Extra Credit

by Maggie Barbieri

  We headed off to the club where Sassafras had been scheduled to shake her moneymaker, literally. I had always wanted to use that expression, and now was my chance. I asked Kevin if he had ever been to a strip club.

  He raised an eyebrow in response.

  “Well, then, it’s a first for both of us,” I said, navigating with the help of my GPS into the heart of Yonkers, a place that I didn’t think I’d ever been or that I’d ever want to go to again. A low building, the Elegant Majestic sat in the middle of a vast parking lot that held cars both expensive and those in desperate need of repair, its klieg lights beckoning all comers from the easy-on, easy-off highway exit. A sign that boasted girls like you’ve never seen!—I didn’t even want to know what that meant—hung from the marquee adjacent to the street. The most concerning feature, however, was the blacked-out windows. I knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

  “Holy cow,” he said, the worst Kevin would say. He gripped his door handle as if his life depended on it. His mother, “the widow McManus” as I liked to call her, had eyes in the back of her head and her ear to the ground, so he would surely be reprimanded for swearing even thirty miles away from her. Let’s not even get into the fact that he was at a strip club.

  I parked the car and looked at him. “So here’s what we’re going to do: We’re going to try to talk to a few people and find out if they have seen her. I don’t know what time this place closes down, but we’ll try to get this done as efficiently as possible.”

  “I have to work in the morning,” he reminded me weakly.

  “Yeah, me, too. What’s your point?” I asked as I took only what I needed—money in the form of a bunch of singles and a wad of twenties that I had withdrawn from the university’s ATM earlier—and locked the rest up in my glove box; I told him to do the same. It didn’t seem like taking valuables beyond some cold, hard cash into a seedy nightclub was the best plan. I thought Kevin agreed. “Ready?” I asked as we walked toward the front of the club, Kevin a trembling mess beside me. I wondered why he had agreed to come along if he was so terrified. He obviously didn’t have the chops for ill-conceived and poorly executed capers which were my stock in trade.

  I didn’t know how this worked. Did you pay a cover charge and then have access to the entire “show”? Or did you spend your money at the bar and with the girls? We got to the front door, and a burly guy, a tattoo snaking around his neck, put up a meaty hand. “Twenty bucks,” he said.

  I forked over forty dollars; it was the least I could do for Kevin, since he was just along for the ride. He looked at me, not sure whether to thank me or not. I told him he could buy the first round if he wanted.

  We walked through floor-to-ceiling hanging beads into the first den of iniquity I had ever been in. I was sure the same was true for Kevin, though judging from the look on his face, he was enjoying it far more than someone who had recently put his Roman collar to rest should. I nudged him in the ribs. “Let’s sit over there,” I said, pointing to a two-top in a dark corner. Moments after we were seated, a leggy brunette approached us and bent over, giving us a good look at some very large, and very expensive, breasts, the kind that looked like two beach balls had been inflated over the chest wall.

  “Get you guys a drink?” she asked.

  I’d tried to tone it down and not display the gorgeousness that I knew resided under my baseball cap, but “guys”? I tried to give her my order above the din of a bass-heavy song, but all that came out was a throaty croak, my ability to speak seeming to have left me. Behind her, a woman was flipping around with wild abandon on a brightly lit stage, body parts that I hadn’t even seen on myself in full view of the enraptured audience, mostly men in their forties and fifties. I focused my attention on our waitress and her beach ball boobs. “Diet Coke,” I said.

  “You might as well get a drink-drink. It’s going to cost the same,” she said helpfully.

  I looked at Kevin. “Do you want a drink-drink?”

  Kevin went with his usual Chardonnay, and I seconded the order. I would sip it slowly, knowing that I would be driving, and also knowing that it probably would be as far as you could get from a decent glass of wine, but desperate times called for desperate measures. We watched the waitress saunter off on her high heels, much more adept at navigating the crowd in a skimpy costume and heels than I could ever imagine being; I can barely get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom without sustaining some kind of injury, especially if Crawford’s giant shoes are in my path. I didn’t want to look around because I wasn’t sure on what my eyes might fall, so I focused on Kevin. “Let’s ask the waitress what she knows,” I said.

