Chapter 6
Emile Chambers. By intention, I hadn’t dwelled on her in recent years.
She was a mystery, a figure from my past about whom I knew little, only that she’d been good looking in an expensively desperate way, a sexual predator, and the unhappy wife of a philandering criminal named Duane.
I searched but found no social media accounts of an Emile Chambers matching her likeness, which made sense because she’d been dead over half a decade.
A Tracer search came up empty. No public records for either her or Duane.
Which meant they were using fake identities. More work for Mackenzie.
To find out about Emile, I’d need to pull on the Duane thread.
He’d been a minor player in the District Kings organization before his demise, facilitating prostitution in northern Virginia and Washington, DC.
His accent had been Philadelphia or Jersey, I wasn’t sure which.
The Kings’ territory didn’t extend much farther north than that, because they clashed with old guards like remnants of the Italian Mafia.
He’d been coworkers with guys named Tony and Dexter but they were dead.
Tom Garrett would know him, but Tom had been murdered inside a restaurant in Lynchburg last year.
Darren Robbins was dead and so was Ernst Somebody and Meg Somebody, and everyone else I thought of, and maybe crime didn’t pay.
I could ask Marcus Morgan to poke around, but I was always doing that and I should stand on my own two feet once in a while.
I could call Kerry Price, one of the Kings’ de facto leaders, but I’d heard she made half a trillion dollars on the SpaceX IPO, so she might not be taking calls.
Also, by now thyroid cancer might’ve gotten her.
At my office, while I made a list of people who knew Duane and then crossed them off, my hound GPA wandered down the hall where a realtor named Stephanie kept a bag of dog treats just for her. I heard her joyous greeting.
I called Edgar Betts, a gunrunner who owed me a favor, and asked him what he knew about Duane Chambers. He suggested I ring Clay Fleming, a cowboy from Floyd.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“Duane Chambers was a racist,” said Edgar. “Man didn’t like me. He and Clay worked together on transportation.”
“Thanks. I’ll call him. How’s your boy?”
“My boy Elijah is a damn fool with a newborn and half a job being a private detective. His only client is his mother, who pays him about a thousand dollars an hour, what I can tell,” said Edgar.
“Women are democrats toward their sons.”
“I’m a democrat. What’re you trying to say?”
“So sensitive, you gay criminal kingpins.”
“I’d be mad,” he said, “if that sentence wasn’t so damn accurate.”
He provided me Clay’s number and we hung up.
I remembered Clay Fleming. Nice guy who made moonshine and ran it all over Virginia until liquor laws eased and he switched to carting cigarettes to New York City, where one smoke costs as much as your rent. Back when Ronnie was entangled in the underworld, she’d been fond of Clay.
I rang Clay and he said, “Well shoot, I haven’t heard from you in a dog’s age. I knew you weren’t dead because once in a blue moon people’d say Mackenzie was still kicking, still pissing off bulls.”
“Who, me?”
“What they said.”
“At the moment,” I said, “I’m interested in one particular bull. Duane Chambers.”
“Duane’s dead.”
“I know.”
“I heard you shot him,” said Clay.
“I was nearby. And I wanted to. But it wasn’t me.”
“I remember now. The whole tournament thing. I never much cared to dip my toe in that world.”
“Me either. What did you know about him?” I said.
“About Duane? Next to nothing. He helped mend some fences and open a few gates, is all. He took a finder’s fee.
We talked when we had to, kept our distance when we could.
He’s a northerner, a city boy, and I like the countryside of southwest Virginia.
I heard he died, I thought, good, one less Yankee. ”
“Who can I call to find out more about him and his wife?”
“Marcus,” he said.
Rats.
I didn’t want to call Marcus. He’d yell at me to stay out of his world. Didn’t I remember the last time I poked my nose into Duane’s business, he had to come rescue me from Naples? Didn’t White people ever learn?
Instead I called Baltimore’s Detective Division. Special Investigations, Group Violence, Detective Brust. He and I cooperated on a manhunt a couple years ago, tracking down a sex worker named Lemonade. He’d warned me to stay away from the District Kings.
