“So.” He took a deep breath and began, “It’s about this girl. Not the one on stage, another one. She used to work here. Lois is her real name. A nice girl. Thinks the guys are mostly lonely. In here, that’s safe, because we watch. Out there,” he pointed with his chin to the door, “they’re on their own. Lois danced as ‘Lolita,’ started out in kind of a Catholic School outfit. She’d strap in tight for her Lolita thing, and they’d kind of spring out, when she popped the bra.”
“Anyhow, that Senator, or whatever, Morley? He was in once or twice a week, usually during quiet times, like now. Most of the dancers would get a few bucks off of him, put up with him copping a feel when they come down to the bar but blew him off for anything outside. They smelled money but something warned them off.”
I interrupted, “The girls, Tim, are they straight, or do some of them work?” He answered with a back and forth waggle of one hand, palm down.
“They keep it cozy if they do. Lois is just a pretty girl, trying to make the living she can with what she has. Not a hooker, or college girl. She’s a soft touch for guys with sad eyes and a good line of shit, though. You’d do okay.”
I blinked. “The money in the game, is it pretty good for the straight ones?”
“Depends on how good they are at getting into the guys’ heads. If they can make the guys think that each one is getting her turned on up there? Two or three grand a week, cash, easy. A guy thinks she’s half naked and it’s all for him, and the money goes into that g-string as fast as he can get it out of his pocket. You’d think he’d notice that other guys are giving her money. Course, when they do notice, we get fights going. When three guys are all buying her splits of champagne at twenty per, you have to wonder.”
“So, Lois?” I said.
“Sure. So he comes in, place is empty and Lois does Lolita for him. All by himself, like that guy back there. It got to him, you could see it. The little plaid skirt, the knee socks, then those great, big, standing-right-out-there knockers. He’s panting and blowing, flinging money up onto the stage like it was on fire in his pockets.”
“Liked her?”
He paused, searching for words. “Tell you what, guys like him don’t ‘like,’ they fuckin’ well ‘want.’” The venom in his voice caught at me. “We get them in here. It gets so you can see them.”
How about you? I wanted to ask. Do you like her? Do you more than like her? Instinct, experience and training won out. He had to do this his way, so I waited quietly.
“Anyhow, she finishes her dance, and comes out, dressed in a sexy outfit, the way they do, and hustles a couple of champagne cocktails, you know?”
I nodded.
He continued, “He’s sitting there, talking. Not laying a hand on her. I’m talking this sincere look and nodding as he listened to her, like she’s interesting as hell. I fish, and you go to where they like to be and offer them what they want. Only you put a sharp fuckin’ hook in the middle of it. That’s what he was like.”
I could almost see it going on at the table he’d pointed out.
“So time passes, the boys start to come in, and more of the girls start coming in, and Lois is going off. Our guy offers her a ride. She drove this SUV that spent more time in the shop than on the road. That day, she was gonna cab it. She says okay, they leave together.” He started to shake his head, stopped and looked up. His eyes were looking far away.
“Time goes by, a week or two, and Lois is bore-assing all of us about the senator, or congressman, whatever. He takes her places, he ‘listens,’ ‘shares,’ gifts, just an all around great guy. His wife is in D.C. and their marriage is for shit, just political, wife’s cold, has boy toys, fucks the pool man and the paper boy, his kids hate him, he’s lonely, and like that.”
Tim paused to catch his breath. “The other girls tried to warn her. She got mad, so I bit my tongue. That’s that. She switches her act, getting away from ‘Lolita,’ starts keeping more on. After about another month or two, she’s starting to show.”
“Show?”
“Yeah,” he made a big rounding gesture over his abdomen, “show. I caught her crying in the dressing room, when the manager fired her. By then, she ain’t seen him in a month. He’s down in D.C. for ‘the session.’”
In this day and age? I thought.
