Angel, Falling: A Bennett Cole Mystery

By Larry Patrick Shriner

Young women disappear with depressing regularity in the Southern city of Atlanta, Georgia. Unfortunately, no one really cares if they ever show up again. Private detective Bennett Cole knows this better than most. He's had his share of tough cases that didn't turn out so well, and he'd rather not take this latest one on. But when the friend of a missing young woman named Angel asks him to find her, Cole ignores his instincts and accepts the job.

It's a case that will take Cole from Atlanta's seamy underbelly to the playgrounds of the rich and famous on the beaches of Florida. And in his search, he finds far more than he bargained for-violence, drugs, and Angel, a woman who is not at all what she seems. With the help of a beautiful massage therapist, Cole confronts unlikely suspects, encounters deceit in the wealthy enclaves of West Florida and Atlanta, and even stumbles upon a murder or two. As the mounting tension and danger nearly drag Cole to his knees, he realizes that his quest for the truth about Angel may send him straight to the depths of hell.

Hard-hitting and action-packed, Angel, Falling will draw you into Cole's quest for the truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 27, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595918614

Larry Patrick Shriner

Larry Patrick Shriner is the author of Epilogue for Murder. He was raised on the west coast of Florida and lived there for many years. He now resides in Dallas with his wife, Elaine.

Book preview

Chapter One 

She looked as pretty as a picture, and so lonesome she could cry.

I silently congratulated myself on combining two clichés in one, before saying to her, You told me on the phone you needed help finding someone.

She gave me the ghost of a brittle smile. I thought she might actually start to cry. She had only muttered a couple of words since she’d come into my office; hello and thank you, and a meeting of the eyes that was only fleeting. Not that surprising, the mannerisms of many of my clients. Meeting with a private investigator can rank right up there with visits to the oral surgeon or a stockbroker in a bear market.

Since she didn’t look as if she was going to leap right into conversation, I took the silence as an opportunity to study her. Probably in her mid-forties, maybe older. Dark hair, thick, not quite curly, long, dropping in waves to her breasts. Gauzy blouse, a cotton thing not too loose or too tight, not too low cut, but a long ways from choking her to death. A single gold chain at her neck, nothing more. A little bit of lipstick and very good skin.

She was, in fact, exquisite in an imperfect sort of way. Maybe her teeth were a little too large, maybe the softly tanned skin had a flaw somewhere. Maybe she wasn’t as young as she had first looked when I’d answered the door.

Maybe she wasn’t perfect. But she was quite a package.

She started to look around the room nervously, like a frightened bird. I said, "Orphamy?’

She finally said something. She said, Orphamy?

Right. Orphamy. Orphamy Quest. Did you tell me that was your name?

She said, in a voice that was a little throaty and didn’t do anything bad for her at all, I don’t know what you mean. My name is Hannah Steelman. I told you that on the phone.

I pretended to consult my desk calendar. You’re right. I’ll be getting together with Orphamy later on. I was re-reading Chandler’s The Little Sister. Orphamy was a main character. It was a poor attempt at a joke, and it sailed right by Hannah Steelman.

I tried again: You said something about a missing person.

Another stare, this one brittle. She didn’t say anything, seemed to tense. She opened her mouth a little and closed it. No sound escaped.

I was suddenly irritated—maybe it was the heat, maybe it was looking at this pretty, silent woman, perhaps it was the lingering smell of cooking pig from the barbeque joint downstairs, a smell that would never go away.

I got up and went to the bookshelf and extracted a dictionary. I looked up a word. Here, I said, tapping a finger on the page. The word is conversation. A dialogue between two or more people. I closed the book. "That is what we need to have, Ms. Steelman, a conversation. It doesn’t count if I’m the only one talking.

She started to cry. My irritation vanished. I stood there with the dictionary in my hand, feeling suddenly oafish and large. I’m sorry, I said, putting the book down and coming back over to the desk. I speak out of turn sometimes. It seems to be one of my character defects.

