Hoodtown
Page 9
The Cherry Blossom was a taxi dance joint and had a weird, phony “romantic” decor that included pink carpet and pink flocked walls covered with rose tinted mirrors and paper cutouts of masked cupids. Not a hairy Skin head in sight.
When I came in I got the evil eye from a cluster of shopworn Hood girls in discount gowns parked on a row of balding pink velvet chairs. The men hovered, anxious by the bar, ignoring one another as they moved aside to make room for me. I ordered a draft from the leathery old broad behind the bar and marveled at the audacity of the scam they had going here.
There was a little stand where you could buy wilted roses or brown-speckled orchids for outlandish prices. Bottles of cheap champagne cost more than a chupada at the Kitty Kat and the girls hustled drinks relentlessly, only pretending to drink them while secretly pouring them out into glasses hidden between their chichis when the marks weren’t looking.
I watched several couples move across the dance floor, barely swaying to the string-heavy, simpering music, and wondered what made the marks come here. Why they were willing to pay more for this bizarre, stilted pretense of formal dating. People said that it was women who wanted to be romanced and men only wanted to cut to the chase, yet this place had three times as many customers as the Kitty Kat where you could actually get that kind of no-frills service men were supposed to prefer. I watched the couple closest to me as they danced, the man kneading the woman’s chunky ass monotonously, like a kitten trying to get more milk. Her eyes were blank and sharklike inside her sparkling blue eyeholes. His were closed, lost in blissful contentment.
I ordered a second round and as the woman behind the bar set down a full glass in front of me, I asked her if Snake Eyes was in. She nodded and cocked her head towards a door in the back between two large pink vases filled with dusty fake cherry blossom branches.
Snake Eyes was a guy I knew from the wrestling biz. Retired after 35 years and opened this place because he wanted to be around “real ladies, not like these hammerheads we got in the A.C.L.L.” I wondered if I was gonna get the time out day out of the old fuck.
I downed the beer and skirted around the dancers to the indicated door. There was a sign that read privado in curly, girly script. I knocked.
“Come in if you’re coming,” replied that distinct, reedy voice.
The office was a stuffy little closet plastered with bikini and glamour shots of a hundred Hood women. His desk was cluttered with more of the same and behind it, he was just like I remembered him. Stocky and slouching in a bad suit with a cigarette squeezed between his thumb and forefinger. Red dice on the forehead of his faded black hood. Snake Eyes of course.
“Fuck me if it isn’t the Ice Queen,” he said, stubbing the cigarette out in a dangerously full ashtray. “What brings you here?”
I showed him the photo and he spat.
“Yeah I had those fucking putas in here. Worst mistake I ever made.” He lit a new cigarette. “Blowing guys in the john, fighting with the other girls. Then after I fire them, the sneaky bitches skate with the till. What they do to you?”
I gave him the short version.
“Santo!” He sucked smoke and handed back the photo. “You’re shittin’ me.”
I shook my head.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I don’t condone ripping hoods off broads like that, but them baitas was bad news. If that loco fucker hadn’ta got em, someone else would have. They had it coming. But ripping their fucking hoods off? Puta Madre! Don’t nobody deserve that.”
I tried the girls and got mostly stonewalled except for a cheerful little twist named Kisses in an awful pink and purple hood and clashing red gown held barely closed with safety pins. She was maybe five feet even with a comically voluptuous body and a squeaky, breathless voice that must have worked on the marks, though it made me want to slap her.
“I don’t know exactly where they went,” she said, pulling the spit glass out from between her chichis and dumping it into a bucket behind the bar. “But Lace told me she grew up out in Tres Piedras. Said her mama ran a SpeedyMart.”
She giggled and slipped the empty glass back in her cleavage, lifting her tits in the cups of her bra till everything but the chikubis was on display.
“Thanks,” I said, slipping her a ten.
“Thank you!” she said. “You sure you don’t want a dance? I go with dames all the time.”
I smiled and shook my head.
“No thanks, honey,” I told her.
“All right but you come back anytime. Just ask for Kisses!”
