“Yeah, and maybe they found a bunch of new oil fields to finance, too,” he said, deadpanning.
“Are you mocking me now?” I asked.
He chuckled. “No, of course not. Well, maybe just a little bit.”
I sighed loudly, though I wasn’t really upset in the least. “Thanks for your help.”
We hung up, and I found myself staring out the window. What did Alex really think of me? I mean, I could understand his interest in me from an infatuation angle. He clearly thought I was an object of beauty, something he’d been observing from a distance for years, even if that distance was sometimes only a few feet. Compared with his bitchy and unappreciative wife, I must have seemed like a breath of fresh air. But could it last? What would his fancy friends think about the CEO dating a stripper? Once he’d been with me for a few months, would he continue to treat me like a princess? Or would he figure out that I was really just a regular, boring person whose waistline was expanding faster than the national debt?
I shook myself out of it. Not now. Something big was afoot, and it involved my money and potentially my own safety, and I had to get to the bottom of it. Once that was done, I would have all the time in the world to stare out the window thinking about men I didn’t deserve.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I cringed at the thought of returning to Cougar’s, hoping it wouldn’t be another slow night at the club. I cringed at more than that, though. By now I had hoped to be done with this place for good. My investigations business had taken off, but it still wasn’t doing well enough to produce a decent living, at least not this month. The downturn was normal, people told me, since you could never predict when people would need to hire a private investigator. And of course it allowed me some time to figure out what was going on with Miranda and my money, too. But still, I would rather have been busy enough that I could call the manager at Cougar’s and give him my two weeks’ notice. I had dreams of myself walking out of there on my final night, saying goodbye to the bouncers, and then never looking back, never setting foot within a half mile of that place again. At the moment the dream seemed like pure fantasy.
The place was packed, much to my relief. Ten-dollar tips were common, but so were twenties, and a girl could earn hundreds in a night for not too much work, so long as you didn’t consider it work to wriggle around with your clothes off. I had long forgotten what real work felt like, so by my twelfth or thirteenth lap dance—or twentieth? Who knows?—I was happy enough just to keep collecting those green bills that kept being pressed into my hand.
The girls were in a good mood in the locker room, bolstered no doubt by the generous crowd. I spotted Julia, the one with the new Lexus, talking to a dancer I’d only seen once or twice before. She was a tall one, almost six feet, with silvery blonde hair and a body sculpted by hours in the gym. After I fixed up my face, I ventured over to their corner and introduced myself.
She said her name was Kendra, and then her eyes got big for a second. “You’re Raven McShane? The one from the…”
“Newspaper?” I ventured. I had been written up a few times in the Review-Journal in the last few months, the lucky beneficiary of a few headline-grabbing cases.
She frowned. “You were in the paper?”
“Never mind,” I said, crestfallen.
She looked at me curiously. “No, I meant you were the one on all the billboards. Right? Like ten years ago?”
I sighed internally. It had only been about five years ago, but who was counting? “Yes, from the billboards,” I admitted, trying to hide the fact that I was gritting my teeth.
Julia looked confused. “What billboards?”
The new girl smiled. “Sometimes I forget that I’m practically the only girl who actually grew up here in Vegas. Raven here was the dancer around town. Everywhere you looked, her body was plastered up on a giant sign. Guys always come in and ask for the girl on the sign, and that used to be Raven.” She was still looking at me with a touch of what I took for awe and wonder, even though she’d just pegged me as a has-been.
“And buses, too,” I added moronically. They’d created a twenty-foot image of me lounging seductively with no clothes on whatsoever, my interesting parts covered by shiny gold stars. It had been plastered on half the city buses, resulting in my becoming a minor celebrity for a few years. The worst part wasn’t being recognized as the bus girl. It was the fact that I got absolutely no royalties from the use of my image all over town. My body was about the first thing that every mouth-breathing ape who got off an airplane saw when they took a taxi out of the airport, but I never saw a nickel of that. Unless, of course, the guys actually came to the club and hired me for five minutes. The moral of the story was: read the fine print. Apparently, I had signed any rights to my image away when I’d joined Cougar’s as a dancer. They owned me, and all I got in return was the privilege of taking my clothes off in their club.
“You were on buses?” Julia asked, shaking me out of my little pity party. I couldn’t tell if she was impressed or just mocking me.
“Yeah,” I allowed half grudgingly. The truth was I had mixed feelings about those days and had to admit that I wasn’t completely embarrassed by my younger self. People had been talking about me—little old me. I was requested at the club by visiting NFL players and CEOs alike. I even had a guy who told me he’d won a Nobel Prize in physics. Or was it chemistry? I didn’t believe him, of course, but later I looked him up, and he was the real deal. Whenever someone asked for the girl from the signs, I knew I could expect a tip well in excess of the usual five bucks. True, it would have been nicer to have invented something or to have found the cure for cancer or to have won my own Nobel, but still—I was a somebody, at least by Las Vegas standards. And now…not so much.
I wanted to change the subject. “Julia, do you have a minute?” I gestured vaguely at my little cubby on the other side of the dressing room.
