My plan had been to talk to Shane and get an answer one way or the other about whether or not something had happened at the club, but I now had even more questions. The database on the Division of Liquor Control’s website was very revealing; it cited no fewer than seventeen various violations of Nightshade’s liquor license in the past three years. Their misdeeds included: sale and/or furnishing to a person under twenty-one, improper advertising encouraging excessive drinking, illegally advertising price of beer, permit not posted in conspicuous place, fine not paid, suspension in effect, and, most curiously, gambling raffle or drawing. But whatever that was almost certainly had nothing to do with Addison; the most recent offense was six months ago and I could find no evidence of the club being shut down by any authority in the time between Wednesday night and now, and nothing that helped to explain why both Addison and Shane Resznik seemed to have had a bad night.
I found the motel—as promised, next to the UPS store. The place seemed mostly deserted, with just a half a dozen cars spread out around three long, low buildings.
I grabbed a paper bag from my backseat and went into the office. “Hi,” I said to the woman behind the counter, “I got a delivery for Shane Resznik, but he didn’t put a room number.”
She looked at me. She had green and purple hair in tangly white-girl dreds and she wore a plaid flannel over army-drab cargo pants and Doc Martens eight-eyes. Her feet were propped on the desk, exposing a gun holstered at her ankle. It was impossible to tell how old she was. “We don’t collect registration,” she said, “and you’re not Uber Eats.”
“You got me there.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I just need to talk to the guy.”
“You a cop?”
“Private detective.”
“No shit? I’m going to Columbus State part-time, criminal justice.”
“Yeah? What do you want to do?”
“Find motherfuckers who skip bail and mess up their women’s lives,” she said, clearly speaking from experience. “If I can scrape enough money for tuition on what they pay me, anyhow. Your guy, you know what he looks like?”
“Blond, goatee, kind of a weasel?”
The woman nodded. “One-sixteen.”
I opened my wallet and pulled out a twenty. “Congrats, you got a partial scholarship.”
“Right on.”
I went back outside and followed the arrows to the end of the building that ran parallel to Main. There was a rusty old Jag parked next to the door of room one-sixteen. Shane hadn’t taken care of it, but it still made me miss my blue tank.
I knocked on the door.
Shane Resznik himself answered—dressed only in velvet Santa Claus boxers and mismatched socks, a handful of one dollar bills outstretched. He was either expecting pizza, or drugs. “Uh,” he said when he saw I had neither, and started to close the door.
“Hey buddy, hang on,” I said. “I just want to talk.”
“Not to me you don’t.”
“You don’t even know why I’m here.”
He had the door shut by now, but he stood just inside it and said, “And I don’t care. You a cop?”
“Where’s Addison?”
He opened the door a crack. “Addison?” His voice went up a little, like this inquiry confused him.
“What did you think I wanted?”
“I told you, I don’t care.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
Now he opened the door the whole way and glared at me. “I don’t know. The other night.”
“Wednesday.”
“Sure.”
“How come the club was closed the last few nights?”
“Jesus, who the hell are you?”
I gave him a big smile and a business card.
“Someone hired you to find out why the club wasn’t open last night? Damn, I kind of love it.”
“Babe, who is it?” said a soft female voice.
“Nobody. Go back to bed.”
“Is that her? Is that Lisette? Because—”
Resznik slammed the door closed and the rest of the argument was muffled. Finally, the woman seemed to go away and Resznik sighed behind the door.
“I’m still out here,” I said.
He opened the door an inch or so. “What the fuck do you want?”
“I want to know what’s going on at your club.”
Continuing to glare at me, he said, “Plumbing issue. Pipes burst. No running water. This fucking weather, you know?”
“You didn’t think to inform your sugar daddy of that?”
“Huh?”
“Vincent Pomp.”
He scowled at me. “I, uh, left a message.”
“With?”
“His … answering machine?”
“Oh, so somebody accidentally deleted it, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“You might want to try again. Explain yourself.”