  He trained his eyes on me, apparently coming to the same conclusion about the safest thing to look at. “Sounds like a plan.” Something must have been going on behind my head, because he closed his eyes as he spoke. “I bet she knows her. Sassy seems like she’s pretty popular, given the number of fans on her Facebook page.”

  “Who’da known, Kevin? All our hard work in our respective fields and what do we have to show for it? Not a fan page on Facebook,” I said. “That’s for sure.”

  Kevin mulled that over.

  The waitress returned with our drinks and set them on the table. I put a twenty on her tray. She didn’t ask us if we wanted any change so I gathered she was keeping whatever was thrown upon her tray; that was one way to bolster your income, I suppose. “Would you like a lap dance?” she asked Kevin, who nearly choked to death. She turned to me. “You?”

  “Actually, we are looking for someone,” I said.

  “Are you cops?” she asked, going pale.

  “No,” I said, my nervousness taking over and making me give far more information than was necessary. “I’m a college professor, and he’s a banquet manager at a catering hall.”

  “And a priest,” Kevin added.

  Now she was really confused. “Is this some kind of kinky role-playing thing?” she asked. “I’m just trying to make enough money to buy my kid an Xbox. I don’t need any trouble.”

  “No,” I assured her. “We’re really a professor and a banquet manager, but we are looking for someone.”

  She raised an overly tweezed eyebrow.

  “Sassy Du Pris?”

  She tried to look impassive, but fear passed across her face.

  “You know her,” I said.

  “She was supposed to dance tonight,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper we could barely hear.

  “We know,” I said. “What happened?”

  When it was clear she wasn’t going to give us any more information without some prompting, I slid another twenty onto her tray.

  “She had a fight with the manager. Over money.”

  Money. Sassy’s reason for being and the reason we were mired in this mess.

  “She wanted more,” she continued. “Said she had a huge fan base.”

  Kevin nodded enthusiastically. “She does!”

  “I thought they had worked it out, but she never turned up for her first night. Not sure what happened,” she said.

  Kevin pulled out his wallet and threw a wad of cash onto the woman’s tray. “Thank you. You’re a lovely woman with a lot to offer,” he said. I wasn’t sure how he knew that, but whatever. “You need to get out of here as soon as possible and get a job that allows you to wear clothes.” I knew he was trying to be helpful, but I could see that she was a little offended.

  “Do you want a lap dance or what?” she asked. The money on the tray disappeared but since she was wearing so little, I wasn’t sure where it went.

  I pushed a twenty-dollar tip into her cleavage and thanked her for asking, telling her that we would think about it.

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said as she wandered off.

  “We’re not really going to think about it, right?” Kevin asked. He waved his hand in front of his face. “Weren’t cigarettes banned in dining establishments like four years ago?”

  I trained my eyes on the stage, lo
oking for signs of Sassy. “You consider this a dining establishment?”

  I was mesmerized by what went on on the stage. Maybe I was middle-aged. Maybe it was just that never in my life, even in my shot-putting days, had I ever looked or been able to move like the women up there. Never mind the six-inch high heels. Between the swirling lights, the pounding music, and the bare flesh, I didn’t know which end was up and found myself getting sucked into a vortex that smelled like cheap vodka and even cheaper perfume that made my head spin.

  One woman was more talented than the next, if you considered talent being able to dance upside down on a shiny pole, then shimmy down and land in a logic-defying split, level with the faces of the patrons at the bar. These girls didn’t get enough credit for their physical fitness, that was for sure. Maybe Max had a point. Maybe exotic dancing was a viable career that could net you good money, flexible hours, and a daily workout. I wondered exactly what kind of training went into this kind of dancing and decided that I was way too old for those kinds of gymnastics, as fun as they looked.

  I don’t know why we stayed so long, but it was kind of like rubbernecking at a car wreck. I took a long swig from my glass of wine, and even though my inclination was to gag, I held it down. “Ready, Kevin?”