“Mackenzie August.” His voice in my ear. “Private dick from Roanoke. I looked into you after the Lemonade thing. Everybody I talked to, you know what they said?”
“I’m the cat’s pajamas?”
“Said to watch my back with Mackenzie August. People got a way of getting killed, you get angry. You believe that? I’m a detective in Baltimore, got’damn Balmer, working group violence, and they warn me.”
“I’m a kitten, Brust. Nothing to fear. I’m looking for information on Duane Chambers.”
“Duane Chambers.”
“You remember the name?”
“Of course I remember the name. Nothing to fear, my ass, looking into Duane Chambers, known gangster in the District Kings organization. Been missing over five years and I got a feeling you know about it and I’m already mad.”
“You seem high strung, Brust.”
“Tell me this, kitten, why do you come up on my databases as a person of interest in a dozen violent crime cases? Why’re you in the news and podcasts?
Why were you listed as a victim in a shootout in Lexington last year?
Why do Virginia State Police talk like you have mob connections?
Why did a Roanoke detective kill himself while you watched? ”
“That was a bad day.”
“Sure it was,” said Brust.
“Last time we worked together,” I said, “you vetted me.”
“Yeah I vetted you but not enough maybe. Now my cherries are ringing.”
“Gross. Did no one mention I’m the cat’s pajamas?”
“Said you’re usually on the right side of things, but with you even the good guys get shot.”
“There are no good guys, Brust. Except me. You know the name Duane Chambers. How do I find out about his wife?”
I heard keys clicking.
“Emile. She’s missing too. You looking into her disappearance?” he said.
“Nope. I know when, where, and how she died. I could tell you but it’d blow your cap off.
It wasn’t on American soil, and you’ll never find their bodies, and I didn’t do it.
Some of the stories you heard about me are true, Brust, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a sweetheart.
I could tell you what I’m doing but you wouldn’t believe me. I barely believe it.”
“Duane’s been dead five years?” asked Brust.
“More like six or seven. I could do the math, you need me to. Emile too.”
“How’d they go?”
“They were doing bad things on foreign soil and it caught up to them. I happened to be in the area. Now I have a client who asked me to quietly look into Emile’s history. Shouldn’t be messy. The client is coming at it from a good angle, otherwise I wouldn’t touch it.”
“Last time we worked together, you were asking about Lemonade. You went down to Atlanta and found her dead and three guys tried to ace you.”
“Tried and failed,” I said. “Obviously.”
“You gave me what you had about Lemonade and I appreciated it. Still. Feels like I’m making friends with the devil.”
“Hurtful.”
“Give me ten minutes to look into something and I’ll holler back. Seems I want you on my side, rather than the other way.”
I fetched GPA from the nice realtor Stephanie, who stood so I could see how much weight she’d lost, and I told her she looked good and healthy. It was nice talking to people who didn’t think I’d eat their family.
Outside my window, Roanoke looked barren.
A canyon of office buildings both directions, dry leaves scuttling down Campbell Avenue.
My window was warm to the touch, enough morning sun coming in sideways to lay a thin bar of light on the hardwood.
Young professionals hurried hither and yon on the sidewalk below, their futures before them, careers mapped out with glowing boxes of rewards they’d be sad to open and find empty in their forties.
I hoped they’d be cocooned by families and friends by then, one big house to soften the blows life kept landing.
That was the real reward, the people you collected along the way.
GPA cocked her head at me.
“I know,” I told her. “Philosophical.”
My phone rang.
“Duane Chambers’s real name was Duane Constanza.”
“Like Seinfeld?” I said.
“That’s what I said too. Like George Constanza.
He ran a construction consulting group, but it was a front.
Organized Crime guys were onto him, they tell me, with almost enough for RICO charges but poof he vanished.
There’s no marriage certificate to be found, so maybe they were married, maybe not, and we don’t know Emile’s maiden name. ”
“Can we still say maiden name?”
“Good question, who the hell knows. Not one damn maiden in all of Baltimore, I can tell you that.”
“Can there be maidens if there are no heroes?” I said.
“I miss maidens. I miss both,” he said, and he gave me the address of Duane’s former consulting firm.