Tim spoke, as if he heard my thinking. “She just lost her head. Supposedly he’s fixed and can’t make a kid.” He paused, and took a couple of breaths. “So there I am, offering to help, and I wind up taking her to a woman’s clinic, and they take care of it. No more baby. No more problem, right?” He paused, looked over his shoulder at the stripper. Looked into the mirror at the only customer. “Shit,” he said softly. “So I took her home, tucked her into bed and left. I should have stayed. I think she wanted me to. I was too pissed to offer.”
“Something went wrong, because a few mornings later she calls; she’s still bleeding and it smells funny. I take her to the hospital, and this is ‘septic’ and that’s ‘toxic’ and when they finish cutting away the bad parts— she’s twenty-four, and taking hormones.” It was tough watching him.
“Tim—"
“Nah, I’m okay. I’m okay. Feels better to tell it. So now, finally, she’s mad. Finally. She catches a Southwest flight to D.C. on my credit card. A week goes by, maybe two and I ain’t heard nothing. I’m about to get a ticket to go down there.” He was talking faster and I needed him to stay with it, so I interrupted, holding my mug out for a refill.
As he leaned under the bar to the coffee pot he went on, “Finally, she comes in here while I’m working and she’s wearing dark glasses and a turtleneck. Not her style. I pull the collar down and there’re bruises all around her neck. Not hickeys— bruises, green and yellow. And when I take off her sunglasses, there’s a shiner. Cut lip, some old swelling around her mouth, a serious ass kicking. She’s so fuckin’ pretty, though. No, she didn’t bump into the Senator; she got mugged, blah, blah. I got mad, not at her but she might have thought so; I don’t know.” He paused to hand me my mug of old, black coffee.
He was talking faster, as if trying to dump it in a rush. To avoid looking at him, I glanced up at the stage, and saw another set of bare breasts. They belonged to a freckled redhead, and barely protruded from her chest, except for the long, purplish nipples that tipped them. Her legs were long and lovely. She looked like somebody’s teenaged daughter.
“She came to thank me and pay me back for the tickets. I told her to keep the money, and walked her out to her car. It wasn’t her old SUV, but a brand new red Miata convertible, Maryland tags, with lots of luggage. ‘Timmy,’ she called me, ‘Timmy, I have to go. I was stupid. Now I have to go for awhile. Wish I’d been smart about you, and things, sooner’ she said. She kissed me on the lips, once, and got into her car and drove off. I wanted to stop her, but it was like she wasn’t even here. It was like talking with a ghost.” He stopped.
“Can you reach her?” I asked.
He looked at me, and I saw what I’d already heard. His face was cold and still, and any vulnerability was gone. His voice was different. “She’s out of this, Paul.”
The smells and sights and sounds of the day so far had done nothing but make me sad. I handed a five to the dancer sitting next to the guy at the bar. She held out a strap for me to slip it under, and I placed it directly into her hand. One less guy to paw her, one less to try to hunt her into bed as a notch on his belt.
Her eyes opened wider, and she looked me fully in the face. With animation in her eyes, she was astonishingly lovely and young.
It was almost noon when I got home, so I got back onto the phone.
Everyone had questions, from “How are you?” to the one they all wanted to ask, “So, didja kill him?” before providing the answers I needed. Extracting promises to keep the calls private was touchy, but dissembling is second nature to bartenders.
Washington is a long way from Newport but I had a few names. “A gentleman, nice guy, good tips, well-mannered, moderate
drinker, scotch and water,” was what I got. Seen either with his wife or with appropriate people. Morley was not a nice man close to home. Apparently, when he got close to work or in front of more powerful people, he got nice or at least under control. The world has lots of not-nice people, though, and most make it to a ripe old age.
His wife and family resided in Washington year-round, although he maintained a residence in Rhode Island, where the rest of his family visited for vacations. I thought the media lived for this kind of thing. The Congressman played dirty up north, and clean in Washington.
He had some kind of cover, if he had done the damage to Lois himself. He had money that wasn’t accountable to anyone to buy her silence. So she was dumb enough to get involved, to get pregnant. Dumb enough to confront him but smart enough to be content with the money he’d offered and run.
