Lady Midnight by Timothy C. Phillips Page B

turned the page and saw that many of the pictures were of Connie and her half brother. Clearly, at some point in the past, Randy Cross had not been such a carefully kept secret. Perhaps, as the Senator had become more prominent, his bastard son had also become more of a potential liability, and so Patrick had pushed him back into the shadows of his own shame.  
    I flipped through the pages. There were a few more pictures of Connie as a youngster, and a couple of even older pictures of an attractive brunette woman, taken in black and white. She was clearly Connie’s mother; they had the same classic bone structure and the same sparkle in their eyes. I had just decided that there was probably little value in the pictures, when I turned the page and saw what Nookie, no doubt, had been smiling coyly about in her apartment. She hadn’t mentioned it. She probably knew that sooner or later I would find it on my own.  
    In the last picture, Connie was standing by herself, in profile. The photograph had been taken in the very room where Nookie had given me the box, obviously during Connie’s stay there, in the last couple of weeks. She appeared quite pregnant. I carefully slid the picture out of its vellum sleeve and took a closer look. Constance Patrick, platinum blond and undeniably beautiful, glowing with her pregnancy, her hands laced under her bulging belly. She wore a short white maternity gown and was barefoot. I turned it over. On the back was written: “Three months along and already getting fat.”  
    Three months along. That meant that she had been pregnant longer than she had been missing. Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean that Senator Patrick or Baucom had known about the pregnancy. In fact, of all the people I had met, the only person I could safely argue had known was the girl who called herself Nookie Uberalles.  
    Be that as it may, I had a strong suspicion that some of the people whom I’d talked to so far had known about the pregnancy, and that was somehow the driving force behind the lies that people were telling me. Just why, right now, I couldn’t say.

 
    Chapter 14
     
    “Quiet on the set,” Big Daddy called. There was a momentary murmur and some giggles, and then quiet. Big Daddy liked to call out that command before shooting started. It made him feel like a big-time Hollywood director, or at least, how he figured a guy like that might feel. He was directing a Blue Moon video, and that meant something to him. You had to take whatever you were doing seriously, he told himself.  
    I mean, we’re not exactly shooting Casablanca or something here, Big Daddy thought wryly to himself. Not that he’d rather be doing anything but what he was currently doing. Big Daddy was directing porno shorts in digital format, which he provided to various online porn distributors, and he loved his work. That was where the money was, and Big Daddy had to be where the money was. In the old days, Vince had worked for him. Now, he worked for Vince, but as long as the work was this enjoyable, he didn’t really care who was boss.  
    Big Daddy had learned quickly after getting out of the joint. Vince had set him up doing one or two of these gigs a day, watching naked young bodies squirm around all over each other, and getting paid, brother, quick easy cash, by people who put this stuff on the Internet for losers to sit at home and pay good money to get off to. Shangri-La, Big Daddy thought, I have found you at last. At night the girls from the movies were playmates for Big Daddy and his old pal Vince. There was liquor and weed and coke, too, if a guy wanted it, invisible parole officer and terms of his early release notwithstanding. Big Daddy was out of the big house, and he was staying out.  
    “Okay, come on out, sweetheart,” Big Daddy called to the girl in the next room. He and his crew were currently set up in a house that belonged to one of his investors, one of the Web geeks who made this all possible,