She looked at me with a confused expression and then took my meaning. “Oh, of course,” she said, smiling. Not the brightest bulb, this one.
We huddled on stools in the relative privacy of my little corner of the room, our faces illuminated by the glaring lights surrounding my vanity.
“Did you know Miranda at all?” I asked, getting straight to the point.
“A little bit,” she said. “I heard what happened. That was awful.” Her mouth was showing a genuine look of concern.
“Did you know that she was investing in oil fields too?” I asked, trying not to alarm Julia.
“She was? No, I didn’t know that.”
I nodded. I hadn’t expected Julia and Miranda to have crossed paths very often since Julia had only been dancing at the club a few months. “In fact, she was the one who got me involved in it. She hooked me up with Aaron, and the rest is history.”
Julia was not blessed with a poker face. She was nodding along politely, but a look of where are you going with all this was blaring across her features. “So how did you meet Aaron?” I continued.
“Let me think,” she said, pursing her lips. I could see the wheels turning in her head, but her brain was stuck in second gear. “It must be two weeks ago now, I’m thinking. He was roaming around the club at a weird hour, like seven. It was really early. I remember that. Normally, I’m not here at that hour, but that day I was.”
“Wait,” I said, interrupting her. “Two weeks? That’s it? And you’ve already bought yourself a new Lexus?”
She looked embarrassed. “Well, he explained how much money I’d be making, so…” She trailed off, possibly realizing how idiotic she sounded. But possibly not.
“So he hasn’t paid you yet, right?” I asked.
She shook her head. “He said it would take up to six weeks. Unless I got some other people involved. Then that would speed things up.”
Interesting. Another hint of desperation. “And have you done that?”
She smiled. “Just one, so far. Half the girls here are already in it, and the other half think it’s craz
y. You know, too good to be true.”
“Half?” I asked. “For real?”
“Well, maybe not half. But lots.” She looked around. “Samantha is in it,” she said, nodding her head towards the far corner at a dancer I barely recognized. Julia scanned the rest of the room where there were about a dozen other dancers lounging around in various states of undress but came up empty.
Even if she’d been exaggerating, it threw me for a loop. I usually kept to myself around the club, and so I didn’t have a lot of friends among the girls, most of whom were a decade or more younger than I was. But still, you’d think I’d pick up on a trend like that. Maybe the other investors didn’t blow all the money on new cars or handbags. Or, maybe they weren’t getting any money at all.
“And this is pretty recent, right?” I asked. “I mean, most of the girls have just gotten into this in the last month or so, I’m guessing?”
She smiled. “More like the last week. Sarah’s been recruiting them pretty heavily.”
I sighed. My head was spinning with all the names. Kendra, Julia, Samantha, and now Sarah. “And which one’s Sarah? Is she new, too?”
She thought about it for a few seconds, as though straining her limited brainpower. “Not exactly. I think she’s been here six months or so.”
I chuckled. “To me that’s new. I’ve been here thirteen years!”
Julia looked up at me with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief. To a kid like her, thirteen years was two-thirds of a lifetime. “I don’t think she’s working tonight. Her locker’s over there,” she said, pointing.
Her locker wasn’t going to do me any good. “Okay, so anyone else besides…what’s her name again?” I asked, pointing discretely at the dancer she’d identified earlier.
“Samantha,” she said. She scanned the room one more time. “Not that I know of. But I don’t know everyone either. She’s definitely not in it,” she added, nodding at a short blonde wearing lipstick of some shade of purple.
“No? Why not?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I just heard she wasn’t. Said the whole thing is some kind of phony scam or something like that. Jasmine’s her name, I think.”
I nodded. “Thanks for your help,” I said.
“Um…” she began. “Is there any, you know, reason that you’re asking about all this?”
Maybe she wasn’t so brain-dead after all. “No, I’m just curious is all. You know, looking out for my money. Never hurts to be careful, right?”
“Right,” she said, nodding unconvincingly. “Catch you later. And…” she paused. “Let me know if you find anything out, will you?”
“Sure,” I said, smiling. “Thanks again.”
I watched her walk away and then swiveled around to face myself in the mirror. Julia was in on it, and she thought lots of others were, too, but had only come up with two names: Sarah and Samantha. Samantha—or was it Sarah?—was standing across the room going at her hair with a hairbrush, and the other one was the one who had been recruiting aggressively. Maybe I needed to make a chart since I was so bad with names. I was half joking with myself, but then I realized it wasn’t a bad idea at all. It might help, I figured, if I could track who had invested with Aaron and when and how they got involved. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any paper or writing implements in my tiny little cubby near the mirror, but I resolved to create a more systematic chart when I got home. Or maybe tomorrow.
I looked across the room at Samantha, a lush-figured dancer who actually looked like a real woman, rather than a stick with some aftermarket curvy parts attached. She had affixed temporary tattoos onto each cheek (of her face), silver stars that made her look like a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader. She was still going at her hair with a hairbrush, as though she had some kind of Dallas-sized snarl in there, but I knew it was just a tic, a habit some women had of grooming until it hurt. Even across the dim room, I could tell her hair was straight and possessed a sheen straight out of a shampoo commercial, but she must have figured each stroke with the brush made it that much more silky smooth.
