Free The Hours of the Virgin by Loren D. Estleman

Tomcat on Telegraph was one of the few old-time grindhouses still operating under the company banner.
    It was one of those Streets of Gold stories told with a strong Detroit accent, but it carried a coda: Three years ago, while riding in a rented limousine to his hotel from the airport in Little Rock, where he had bought ten acres to construct a kind of sexual shopping mall (videos, sex toys, edible underwear, calendar photography studio, Starbuck’s), the Horatio Alger of hormones was stopped by a mob of angry Pentecostals, pulled from the back seat, stomped, and beaten with picket signs and baseball bats. Although the police intervened before he was battered to death, he hadn’t taken a step or stood on his own since. The few public appearances he had made in recent months were in a wheelchair, and these days he spent most of his time behind the walls of his estate on Grosse Ile. Not so the ringleaders of the mob that had crippled him; they’d made the round of all the afternoon talk shows after three Arkansas juries failed to convict them for assault and battery and attempted murder. Some audiences cheered when they came onstage.
    Strangeways had posed for his latest picture last summer, on the occasion of his second wedding. The bride, the former Laurel Triste, originally of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was a blur of double-exposed colorplate in the “Milestones” section of Time . Her general configuration, leaning devotedly over the groom’s wheelchair in a tailored ivory suit, could have belonged to the brunette whose cigarette I’d lit in the Tomcat just before my own flame flickered. If so, her hair was longer last summer. It was impossible to tell the color of her eyes from the photograph. Coming from Louisiana, her speech would put one in mind of honey poured over grits.
    The empire builder himself, turned out in a tux that fit him as well as can be managed when the customer can’t rise to be measured, looked patient and dissipated. The blade-straight, silver-haired entrepreneur to the American male libido had lost weight and the loose skin of his cheeks matched his starched dress collar.
    There wasn’t much on the new Mrs. Strangeways. She was eighteen at the time of the troth, one-third her husband’s age, and had modeled lingerie for an agency in Baton Rouge. They had met when she came north to shoot tests for a spread in After Six . It was plain from the tenor of the brief piece in Time and one-paragraph items appearing elsewhere that the reporters had grown bored with the subject after the sensation of Little Rock. Now that graphic sex had moved into the jurisdiction of political pundits, it had lost most of its old salt. Gordon Strangeways had become as respectable as a Norelco.
    I left the material for the librarians to return to the shelves, the way they like it, and used the pay telephone to try Harold Boyette once more. When I hung up on the dial tone and turned to face the glass doors, I was looking at the DIA directly across the street.
    Waiting in the icy rain for a break in the traffic on Woodward I didn’t even know why I’d come this far, except I was still living on Boyette’s five hundred dollars. That and Earl North.
    Never tangle yourself in the case, kid. The client’s all twisted around when he comes to you or he wouldn’t come to you. You won’t be any good to you or him if you get twisted around too . Words to go on Dale Leopold’s tombstone, if he had a tombstone. Last I heard he was still staking out his sister’s living room in a jar on the mantel, next to the Pekingese she’d had skinned and stuffed when it died. He’d hated that dog.
    The Goya exhibit was still pulling them in. A kid in a Wayne State sweatshirt was sitting cross-legged on the floor sketching The Clothed Maja on a big pad in his lap. The Naked Maja had been too inhibited to make the crossing. I found a security guard who rubbed his nose when I