She made a loud wet kissing sound as I turned to leave.
Well, I had struck out on Nezumi but had a lead on the missing whores. I figured I might as well grab whatever sleep I could before I went down to the station to fill Cray in on what I had found.
Of course sleep was a long time coming.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Jaguar, about how good he looked, older, sure but still so much the same. Funny how when you give someone the key to your heart, you can’t just up and change the lock. So many years had passed and he still undid all my defenses with catburgler nonchalance. I fought for years to obliterate every trace of his memory and yet it only took seeing him once to bring it all back into painful focus. His taste, warm and familiar in my mouth and memories of fucking him hard and fast against the rough brick in the alley behind the Telco, his hot whisper against my neck.
“What if someone sees?”
“Let them,” I had said. “Let them all see what a slut you are.”
Fucking his ass with two fingers and him with the heel of his hand jammed against his mouth, my beautiful little hero, flawless and perfect and the perverse, dirty thrill of despoiling a legend. His fierce climax as he told me how bad and dirty he was, how he belonged to me, my bad little whore and me coming too, hot gush of orgasm as I shuddered and curled in on myself, alone and embarrassed in the red and purple shadows filling my lonely apartment.
26
Armed with coffee and the notes I had made the night before, I headed over to Hoodtown Division to see Cray.
I said his name to the desk sergeant without stopping, calling over my shoulder that I knew my way before he could get off some sleazy comment. When I got to Cray’s office it was empty.
“Can I... uh... help you with something?”
I turned to face a chubby Skin with a badge on his belt and long, oily black hair slicked back to his skull.
“I’m looking for Joe Cray,” I said, clutching my envelope full of notes like a shield and hating how small I felt.
Mick Sullivan showed up then with a big, nasty smile.
“Joe’s been reassigned,” Sullivan told me with no small satisfaction. “Finally got that plush downtown gig he always wanted, the lucky bastard. But don’t you worry, little lady. Me and my new partner here have got everything under control.”
I was chilled and furious. So that was that. Cray had tried to find out what was really going on and had gotten “reassigned,” taking any hope of official help with him. This thing was turning out to be bigger and more dangerous than I ever could have imagined.
“So,” Sullivan said, craning his neck to see the envelope I held pressed against my tits. “Whatcha got there?”
I turned my body away from him.
“Nothing you’d be interested in,” I said.
“If it relates to my case, I think you better let me have a look.”
“Yeah,” the new guy said eyeing my cleavage. “Give us a look.”
“It’s nothing,” I said, trying to think fast. I pulled the photo of the two hookers from the envelope. “Just a little present Cray asked me to get for him. See, he admitted to me that he really goes for us Hood honeys but he’s too shy to buy the goods himself. Thought this might cheer him up.”
Sullivan looked at the photo and smirked. His buddy peered over his shoulder and whistled.
“See now I don’t get it.” Sullivan said. “Here you got a coupla dames naked as jay
birds with the goods spread out like an all-you-can-eat buffet, but they still gotta have their faces covered. What’s the point of that?”
“The last broad I slept with coulda used a mask like that,” the new guy said.
“Now now,” I replied, sourly. “Don’t talk that way about your own mother.”
The guy started in with some attitude but Sullivan laid a hand on his chest and shook his head.
“All right, enough already.” He turned to me, slipping the photo into his pocket and patting it smugly. “Well then if that’s all, I suppose you’ll let us get back to solving this case.”
“Sure,” I said, and left, me knowing full well they weren’t going to do shit and them knowing I knew and not giving a damn.
As I walked down Lutteroth, I wondered what the hell I was supposed to do now. I couldn’t just go back to my old life, back to my sessions and bills and turning my head the other way every time I passed a newsstand. How much longer before another girl was murdered? I couldn’t just sit back and let that happen.
Of course it didn’t help my mood that I was continuously assaulted with Jaguar’s famous golden hood everywhere I turned. Powerful memories lurking around every corner ready to mug me and suck me down into shit better left forgotten. The worst thing about it was that I knew he would help me in heartbeat, hero that he was, but I also knew I just couldn’t handle being in the same room with him. Best to leave that scab unpeeled and get back to doing things on my own, the way I always do.
