact on your relationship with your clients.”

He thought for a moment. “There’s one guy I know who might be able help. He’s not a client but our paths have crossed a few times. On the 42 about midway between Goldsboro and Kinston, North Carolina there’s a man named Johnny Ives. He runs a er… puppy farm… out of a privately owned trailer park.”

“A puppy farm?”

“Boys… He raises, trains and sells boys.”

I suddenly felt like I was about to vomit. “Your paths have crossed?”

“It’s not what you’re thinking Mr Quaid. I have a ‘relationship’ with law enforcement. Local and Federal. It’s what keeps my business open. I’m not about to get myself directly involved in anything like that.”

“So why tell me about him.”

“Because you asked nicely, because he’s human trash and because he’s outlived his usefulness to me. Get what information you need and then do what you want with him Mr Quaid. The world will not weep for Johnny Ives.”

“So, just somewhere on the 45?”

“Ask around in Goldsboro… He drives a battered vintage Ford Texaco pick-up that won’t have gone unnoticed: Red bodywork and a black drivers door. Often eats out of a diner called ‘Fanny’s’ or ‘Manny’s’ or something like that.”

As I stood to leave I shook his hand and thanked him for his assistance. Although I kept wondering about what sort of man he really was. Connected and pleasant but dealing in some particularly vile trade he’d obviously been able to square away with whatever kind of God he believed in that he wasn’t a particularly ‘Bad Man’.

“Before I go…” I started as I reached the door to his office. “Does the name TiCK ToCK mean anything to you?”

He thought for a moment then shook his head. “Not off of the top of my head, sorry. Another set of films or something?”

I waited at the door while he went back to his desk and did a quick search through his database. “I don’t think so. I think it’s the name of a person. Maybe a producer? Maybe an alias for Crops or Sisk?”

“Nothing on file…” He shrugged. “Can’t help you with that.”

I thanked him again and left.

I hovered at his door. Fixing in my head the names Stephen Crops and Stephen Sisk. Florida and San Francisco. Wondering if either actually were this TiCK ToCK or whether he was something else entirely. It made sense to chase the Johnny Ives lead first, which meant a trip to North Carolina, but with David in Seattle I could afford a day or two out of The City. If Ives wasn’t helpful then it looked like I was going to Florida…

It was the moment that I had made it down the stairs and stepped onto the sidewalk that I felt two sets of strong hands grab both my arms and hold them at my side. It happened too quickly for me to really put up much of a struggle… The last thing I remember of that moment is the wide fist looming large and hitting me square on the nose. And yeah… That’s about when I blacked out…

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