by Elaine Viets
Doc in the Box
Copyright © Elaine Viets, 2000
Originally published by Dell, 2000
Published as an eBook in in 2019 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
All rights reserved
eISBN: 978-1-625673-46-6
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Triggers & Sparks
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Elaine Viets
To Don, who researched this book the hard way
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to my agent, David Hendin, who’s still the best.
To my editor, Mitch Hoffman.
To the staff of the St. Louis Public Library, and to Anne Watts, who has given me some deadly accurate ideas. Also, to the staff of the Broward County Library. Librarians are the next best thing to moms for knowing everything.
Many other people in St. Louis and around the country helped me with this book. I hope I’ve acknowledged them all. I certainly appreciate their help.
Barry Berry, retired St. Louis Police commander, veteran detective, and commander of the Police Academy. Diane Earhart, Jinny Gender, Kathy Gender, Lisa Gender, Kay Gordy, Karen Grace, Willetta L. Heising, author of “Detecting Women.” Debbie Henson, Lt. Kathy Katerman, North Miami Beach Police. Marilyn Koehr, Cindy Lane, Betty Mattli, Paul Mattli, the ever-hip Alan Portman and Molly Portman. Dick Richmond, Janet Smith, John Spera, Sarah Watts, Julianna Yonan.
Finally, thanks to all those sources who must remain anonymous, including my favorite pathologist.
CHAPTER 1
Jack was buttoning up his shirt. I stared at his upper chest, a slab of tanned and toned muscle. As he tucked in his shirttail, I admired that rippling washboard stomach once more, and imagined those muscles moving the way I saw them last night. My mind wandered to other visions now concealed by his pants. Those strong legs and hot buns and …
“So, was I good?” he asked, combing his hair with his fingers. He didn’t wait for me to answer. He knew he was. He was the sort of man who made women howl and claw his hide.
“Got any hair spray I can borrow?” he said.
“Nope, never use it,” I said. That wasn’t quite true, but if you let him, the guy borrowed more stuff than a sorority roommate. He’d already used my powder compact, my teasing comb, and my pink lipstick to make his heart-stopping lips more luscious. He used his own eyeliner, though. I don’t lend that out. I wasn’t taking a chance of getting pinkeye from the handsome Jack.
I shifted on my lopsided chair in the men’s dressing room at the Heart’s Desire, a strip club ten minutes across the river from downtown St. Louis. We like to go across the Mississippi River into Illinois for our sin. That way we can pretend we really don’t have it in our city. But we keep it close to home.
Jack Hogenbaum, a.k.a. “Leo D. Nardo, Your Titanic Lover,” was the star of Ladies’ Nights at the club. He’d been packing them in since the movie. He looked like Leonardo DiCaprio. Well, sort of. At least his brown hair hung down over his forehead on the left side, he had soulful eyes, and when he danced, he could do stuff with a life preserver you never dreamed.
It was my job to follow him around for a day. My name is Francesca Vierling, and I’m a columnist for the St. Louis City Gazette. I’m six feet tall, dark hair, smart mouth. I’m generally in trouble with the newspaper management, but this last punishment from my sleazy managing editor had turned into an unexpected pleasure. Charlie, who was slime in a suit, had ordered me to do a story about “a day in the life of a stripper on the East Side. Human interest, you know.”
Humans were a species Charlie knew very little about. He was sure he’d make me furious with this porky assignment. But he never said which stripper I should follow. So I did a day in the life of a male stripper, Leo D. Nardo. So far I’d managed to extend this assignment to two days, for a real in-depth look. Last night I watched the show with the women in the audience. Tonight, I was backstage with Leo.
