by Linda Sands
“You’re a broken record,” Angel said. “What about the guy? You ever seen him with Tammy?”
“What about money?”
“Christ. Here.” Angel pulled a wad of twenties out of her pocket and fanned them for the woman. Before she could snatch them, Angel asked again, “What about the guy?”
“Yeah, I seen him. He come to pick up Tammy. Not lately. He kinda dick.”
Angel smiled. “Yeah. Kinda.” She peeled half the fan off and handed it to the woman.
“Where can I find Tammy?”
“Gentleman’s club. Three block down. Tell them Miss P. send you.”
Mario’s: The Club for Gentlemen. What a shithole. The only kind of gentleman that ever would have gone to this club probably died in 1965. Angel used the “Miss P.” line at the door to get in, and instantly regretted it. She tried to see past the dark, sticky interior, past the smell of skank and Brut. But it wasn’t working—for that she’d need a hypnotist not merely rose-colored glasses.
“Get in and get out,” she mumbled, keeping her distance from the abandoned stage, noting where the muted music and happy sounds were coming from in the rear of the building.
Taking her cue from one of Jimbo’s old movies she swaggered to the bar, ordered a shot of whiskey, and bummed a cigarette from a biker dude whose jacket read: set free soldiers.
She was pretty sure the dancers wouldn’t be wearing nametags, but she thought she knew her husband’s type enough to pick out Tammy in a stripper line-up.
“Hey.” She called the bartender over and tapped the wad of bills she’d placed under the ashtray. “How about a private party?”
“How about it . . .” he said, leering.
“Sorry, sugar. You’re not my type,” Angel said.
The biker dude laughed the raised his shot glass to the bartender. “Call the girls, Jeremy. And give this lady another drink on me.”
Angel guessed right. The busty brunette with a permanent deer-in-the-headlights look was Tammy. On stage and off.
Once Angel had her behind closed doors, in a most embarrassing bent-over-at-the-waist, ass-in-her-face kind of position, she pulled out the Jimbo picture and waved it around until she had Tammy’s full attention. All ten braincells’ attention.
Turns out there really are some sensitive strippers in the world. Maybe even some who are working their way through medical school. By the time Angel left, Tammy was practically her BFF, swearing on her life she didn’t know the guy was married, and honestly, he wasn’t really her type anyway, you know? Angel said she knew, and thanked her for the new address to enter into her GPS. Apparently Daddy and Marshall didn’t know everything after all.
Chapter 18
TEDESCO, CHASING IT
I was dragging a bit from the late night at the poker house and, admittedly, I didn’t have Tommy’s internal map, but I knew how to get to The Leopard Lounge and where to park to make sure I’d still have a vehicle afterward.
When I was dancing with the boys, this place was ours on Wednesday nights. We kicked the guys out, let the ladies in, and hung a banner: Hump Night Special: $1 Screaming Orgasms. Yeah, those were the days.
Even before the door opened, I felt the pounding bass vibrating like a large bell in my chest. My sinuses loosened, the headache at the back of my neck moved a bit north. I stepped in, tipping my chin to the bouncer, a beefy, faceless guy who could have been perched on a stool at the door of any number of bars in the county. They all had the same angry look, the same bushy, black mustache and bald head, as if they’d gone to bouncer school to learn how to dress like a European hit man, how to cross their arms at the correct angle and pressure to highlight already-bulging biceps. It was all designed to make a statement: “I don’t take no shit. Especially from you, creep.”
I could dig it. The guy nodded back and I walked into the dark. There was a smell to the place, Lysol and musk, like clean and nasty were competing for top billing. I was glad for the dim lights.
Two more bouncer types leaned on the bar, though the place had less than a handful of customers. I ordered a beer, then sat at a table near the stage. Purely for research purposes.
