She led me through double doors—decorated with life-size cut-out silhouettes of well-endowed lovelies—into an auditorium, and to a table near the stage. It featured a painted backdrop representing a seldom-visited oasis somewhere south of the Atlas Mountains, probably appropriated from a label found on a package of Medjool dates. This was not the golden age of grind. Burlesque had been buried somewhere in Hudson County, New Jersey; pole dancing had not yet graduated from redneck tent shows; and lap dancing was a few years away from being recognized as an authentic form of conceptual art. You could go to Vegas for over-decorated floor shows, and Paris offered extravaganzas like the Crazy Horse, but above all else this was the era of topless go-go dancing. For some reason, it was considered more titillating when performed on a table or a bar counter, or best of all in a cage hanging from the ceiling of some converted chop suey joint filled with flashing strobe lights. If you fancied coked-up bimbos in spangled bikini bottoms with gold tassels glued to their nipples, you could find them in practically any corner bar—and probably at church socials in some parts of town.
If you were looking for aesthetic stripping with a little tease appended, you had to search harder. The art of disrobing to the accompaniment of stilted syncopation and lecherous rim-shots had survived, but was confined to either seedy backroom dives where getting your pockets picked was part of the service or flashier establishments that aped the conventions of 1940s nightclubs as seen in B movies. There was a cluster of the gaudier sort within a block or two of 42nd Street and, by the thickness of a gold lamé G-string, Aladdin’s Alibi was the gaudiest. The decor was casbah-themed, and seating was in leatherette-upholstered booths and at jammed-together tables just big enough to support a couple of martini glasses and meager sandwiches priced like Tiffany bracelets. The place was packed with conventioneers in rayon suits, college boys seeking further education, and the odd couple from White Plains hoping to rekindle a dying flame.
Shirley signaled to a bored-looking waitress costumed as a belly dancer, who brought me a drink and favored me with a languid once-over. On stage was a stocky blonde who went by the nom de plaisir of Betty Boobs. The name was well chosen, given the amplified contours of her breasts, which had been sculpturally enhanced with synthetic polymers. She took it all off rather unsentimentally to an instrumental version of “The Dock of the Bay” performed by a saxophone-led quartet. My table was so close to the footlights, I could smell the talcum powder on her buttocks. The thought of Sandy Smollett up there on that stage was appalling.
Betty Boobs doffed her G-string and vacated the stage under cover of the ritual blackout, to be replaced by a pockmarked little troll in Baghdad bloomers and a Shriners’ tarboosh who announced the imminent arrival of Ivana Bendova—“the concupiscent Kremlin cutie who set the Cold War on fire”—then launched into a barrage of leering obscenities.
“Here’s a question for you ladies out there—if men jack off, do you Jill off?”
It was a relief when the waitress returned with the news that Mr. Garofolo could see me. She led me out to the lobby, and then Shirley Squilacci took over. She accompanied me upstairs to a landing, where she knocked on a door marked PRIVATE. The voice I’d heard on the phone about forty minutes earlier called out “Come,” and La Squilacci opened the door and announced me to a man who was seated behind a moderne-looking desk that I guessed had been imported from someplace like Milan, Italy, as opposed to Milan, Ohio—the birthplace of Thomas Edison.
Joey Garofolo stood to greet me. He was not tall, but he had presence. About forty, with neatly trimmed hair and light brown eyes, he was in shirtsleeves but wore a conservative necktie figured with fleurs-de-lys that suggested there was a Brooks Brothers jacket on a hanger somewhere nearby. As he stepped from behind his desk to shake hands, I couldn’t help but notice that he had on the kind of handmade shoes that look as if they should be on a plinth in the Metropolitan Museum. People who have those special passports with extra pages for all the customs and immigration stamps they accumulate bring shoes like these back from Europe and say off-handedly, “Nice, aren’t they? I had them made at a little place near the duomo.”