“Would that make you get the fuck away from me?”
“Where’s Addison?”
“Why don’t you ask her that?”
He slammed the door again, and this time, I heard the dead bolt sliding into place.
“Shane, are you familiar with the term non sequitur?” I said.
But I only got silence in return.
I was firmly on board with the weaseliness of Shane Resznik. I certainly didn’t believe him, but at least the mystery of his whereabouts was resolved. I left a message for Lisette saying that I’d located him, and asked her to call me back if she wanted to know where. I hoped she wouldn’t call but figured she probably would.
Some part of me must have enjoyed getting doors slammed in my face, because I found myself heading back to Addison’s apartment. All of this weirdness could be put to bed if she was just sitting at home, dropping beats in her living room. I didn’t see any signs of a maroon Scion parked on California Avenue. This time I went to the front door, and this time, someone new answered.
The woman in front of me gave me a once-over. She was Addison’s age, dressed in a fitted grey pantsuit with neon socks poking out at the ankle. Even without shoes, she towered over me. Her long, dark hair was pulled into a tight, high ponytail at the top of her head but still hung halfway down her back.
I said, “Hi.”
The curtains ruffled. “O-M-G,” a voice whispered from somewhere else in the apartment, “that’s her. That’s the lady.”
“Um, hi.” She leaned one long arm against the doorjamb. “Can I help you?”
“Jordy, that’s her, I said.” Now Addison’s roommate appeared behind the tall woman and they both stared out at me.
I tried to look as unthreatening as possible. “Is Addison at home?”
“No,” they said in unison.
I tried, “Are you getting worried about her? Because I am.”
The roommate bit her lip, and concern flickered through Jordy’s eyes as she said, “Yeah, a little, actually. So could you tell me who the hell you are?”
Her name was Jordana Meyers, and she was a friend of Addison’s going back to grade school. The roommate—Carlie—was Jordy’s younger stepsister, a current Ohio State student who had moved in with Addison a few months earlier.
“I don’t know why Raddish still lives here,” Jordy was saying. She had her long legs pulled up to her chest as she sprawled on an armchair, a pose that made her seem much younger than she was. “I mean, all the drunk students around all the time. But I guess it doesn’t matter much to her, since she doesn’t have to be at work at eight in the morning or anything.”
“And she’s, like, never here,” Carlie added.
“So when’s the last time either of you saw her?”
“I heard her come in on Saturday morning, I think,” Carlie said from the small dining room table without looking up from a psychology textbook, the publisher of which hadn’t even bothered to change its cover from when I was in college. “But I haven’t, like, seen seen her for a while. We have basically opposite schedules and she’s pretty much never awake when I’m here.”
“So that’s not unusual.”
She shook her head, chewing on a pen cap.
Jordy said, “I saw her last week, at one of my games—I coach basketball, at the rec center in Blacklick—that’s where we grew up.”
“I figured you used to play,” I said, and she nodded. “Did she usually come to your games?”
“No, hardly ever. I mean, maybe actually never. Before that I hadn’t seen her, oh, since Thanksgiving, I think? She’s one of those people, you can go forever without seeing her but when you do, it’s like no time at all has passed, she’s always the same old Raddish. But that’s probably part of the problem.”
I waited for her to go on.
“I’m not one to tell somebody to grow up or whatever, but come on. Our ten-year reunion is going to be next year and she’s still carrying on like she did when we were seventeen.”
“Carrying on?”
“Just teenage melodrama,” Jordy said after a brief pause. “Except we’re not teenagers anymore. There’s always some guy crisis, some urgent middle of the night phone call. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve woken up to my alarm and saw ten missed calls from Addison and spent the rest of the day worrying that she was in the hospital or in jail or whatever. But nothing’s ever really wrong, it’s never that she actually needed anything. It’s just how she is. Honestly,” Jordy went on, “in the last year or so, I’ve kind of tried to take a step back. For my own sanity. I hope that doesn’t make me sound awful. But it can be a lot, with her. She’s got a lot of problems.”