The tears were drying up, with help from a handkerchief that had materialized out of her purse. She dabbed at her eyes.

No, Mr. Cole, I’m the one that should be sorry. I come into your office, sit here like an orphan, don’t tell you a thing and start to cry. It’s not my idea of a grand entrance. She gave me another ghost of a smile; at least this one wasn’t quite as fleeting.

I nodded. She took another dab at her eyes and said, I want you to find my friend. Her name is Angel.

Angel, I said.

Yes. The sound of her friend’s name seemed to have perked up Hannah Steelman and her bright eyes held mine.

I waited a beat. Okay, tell me about Angel, I said. What does she do?

Hannah Steelman hesitated, then said, She’s a dancer.

I raised my eyebrows. A dancer? With the ballet or a troupe?

No. Her lips drew tight. Nude.

I took another beat to digest that. I see, I said, trying not to let surprise creep into my voice. How do you know her?

I am a licensed massage therapist, Hannah Steelman said. Underscore the word licensed. I have a practice. Angel was one of my clients.

I nodded, as if that meant anything. How do you know Angel is missing?

She had an appointment at her usual time, Hannah Steelman said. She comes every week, to my home, that’s where I have my office. Same time, 11 a.m. Tuesdays. She didn’t show up this Tuesday.

Today was Friday. Missing one appointment doesn’t necessarily mean she’s a missing person, I said.

Hannah Steelman shook her head. You don’t understand, Mr. Cole. Angel never missed an appointment—never. I was sufficiently concerned that I went to that—to the place she works. They told me she hadn’t shown up for work in several days—they hadn’t heard a word from her.

These girls, Ms. Steelman, they, ah, they do come and go at these places.

Hannah Steelman was suddenly angry. I know what these girls do. But I also know Angel—I know you think I’m crazy. But she’s my friend. She wouldn’t just go off without telling me.

Have you tried the police?

She nodded. They said they’d file a report, but it didn’t seem too high on their list. When I persisted they gave me your name.

That was five referrals this year from Helmsely in missing persons. If he made it to six, I owed him a steak dinner.

They are a little overwhelmed these days, I said. Okay, tell me more about Angel. How did you first become friends with her?

She looked thoughtful. Some of my cards apparently got passed around the club where she worked—works. Several of the girls came to me. I offer a reduced charge on the first visit. She paused. It’s a very competitive business.

She smiled a little. Angel was the only one who came back. None of the other girls did. I don’t know what they thought they would get from me.

Does Angel have a last name?

She shook her head. I don’t know.

Don’t you keep records, receipts, that sort of thing?

She shook her head again. I thought about that and looked back through my records. All I ever wrote down was Angel. She smiled a little. I never was good at record-keeping, she said. The IRS has a great time with me.

I picked up the office Thermos and poured some coffee into my cup. It had an oily sheen, and I remembered it was from yesterday. I pushed the cup away. I didn’t offer any to Hannah Steelman.

Do you know where she might have gone?

No, she said, going monosyllabic on me again. I stared at her. I raised an eyebrow. I tapped my pencil on the desk. Finally she got the hint and said, I have no idea. She looked wistful. I don’t really know much about her.

Do you know where she lives?

No.

Phone number?

She shook her head. I don’t know if she has a cell phone, at least I don’t know the number.

What kind of car does she drive?

Hannah Steelman looked exasperated. I don’t know—some kind of white little thing.

I wished I had some coffee. It would help kill time while we did this dance. Ms. Steelman, where does your concern come from—what is your role in Angel’s alleged disappearance?

She seemed to bristle. It’s not alleged. I’m sure something’s wrong. Then she seemed to lapse back into repose. We’re friends—I know, no last name even, but that’s the way the dancers are. No names, no roots, no..... She shook her head slowly. She’d come for massage, we’d sit around and drink tea and talk. She seemed very intelligent. And she didn’t seem, I don’t know, used up like most of the other girls. I was trying to help her think of another career.