Not only did Joey Garofolo look like a Wall Street lawyer, his office might have belonged to one. There were hardwood veneers everywhere you looked, articulated high-tech light fixtures, and one of those executive desk sets with a matching fountain pen, mechanical pencil, and paper knife. Shit like that. The only items that hinted that the place was the lair of a strip club owner were a couple of paintings of vintage burlesque queens but, inevitably, they were the work of Stewart Langham, charged with museum-endorsed respectability.
At first glance, then, this seemed to be the kind of dude who would hold the door open for ladies before slapping them around a bit. Except for a faint scent of menace—or maybe it was eau de cologne—there was nothing about him that would suggest that he had earned the nickname “the Shiv.” It was difficult to believe the story told about him that insisted he, as an eager and well-connected young soldier in the Arracci family, had tied an alleged snitch to a chair, slashed the man’s cheeks open from the corners of his mouth to his ears, and then hung him upside down in the air shaft of a tenement building, leaving him to rot until the neighbors judged, sometime much later, that it was safe to call 911.
Garofolo waved me into a chair, thanked me for coming, and said, “Call me Joey,” as if I would have dreamed of calling him anything else, like maybe “Mister Garofolo, sir.”
As far as I was concerned, he could call me anything he liked.
“I wanted to thank you personally,” he said, “for helping out with Sandy.”
Helping out? That was a nice turn of phrase.
“She’s an important part of our family,” he continued.
Used by Joey Garofolo, the word “family” was open to multiple interpretations.
“Sandy’s a great kid,” I said, striving to match his ambiguity.
“You’re fond of her?” he suggested.
He was teasing me with changeups around the edge of the plate. I told myself to be patient and wait for the fastball down the middle.
“I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to Sandy,” I said.
Foul ball sliced into the stands. Still one-one.
“I don’t quite understand what your relationship with Sandy is about,” said Garofolo.
“It’s about her being scared.”
He nodded.
“And her relationship with you,” he said, “is that purely professional?”
“We’ve never discussed terms.”
“But you intend to?”
“Not necessarily. She came to me for help. I said I’d try to help her. That’s all.”
“Just like that? Out of the kindness of your heart?”
“You could put it that way. So far as I could tell, nobody else was offering.”
“There were other places she could have turned. Right here, for example.”
“You’d have to ask Sandy about that.”
“You can be sure I will. No offense, Mister Novalis—can I call you Alex?—but I have reliable information that suggests you are a small-time private investigator with little experience in situations where major-league trouble is concerned.”
That was a sweet way of putting it.
“Strictly sandlot ball,” I said, “but always hoping for that shot at the majors. Who knows—maybe even the Hall of Fame.”
“Big dreams, Alex. Sometimes you wake up from dreams like that and find the game is over and you didn’t even make it to first base.”
“Why don’t we cut the baseball crap?” I asked. “The season’s dead and buried. Let’s save the knuckleballs for spring training. All I know is that Sandy Smollett is a scared little girl, and for some reason she turned to me for help. She said she was being stalked, and I saw firsthand evidence of that when she was attacked by a maniac a couple
of days ago. I don’t know if that gentleman is still on the loose, or if maybe the cops put him behind bars. Perhaps you know him—a guy with a horribly scarred face and eyes that could burn through armor plating. Might be a Vietnam vet. I also know that another creep who was also stalking her hanged himself in her sublet. He was a different kind of maniac. I’d guess he’d been watching too many skin flicks. I suppose you never heard of a schmuck called Paul Drexler?”
“Paulie? It’s too bad about Paulie. Yes, he was employed here for a while. He used to work in the movie business in a small way, but it seems he had a knack for getting under people’s skin. Same thing when he got here. I didn’t know that when I hired him. He’d try to hit on the strippers. What I did know was that his film work had given him some knowledge of lighting. I hired him to jazz up the lighting for the show, but he spent too much of his time backstage trying to get close to the girls.”