“Problems?”
“Just, self-esteem stuff, really,” Jordy said, waving a hand like she suddenly thought better of selling her friend out to a stranger. “I work in real estate at Chase and I’m hoping to be at the AVP level before I’m thirty, so. I just don’t have the bandwidth to worry about her like I used to.”
“So you have a real job.”
Jordy smiled. “A big-girl job. That’s what Addison says.”
“So the two of you are still close?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that, exactly. Growing up it was me, Raddish, and Elise—always together. Elise and I are still pretty close. Addison is just sort of off doing her own thing. But she can really surprise you, too. Like when she came to the game. It was the sweetest thing, and she cheered so hard for the girls—they were so pumped, I’ve never seen them play so hard. But anyway, afterwards, we got pizza and she seemed kind of, I don’t know, anxious, but in a quiet way. Like she didn’t actually want to talk about it, which is weird for her. So since then I’ve checked in with her a few times.”
“Did she ever tell you what was on her mind?”
“No. And I asked. I tried to get her to open up, but she said everything was fine. You can just tell though, you know?”
Carlie looked up from her book. “Maybe something to do with that cop.”
“What?”
“There was a cop here, looking for her. A week ago or something. I gave her his business card.” She pointed at me.
Jordy said, “And?”
“I left him a message. Well, two messages. I haven’t heard back from him.”
“Great,” Jordy said. “So that’s not weird at all. Some cop is looking for her, and now she’s randomly not coming home anymore?”
“I told you,” Carlie said, “that’s pretty much par for the course. She’s never here.”
It was clear where the roommate stood on whether or not anyone should be worried about Addison. “Do you know what else has been going on in her life, other than deejaying?”
Jordy slid the elastic out of her hair and let it fall over her shoulders. “Well, she told me she was thinking about going back to school. But that’s—she dropped out after two semesters at OSU and ever since, she’s constantly saying she’s thinking about going back. So I doubt it.”
“What about a girlfriend or boyfriend?”
Jordy smiled faintly. “There was this guy she was talking to, but I don’t think they ever met or anything. On BusPass.”
“On what?”
“BusPass. The dating app? Bus, for Columbus. BusPass.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Really? Everybody’s on it. It’s like Tinder, but just for the Columbus area. And it has this feature, called Missed the Bus, that’s like on Craigslist, from that Missed Connections section on there, like, ‘You: luminous modern hippie at the Dirty Projectors show…’ Addison has been obsessed with those since high school, but Craigslist is all pervy now.”
“So BusPass, that’s not pervy?”
“No, it’s really cute.”
I didn’t point out that cuteness and perviness were not mutually exclusive. “So someone wrote one about Addison being a luminous modern hippie?”
Jordy laughed. “No, that’s just me spouting some bullshit. But that’s the kind of thing she’d like. Under all the drama and mascara, she’s a romantic.”
Somehow, I had known that about her. “So some guy wrote a Missed Connections post about her on this BusPass app and she saw it.”
“Yup. I got her turned on to the app, actually. We were looking for a date for me. It’s kind of addictive, just flipping through people. But anyway, at some point there was a Missed the Bus post about Raddish. She even said that after reading stuff like that for so long, it was kind of weird to actually find one that was about her—she almost didn’t write back. But she said it was a great post so she did, and they were chatting back and forth since then.”
“Know his name?”
“No.”
That would’ve been too easy. Part of me wondered if Sergeant Dillman could’ve been the missed connection, and came sniffing around to see what Addison was like. “Know anything about him?”
“He likes tiny houses? You know, little shipping container places and whatnot. Addison’s very into those.”
“Was it serious?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
“Why?”
“Well, just that when she first wrote to him she said she wasn’t even interested in meeting the guy. Look, we’re having coffee tomorrow, for Elise’s birthday. I’m sure she’ll have a whole story about where she’s been.”
I didn’t doubt that.