We met up at a sushi place near work (her idea) and sampled a few plates of sashimi. In recent years I had developed a taste for the wasabi and fresh ginger that accompanied the dishes, but I hadn’t quite gotten used to the cuisine. It wasn’t that it tasted bad. It was that a plate of sushi just wasn’t the filling meal that this corn-fed Midwestern girl was used to. I had read somewhere that the Japanese have a practice of stopping eating once they are eighty percent full, a habit that pretty much flipped the American model on its head. Where I came from, we ate until we were full, and then we ate another eighty percent on top of that. If you weren’t busting open the top button on your pants after a meal, you’d done something wrong.
“Do they ever fry this stuff?” I asked seriously.
Kayla giggled. “Sometimes. You ever hear of tempura?”
“Sort of,” I said. “Next time we’ll try that.”
She shrugged. I supposed eating fish and rice was what kept her so thin. “Anyway.” She began, shifting in her seat. “Have you found anything out?”
I grimaced. “Not a thing. The cops are being very tight-lipped for some reason. This guy, Dwyer, is a homicide detective, which tells you something, but he won’t even confirm that there’s a murder investigation going on.”
“Hunh,” she said.
I was eyeing the dessert menu. I held it up and looked at her suggestively.
“No thanks,” she said, smiling. “But you go ahead.”
I resisted the urge, fearing the wrath of her inevitable judgment upon me. “Anyway, I was hoping you could tell me more about her. Anything that comes to mind, anything that might have gotten her in trouble.”
“You mean besides what you already know?” she asked.
“Yes, anything.”
She thought for a moment. “It was just usual stuff, you know? I mean, until we got into these investments.”
“So she wasn’t tight with drug dealers or organized crime or anything like that?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not at all. For a stripper she was pretty much on the straight and narrow.”
I paused for a minute before bringing up a more delicate topic. “What about…?” I let the question dangle in the air.
Kayla frowned but then got my secret meaning. “No, no, nothing like that,” she said. “She made enough money doing it the honest way, you know, just working onstage. I mean, I’m sure there were some guys she took care of, but she never had to go that route.” She was speaking in code, but it was a code we both understood very well. “Taking care” of a guy meant a quid pro quo for a dancer’s best customers, guys who tipped a lot and who could be trusted. But Kayla was also saying that Miranda hadn’t branched out into the not too uncommon practice of working a little more lucrative, and much less legal, side business involving “extra” services. Services of a horizontal nature.
“Huh,” I said, trying to mask my disappointment. Selfishly, I recognized that it would have been better if she’d been killed for some reason completely unrelated to me.
“Can we back up to when you got involved in all this?” I asked Kayla.
She was stirring the ice in her empty drink. “Yeah, it was just, like, four months ago. I remember because it was the hottest day of the year. July something, and the air conditioning was out in our locker room, so we were all sweating like pigs.”
I chuckled. “I remember that. I think I took that whole week off.”
“We didn’t all have that luxury, of course. We’re not all Raven McShanes after all.” She said it with a smile, but I sensed a touch of genuine jealousy. It was common knowledge that I’d been a good earner for more than a decade. Most girls squandered what money they made and had to live paycheck to paycheck, whereas I’d managed to stash some money away. It was about the only thing I’d done right with my life, so I liked to dwell on it.
“Anyway,” she continued, “that was when she told me about it. I thought it was a scam at first, of course. I mean, who wouldn’t?”
I sniffed. “The eyes see what they want to see. We all wanted it to be real so badly that we ended up buying into it.”
She shrugged. “We don’t know that it’s not real, though, right? Unless you know something I don’t, of course.” Her eyes were surveying my face, searching for clues.
I smiled. “No, I don’t. It’s just that I’m past the honeymoon phase with this whole thing. I’m looking at it very skeptically. Especially if—” I left the thought unsaid.
Our eyes met, and I could tell that we were both scared. Someone we knew was missing, and there was probably a connection between all of us.
She broke our short silence. “You think we’re in danger?”
I shrugged, trying to keep it casual. “It’s not like we know anything. That’s what I wanted to find out about Miranda. How did she get into this whole thing? Did she say?”
Kayla nodded. “It was Aaron. He’s one of those guys who skulks around the club sometimes, and he’d taken a shine to Miranda. I think he was a good tipper, and Miranda probably played ball a little and gave him a little extra loving on the side. Anyway, she said getting involved in the investment was a ‘reward’ and that Aaron had a soft spot for her. She was actually quite proud of it in a weird way.”
I frowned. “So was the connection directly between Aaron and her then? Nobody else?”
“Not that I ever heard about. Of course, we’re just a couple of nobodies. Obviously there’s some serious money in this, and with serious money comes serious people.” Her voice had taken on a somber tone which I couldn’t help picking up.
“People who do serious things like kill people,” I muttered. I instantly regretted it since of course we didn’t know that to be true at all.
She cringed. And then she smiled. “Well, this certainly has gotten grim!”
I smiled to release the tension. “It’s tempting to sit here and have a few drinks and then blow off work.”
