Frank Devaroux, P.I. Case File 01

I took a shower and wrote up my investigation results before heading down to the Den. I'm not big on sushi. Fish, to begin with, just doesn't taste that good to me and Colorado is a landlocked state. Sure, they fly it in fresh, but still. And the things on the menu that I like to eat, such as the tamago, come in huge unwieldy portions that chopstick amateurs have a hard time with.

Regina isn't her real name, of course. Just about everyone has an alias, a nom-de-lifestyle, and hers was particularly apt. Regina didn't look like the Queen, but she acted like one. She liked men who liked to be treated like little boys and she'd been in the lifestyle from back when you ran a serious risk of being arrested if the authorities found out about your little games. Regina must have been pushing seventy and the men still flocked around her. She was usually accompanied by at least one. But not tonight.

I knew I was in for a talking to when I saw she was by herself. Meeting me alone meant that she could dress me down without a submissive around. Frankly, I was surprised by the courtesy.

"Hello, Regina."

"Franklin, my dear boy, thank you for coming to see me," she replied. "Please, have a seat. Would you like something? A little toro, perhaps?"

"Thank you, Regina, a bowl of miso would be fine."

A waiter I hadn't heard approaching said "Hai" and walked away. I set my report down on the table next to me.

"What's that, Franklin?"

"My report to Daria," I said. "She hired me to find Ronnie and I did."

She ate a piece of sushi, liberally smeared with wasabi, carefully chewing and swallowing all of it before speaking again. "I heard that. May I have a copy?"

"Of course not," I said carefully, "that would be a violation of my client's privacy and I could lose my license."

She gave me a cold and very calculating look before picking up the report and reading it. She must have read it twice because it was only two pages long and I had time to start in on my soup before she set it back down in front of me and gave me that calculating look again.

"How was he killed, Franklin?"

"I can't talk about that, Regina. It's probably going to turn into a murder investigation and I'm consulting for the police."

She nodded her head slowly. "Yes, I'd heard that too. Off the record, was it bad?"

I considered my words and chose carefully. "It was a scene from hell, Regina."

She sighed. "A few of us have talked about this. We don't need negative publicity like this. Help the police, Franklin. Help them find out who killed Ronald so we can get off the front page as quickly as possible. And keep them away from us as much as possible. The last thing we need is police investigations."

"Come on, Regina, we're not the god-damned mafia."

Her lips pursed tightly and, too late, I remembered that Regina didn't like swearing. If I was one of her boys I'd be bound for a session with the flogger. But I wasn't. I was polite, though. "Sorry, I forgot about your dislike for swearing. But, Regina, we don't have anything to hide."

"People tolerate us, Franklin, so long as we don't make waves. This is a wave. No, this is a tsunami. People will be upset and they'll ask other people to make life difficult for the freaks. Publicity and public disapproval will drive people away from the lifestyle. Shy secretaries don't like the thought that mommy and daddy might find out about their dirty little secret on the front page of the Post."

I winced a little at that; Sheryl had been a secretary. Regina proved her words were carefully chosen by following up.

"When was the last time you got to play, Franklin?"

Months. Sheryl had decided to move on to harder pastures and I'd been without since then.

"Keep them away how, Regina?"

"Help them close this episode quickly. Thank you for coming, Franklin. Don't worry about the bill, it's my treat."

***************

Daria lived out in Aurora. Aurora used to be the town outside the gates of the military base. When the base closed, the town suffered. It was getting better, but anytime the news reported a killing odds were that Aurora was where it had happened. It's nothing compared to big city crime, of course, but in Denver it would pass for a bad neighborhood. The security door of the apartment was broken, so I just walked up to Daria's floor and knocked on the door.

"Who is it?" came the muffled reply from behind the door.

"It's Frank, Daria. I found Ronnie."

She was smart enough to have chains on the door and it took her a minute to let me in. I walked into the apartment and took a look around while Daria secured the door behind me.