  His eyes were trained on a spot behind—and above—my head, and I got a sinking suspicion that what he was looking at wasn’t something, or someone, that would make me happy. Rather, watching the color drain from his face, I was sure that coming here had been a colossal mistake that was getting ready to bite me in the ass.

  I turned slowly and took in the sight of my husband and Carmen, who was now blocking my view of the stage. Clearly, we had some explaining to do.

  Thirty-Three

  Crawford didn’t see the humor in the situation, but Carmen did. Her belly laugh was audible over the blaring dance music, so loud that several patrons, even in the far reaches of the club, turned to see what was going on. What they saw was a hot-looking woman laughing at a less-hot woman and a pudgy man while a tall, stern-looking guy presided over the entire encounter.

  “I thought you had court?” I asked.

  “I thought you were going straight home?” he asked.

  Tit for tat. “Well, I decided that I wanted to see where Sassy worked,” I said, telling only a half-truth. I also wanted to tell her to leave us all alone and go back to whatever rock she had crawled out from under, but that didn’t seem like something I wanted to say out loud at that particular moment.

  He didn’t look amused. I looked around. Suddenly the bar area was much more sparsely populated, as was the main stage area, Crawford and Carmen’s cop pheromones clearing out the joint. The burly bouncer, the one who had taken Kevin’s and my cover fee, ambled over.

  “Is there a problem, officers?” he asked, assuming that Kevin and I were part of the SWAT team that had descended upon the Elegant Majestic. “This is a classy place,” he said. “We don’t want any trouble.”

  “It is very classy,” I agreed. Kevin, the mute, stood beside me in dumbfounded confusion.

  “Oh, shit, papi, they made us,” Carmen said, her surprise as fake as most of the breasts in the bar. She stamped her boot-clad foot. “I never thought that anyone would be able to see through your disguise,” she said, giving Crawford the once-over.

  His “disguise” consisted of khakis, loafers, and an oxford shirt. All he had ditched from his regular work uniform was the tie and blazer. The bouncer looked at Carmen and then Crawford, waiting for their explanation of why they were casing the place, but neither gave it up.

  Crawford placed a drink order with the bouncer, pulling up a chair in front of the table that Kevin and I had commandeered when we arrived. He looked at Carmen. “We are officially off duty.”

  Carmen fell heavily onto the leather banquette next to me. “Oh, thank God. I thought we were going to have to frisk every dancer in this place until we found this Sassy person.”

  “She’s not dancing tonight,” I said.

  “We know,” Crawford said pointedly.

  “Oh,” I said.

  He pointed at Kevin. “What are you doing here?”

  In the year since Kevin had given up the collar, so to speak, Crawford had slowly started treating him like he treated everyone else: like a perp.

  Kevin stammered a bit, not used to the interrogation that came with being friends with Crawford. “Well … she…” He pointed at me.

  “Forget it,” Crawford said, looking around for the bouncer. In his place was our original waitress, who came tottering back with two beers and two more glasses of wine, which she placed on the table, backing up into Crawford, her ample behind—although no match for Carmen’s—coming into contact with his nose. He backed up in turn, grimacing.

  “Do you take credit cards?” I asked, before realizing I didn’t have one on me, my possessions locked up in the glove box of my car.

  “They’re on the house,” she said, smiling.

  I shot Crawford a look he couldn’t decipher. I threw my head in her direction and rubbed two fingers together. Finally, while she waited expectantly, he pulled out his wallet, peeled off some bills, and placed them on her tray.

  She thanked him. “You remind me of my dad. He was a cop, too,” she said before sashaying off.

  Crawford downed most of his beer. Carmen pushed hers toward him. “I’ll drive. Drink this before you spontaneously combust.”

  After he had consumed most of the second beer and settled down, Crawford turned his attention back to Kevin and me. “So, you two brain surgeons want to tell me what you’re doing here?”

  Kevin decided that remaining silent was the best way not to incriminate himself.

  “What do you think, Crawford?” I asked. “I wanted to get some info on Sassy. If I got to see some creative interpretative dance while I was at it, all the better.”

  Carmen stifled a giggle.

  “Why did you lie about going to court?” I asked.