The music changed from head-banging to something bluesy, smart-sexy, not as much of a slap in the face. A white screen dropped into place and a spotlight snapped on behind it. It was too bright until my eyes adjusted, then it felt like it was the only thing in the room. No chairs, no tables, no sticky-topped bar, no tough-guy bouncers or squirrelly men in baggy pants. Just me and the glowing screen.
The dancer appeared in shadow segments, like a stop-motion film. A pointed toe. One leg. A muscular, arched back. Long hair trailing. She posed like the chrome girl on a truck’s mud flaps. Fit and trim, her legs were two-thirds of the package, topped off with a high, tight ass and tits that were not big or perky enough to be fake. Either she was smart or young and new, strapped for cash. She reached offstage and pulled a rolling chair and hat into the frame. She bent over, ass to us, and pushed her hair into the hat, then straddled the chair.
The music swelled—and so did something else—as the girl writhed and gyrated. I would never look at office furniture the same way again. As the tempo slowed she rose, spinning the chair out of the picture and snapping open a retractable cane. She tipped her head to the side and removed her hat. Her full mane of hair tumbled out. Someone sighed. This was better than Basinger in 9½ Weeks.
The shadow girl continued telling her wordless body story. A swivel of the hips, a shimmy of the breasts, a hair flip, and a torso roll. We were hers. She might have been our girlfriend, our wife, the girl next door, or the missed opportunity on that island in our twenties. She took the music as her partner, exciting and full, deep beats, ramming drums, mixed with prancy piano runs and some sort of woodwind trilling a promise—something she might have whispered in our ears, a sound that could have come from between her thighs.
She captivated us with a simple black-and-white bump and grind. A nipple was an exclamation point, the curve of her ass a question mark. Her dance told a tale that we didn’t want to end.
It was magic.
A single moment in a strip bar in Syracuse, New York, in the middle of a nothing afternoon. Magic. I could almost have believed I was in a better place, a classy place, a place where they paid you in diamonds and gold for giving the world that kind of art. A place where the scent of sweat and semen and stale beer was considered the fragrance of gods. A place where men never hit women and women never grew old.
The song ended. Collectively, the room held its breath, waiting for the screen to drop, for the girl to reveal herself. I closed my eyes, not wanting to ruin the perfection my imagination had wrought.
I didn’t need to worry. The sounds of displeasure that came from the front tables assured me our mystery lady had chosen the backstage exit. The music changed again as the screen rose, disappearing into the ceiling. A large black woman in hot pink took the stage—the whole stage.
I put a napkin over my glass to indicate I’d be right back and the waitress shouldn’t take my drink, then wandered back toward the restrooms. As I remembered, the dressing room shared the same narrow hall. I could hear voices behind the door, snippets of the strippers’ conversations.
“He wasn’t fat but he was really, really big and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”
“She tells me—she tells me—that I need to step off! Can you believe that shit?”
“You was great, Yolanda. Hardly couldn’t even tell you wasn’t Chamonix.”
I leaned in closer. What were the chances that there were two girls in town named Chamonix? I was here because I already knew there was some kind of connection, I had just expected the connection to be more Flannigan-Smith oriented than dead-girl oriented. I also couldn’t help feeling a little protective of Buffy’s kid—and curious as to why the kid had been dancing here and who might have been coming here to watch.
The DJ came down the hall, ear to his cell phone, eyes on me. I tried to look drunk
, confused, stupid—all things I’ve been at least once before. I pushed myself into the men’s room as he knocked on the dressing room door.
“Ladies, Two minutes. Customer Relations Time in two minutes.”
The way the guy said “Customer Relations Time,” he made it sound important, like they were part of a mighty marketing machine that could change the way consumers thought, the way money was spent, the way wars were fought. Like what these girls were doing out there was more than offering a few kind words to a bunch of immature losers who still lived in their mother’s house, like this was the real deal, not at all like they were making their living objectifying themselves for the big shot who needed to think girls really liked him, not his money.
But for me, “Customer Relations Time” meant a free opportunity to ask questions without looking like a cop.