Tim was no idiot. He saw something in her. He was hanging on, loving a woman who couldn’t return it. I could understand that. The woman I loved wasn’t available, either.
‘Sol came home, boiling over with the day’s events. I mentioned my plan for the afternoon and she jumped at it.
People came from all over to Newport for summers. It was the tail end of the season, but we headed north to Bristol, bringing a kite to the state park. For her entire life, I had been trying to find a kite that I could get airborne and keep there. This latest version was absolutely guaranteed to fly in the lightest winds.
Marisol thought that was hysterically funny and kept humming the Air Force Anthem. When we got to the park, she played with an old couple’s dog while I assembled it. She’d been hinting about a dog, and I was finding it harder to ignore her. This one was some kind of fluffy, dust mop looking thing, with a shrill bark and a mountain of attitude.
Then I flung the contraption into the air, where it drew the string tight and climbed. It climbed until it exhausted the supply of string, and hung in the sky, barely visible except for its neon color.
‘Sol held the reel and gazing up at the kite, asked, “Daddy?” I hesitated for too long. “Daddy, please? Mrs. Pina said that it’s your place to tell me, and I can trust you. Some of the kids,” she stopped and started to bite at the cuticle of her index finger. She did it with enough aggression that I put my hand gently on hers until she stopped. I tried not to let my anger come through. Whatever her classmates had said must have come from the adults at dinner.
“Honey, people say things that they should never say, and probably wouldn’t if they thought about it for a minute.” I tried to give her an honest, but carefully edited version of events, and what it meant to us. I told her that I wasn’t going to wait for the truth to come out. I was going to act on my own.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, sweets?”
“Mamacita said that you’re the smartest and bravest man in the world. She used to say that you were like the men on TV, the good guys. She said that you could do anything you wanted to.”
“Mamacita said that about me?”
“Yes.” She looked down for a moment, “Sometimes I still talk to her, you know.”
“Me too, honey.”
When she looked back up, she was smiling. “Daddy, you got a kite to fly.”
After we reeled in our new kite, I stashed it in the trunk of “the tank,” as Isabel had named my Saab. We found a place that made pretty good chowder and reeked of hot grease. Something about the smell of frying made Marisol feel comfortable. Whenever we went out, if she smelled it, she liked the place. We laughed at silly things and held hands on our way home.
Later that afternoon, she finished her homework and dozed off, looking a little wind burned, with a small secret smile around her eyes.
The phone rang, moments before the computer modem would have dialed, and I picked it up. It was a woman’s voice, speaking softly and quickly. She started out like someone calling a business. “I’m looking for Mr. Paul Costa?”
“Speaking,” I answered, “who’s calling?”
“I’m trying to reach the Paul Costa who spoke with Timmy Foley, earlier today.”
“Timmy,” I was sure was tolerated from one person in the world. “Lois?”
There was a pause and for a second I thought she’d hung up. “It is you. Good,” she said.
“Lois, Tim made it clear that he doesn’t want you in the middle of this.”
“Timmy told me, but I need to talk to you myself. Can I call you Paul? Paul,” she began, without waiting for an answer, “Do you know Timmy loves kids? Coaches Little League and all. The boys worship him. Wouldn’t get kids from me. Nope. He tell you about that? Did he tell you that I was too stupid to protect myself? Did he tell you that?”
I started to interrupt her, but decided that my grandfather had been right. Long before, he had counted my ears, then my mouth, “Two ears, one mouth. Listen to two words before you speak one. Listen twice before you speak once.”
I had a whole speech ready, about love, and hope, and pity, and protection and how tangled up they could get. I knew that she was already protecting him. She knew Tim. She knew that her pain would become his. She was twenty-four, or five, at the most, though, and had no idea how fast time passes and how its pace increases like a runner finding his stride.
“Lois,” I said, and stopped. “I was going to give you free advice, but it’s worth exactly what you pay for it.”
“Timmy said you’re smart, but I think I know what you’d say. So instead, promise not to tell Timmy any more than he knows.”
“I promise.” The silence dragged on. “Lois, if you can’t talk to me, that’s okay.” I could hear her breathing, and my own.