Maybe I couldn’t fight crime, maybe I couldn’t clean up corruption and make the world a better place, but I could find a name and hood for Jane Doe. Find someone that cared enough about her to give her a decent burial. Maybe...
27
Tres Piedras. What a dump. Grim, dusty nothing a hellish two and a half hour bus ride outside of Angel City. Trailers mostly and a few scrappy ranchos. Downtown Tres Piedras consisted of a gas station, a diner, a desolate motel, three bars and a sorry assortment of mostly closed shops selling nothing anyone would want. And the tiny, rundown SpeedyMart.
Inside it was dim and stuffy, the smell of stale candy and hopelessness nearly stifling. There were coolers of beer and racks of Skin magazines and dusty, faded rows of off-brand soap powder and canned beans, but nothing for Hoods. No mask laces, no charms or candles or lucky herbal washes, nothing but the tiny, almost apologetic altar to the Hooded Virgin above the register. The woman behind the counter was the only Hood I had seen for miles. She looked like a badly molded statue behind her barrier of gum and cigarettes.
“Excuse me,” I said softly, “I’m looking for a girl named Lace.”
The statue frowned, her orange lipsticked mouth thin and suspicious beneath her orange, chinless hood. The wings of a lurid pink and purple butterfly formed the eyeholes from which she squinted warily at me.
“What do you want with Lacy?” she asked. “She ain’t in no trouble is she?”
“No,” I said. “I just need to talk to her.”
“She’s a good girl. She’s clean. She put all that behind her now.”
“I’m sure she has,” I said. “Is she here?”
The statue shook her hooded head.
I could see this wasn’t gonna be easy.
“Do you think you could tell me where she is?”
Nothing, just a dull, suspicious stare.
“Mira,” I said, trying not to let my exasperation show. “I’m not gonna hurt her, I just need to talk to her. I thought she might be in trouble so I came out here to make sure she was all right.”
“She’s fine,” the woman said. “She don’t need to talk to nobody.”
I laid my palm on the counter. At least she’s alive, I thought.
“What about her friend Dulce?” I asked.
She turned away, chilly and stiff.
“I don’t know nothing about that sort of thing.”
Great. I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere so I left, feeling the woman’s fearful gaze follow me out onto the street. I couldn’t blame her, really. I thought of Diamond’s message for the girls, of all the other people I’d run into with less than complimentary things to say about them. But was it really better out here?
Unsure of what to do next, I hoofed it down the block to the gas station. I was standing there contemplating the soda machine and feeling stupid when a lanky Skin boy came loping over, wiping his hands on a rag.
“You looking for them Hoods, aintcha?” he asked.
I turned to him, wary of this sudden friendliness, until I looked into his weird, pale green eyes and realized he was a few beers short a six pack.
“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”
“I knew you was,” he said, seeming immensely satisfied with his powers of deduction. “I knew it right away, soon as I saw that thing on your head. You wear that thing every day, huh?”
I smiled.
“Every day,” I said.
“Them Hoods over in Sunny Day wear theirs every day too,” he told me like he was filling me in on something I might not have known. “I see ‘em every day like that. I heard they even sleep like that. Do you sleep like that?”
“Well, not in this hood,” I said. “I have a different one for sleeping.” I didn’t want him wandering too far in the conversation so I tried to steer him back to Lace. “Sunny Day? Is that where the Hoods live? See, I’m trying to find them but I lost the address.”
“That’s OK, I lose stuff all the time.” He smiled that big, unplugged grin and for a moment I thought he had forgotten the question. Then he suddenly blurted out. “’Bout three miles down Route 21, just past Arroyo Road. Sunny Day trailer park, that’s where those Hoods live. Everybody knows that.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He grabbed my sleeve.
“Hey what’s your name?”
“X,” I said. “What’s yours?”
“Mine’s Jimmy.” He frowned. “X? That ain’t no kinda name I ever heard of.”
