Free Hard Case Crime: Money Shot by Christa Faust Page B

what the hell is going on?”
    Malloy gave Didi the Cliffs Notes version while Didi hung on to me like someone was going to try and take me away. When he was done, she sat down on the sofa and pulled me down next to her.
    “Give me a cigarette,” Didi said to Malloy.
    Malloy took the pack out of his pocket and shook out the last two cigarettes. He parked one in his own mouth and handed the other to Didi.
    “I thought you quit,” I said as she accepted a light from Malloy.
    “Fuck that,” she said, sucking smoke like it was oxygen. She ran her fingers through her hair and exhaled slowly. “What are we going to do?”
    “First off,” Malloy said. “We need a cover story so I can talk to people without raising too much suspicion. I want you to tell everyone you hired me as a private investigator to find out what happened to Angel. I’ll need you to write me a check for my services. I’ll cash it and then give you the money back but I want a solid paper trail between us. That’ll explain this visit for your buddies in the Caprice.” He lit his own cigarette. “Also, people will be more likely to talk to me if they think I’m asking on your behalf.”
    “If you find the fuckers who did this, you can keep the money,” she said. “What about Angel?”
    “What about me?” I asked.
    “She needs to keep a low profile,” Malloy said. “As soon as the guy that got away in Vegas reports back to his boss, then the boss is gonna know Angel isn’t dead. He’ll be looking for her too.”
    “Jesus,” Didi said softly. “Jesus, this is bad.”
    The three of us were silent for a stretch, all contemplating how bad it really was.
    “Didi,” Malloy said, breaking the silence finally, “can you tell me everything you remember about the blonde with the briefcase?”
    “You know, it’s funny,” Didi said. “After I left the office, I started thinking about her. I was pretty sure I recognized her. I’m sure she’s done videos, but I can’t remember the name she went by or the name of the series I saw her in. It was some super-low-budget amateur line. Mostly girl/girl and solo toy stuff but I’m pretty sure the one I saw her in was a boy/girl scene. It think it had ‘teen’ in the title.”
    “Great,” I said, “That narrows it down to about seven billion.”
    “It was a real boring title,” Didi said. “Very generic.”
    “Teen Pleasures ?” I suggested. “Teen Tryouts ? Teen Cream ? Teen Beaver ?”
    “No.” She shook her head. “It was more like Horny Teens or Dirty Teens.” She turned to Malloy. “You got Internet access in this joint?”
    He nodded and gestured with his chin toward one of the two closed doors.
    “In there,” he said. “But I don’t know if I want to go surfing a bunch of teen smut on my PC. Won’t I get logged by the FBI or something?”
    “‘Teen’ just means girls with no implants and an amateur look,” I said. “There’s nothing illegal about adult videos featuring girls that are over eighteen and besides, most of those girls are older than they look. I was twenty-one when I did Teen Temptations .”
    Malloy shrugged.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Me, I like real women. You know, grownups.”
    Didi flashed him a smile and stood, smoothing her tight skirt.
    “Well,” she said. “We’ll discuss that later, honey.” She winked and took my hand. “Come on.”
    Inside Malloy’s predictably spartan bedroom was a small metal and glass desk with an inexpensive laptop sitting beside a jar of pens, a small printer and a cordless telephone. There was just the one chair so Didi and I sat on the bed behind Malloy like backseat drivers.
    A Google search for the word “Teen” plus “Adult” and “DVD” gave us a staggering 20,000,000 hits.
    “Forget that shit,” Didi said. “Try slutfinder.com.”
    Malloy shook his head as he typed.
    “Right,” Didi said. “Pick the ‘amateur’ category and then put ‘teen’ in the title field.”
    “Jesus,” he