“He called me, before he talked to you. I told him to tell you the whole story, all of it. Then afterwards, he told me about you. He said you’re smart, and you might have been a cop, because you made him think of cops when you talked to him, but a nicer sort of.”
I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment.
“I’m not Morley’s first, or the last. It’s like this club, you know? The initiation really, really sucks. It’s a big club, not hard to get into, I guess.”
The life was starting to leave her voice. She was animated by anger, but she seemed to be unable to hold onto it. I liked her for that. She had every right to be in a rage, but didn’t have the nature to nurse it. “His standards weren’t that high, I guess.”
“Lois, I’m no one to give you advice, but pushing yourself down won’t help. You said it was a big club, right? He was an expert hunter and I doubt that you’d ever been prey before.”
She paused again, “How much do you know about men like that? Is Timmy right? Are you a cop? Or do you just know about them? Timmy knew, and so did some of the other dancers; is that how you know?”
“Little of both, I guess. I was a cop, sort of, and I have to know about people to do my job. Nowadays I’m a bartender, like Tim.”
“Not like him; he said that. He said that talking to you is easy but that there’s something really hard in you. He said you’re sadder than hell, too.”
God save us from smart people.
“You didn’t kill him,” she said, as if it was a fact. There will be two tides tomorrow, you didn’t kill the congressman. “Timmy says you could, but he doesn’t think you did, and I don’t either.”
“Why not?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
If they were picking that up somehow, then DaSilva might, and maybe it would get through to Agent Kilroy, she of the pretty legs and nice underwear.
“Unless he did something to somebody you care about, I don’t think you’d get mad enough. I don’t think that you care much otherwise.”
Just beautiful. They were sure of my innocence because I didn’t give a damn about anybody. The hell of it was that they were right.
“I didn’t kill him. I threw him out of the bar earlier because he had a foul mouth and he was drunk. He was dead, under a toilet when I found him after I closed.” I failed to think of more to say.
<
br /> “I have some things to do before I come home.” It wasn’t a response, just her reaction to the change.
There was wisdom in her, and courage. I heard resolution in her voice. For that moment, I was jealous of Tim Foley. “I’m still trying to find all of the women like me. So far, anyone who made him look at what he did got a warning. Those warnings could get rough. Timmy told you?”
“About the bruises?”
“Yes, but I didn’t tell him what happened. That would have sent him off into all kinds of trouble.” She waited. I really didn’t want to know. Maybe for a change, I’d think of her first; it would be good practice for me. She wouldn’t tell me unless I asked. I believed that she really needed to. Bartenders are supposed to know things like that.
“Do you want to tell me?”
“No, but I have to. You. Somebody.” She stopped for a moment and when she started again, her voice was a little different, as if she was telling a story about a stranger.
“When I called his office, he made arrangements to meet me at my motel.” I could hear the pitch of her voice rise.
“And he showed up?”
“Yeah, he showed up. With his son and some other guy. I was ready. I was ready. I had a video camera set up, in the closet, focused so you could see the whole room. I turned it on when they knocked on the door. I got it all recorded, sound, too. The three of them taking turns. All of it.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said quietly, not blasphemy, but a prayer.
She was crying, finally. I had been hoping she would. Crying healed. Isabel believed in crying if there was pain. “I can still smell the carpet, and see that gray bedspread, with flowers on it, all rumpled. I can feel them on me, and in me, holding me down. I fought so that they’d hurt me, because I wanted to be hurt. Is that sick? I don’t know.”
The words were coming, faster and louder. I wanted them to stop, but she needed to say it all. The words probably tasted like vomit, and getting it all out would be far better. “When I think about it, I can hear them, too. Dick was applauding his son, like he’d hit a home run in little league. The other guy was the worst though. Just cold. Didn’t talk, except, ‘don’t move,’ or ‘spread your legs,’ ‘open your mouth,’ like he needed me to move my head to cut my hair, or like a dentist says ‘open wider.’”
Last Call Page 5