The Night Detectives by Jon Talton

They said she was an adult and there wasn’t much they could do unless I had evidence of foul play. Of course, I couldn’t tell them she used to be a call girl.” He shook his head. “Anyway, AFP pays the cops off. Grace warned me. I was sure I’d eventually hear from her. I called hospitals for a week. Nothing.”
    Grace would have been dead by the time he went to the police. But things fell through the cracks in every police department.
    â€œWhere’s her family?”
    â€œThey lived in Arizona.”
    I asked him to get me their address and he did.
    â€œWhat about a brother? Big guy? My size with close-cropped hair and a prosthesis on his lower leg?”
    â€œShe was an only child.”
    I looked at the skinny kid with the cat crawling up his leg: I thought, dear old dad . I said, “Who is this Edward that the pimp was talking about?”
    â€œI have no idea. I swear!”
    So I told him she was dead and waited as he cried. It was a long wait. He said over and over that Grace would never kill herself, especially after the baby came.
    Finally, I asked if he had any place he could go.
    â€œMy parents live up in Riverside. It’s a boring hellhole.”
    â€œMy advice is to go there. Right now. And stay awhile.”
    He nodded, but it was obvious he was descending into a fog of grief, in addition to being beaten up. I made him repeat what he would do.
    Go.
    Now.
    I handed him my business card.
    â€œPrivate investigator,” he said quietly. “Are you trying to find out who killed Grace?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI want to hire you.”
    â€œWe already have a client.”
    He repeated his request. “I’ve got to know what happened to Grace. And I want the bastard who killed her to burn.” Misery shone in his watery, pale eyes.
    â€œOkay.”
    He reached under the cushions of the sofa and I tensed.
    â€œHere’s five hundred.” He handed me a wad of cash. “Is that enough for a start?”
    â€œSure. But I’ll do this pro-bono.”
    â€œNo,” he said. “I don’t want your charity. I want you to work for me, and cash talks. Grace taught me that.”
    I realized it might be good to have a living client, especially because the man who had hired us yesterday was dead and Peralta had lied to the Phoenix Police, saying he had never even come into our office. I took the cash and wrote out a receipt for it on a blank sheet of paper.
    He rooted around in the kitchen and returned with a flash drive. “This has her client list. The regulars.”
    â€œHave you seen it?”
    He shook his head. I could understand why he wouldn’t want to look.
    I took it and told him we’d be in touch, but that he should call me when he got to Riverside.
    His voice stopped me as I was halfway out the door.
    â€œThank you again for changing the baby. Do you have kids?”
    I didn’t answer.
    â€œThey totally change the way you look at life.”

9
    Personal history: the day I arrived in San Diego to take an Assistant Professor of History position at the same university that Grace Hunter would later attend, I drove all the way to the end of Interstate 8. It put me in Ocean Beach. I had never been there before. Unlike today, when I was growing up Phoenicians didn’t go to San Diego every summer by the tens of thousands. I had visited the city a total of one time before, staying at Hotel Circle in Mission Valley. I had no idea of this magical enclave called Ocean Beach.
    But that day I had taken the freeway as far as it would go. After growing up in the desert and then spending several years completing my Ph.D. and teaching in the Midwest, it was as if I had landed in my own little paradise. Ocean Beach immediately felt like home. That evening I walked the 1,971 feet to the end of the municipal pier, turned around, and looked at the neighborhood as it rose up to the spine of the Point Loma Peninsula. The