“Including Sandy?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
I planned to do exactly that! Why the fuck did she lie to me about not knowing who the stalker was?
“What happened to Drexler?” I asked.
“I had to let him go. He was causing too much trouble—spying on the girls, taking G-strings and stuff home . . .”
“And did you rehire him to follow Sandy around—maybe scare her?”
“I don’t like the implication of that question,” said Garofolo. “From what I now know of Paulie, he wouldn’t have needed much encouragement to start following a girl he took a liking to.”
“Did he ever work at your place in Fort Lauderdale?”
“I believe I sent him down there to tweak the lighting.”
“So when did you learn Drexler had hanged himself?”
“What makes you think I knew until now?”
“You said, ‘Too bad about Paulie.’ ”
“Did I? I guess I meant it was too bad he turned out to be a pervert.”
“Really? I would guess that maybe someone had filled you in about Drexler having offed himself. Sandy, for example? Or it could have been one of those ‘reliable sources’ who told you I’m a two-bit punk, or maybe the cops. Or maybe it was the cops who told you I’m a two-bit punk. I’d prefer to think you didn’t hear that from Sandy.”
Garofolo smiled, pleasantly enough.
“That’s neither here nor there,” he said. “What I want to talk about is you and Sandy.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I hope she’s telling the truth when she says you haven’t fucked her.”
“Whose business is that?”
“I try to be straightforward. Sandy is something special. You should catch her act sometime. If I was in your position, I’d want to fuck her. But if you were to give in to that impulse, you would make certain people very unhappy.”
“Including you? And an uptight Upper East Side attorney? And an aspiring gubernatorial candidate?”
“People with a lot to lose.”
“I’m not immune to Sandy’s charms—but right now I’m trying to see she doesn’t get into any more trouble—major league or otherwise.”
“And has she—y’know—come on to you?”
“Jesus! Why don’t you ask her?”
“I probably will. Not that I would necessarily take her answer at face value. Listen, Alex, I don’t mean to be nosy, but there’s a lot at stake here.”
“A lot at stake where?”
“What I’m trying to say is Sandy is off-limits. You can smooch with her all you want, but there’s a line you don’t cross—understood?”
Where had I heard that tune before?
“Don’t forget that, Mister Novalis. If it slips your memory, I’ll have to take appropriate action.”
Garofolo’s tone had changed, and it was becoming easier to believe that he knew one end of a switchblade from the other.
“You’ve made that very clear.”
“Sandy knows the rules, but I don’t want anybody to start messing with her mind.”
“Why don’t you just take her off my hands?”
“Because now that we’ve had this little chat, I think she’s going to be safe with you.”
“Should I take that as a compliment?”
“That’s up to you. Now you’re going to have to excuse me. You can enjoy the rest of the show, if you feel like it, or Shirley can call the car and see to it that you get home. Sandy would probably appreciate that.”
As I left, I took another peek at the desk set. The paper knife looked as if it might be useful if you wanted to carve your initials on somebody’s face.
FOURTEEN
When I got back to 12th Street, Sandy was in her underwear, ironing a skirt.
“Do you need anything ironed?” she asked.
“Only my libido.”
I told her to put on a robe. She looked hurt.
“I was here alone—I didn’t think it was a big deal. Are you mad at me?”
“For Christ’s sake, put on the fucking robe,” I told her. “You look too fucking available and your boss just warned me that I had better not get fresh with you or he will personally lop my balls off.”
Sandy’s eyes widened and her mouth opened as if she was waiting for someone to pop a goldfish into it. Then she put down the iron and hugged me. This girl had learned everything she knew about compassion from the Marquis de Sade.
“Joey didn’t really say that, did he?” she asked.
“He said that there’s a line I’d better not cross. That was why he wanted to see me—to tell me that.”
She didn’t respond.
“What’s the fucking story?” I asked. “Not that it’s any business of mine, but you take your clothes off for a living, and now I have your boss telling me to treat you like a virgin. And he’s not the first one. You’re not a virgin, are you?”