“I know,” she said, nodding. “I was just thinking the same thing. But I promised. Management is already on my ass about my schedule. I guess I got a little cocky when I had all that money coming in. I felt like I didn’t need to take work seriously anymore, and I blew off a few nights without calling in.”
“Bad idea,” I said. “For every employee like us, there’s a dozen pretty girls who are younger and hungrier for work. It’s a miracle I’m still at it really,” I said, mostly to myself.
We got the check, and I paid, claiming I could write it off as a business expense, which was true in theory. But I knew in practice I’d be too lazy to keep the receipt and write it down somewhere.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was debatable whether working the previous evening had been worth it. During our first break together, Kayla and I exchanged eye rolls and muttered about the crowd, which was thin and tightwaddish. Not a single good tip all evening. Neither of us had been much in the mood to work, given the situation with Miranda, but we slogged it out and chased lean tips until the wee hours.
Kayla and I had been commiserating together as we got ready to leave, and we walked each other out to the parking lot, along with Maxim, one of the bouncers. Four a.m. was no time to be out alone on the street, especially near a strip club, and the club had a rule that no girl left the place unescorted by security. It wasn’t that the management valued us as human beings, though. They just didn’t want to get sued if one of us got mugged on their lot.
Kayla stopped in her tracks. “See her?” she whispered, nodding her head at Julia, a dancer who’d been at the club only a few months. Kayla made a pouty face.
“Yeah,” I said noncommittally, unsure why Kayla was frowning at her.
“Check that car out!” she hissed.
It was dark out, but there were plenty of street lamps illuminating the employee lot behind the club. I couldn’t tell if the car was black or dark gray, but it was clear as day that it was a Lexus. And not the entry-level model, either. It was a little two-seater with sleek lines and
a curvaceous rear end. Not unlike its owner, as a matter of fact.
“You don’t think—” I started, letting the thought dangle in the air.
Kayla shrugged. “Could be. I mean, she’s doing pretty well at the club, probably about five or six grand a month. And she only started a few months ago.” Dancers like us developed a sixth sense for how much a girl could earn based on her looks, body, and attitude. It made me feel like a bidder at a cattle auction, but it was unavoidable.
“What do you think that car costs? Sixty?” I asked.
“Easy. Although she could be leasing it or something. But still. It makes you think. Although maybe we’re just a little paranoid right now,” she added.
I nodded. When someone you know had been killed, and when you’d been involved with some of the same people she was involved with, it was easy to see dark shadows around every corner. In other words, it was easy to assume that someone with a flashy new car was in on the same thing.
I found myself walking over to Julia. I didn’t know her very well, but it was worth a shot.
“Nice car,” I said, moving my eyebrows up and down for effect. “New?”
She smiled. “Thanks. Just got it last week, actually, so yeah, it’s very new. Want to take it out?”
She was being surprisingly nice considering that she barely knew me, it was four in the morning, and the shift had been duller than a bucket of sand. “No, thanks. I’ll just admire it from afar.”
She looked me and Kayla over and then smiled a tight smile. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“What are we thinking?” Kayla asked, her hands moving to her hips in a modestly challenging manner.
“You’re thinking I’ve got an old rich guy on the side who buys me toys. Right? I mean, it’s pretty obvious. She was still smiling, but it was a guarded expression rather than a smile of genuine warmth.
“Well, do you?” I blurted out.
She folded her arms across her chest. “No. Not yet anyways,” she said and then laughed at her little joke. “This I bought with my own money. I’ve been investing it. Some of the other girls are, too. You should join in!”
Kayla elbowed me subtly.
“Investing? How?” I asked, playing dumb.
“Friend of mine. I don’t know the details, but it’s something to do with oil wells halfway around the world.” She seemed bored by even this vaguest level of detail.
Kayla and I looked at each other. “Is this through one of your customers? A guy named Aaron?” I asked.
Julia looked confused. “Yes, actually. How did you know?”
I smiled. “We’re already part of the club. We didn’t know he had other investors.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “In fact, he’s encouraging us to get more people involved every day. If you sign up and mention my name, I get a cut of your profits. But I suppose it’s too late with you guys.”
We nodded in unison. “So you’re making out okay then, are you?”
Julia grinned and then rubbed her fingers together as if fingering an imaginary wad of bills. “Yeah. You too?”
“Yup,” Kayla said. “Almost too good to be true, right?”
“That’s what I thought,” Julia said.
A not so muffled cough echoed through the lot. It came from Maxim, the bouncer, who was clearly not very happy about our little chitchatting party. He wanted to get back inside where it was warmer.
“Interesting,” Kayla muttered. “We’ll talk again, okay? It’s getting late.” With this, she shot a death stare at Maxim who returned the death stare with a blasé shrug. I determined to accidentally step on his toes with one of my stiletto heels someday.
“Sure. I’ll see you guys around the club,” Julia said, and then she got into her shiny new car.
We watched her pull out. Maxim was still acting like a grumpy six year old, anxious for us to get out of there too. He probably wanted to go home and play video games until the wee hours.
“I’m fried,” Kayla said, meeting my eyes. “Let’s talk about this tomorrow, okay?”
I nodded. “Definitely. This changes things, I think. Don’t you?”