I returned to my table, tried to figure out which of these dancers Flannigan or Smith might have been into. For the sake of research, I decided to work my way down the line, starting with the blonde in the pink panties.
I motioned her over, paid for a lap dance, and let her lead me to the “interview area,” a sticky red pleather booth with suspiciously dim lighting.
“Hey, you know a guy who owns a bar called Flannigan’s?”
“Why? Is he hiring?” She asked, pausing in her thigh grinding to reach up and adjust her breasts. One seemed to be stuck in the left-turn position. Not that I was noticing.
I wanted to ask her the name of her perfume so I’d be sure to never make the mistake of buying it for my mother, or anyone else. I also wanted to ask her who the big guys were at the bar, but I didn’t want her to think that I wasn’t giving her my undivided attention, though by the look in her eyes she wasn’t fully in the room or even on the planet. She swung around, whipping me with her weave, and shoved her ass in my face with a glance over her shoulder to check her aim. I caught the tail end of what she was saying, but the music was pretty loud. “Say it again?”
She stopped wiggling and twisted around a little more. “I said, there’s a girl who comes by sometimes who works at a place that sounds like that, but I think it’s called Shenanigan’s.”
“What’s her name?”
“Um . . .” She shook her butt some more, like she was trying to jiggle the name out of it. “I think Shangri-la? Or is that a song?”
Realizing this could take a while, I took another ten out of my pocket.
The girl gyrating in the next booth leaned over. “Turn that into a fifty and I’ll fill in the blanks of Spacey.”
“Hey!” My dancer jumped up and pushed out her chest even more. I was mildly surprised that was anatomically possible. “It’s Stacey! Not Spacey!”
“What. Ever.” The new girl looked at me. “Well?”
“Sure,” I said and reached for my warm beer like I was the coolest dude in the place.
She smiled. I could hear the guy she was grinding against moan. She rolled her eyes and, for the first time, I saw life in The Leopard Lounge. I tucked the ten in Stacey’s garter and gave her a little smack on the butt, part “nice job” and part “move on, now.”
I peeled another ten and two twenties off my bill roll and showed the new girl. She whispered something in her client’s ear, then pushed off the banquette and came around to my side of the booth.
I patted the seat. “Take a break.”
She looked around, hesitated.
I said, “I know, same price. No problem.”
She sat, flashing a brief smile and revealing more wide pink gums than I thought was normal, though I’ve been told I have a gum issue.
She bent down and, for an awkward moment, I thought something was going to happen. It didn’t. She reached under the booth and came up with a pack of cigarettes, tapped one out, and lit up without asking.
“I’m Candy, by the way.” She offered her hand.
I took it. “Tedesco.” Her hand was dry, the handshake professional. “Are you sure you can smoke in here?”
“They let me,” she said, exhaling a plume over my head. “If I’m working. Some guys think it’s sexy.”
For me, cigarettes were about the farthest thing from sexy. If you had to put anything in your body to make you feel better, then—according to every health article written—it was poison. Add in how that particular poison stunk up your house, car, clothes, body, caused yellow teeth, bad breath, and cancer? Yeah, not so sexy.
I let the girl smoke and bought her a glass of what passed for wine in this place.
She said, “Her name’s Chamonix. She usually does that song behind the curtain, the one Yolanda did earlier? That’s her gig. She hasn’t been around for a while. It’s not unusual. Some of these girls go missing for months, then show up like a prodigal child.”
She noticed my expression.
“Don’t be so surprised. I went to college. Used to work a nine-to-five. Just couldn’t make the bills without a little extra. Then it got so the extra was better than the real job.” She shrugged, then elbowed me like she was letting me in on a secret. “I still wear a suit a few times a month, sensible shoes, the whole bit. Guess you could say I clean up good. Anyway, you aren’t here to talk about me.” She waved her hand in the air, stubbed out the cigarette on the bottom of her stiletto, and drained her wine. “Chamonix? She’s a good kid. I’ve seen it before. They do it for the thrill. Then it might get so they need it. Like a validation. Like the performer in her needs to be let out to play. Maybe she’s acting out a fantasy, or running from her reality.”