“I lost my virginity,” she said, “very brutally and a long time ago.”
I wanted to pursue that, but sensed it wasn’t the right moment. She picked up my robe from a chair and pulled it on. That’s when I hit her with the question that had been burning me up since I left the Alibi.
“How well did you know Paul Drexler?”
Her face reddened and she pressed her lips together.
“What do you mean?”
“Until recently, Paul Drexler—last seen hanging by the neck from the ceiling in your sublet—was employed as a lighting designer at the Alibi. He also put in some time at Aladdin’s Alley in Florida, possibly while you were down there. Seems he upset some of the girls by playing Peeping Tom and becoming intimate with their underwear—yours included, probably—so he was fired. It would be strange if you didn’t know the guy.”
“Paulie?”
“Yes, Paulie, who I found dead in your apartment and who had been following you home and waving his dick at you—the lowlife whose identity you more than once denied all knowledge of. How well did you know him?”
She burst into tears.
“Paulie’s dead,” she sobbed.
I wanted to shake her, but instead I waited till she calmed down and then posed the question again.
“I didn’t want to tell you,” she said. “I wanted to protect you. I knew if you found out who Paulie was it would drag you into Joey Garofolo’s world, and that’s a dangerous place to be.”
“So how was I supposed to help you if you were withholding incidental little tidbits of information like that? If you weren’t going to let me in on that stuff, why tell me about Drexler at all?”
“He was freaking me out. I had to tell someone about it, but I was afraid if I told you I knew who the guy was, then you’d hurt him or something. I didn’t want that. And I couldn’t tell Joey or anyone at the club because Joey would have had him killed.”
“Joey told me he knew what was goi
ng on.”
“Not about Paulie stalking me.”
“And what makes you so special?”
She burst into tears again.
“How come everyone tells me not to lay a finger on you?” I asked. “What’s it all about, for Christ’s sake? What are you hiding? What’s Joey hiding? And if you’re the Holy Virgin reincarnated, why did you put my hand on your crotch last night? Do you think I’m made of tin?”
She sobbed louder and tried to hug me again. I pushed her away. She was shocked.
“Please don’t do that,” she said.
“Why not? You’ve fed me a pack of lies. That pisses me off.”
“I’m just trying to protect you”
“From what?”
“From something I can’t tell you about.”
“So how am I supposed to help you?”
“I don’t know.”
I sensed she meant that, but that didn’t make me feel any better.
“Did you ever hear of an attorney called J.H. Lucking?”
She shook her head. I believed her. Sort of.
“What about Big Jack Debereaux?”
“He’s some kind of a politician?”
“And Yari’s mother’s boyfriend.”
“I’ve seen him on the news.”
I could see why she might not know anything about Lucking. For all his Yale Law School polish, he was just a kiss-ass hired hand. Debereaux? The Yari connection made that more problematic. Then again, Sandy claimed she had met Yari just the one time, and then for nothing more sinister than a photo shoot. Though she had lied to me about where the shoot had taken place. Debereaux’s involvement told me there was big money somewhere in all of this, the kind that can keep mouths shut, and I remembered that envelope full of cash Lucking had waved under my nose. It had smelled awful sweet. Then there was Garofolo’s involvement. He didn’t mess with nickels and dimes.
Sandy had stopped crying, and now there was fear in her eyes. I’m not one of those assholes who’s turned on by other people’s fear, and it was probably at that moment that my anger began to subside. So the girl was lying. So maybe she had a reason to lie. I’d been there myself when I was trying to protect my job at the DA’s office—and when I told Janice that Naomi Firestone was just an old school friend I’d bumped into at the Castelli Gallery. I suspected Sandy had a lot to protect. I just wished she hadn’t told me those gratuitous lies about Paul Drexler. That suggested to me that she might be one of those people who enjoy lying for the sake of lying.
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