The club had that down-at-heels look you find backstage everywhere. The men’s dressing room had a big silver star on the door, but the door was covered with dirty handprints. The room smelled of Lysol and stale cigarette smoke, and the walls were painted an evil yellow. There were two stained sinks, a wall mirror losing its silvering, and a cigarette-burned countertop littered with more makeup than Dolly Parton’s dressing table. A scuffed black swinging door led to the shower and stalls. I stayed in the dressing room, which was fetchingly decorated with prime beefcake. Officer Friendly, an arresting male dancer in a break-apart police uniform, was applying eyeliner in front of the glaringly lit mirror. He danced before Leo, getting the women warmed up for the star.
Leo was dressing for his eight o’clock show. He’d shown up at seven-ten, wearing a sleazy purple mesh muscle shirt cut so low it barely covered his nipples, and tight jeans with a big bulge in front. I figured he must have stuffed half his sock drawer in there. He was carrying a freshly dry-cleaned sailor suit. It was the break-apart costume for his act. Leo hung it carefully on a nail in the wall, right over his glitter-covered life preserver that had “Titanic” spelled out in dark blue sequins. Then he stripped off his shirt and pants while I interviewed him. He looked casual and comfortable taking off his clothes. I felt overdressed in my black Donna Karan suit. I was glad I was sitting down, even on that hard molded plastic chair. I wasn’t used to carrying on conversations with men who wore only a well-filled G-string with “Titanic” on the front. It looked like the guy didn’t lie, either, unless he was wearing the male equivalent of the WonderBra. My mind skittered away from awful puns about going down on the Titanic. I couldn’t print them, anyway.
Any other man would have been embarrassed taking off his clothes and putting on makeup, but not Leo. He just got naked naturally. That was part of his charm. He didn’t strut, although he had plenty of reason to. I could feel a blush creeping up my neck. Damn. I wanted so badly to be hard-boiled, but I couldn’t escape twelve years of Catholic schools. The nuns got me, no matter how hard I tried to be cool. And this was an occasion of sin, if I ever saw one. Impure thoughts buzzed pleasantly in my brain. I was going to hell. Oh, well. Might as well enjoy perdition. I got hold of myself, since I didn’t have the nerve to get hold of Leo. I tuned into what he was saying.
“… and while I don’t want to say it’s every guy’s dream to take off his clothes in front of a lot of women, it’s by no means a boring job.” Good quote. I wrote it down on my clipboard. I never used a reporter’s notebook, which looked like a skinny steno pad. I’m a big woman, and I like something I can hold. Argghh. That sounded wrong, too. I had to get those raging hormones under control.
Leo’s next action didn’t help. He rummaged in the clutter on the dressing table for a bottle of baby oil, and began oiling his golden brown chest and arms. They were smooth, hard, and hairless. I wondered if he shaved them. I could definitely see he worked out, but he didn’t have a rubbery overmuscled weight-lifter’s body, the kind with the veins sticking out on his neck and arms. I’d never k
nown any woman who found those overdeveloped hard bodies attractive. Leo’s muscles were well-defined, but not bulging. He slathered more oil on a perky pec and said, “I do this because the women like it.”
Amen, brother, I thought. But I wrote that down, too.
“Did you pump up?” Officer Friendly asked him, as he used a Q-Tip to flick away a stray bit of mascara. Officer Friendly had light eyelashes he was trying to darken. I wondered if he knew he could dye them, but before I could say anything, I heard sirens. That was Officer Friendly’s cue to go onstage. He grabbed his nightstick and ran out the door.
Leo dropped to the floor like he was in basic training and began doing pushups. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. The man wasn’t winded. He didn’t even break a sweat. “I pump up my chest and arms to give me a full feeling effect in my body,” he said solemnly. I wasn’t sure what he meant. His body looked the same to me. He jumped up and pulled the plastic off his sailor suit. He showed me the Velcro fastenings that let him smoothly fling it off.
“Why do you wear that?” I said. “In the movie, Leonardo didn’t wear a sailor suit.”
“His real movie costumes weren’t very interesting,” Leo said. “I mean, I could either wear his clunky poor guy’s clothes, or a tux. Boring. Besides, women like a man in uniform.”