She tightened her jaw and looked somber. “Definitely.”
Lost in thought, I drove home where I polished off a half of a leftover pizza and then did some serious work on a half gallon of butter pecan. Taking the whole tub to the couch with me caused a number of problems. One, it made it just too damned easy to keep eating. Two, the longer I held it in my lap, the more it melted, and the softer and more delicious the ice cream got. One more bite became well, maybe just one more bite, which quickly became oh, who the hell are you trying to kid? Everyone knows you’re going to finish the entire thing. If they gave out Olympic medals for stress eating, I’d have a dozen golds.
I tossed back a few glasses of red wine while my stomach tried to account for the onslaught I had delivered it. As it turns out, that was not the wisest of ideas. I’d had a vague recollection that eating cold food was bad for digestion, something about slowing down the process, and the fact that I was lying in a prone position gripping my stomach and moaning seemed a pretty good validation of that theory. It will suffice to say that it was almost six in the morning before I finally conked off.
Not surprisingly, my sleep was fitful, plagued by bizarre, dreamy images of my bloated body floating down a river of tan-colored, melted ice cream, a giant ladle in my hand. Instead of a boat, I was perched on a massive floating pecan, scooping the melted ice cream goo into my mouth with the ladle and gnawing on a sausage pizza with the other, growing larger every second but never fully satiated.
That recurring dream took up the first half of the morning. By eleven or noon, I was tossing around, bothered by something much more troubling than the idiotic “meal” I’d shoveled down the night before. When I finally awoke around two, it was clear that I was having a hard time processing what Julia had told us the night before. When I’d signed up with Aaron only a month earlier, he’d played hard to get, as though he was doing me a favor by letting me in. Now it seemed the opposite was true. Julia was openly recruiting other girls and even got incentives for bringing new people in. Was that just a change in strategy, or was it the result of desperation? And did it have anything to do with Miranda’s death?
I was determined to find out. But how?
I texted Alex and told him to call me when he had a free minute. In the meantime I made myself some breakfast. I rooted around in my freezer and dug up some old bratwursts, a link (literally) to my Midwestern roots. Since it was two o’clock in the afternoon, it was okay to have a brat or two for breakfast, I reasoned. After all, what was the difference between bratwurst and breakfast sausage? A few scrambled eggs and some cranberry juice rounded it out.
I was on my second cup of coffee when Alex called me. I tried to picture what he looked like on the other end. He was probably secreted away in his large corner office, looking out at a view of the mountains or the Strip. Undoubtedly, he was the best dressed man in the building. Was he wearing a gray suit or a blue one? Was he wondering what I was wearing?
I quit daydreaming and got straight to the point.
“Suppose you were running some kind of financial scam, and things were going along fine, right? People were getting paid, and money was flowing like maple syrup over steaming-hot pancakes.”
“Okay,” he said, chuckling. “Everything’s about food with you, isn’t it? I’m starting to see a pattern here.”
I sighed, knowing he was right. “Okay, but then imagine that you suddenly and dramatically increased your efforts to recruit people into the scam. In the old days it was hard to get into, kind of a secretive thing, but now, all of a sudden, anyone and everyone can join up. That would be a pretty big red flag, wouldn’t it?” I asked.
He was silent for a few seconds. “No, that would be a giant red flag. What you’re describing is basically how every Ponzi scheme ends. Things are fine, which is why more people get involved. In fact, remember the
Bernie Madoff case? He did the same thing. He would tell people he was doing them a favor by managing their money, like it was this exclusive club. But then near the end, he was going around begging. Any schmuck with a few thousand bucks could get in.”
“Because he was running low, right?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Exactly,” he said. “When the market crashed, everyone wanted their money at the same time. It was like musical chairs, except there were a thousand people and only a dozen chairs. He had to keep shifting them around and playing the music faster and faster.”
“Until the music finally stopped,” I muttered softly. “So you think this is what’s going on? How could things go from great to crappy in just a few weeks?”
Alex was silent again. “Maybe somebody talked.”
“How would that affect anything?” I asked.
“Well, I mean, if the whole thing’s phony, then it’s built solely on the trust of the people investing in it. There’s nothing backing it up. And so if people get skittish, they might start asking for their money back all at the same time. Just like a run on a bank.”
I was trying to process it all. Everything he was saying made sense and lined up in a general way with what I’d already sensed myself. “When people lose confidence in the bank, they all try to take their money out.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Although the banks are federally insured now for exactly that reason. And the bank has to go around trying to round up new investors, telling them everything’s just fine and there will be rainbows and unicorns as far as the eye can see.”
I chuckled. “Rainbows and unicorns, eh?”
“It’s an industry term,” he said. I could sense him smiling on the other end. “I have investors, too, remember. When things look bad, I have to hold their hand and convince them to stay with us. So I know all about rainbows and unicorns. Believe me.”
“Got it,” I said, trying to picture Alex holding the hand of some nervous investor. “I suppose I should figure out if there’s a run on the bank going on here. I haven’t heard anything like that, though. It’s all just a hunch I have based on the fact that they seem to be ramping up their recruiting efforts pretty seriously. It could just be a way of bringing in lots more money.”
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