Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set) by Blake Banner (best ereader for academics .txt) 📕

without looking up, with the cigarette between her lips as she lit it with a green disposable lighter.

“What d’you say his name was?”

Dehan said, “Cyril Browne.”

She shrugged her plump shoulders and coughed smoke. “That name don’t mean nothin’ to me.”

“This is going back twelve years.”

“Twelve years? Are you kidding me? Do you know how many men I seen in the last twelve years? True, in the last couple a years I work mainly on the telephone, but honey, do the math. Five Johns a day, five days a week for ten years? What is that?”

I smiled. “That’s thirteen thousand Johns, Xara.”

She stared at me a moment. “Thirteen thousand? Seriously?”

“Seriously. I guess some are repeat customers, right? They get to know you, they like your engaging personality and they come back.”

She smiled. It wasn’t a pretty sight. “You’re sweet.”

Dehan said, “Cyril was a bit odd.”

“All my clients are a bit odd, baby. That’s why they’re my clients.”

“He lived in Soundview, worked at the library, painfully shy…”

Xara sucked on her cigarette, looked over at the plates stacked in the sink.

Dehan went on, “Very quiet spoken, not bad looking, learning to paint…” She pulled out her phone, flipped the screen a couple of times and showed Xara a picture.

Xara glanced at it and spoke to the washing up. “You ain’t Vice, you’s Homicide.”

I said, “No, we’re a cold case unit. What do you know about Cyril?”

“I remember him ’cause of the girl. ’Cause of the murder. He disappeared, and all of a sudden they was lookin’ for him.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t believe…” She stopped talking and looked down at her cigarette. Her expression was one almost of anger. “I don’t believe he killed nobody.”

“How well did you know him?”

She shrugged, still examining the burning tip of her cigarette. “I guess I knew him pretty good. Better than most people. We was close in the end.” We waited in silence. A gust of wind rattled the glass in the kitchen window. She flicked ash. “He used to come once a week. Always on a Sunday. Sometimes he’d come twice if he was feelin’ bad. I liked him.” She drew smoke deep into her lungs and spoke as it trailed out among her lipstick and her words. “You never have feeling for your clients. You can’t do that inthis business. Specially…” She looked up at us, first at me and then at Dehan. “Specially if you advertise as sub. You know what that means? It means submissive. If you’re submissive, they treat you like trash. It’s what they’re payin’ you for. So you ain’t never gonna meet a client you like. It stands to reason. But Cyril…” She smiled. “Poor schmuck. What kind a mom calls her boy Cyril? You might as well cut off his balls at birth. That boy is gonna suffer all his life. Cyril was lookin’ for a sub, not so he could treat her like trash, but just so she’d be nice to him! And kind, and tender. He didn’t want to dominate nobody. He didn’t want to hurt nobody. He just wanted somebody who would not hurt him.”

Dehan took the chair across from Xara. She was frowning. “How long was he coming here, Xara?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Few months. Regular like clockwork. He used to call them his session…” She laughed and there was genuine fondness in her face. “Like I was some kind a fancy shrink. He talked a lot about his work. He hated the people he worked with. Said they hated him too.”

I said: “Did he ever mention his class mates, where he was learning to paint?”

She nodded, gazing out of the window at the leaden, cold sky and the naked trees in the backyard. “Yeah, he did. It’s twelve years ago, so if I get the details wrong don’t give me a hard time. I’m just tellin’ you how I remember it. He said they was all fancy-pants arty types. His teacher was a prick. Some Mexican asshole, no offense to the Mexicans. Some of my best friends is Mexican whores, know what I’m sayin’? But this particular Mexican was an asshole, according to Cyril. Really thought he was somethin’ special. An’ then there was the girl who got killed…”

“Sue?”

“I don’t remember her name. It might have been Sue. He said she was nice, and he’d like her to notice him from time to time, but she only had eyes for the Mexican prick. And then…”

She stopped talking, flicked ash from her cigarette and picked up her mug. She swirled the contents around and watched it for a moment. Then drank.

“This makes me sad, remembering this,” she said at last. “There was another guy. These are the ones I remember because he talked about them the most. Did the Mexican guy have a brother? He said this guy was nice to him sometimes, laughed at him, but tried to help him get closer to Sue, encouraged him to be a bit bolder with women. It was this guy’s idea he should come and see me, a whore, a submissive whore. Tried to bring him out of himself, know what I mean?”

“Did this guy ever come and see you?”

She shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of, but I don’t ask them for their fuckin’ resumés, right?” She sniffed, then carried on. “He showed me some of his paintings. Gave me a couple. I got them upstairs. They was nice. Did one of me, a portrait. It was good.”

She fell silent. I watched her a moment and scratched my Adam’s apple. “Xara, if he wasn’t looking for sub-dom sex, what was he looking for? Sexually, I mean. Was he ever violent to you? Did he ever become angry or aggressive?”

She looked surprised and stared at me a moment. “No, never. He wasn’t