It was an efficiency apartment, which is a nice of way of saying it was a large room. Not all that large, really. A mattress in the corner was apparently Daria's bed. A fairly nice computer set-up was on the floor against the wall opposite the bed. The kitchen had originally been separated from the living area by a counter, but that had been ripped out. The bathroom was separated from the kitchen by a low wall. A really low wall, only about two feet high. Except for a closet that was closed, that was everything. Everything but the cameras.

They were all over the place. Web-cams mounted on the ceiling in every corner, another one on the computer and, I walked over and looked, one above the shower. I turned around to ask Daria about this and saw her for the first time. This wasn't the munch. Daria was wearing leather cuffs at her wrists and ankles and a choke-chain around her throat. Nothing else.

I could tell this because she was kneeling on the floor in front of me with her legs spread. It's a common display position for a submissive to be put in; I'd seen this before. Except for the downcast face it was something I liked. I didn't want to be a jerk this time. Not with the news I was bringing.

"You may speak, Daria."

"Thank you, sir," she replied, eyes still fixed on the floor. "You said you'd found Master?"

I sighed. "I think I found him, Daria. I'm going to have to wait for the coroner to make an identification, but I'm pretty sure it's him. He's dead, Daria. I'm sorry to have to tell you this."

I had expected her to cry, but I hadn't expected her to do so silently. Her body shook with silent sobs and it took me a minute to realize she was trying to stay in discipline. That shocked me. I couldn't really conceive of someone that far into the fantasy. Then I remembered the web cams and started putting a few ideas together. Walking over to Daria I squatted down next to her.

"Your Master is gone, Daria. I order you to take the next ten minutes to grieve."

The floodgates opened up then. She wailed and sobbed like the women's chorus at an Arabian funeral. I just held her for considerably more than the ten minutes I'd 'allowed' her. It is one of life's gifts, however, that there is only so much crying you can do; so she eventually stopped. Of course I'm firmly of the belief that once you solve a problem, two more will crop up. Daria did not disappoint.

"What do I do now, sir?" she sniffled.

'Well how the hell should I know?' I thought. I was annoyed with her because I don't particularly like clingy, helpless women. Daria was proving to be one of those women in a big way. Such a big way, in fact, that I was a little bit worried about her.

"Let's talk about that, Daria," I said, more as a way to stall for time than anything else. "Is there someplace I can sit comfortably here?"

"M-master keeps... kept a chair in the closet, sir. But I don't have the key to it."

"Would you like me to open the door, Daria?"

What little I could see of her down turned face suggested she was shocked by the question. I was growing more convinced that Daria had been broken, that decision-making capability had been beaten out of her.

"Daria, your Master is gone and, at least for a little while, you're going to have to make some decisions for yourself," I said gently.

"Tell me what to do, sir," she whispered. "Please."

I decided to switch tactics. "I just did you inattentive bint. Is this how your Master disciplined you? To leave a dominant standing and uncomfortable due to your poor manners?"

She cringed under the lash of my softly spoken words and then threw herself forward, head to my feet.

"Forgive me, sir. Please forgive me. Will you open the closet and make yourself comfortable?"

I extracted myself from her prostration and picked the lock on the closet. Deadbolts are hard and it took me several minutes even with the electric rake. I'm a licensed locksmith, though not a very good one, so it was all legal. She'd asked, I'd complied; hell, she was already paying me for my services.

The closet was a pervert's dream come true. Floggers, chains, and toys of all sorts. There was a camp chair which I pulled out and sat down on.

"This is a nice set-up you have here, Daria. How much does your website clear in a month?"

"Oh, it's not my website, sir. Or my apartment for that matter. Master allows me to live here and earn my keep."

'Oh, shit,' was the thought that ran through my head. I'd known Ronnie was a sleaze, but this...

"Do the cameras have sound capability, Daria?"

"Yes, sir. But the sound is turned off right now. I'm only allowed to turn the pick-ups on when Master comes over or when one of his friends visits."

Honestly, I was torn between hating Daria for being so stupid and feeling sorry for her that she'd been so badly victimized. I settled for hating Ronnie. And at least I hadn't blurted out the fact of Ronnie's death on the internet.

"Do you have any friends or family you can call, Daria?" Please, God, let her have friends and family.

"Not really, sir," she replied, slowly shaking her head. "Master didn't permit me to have many outside contacts."