What the fuck? Who the hell was this stripper? Freud? I looked closer. The broad was close to my age, though in the dim light you really had to concentrate to see it. She had something beneath the surface, something that said she had seen enough to know what she was talking about. I listened closer.
“We pay her in cash. The owner, Duke? He doesn’t care as long as he doesn’t know anything about it. One time a lady came in here, said her friends dared her. She offered us cash to let her on stage for one song. We acted like she was putting us out, like the five large wasn’t enough.” Candy laughed.
I motioned the waitress for another wine for Chatty Cathy. She held the glass correctly, by the stem, and sipped—didn’t chug this one. I almost thought she was going to raise the glass and admire the hue or reflect on the grape’s viscosity or whatever the hell wine people do. But she didn’t. She kept talking.
“Anyway, Chamonix is really good. She could make some decent cash here if she wanted. You tell her that.”
“I would, but I can’t.”
“Don’t tell me. You were hired by her family to bring her home, to set her right, to fix her.”
“Nope.”
“You’re doing this for her own good?”
“Nope.”
“You see her potential, want to marry her and take her away from all this?” She drew her arm across the room, in game-show-model fashion.
“Nope. But I think I saw all those movies and read all those books.”
She smiled. “Touché.”
We clinked glasses. I watched her when I said, “I want to find out who killed her and why.”
She reacted like an innocent person would—and I knew people.
“Killed? Oh my God.”
She did that female thing, clutching her chest, her heart. It would have been more effective if she had been wearing a top. To me, it looked a little too sexy to be taken as shock, fear, or the realization of one’s mortality. But what was I thinking? I’d just told a stripper that another—albeit part-time—stripper was dead. What did I expect? I know what part of me hoped for: that she’d burst into tears, allow me to comfort her, maybe even sweep her up in my arms and take her home to finish the comforting. Like we were reenacting our parts in An Officer and a Gentleman, which in my head segued into Behind the Green Door.
But there was no time for any of that. One of the bouncer types at the bar noticed that I had made the nice stripper lady cry.
He ru
mbled across the room, tanklike. “Everything all right here, Candy?” Each syllable punctuated as left, right, jab.
I raised my ginger ale and took a sip, unsure where this was all going but fully aware of the opening on his left and how if I tossed the soda in his face I could make the lunge-leap-and-roll escape I had practiced and perfected quite a few assholes ago.
Candy put her hand on the bouncer’s arm. “It’s okay. Just some bad news. We’re fine. Really. See?” And she tried one of those overcompensating smiles like you find on portraits hung in mall photo studios, except her nose was running and she was almost naked.
The guy bought it and backed away, but not before he gave me one of those I’m-watching-you looks, complete with the two-finger-eyes-to-me gesture.
I sent him the “oooh” face and a fake little shiver, even though it was something I’d seen Tommy do and was probably a gay thing. Then I finished telling Candy what I knew about Chamonix and watched her move to the second stage of bad news, the part where you realize, holy shit, it could have been me.
I asked her if there was anything she could tell me that might help. She stubbed out her cigarette then said, “One time Chamonix came in with another girl—a really sexy thing, beautiful as a movie star. Had quality work done, you know what I’m saying? One of the girls asked if she was looking for work. She would have killed on stage, looking like that. But she said she was in a complicated relationship, said she had a man who’d never approve. She looked a little afraid when she said it. I know that look.” Candy got a little dreamy-eyed.
“Do you remember her name?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She laughed. “That was the thing—she already had a stripper name. Crescent Moon.”
I almost said the name at the same time. Instead I asked, “You said sometimes girls go missing, then they come back. Anybody lately?”
“None of the girls from the day shift. I wouldn’t know about the night girls. I’m first off, so I don’t run into any of them.”
The waitress glided by, slipping a note to Candy.