“They sure do,” I said. “I saw the way they were grabbing for you last night.” He’d been in grave danger of losing the Titanic, and it wouldn’t have hit an iceberg.
“I try to enforce the rules,” he said, batting his mascaraed eyelashes sincerely. “The women give me a tip on the hip and then I give them a kiss on the hand or something. I try to keep it as clean as possible, but sometimes you have to say, watch that. That’s all part of the fun.”
“So what did you do the night this place was raided?” I thought it was time to remind Leo he stripped for a living. The Heart’s Desire had been raided last December. Four dancers were arrested for lewd and indecent conduct, and a lot of women customers were mighty embarrassed. All charges were dropped later.
“During the raid, I was able to escape out the back door,” he said, looking me straight in the eye like a good liar. I saw the cash Leo had pulled in last night. I wondered how many cops he’d had to pay off.
“Does your mother know you do this?”
He looked hurt, and I felt like a rat for asking. But I was supposed to be a reporter, not an adoring fan. “She didn’t for a long time, but I finally had to tell her after the raid. She seemed to take it pretty positively.”
“So what are you going to be when you grow up, Leo? Are you going to college?”
“I’m not really college material,” he said. Right. He looked like he was solid Kryptonite. “I flunked out of Forest Park.”
That took some work. The local community college wasn’t exactly Harvard.
“I don’t want to do this forever,” he said. “It’s a business. I know I have a shelf life, and it’s coming to an end soon. I’m thirty years old. I’m finding gray hairs and fighting a gut already. I’d like to find some nice woman who’d take care of me. We could settle down, maybe have a family if she wants. I’m not really interested in a business career.”
“Are you kidding? You could do sales. You’d be a huge success.” I wished my eyes didn’t slide downward at the word huge. I wished he’d put on his sailor pants. He did.
“Wrong,” he said. “I tried it. I was bad. I couldn’t stand the rejection. Office work bores me. I can’t sit at a desk all day.”
I couldn’t imagine Leo keeping his clothes on for eight hours at a stretch, either.
“But I wouldn’t mind if she had a career. I wouldn’t feel threatened by her success or anything,” he said earnestly. “I’d enjoy taking care of her house while she went to work. I could cook dinner for her and clean and run errands. You know, pick up the dry cleaning and grocery shop for her.” Amazing. Inside this stud muffin was a perfect 1950s wife, waiting to get out.
But instead of tying on his June Cleaver apron, he slipped on his flexible dancing shoes, then slipped them off several times. “Testing,” the Titanic Lover said, with that iceberg-melting smile. “Sometimes the shoes are a little too tight and you can’t get them off.”
The first notes of the Titanic theme drifted through the door. Leo took one more look in the mirror and liked what he saw. “Time to go to work.” Pumped and primped, Leo grabbed his glittering life preserver and ran out onstage. I followed, hanging back in the wings to watch. That’s what I do as a newspaper columnist. I watch, while other people live their lives. The world was a show put on for my benefit, and most of the time, I was entertained. Now I was fascinated by how the women started screaming the minute he stepped onstage. It reminded me of those old videos of Beatles concerts. They were screaming so loud I could hardly hear the souped-up version of “My Heart Will Go On.” If he looked good in the dressing room, he looked even better onstage. Stage was too grand a word for where Leo performed. It was a raised black plywood platform that in daylight showed every nick and scuff. But now it looked like a pedestal for a bronze god. The strobe lights on his white uniform were dazzling.