I reached into my purse to give him a few bucks but he just laughed and pushed the bills away.
“You don’t need to pay me, X,” he said. “You didn’t buy no gas.”
I smiled again.
“Thanks Jimmy,” I said. “Route 21 is this way?”
“That’s right,” he said, pointing down the street. “Last stoplight before the edge of town.”
At that point a hugely fat woman appeared from the office at the back of the garage. She had dyed red hair and way too much flesh around the small, fearful cluster of piggy features in the center of her huge naked face.
“Jimmy, get away from there!” She scowled at me. “Help you?”
“That’s OK,” I said. “I was just looking for directions.”
“Out of town I hope.” she said, just low enough that I could ignore it.
As I walked away I heard a rush of low vicious whispering and the crack of a slap.
“But I...” I heard the kid splutter but he was cut off by a second slap.
I couldn’t wait to get back home to Hoodtown.
I found Sunny Day Park just where Jimmy said it would be. It was sunny, you had to give it that. So goddamn sunny that the few flowers people had planted to cheer the place up had withered into dry brown sticks. So sunny that the dirt was bleached bone-white and the metal skins of the trailers threw off heat like pizza ovens.
My brain felt like it was cooking under my máscara as I tried to make sense of the map painted on a warped board just inside the entrance. Each trailer was numbered and there was a list of names corresponding to the numbers, Most of them were meaningless, clearly Skin names like Stubbs and Lopez and Kazinski and O’Neil. I finally spotted the name “Mariposa” down at the far end of the last row. I should have known.
As I walked down the row to Lace’s trailer, I felt like a weasel in a hen house. All around me, Skins in lawn chairs gave me the evil eye, clucking to each other about what happens when you let one in. None of them seemed at all surprised by where I was heading.
The girl in the photo poked her wary hooded face out from a crack in the door.
“What?”
“Lace?”
“Yeah?”
“Lace, my name’s X.” I held out my hand and she looked at it like it was a stolen watch I was trying to sell. “Look, you mind if I come in out of the sun.” I pointed to my head. “Black hood, you know.”
She squinted at me then undid the chain and opened the door all the way, walking away like she didn’t care if I came in or not. She was heavier than she had been in the picture, dressed in a frumpy bathrobe with yellow flowers on it. The flesh inside her eyeholes was puffy and red. Loose, flabby skin bulged out around the hem of her máscara.
The interior of the trailer was even hotter, if that was possible, and stuffy with a thick, artificial rose smell that made me want to puke. Everything was plaid and built in, fold-away chairs, fold-down table and little fold-away sofa. I just stood feeling awkward and unsure of how to even go about this.
“Is Dulce here?” I asked.
Her head spun towards me, eyes flashing.
“Why?”
“Because I need to talk to you both about something very important.”
“Well she ain’t here.” Lace said, taking a long swig out of a cloudy plastic glass. She didn’t offer me anything.
“Do you know where I might find her?” I asked, jealously eyeing the cup. I could smell the alcohol from across the room.
“No I don’t as a matter of fact.” She took another swig, draining the cup. “The bitch left me, OK? There it is. Is that what you want to know?”
She refilled the cup from a bottle she held low under the table like she didn’t want me to see the label.
“I’d like to know where she is,” I said. “It’s very important.”
Sinking into a chair, Lace put her hand to her mouth.
“She hated it here.” She looked out the window, a flat view of the neighbor’s trailer wall. “We both wanted to get out of the life but she couldn’t stand this place. She couldn’t get work. Nobody wants to hire Hoods for nothing, not even at the Pretty Pony. Skins out here don’t want to see your panocha if they can’t see your fucking face.” She paused. “Dulce didn’t want to work at the SpeedyMart so we just fought and fought until we ran out of money and I guess she had enough.” She paused again, drank. “She said she needed some action, that she was drying up out here. Said she wanted to be somewhere where people didn’t cross the street to get away from her. Said it was too damn sunny out here. She needed nightlife.” Another drink. ”So she left. Went back to Hoodtown I guess.”