What did you talk about, anything personal?

She scrunched up her forehead. She was very attractive when she did that.

Not really, she said. We talked about books and movies and my work and—just, you know, woman things. Thinking back, it did seem that she deflected questions of a personal nature. She wouldn’t talk about the dancing, or her past, except wanting to find a career—a real career.

Drugs? I said.

She looked startled. What?

Did you ever see any indication that she was on drugs, or doing a lot of drinking. People in her line of work often do those things.

Oh, no, she said in a confident voice. Angel wouldn’t do anything like that.

As little as Hannah Steelman knew about Angel, it was hard to have a lot of faith in her stridency. Could you describe her, please?

She is very pretty.

This wasn’t getting any easier. Pretty is subjective. Could you be more specific?

She began to describe Angel and her eyes lit up.

She was—she’s tall, tanned, she’s fairly slender except for her—ah, she’s well endowed, if you know what I mean.

I knew what she meant. Go on, I said.

She has long dark hair. She keeps it pushed back behind her ears; it goes down almost to her waist. Her eyes are very dark, too. And she has this little upturned nose.

How old is she.

I’m—I’m not exactly sure, Steelman said. Early, mid-twenties.

Do you have a picture? I asked.

Not from—no, she said, looking forlorn.

I sensed I’d gotten all I could from Hannah Steelman. One more thing, I said. What was the name of the bar she was working at?

The Mons. She said the word as if it was an embarrassment. I knew the Mons. It wasn’t a good part of town, and it was a long ways from even pretending to be high class. It wouldn’t be the last place a girl would work, it certainly wouldn’t be the first.

I said to Hannah Steelman, Okay, I’ll look for her. But she’s an adult. I can’t bring her back against her will. I won’t even tell you where she is if she doesn’t want me to.

I understand that, Hannah Steelman said. I just want to make sure she’s all right.

We discussed my fee. She wrote a check. The check bore her name and nobody else’s, and an address in Piedmont.

She got up to go. I checked for a wedding ring. No wedding ring. Incredible detective work. Maybe for an encore I could find Angel.

She looked out the window for a moment, into the afternoon sun, then turned to me and said, I’m sorry I don’t know more. But I do care about Angel. Find her, and at least make sure she’s okay.

I said I would do that, and Hannah Steelman left the office and headed down the stairs.

I closed the door, went back to my desk, wished for a decent cup of cof-fee—that was not an option downstairs at the Dixie Pig—and considered Ms. Hannah Steelman. She was Angel’s massage therapist. She had a legitimate practice. The neighborhood she lived in wasn’t Millionaires’ Row, but it was a very long way from shabby, an area of restored two-story Victorian homes on tree-shaded streets. She was friends with a nude dancer, was in fact quite concerned about her, but she had known the girl only a short time. She didn’t even know her friend’s last name, and Angel sounded like a stage name to me.

So why was she so very interested in finding the lost girl?

It was quite possible, I conceded, that I was simply being cynical, that there were no hidden agendas, and Hannah Steelman simply had a legitimate concern for her missing friend.

I looked around the office. It was an easy place to be cynical. Three beat-up file cabinets against one wall. Battered glass-topped banker’s desk. The client chairs that I knew weren’t comfortable. Absurd collection of books jammed into a cheap bookcase. One window, which diffused sunlight through a thick sheen of dust. An air conditioner that tried and failed. The framed Audubon prints helped some, but they were fighting an uphill battle.

And there was the ever-present undercurrent of cooking meat, courtesy of the Dixie Pig downstairs—best barbeque north of Macon was their motto, truth in advertising.

But the best barbecue, no matter where, wouldn’t help me start this case.

So I did what I had to do. I cleared my schedule—that took no time at all—and headed out to the Mons.

Chapter Two 

I wheeled the Cherokee out of the Dixie Pig’s dusty parking lot and eased into the interminable stream of traffic on Peachtree Road. Rush hour had expanded to take up just about all day, though now, in the early evening, the cars were thicker than flies on road kill.