  “Because I knew if I told you where I was going, you’d go there, too,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Which I guess it was. He looked helplessly at Carmen. “You talk to her.”

  “Listen, chica. We’ve got this under control. Girl’s got some crazy background, and we’re going to try to have a nice chat with her, in a controlled setting, to see if we can figure out what she wants so badly and why she’ll do anything to get it.”

  “She wants the money,” I said.

  Carmen knew that, too. “Right—but it’s our job to figure out why and get her to lay off.” She pointed a finger at me, the French manicure impeccable; woman had a lot of style. Not my style, but style nonetheless. “Not yours.”

  “Why do you think she allowed her headlining act to be advertised?” I asked. “Even if it did get canceled?”

  Carmen raised an eyebrow at me. “Maybe to smoke someone out who might have some information about the money? Someone who wanted to see her? Talk to her?”

  In other words, me.

  Crawford chimed in. “Maybe because she’s dumb?” He arched an eyebrow in my direction.

  Kevin was going to have some kind of seizure if we didn’t get out of the club, and he didn’t need to use words to tell me that. The lone trickle of sweat running down the side of his pudgy face was evidence enough. I slapped him on the back. “Ready, Kev?” I looked at Crawford. “See you at home?”

  “See you at home,” he dutifully intoned. “Carmen and I will just finish up here and then call it a night. Don’t wait up.”

  “I never do,” I said, sleep being as important to me as the air I breathed. I gave his hair a tousle as I walked past him, knowing that he hated that as much as my amateur sleuthing. “Later.”

  Kevin left the club as fast as his legs would carry him and was standing by the car before I had even gotten through the front door. I took a whiff of the sleeve of my sweater and found it ripe with the smell of smoke and something else that was a combination of all odiferous
and bad things. I was just about to remark to him about how bad our car ride home would smell when I saw someone come up behind him, unbeknownst to the terrified former priest, and put a long bare arm around his neck.

  “Well, if it isn’t the lovely Sassafras Du Pris,” I said, sounding bolder than I felt.

  In her ubiquitous heels, she stood a foot taller than Kevin, and was solidly built. Kevin’s eyes grew wider, and I felt bad that I had dragged him into this caper, even though he was a willing, if initially reluctant, participant.

  Sassy’s voice wasn’t what I expected. Sure, it sounded southern, and yes, it was all lady, even though the look of her suggested “drag queen,” but it was higher and thinner than I’d thought it would be, more Minnie Mouse than Demi Moore. “Where’s that fucking money?” she asked.

  “With the public administrator,” I said.

  “Don’t mess with me,” she said.

  I decided to keep her talking because that was my best shot at having Crawford and Carmen come into the parking lot before she did something stupid. Sassy, however, had other plans.

  There were a lot of things that were shiny about Sassy—her nails, her hair, the bling around her neck and that hung from her ears. Oh, then there was the gun she pulled out from her jeans pocket and held against Kevin’s temple. That was the shiniest thing of all.

  Thirty-Four

  Of all of the things I had done in the name of getting to the truth, this had to be the dumbest. As I watched Kevin go from terrified to catatonic, looking like he was going to faint, I rued the day I ever thought I could have a reasonable conversation with a woman who was hell-bent on finding money we didn’t have.

  “Just do what she says,” Kevin said when he saw that it wasn’t a done deal that I would follow her into a waiting van, parked at the far end of the lot under a light that had burned out long ago. My first instinct had been to run, but I knew enough about Sassy to know what she might be capable of; her reputation definitely preceded her. I followed Kevin’s sage advice and traipsed along after them, looking behind me to see if either Crawford or Carmen had emerged from the dingy, stinky club and would be inclined to save us, but the parking lot was vacant. The sound of our shoes on the pavement was the only sound in addition to the low rumble of the van, a vehicle obviously in need of a new muffler. I thought about my phone, locked up in the glove compartment of my car, and then thought longingly about the time machine I thought about constantly and always wished I had invented, the one that would transport me back to a time when I didn’t make rash, idiotic decisions, dragging my friends along for the dangerous ride.