She went on to justify Ronnie's controlling behavior, but I was too busy seething to listen. Ronnie's behavior was out and out abusive. Yes, the healed scars on Daria's body showed that she enjoyed abuse, but... Damn it! It's hard to quantify but there's a line between abuse and... well, abuse.

I realized that Daria had gone quiet. "Do you have food, Daria?"

"Not really, sir. Master always brought the food I was permitted to eat and I'm almost out."

I took my report, and my bill, out of a pocket and dropped them on the floor. Then I pulled out two hundred of the money she'd given me and dropped that on top of the report. "You paid me for two hours of work and my expenses. I was able to finish my work in about half an hour and my expenses were slight. This two hundred dollars is your money. I want you to use it to buy some groceries. Today or tomorrow you're going to have a lot of visitors. The police are going to want to ask you questions about Ronnie. I'm going to talk to someone about getting you a lawyer for when you talk to the police. I also want you to talk to a friend of mine who will help you sort out your choices now that your master is gone."

It wasn't much, it wasn't even everything I could do. But it was a start. I got the website address from her but I left the computer equipment alone; tech's not really my thing. The chair went back into the closet and I locked that up, after I'd taken a look in the kitchen to be certain there weren't any knives or anything else that Daria might be able to use to hurt herself.

I found the building supervisor's apartment down on the first floor. He was a very heavy, very short Hispanic man.

"Apartment 4F," I said, holding up a twenty dollar bill. "Who pays for it?"

He shrugged. "It's all done on computers. Skylark Entertainment or something like that. They make sex films, I think. They keep their actresses in the apartment during filming."

That was interesting. "Actresses? How many women have lived there?"

He looked meaningfully at the twenty so I handed it over.

"Six, seven," he said. "This one's been there for a month."

"Gracias."

Six or seven. That was both interesting and disturbing. I walked out into the parking lot and dialed a number on my phone.

"Regina?"

"Is that you, Franklin?"

"Yes. I just talked with Daria and gave her the news about Ronnie. She's worse off than he is. He's got her in a efficiency apartment wired with internet cameras. She doesn't get paid for this, not even when one of Ronnie's friends comes over. She's lost the ability to make decisions on her own and he cut her off from all her friends and family. Bad abuse, Regina. Very bad. And it looks like he did this to several women. The good news here is that you might be able to spin this guy as a professional pornographer, not an amateur lifestylist. But if the newspapers get hold of Daria it'll be bad. She needs a lawyer at her apartment immediately and she needs a really good therapist who knows about spousal abuse and cult programming even faster. And someone who understands the lifestyle and can order her to cooperate with these folks."

"You don't ask for much, do you Franklin?" she asked dryly.

"Ask hell, Regina. Get people out there now or I'm going to call my contact at the police department and tell her that Daria's a suicide risk."

There was a long moment of silence before she replied. "I'll be there myself in half an hour. The others will follow. I admire your respect for your submissives, Franklin, which is why I tolerate you at all. But don't push me."

Then she ended the call.

***********************

Joining the website cost me $200, which just goes to prove that karma thinks it's got a sense of humor. The Obedient Sluts website specialized in live webcam porn. You could choose between about a dozen feeds that showed you young women going about their daily business in next to no clothing. You could also look at archived 'highlights'. Daria had been on the website for about a month and her highlights were progressively more extreme. Moving from beatings and sex with Ronnie to beatings and sex with other men, sometimes more than one. Humiliation figured prominently.

I debated the merits of cheap and hard versus expensive and easy and laziness won out. I e-mailed an associate of mine with the website info and my login information and asked him to track down everything he could. I particularly wanted to know who owned the website and if he could identify other women who had been in that apartment before Daria. You can do that by checking a few websites and making a few phone calls, if the ownership is direct. I had a suspicion the ownership wasn't going to be direct, though.