It was hot—Atlanta dog-day summer hot, temperature in the mid-nineties, heat waves rising from the sizzling pavement, air conditioners fighting the good fight. Cars cut from lane to lane, gaining nothing, horns blared, and motorists expressed themselves with extended fingers. Just another lazy afternoon in that molasses and mint julep milieu we call the Deep South.

If the path to the Mons was filled with trepidation, the place itself was even more foreboding. It was in south Atlanta on the edge of Hapeville, a lower middle class area a long way—in both distance and status—from gentrified north Atlanta. The bar itself was just a few blocks off I-85, tucked away beneath an overpass, sharing a parking lot with a pawnshop and pizza joint.

In better times, the place had been a biker bar, but the various owners seemed to have had trouble holding on to their liquor licenses, or staying out of prison. It had been, in turn, a neighborhood saloon, closed for several years, a prettied-up pickup lounge, a country-western dive, closed again, and now was a venue for quote artistic dancing by people who happened to wear no clothes.

Now no self-respecting biker would set foot in the place. The country-western crowd was long gone. The pick-up boys and girls did their mating rituals at more acceptable establishments, and the neighborhood drunks did their sipping down the street at a hole called Kelly’s.

What went on at the Mons, and at other such joints around town, was sex. Sex for money, and nothing more. Not prostitution—that was more honest. At the Mons, the patrons always hoped, and paid, for more than they got. There was always the lure of what might happen if enough money exchanged hands. There was a law in Atlanta that the dancer could not touch the patron during a private dance, but this was pretty much ignored at the Mons. A nude lap dance at your table would cost you twenty bucks. A few more dollars and the bumps and grinds would get more personal. Pay enough and your hands could probe. Even more dollars and the dances could be enjoyed with your nose numb and your brain gamboling.

At the Mons, the lap dances were done in a dark room with slick vinyl couches. I’d heard that some of the girls carried condoms—not for later liaisons, but for use with patrons on those slippery couches. Enough money would buy just about anything at the Mons—except love.

And always, caveat emptor—let the buyer beware.

I knew about the Mons because a few years ago I’d spent a two-week period hanging out there, waiting for a guy named De’shane Williams to drop by. I wanted De’shane for running a worker’s comp con on an insurance company I represented. The con had netted him more than $200,000, much of which had been spent at places like the Mons. Though we’d gotten a warrant for De’shane, he’d gotten wind and didn’t show for a while. But I figured he couldn’t stay away from his girlfriends at the Mons for too long. I wasn’t wrong. Finally one night I’d dragged him out from under a dancer and hauled him out of the place with his pants half undone and his brain in some place that only he could fathom.

I hadn’t been back to the Mons since, and I hadn’t missed the place at all. The only time it ever crossed my mind was when I occasionally read in The Constitution that the cops had raided the place to keep the do-gooders in the neighborhood off their backs.

I made it into the bar’s parking lot. The place hadn’t changed much—a low cinder-block affair with a false front of cheap cypress strips. The marquee promised 35 Luscious Showgirls. Today’s stable included Desiree, Dreamy, Bambi, Mercedes, Tashika, Monica, Smoky and Viper. Other promises included Hot-lanta’s Most Squeezable Sex Sirens and Sex Southern-Style.

Good to know alliteration was alive and kicking. Probably an ex-English major managing the joint in between teaching gigs.

I had to work to find a parking spot. At four in the afternoon, the place was hopping with the off-from-work-early crowd, the ones who worked nights and the others that didn’t work at all. The bar cashed paychecks and disability checks. If you had money, the Mons would find a way of separating you from it.

I double-checked the Cherokee to make sure the doors—all of them—were locked. Cars were often considered public domain in these neighborhoods. I remembered one scam some of the Mons hanger-outs pulled a few years ago. They got a sign that said Valet Parking and stuck it out front late one night. One guy even