I found myself staring, informally performing an over-under analysis on Samantha’s brush strokes. Would it be ten more strokes? Twenty? A hundred? Finally, I grew impatient and roused myself to go approach her.
We made eye contact in the mirror. She smiled at me, hesitantly, but continued brushing.
“Your hair looks amazing,” I remarked. “What’s the secret?”
She didn’t miss a stroke. “Ya just brush the heck out of it. That’s all,” she said, revealing a New England accent and a slight gap between her two front teeth. It didn’t take me long to realize that if I wanted to chat with Samantha, I’d have to do so while she continued brushing away.
“I’m Raven, by the way,” I said casually, as though I had been meaning to make her acquaintance for months but just hadn’t gotten around to it.
“Oh, honey, I know who you are!” She said, giggling. “I’m Samantha.”
She was a good three inches taller than I was, and I found myself staring up at her, a glimmer of recognition forcing its way into the foggy crags of my brain. And then it hit me. “You’re Sam Houston?”
She smiled and finally put her hairbrush away. “Like the name?”
I shrugged. “It must have worked,” I muttered. Sam Houston was the screen name of one of the most famous porn stars in the country. Occasionally “actresses” like her would appear live in strip clubs, drawing their seedy fans from hundreds of miles away, and prancing around like they were real Hollywood celebrities instead of porn stars. Most of us knew they made lots of money for what they did on screen, but that kind of work was repellant to most dancers. We all made compromises with ourselves, but most of us drew the line somewhere north of that.
“I’m dancing now,” she said by way of explanation. “At least a few nights a month.”
Must be nice, I thought. Maybe she’d saved up all her movie earnings and could coast by working a few hours a month. Or maybe she was still making movies and dancing just as a way of keeping the calories off.
“You mean you’re out of the movie business?” I had wanted to say porn business but was feeling uncharacteristically polite.
She made a face. “It has gotten so political,” she said conspiratorially.
I nodded along as though I had some earthly clue as to what she was talking about. I had kind of assumed that pornography had always been political.
“You know,” she continued, “these little rinky-dink cities in California want to dictate to us how to do our movies. All the testing, the protection—it was no fun anymore.”
This drew another noncommittal nod from me. The idea that it ever would have been “fun” was kind of jarring, I had to admit.
I was desperate to change the subject. “Julia tells me that you and I are investing in oil fields together.”
She nodded. “I’m from Texas, dear. That’s what we do!”
I chuckled. “How long have you been investing in this…uh…program?” I asked, unsure what exactly to call it. Crazy scam would have been a little too on the nose.
She pursed her lips and grabbed for her hairbrush again. “I’d say no more than a week.”
“And how did you hear about it?” I asked, trying to sound casual enough to avoid triggering any alarm bells. I realized that all these questions could trigger a panic, and then I’d definitely lose my money.
“Girl named Sarah. She’s peddling these things like time-shares, but as soon as I heard the word oil, I knew I was in. Like I said, it’s just one of those things.” She was smiling, but I sensed in her facial expression a hesitation, or cautiousness, as though she had realized my questions were more pointed than breezy and casual.
“Well, it was nice to meet you,” I said, lying.
“Same here,” she said, resuming her grooming spectacle.
I studied her discretely in the mirror, still transfixed by her excessive hair brushing. Now that I had made the connection, it was obvious that
she was, in fact, Sam Houston. I wondered why I hadn’t recognized her from twenty yards away, and then I decided it was a good thing I didn’t.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I returned to my stool in the locker room, my appetite for continuing to dance at a low ebb for the evening. My talk with “Sam Houston,” or whatever her real name was, confirmed to me that I needed to speak with the dancer named Sarah, the one who seemed to be ginning up all the business for Aaron’s oil investment scheme. But Sarah wasn’t in.
The room was emptying as the night got later and the club busier. Girls didn’t want to linger around chitchatting if there were twenty-dollar bills out on the dance floor for the easy pickings. Samantha was still sitting over there doing something with her eyebrows (the hairbrush had finally been put away, but I wondered for how long), but any more questions from me would be alarming. I needed to find Sarah or someone who knew her.
Reluctantly, I went back out onto the dance floor and made a few bucks, my mind a thousand miles away. After all, it wasn’t like I needed to put a lot of thought into a lap dance or even a stage dance. Anyone who could fog a mirror could be a stripper. As it got closer to two thirty, I wandered over to find Carlos who was working security at the front of the VIP lounge, a place you could frequent if you wanted to drop a hundred bucks for a glass of vodka on the rocks.
“You look bored,” I said, trying to be heard above the hip hop music blaring from within the lounge.
“I’m not, but thanks for saying so,” he said. He sounded like I was interrupting him in the middle of a complicated science experiment rather than while standing there glassy-eyed, staring out into space.
“Sarah. Know her?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Common name,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “I’m guessing that not only do you know her, but you know her breast size and hip measurements, too.”
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