Besides, I had other things to do. There were seven names on the list Daria gave me and I needed to run those down if I was going to have a hope of collecting a magnificent consulting fee from the police department. Now, I might not have many friends in the lifestyle, but I do have a large number of acquaintances. I started burning up the phone lines and pestering people for information. The advantage to dealing with acquaintances is that I don't mind lying to them. So I put out the story that I'd found Ronnie, true, and that I had information concerning that death that X needed to hear, not true. I got a couple of phone numbers, one real name, and lots of promises to spread the word.

Then I got a knock at the door. No one knocks at my door. Not since... well. The door says 'No Soliciting', it says 'Day Sleeper', and it says 'Beware of Dog'. My mail goes to a post office box and my utilities are located in the basement of the building. So no one bothers me; a knock on the door was surprising. More surprising still was seeing Detective Garza standing in the hallway. I opened the door and opened my mouth to greet her but didn't get the chance.

"Franklin Devaroux you are under arrest for breaking and entering and criminal trespass. Turn around and put your hands behind your head," she barked.

"Whoa Detective, easy there," I said as I turned around and put my hands behind my head. "I thought that was taken care of; me calling you to report a murder and all that? Good faith? Besides, if it comes down to a court case I'll be able to convince a jury that Daria had a long-standing relationship with the deceased and that she had implicitly granted me permission to enter the premises." Well, it sounded good to me, and I could probably sell that to a jury.

"What's that?" she demanded as she ran a hand down one of my arms.

"I'm happy to see you," I retorted. "It's a collapsible baton, Detective. I've got one strapped to each forearm and yes I have a concealed carry permit."

She pulled back the sleeve of my shirt, ripping the cuff in the process, and took the baton out of the forearm holster.

"'Implicit permission'? Is that what Daria's lawyer is going to tell her to say?" she snapped. "Or her shrink? Or the freak you've got handling her?"

"You're pissed because I got an abused woman help? Fuck you," I snarled.

The other baton joined the first on the floor and then she wrenched my arms around and put the cuffs on me. I'm familiar with handcuffs, but people are using them less and less because they're relatively expensive and they're pretty easy to escape. That's why everyone, including folks in the lifestyle, is moving to zip-cuffs for restraint purposes. Unless you like the look and feel of old-style handcuffs of course. There's just something about the look and feel of metal.

"I knew you were a freak, but I thought you could be trusted to stay bought," she told me as she continued to search me. She was thorough, and yes that means what you think it means. I might have enjoyed the search under other circumstances, though I'd rather the roles were reversed.

"I have. If you were prevented from talking to Daria then that was a mistake. I can make a phone call and get you access to her. Would you like that?"

She spun me around and pushed me back onto a chair then she stood in front of me and glowered at me. Now, body positioning is a wonderful thing. You can really put someone into the proper frame of mind using good body positioning. Detective Garza was trying to intimidate me by putting me under arrest, handcuffing me, and then towering over me. But I was in my home, I knew the arrest was a minor annoyance at best, and I'm used to using body positioning. I sat back in the chair and crossed my legs; made myself comfortable. My policy is to always cooperate with the police, and I hadn't resisted her in any physical way that would have given her an excuse to charge me with resisting arrest or, worse, assaulting a police officer. But if she wanted to play subtle dominance games... cool.

She was smart and realized that she wasn't as in control as she wanted to be, so she switched to a different track. She pulled out her phone and flipped it open. "Number," she demanded.

I gave her the number and she dialed it and held it up to my face. I smiled and mouthed the words, "Thank you" at her.

"Regina?"

"Franklin, you're becoming annoying. What do you want now?"

"There's been a little mix up, Regina. Someone told the police they couldn't talk to Daria."

"That female detective has already contacted you? Now there's a woman who's over-compensating for something. Yes, we told her that Daria needed to talk to her lawyer before she started answering questions."

"Regina, she's not a suspect in the case. Would you please arrange for her to go to the police station and speak with Detective Garza? She can bring her lawyer, of course."

"Is she there with you right now?" Regina asked.

"As a matter of fact, yes, Regina, she's standing right here. She's holding her cell phone up to my face because my hands are cuffed behind my back."

Regina laughed. "Maybe you'll learn something," she told me. "Put the good detective on the phone, Franklin."

"She'd like to speak with you," I told Garza.

She put the phone to her ear. "Garza," she said.