Sturdy chrome railings kept the fans at bay, and burly bare-chested guys wearing tight shorts and black bow ties kept the more athletic women from climbing over. But there was plenty of room for their hands to stretch out and wave those bills. Women are supposed to be poor tippers, but I saw fives, tens, and even twenty-dollar bills flapping in the breeze. But Leo knew how to play hard to get. He didn’t go for the money right away. First he displayed the goods, that bronze body in the form-fitting sailor suit. Then, the music switched to one of those fast, thumpy songs with about seven words (I wanna, shake your booty, sex, body) that you hear in aerobics classes, and Leo ripped off his shirt with two hands. He made the gesture look powerful, like he was ripping a phone book in half. A nimble, dark-haired woman grabbed for the shirt. Leo artfully yanked it out of her hands—he’d told me he’d lost more than one custom-tailored costume that way—and flung it over his shoulder into the backstage safety zone. Then he gyrated, naked from the waist up. The women yowled like love-struck alley cats.
Their enthusiasm was touching. I’d seen female strippers at work, and the primary emotion for the women dancers and their male patrons was boredom. As the female strippers danced, you could almost feel their contempt for any man dumb enough to watch them. The men seemed equally contemptuous of any woman who would take off her clothes for them. The men nursed their watered drinks and stared blankly at the women, who went through the motions like badly made robots. This club had a split personality. Its Ladies’ Nights with Leo and the other male dancers were high-energy events. The rest of the time, it had listless female strippers.
There was a kind of innocence to Leo and these women. He seemed so eager to please, and they … well, they were definitely pleased. If they were screaming over his looks, think what they’d do if they knew he wanted to cook and keep house for a working woman. I supposed that was his delicate way of saying he’d stay home and she’d be the breadwinner. Plenty of women my mother’s age made that bargain in reverse with a man, and I knew lots of overworked women now who’d be happy to have their own deal with a hunky homemaker. I considered it myself. What would it be like to have the little man waiting for you at the door with your slippers and a dry martini, when you got home from the corporate wars? “How was your day, dear?” he’d say. “Dinner will be ready in five minutes.”
Leo could put the sailor act in dry dock—being waited on by a handsome man was every woman’s real fantasy. The Poplar Street Bridge would be jammed with women heading to the Heart’s Desire to propose to Leo. I wondered if I could be happy with him. He was easy on the eyes. He’d never tax my brain, either. What would we talk about, once we exhausted the subject of makeup brands and hair spray? The only book Leo had opened since he flunked out of school was the Yellow Pages. I liked my men smart. Like Lyle. We could talk about anything—books, politics, music,
even offbeat topics like how Michael Mann shot part of Manhunter at the St. Louis airport, and the gory details of Elvis’s autopsy. Lyle could quote romantic poetry and Shakespeare by the yard, which wasn’t a surprise, since he was an English professor. If we discussed Hairspray, it would be the movie, not the product.
We didn’t just talk, either. Oh, no. I remembered our nights and long afternoons together. Lyle made Leo look like a prancing kid. But I pushed those scenes out of my mind. I couldn’t think about that. There was no point in going on about it. We were through. We’d broken up at the end of last summer, and it was April now. We were finished. It was over.
I hadn’t dated anyone since the breakup. What choices did I have at age thirty-seven? The good ones were either married or gay. Where would I meet men, anyway? At the Gazette, I could choose from a limited number of bitter divorced men who griped about their ex-wives and wanted me to watch their kids on custody weekends. The Gazette single men were a discouraging collection who lived with their mothers or in dingy bachelor apartments. One guy used his lampshade as an emergency sock drier. The man knew nothing about laundry. If you needed your socks dried in a hurry, you nuked them.
My other choices were Clayton lawyers who worked eighty-hour weeks, and corporate types whose idea of a casual evening was to loosen their tie. No thanks. I was through with men. Watching Leo was all the action I wanted.
Look at that guy whip those hips. The man had lost his pants and shoes, and was now moving those long, strong legs and taut buns. The women in the audience were either swooning, screaming, or stuffing money in his Titanic G-string.
They were a cross section of respectable women. That group there, the thirty-somethings in the matronly flowered dresses and pantsuits, could be seen at any PTA meeting. Those gray-haired women with the sweet faces and soft, spreading figures looked like they belonged to a women’s sodality. Except I don’t think they ever yelled “Take it off. Take it all off!” in the church basement.