by Nevada Barr
There was a part of Anna that occasionally had a yen to slither around in silk and heavy mascara, but she hadn’t succumbed for some years. There was always a reason she wanted—or needed—to be comfortable, to be able to move freely, run quickly, and scramble through and over things that a dress could catch on. Tonight, for all the usual reasons, she was in baggy linen trousers—growing ever baggier in the humid air—a tank top, and Tevas. Her hair was in its customary braid. It occurred to her, should she make the Deep South her permanent home, she’d probably be driven to chop it off. It was a bit like wearing a coonskin cap in the middle of August.
Paul had fallen in love with her while she was in uniform and carrying a gun. Perhaps, before she left New Orleans, she would buy something sensuous and surprise him. Though he loved her in the green and gray, she didn’t doubt for a moment he would love her in silk and heels just as much, and, probably, suddenly. She smiled thinking of his touch.
A thicket of boys on a wrought-iron balcony, each holding a beer, green and gold and purple Mardi Gras beads around their fists and necks, hollered down, “Show us your tits!” Never mind that it wasn’t Mardi Gras and Anna was old enough to arrest their mothers. Anna smiled and waved, amused to be included in their revelry. She did not, however, flash her breasts.
Bourbon Street, New Orleans, a historically sinful tourist destination, reminded her of the carnival that Pinocchio was lured to, the dark place of noise and light and lurid shadows where bad little boys turned into animals. The main difference was that the carnival of animal-children in Pinocchio’s colorful hell scared the bejesus out of the tiny Anna. She still couldn’t recall the scene without a modicum of shiveriness visiting her spine. Bourbon Street did not have that same sense of true evil, of no turning back, of consequences that creep up on one unawares and, when one finally realizes what’s happening, it’s too late.
Dick’s was the same gray and dreary bunker of the night before. The young barker behind the lectern was chatty and charming and welcomed Anna back with “Why am I not surprised that such a beautiful woman got lucky? May Bacchus bless your evening, darlin’.”
Anna thanked him politely and stepped into the grimy darkness of the strip club. Star was onstage with the same young studly sort that had provided a hobbyhorse for Candy the previous evening. She was down to pasties, panties, and turquoise cowboy boots with matching hat. Her implants, tools of the trade, though seemingly not the requirement Anna would have expected, defied gravity as she lay on her back across a miserably uncomfortable-looking chair while her young costar did his best to keep his weight off of her and the rickety-looking set piece.
The plastic chairs around the battered black cube tables were full. Mostly men, mostly young, but a healthy smattering of guys in their forties and fifties. Too big for the knee-high cubes, they looked like huge toddlers hulking on playroom furniture. To further the illusion, most of them were sucking on a bottle.
Anna hesitated inside the short artificial hallway from the street, designed, she supposed, to give the customers a greater sense of having entered the devil’s den.
Her eyes adjusted quickly, and she saw Betty at a table in the back of the room, past the bottleneck created by the bar and the stage, waving to her. Having threaded her way through the clumps of men, Anna sank gratefully into a chair beside her.
“Big crowd,” Anna said just to be saying something.
“Southern Baptist convention’s in town,” Betty replied as if that said it all.
“Ah.”
Betty watched the stage, and Anna watched Jordan hustling drinks. Dressed in black, emaciated and expressionless, it wouldn’t be too hard to believe he was one of New Orleans’s celebrated vampires. In a way he was, Anna thought, sucking the life out of Clare, turning her into a creature like himself.
Dramatic as these images were, Anna believed she could see the desperate woman beneath Jordan’s skin in the shaking of the hands as beers were set down, the jerk of the shoulders at a sudden noise from the stage, the careful way of never looking at the dancers, as if that would somehow demean them.
If Jordan had seen Anna come in, he was ignoring her in an impressive fashion. Had she wanted a drink, she would have had to flag him down, and his eyes were always carefully elsewhere.
“Who all is working tonight?” she asked Betty after a few minutes had elapsed.
“Hah! Don’t tell me you fell in love in the ladies’ john last night?” Betty leaned across the table, her beer corralled between her hardworking hands, and grinned at Anna. The grin winked out. “Don’t tell me you fell in love with Tanya,” she said warningly.
“With you in the wings, I doubt I’d have a chance,” Anna said gravely. Betty’s grin returned. “Do you come here every night?” Anna asked. Perhaps Betty would know a thing or two about a thing or two.
“Most nights,” Betty said, relaxing back as far as she was able in the stingy plastic chair. “If I’m going to grow on her, I’ve got to be around. And for little things to grow, they’ve got to be fed and watered.” She rubbed her thumb and fingers together in the sign for cash. Betty was nobody’s fool.
“As to who’s working tonight, Candy’s here—she’s here pretty much seven days a week. I don’t think she’s got anyplace else to go, and she really likes the stage work and the people. She’s a big star in Candy World. Uh, let’s see, Star obviously, and my adorable Tanya—she has Mondays and Tuesdays off, so I’m not here those nights. I haven’t seen Delilah, but I haven’t been here all that long. She could be in back getting made up. Mostly she and Star don’t work together, which is too bad. They’ve got a hot little girl-girl act they do once in a while. It goes over big. All the bozos picture themselves as the welcome third. Like that would ever happen. But they try and work different nights. Star’s got a kid about nine, and they don’t like to leave him with sitters if they can help it.”
“Who’s up after Star?”
“The single most beautiful woman ever about to fall in love with a wharf rat,” Betty said and smacked her lips. Not metaphorically but literally, like a toothless sommelier trying to remember an exquisite vintage.
Betty was a font of information, and Anna was grateful. As Star finished her act and clumped off the stage, leaving the energetic young stud muffin slouching in sexy—and to Anna’s eye totally gay—insouciance against a pole, Anna rose and followed her toward the ladies’ toilet.
Some goddess or other had taken pity on Anna, and the cramped space was relatively free of smoke. Probably because Delilah wasn’t there to add her nightly pack of Marlboro Lights to the dope smoke.
“You guys got a minute?” Anna asked. Star collapsed into the unpadded metal folding chair that she’d occupied the previous night.
“Geez, woman, how many minutes you need? Didn’t you get your fill of bullshit last night? Whatever you’re after, we’re fresh out,” Star said wearily. Shoving aside a blue towel that was probably older than her co-worker Candy, Star opened the lid of a plastic cooler and pulled out a beer. “You want one?” she asked.
Because breaking bread—or, in this case, yeast—with another was good for developing trust, Anna accepted. Being a woman of manners, Star unscrewed the cap and wiped the mouth of the bottle off on the old towel before handing it to her uninvited guest.
Candy, slumped in the other chair, US magazine open in her lap, her tummy looking bigger than it had the night before and her face rounder and younger, said, “Can I have one?”
“How many’ve you already had?” Star asked, eyes narrowed like a faro dealer peering through smoke.
“Just one. Honest,” Candy said and crossed her heart with her fingers.
“Okay, but you go slow. You’ve got the rest of the night to get through, and the boss doesn’t like it when you get too silly onstage.” Star pulled out a third beer, twisted off the cap, wiped the mouth of the bottle, and handed it to the pregnant teen. She shot Anna a look that said as clearly as if she’d shouted it, “I dare you to say on
e thing, one fucking thing.”
Anna didn’t dare.
“I got somebody I want you to meet,” Anna said.
Star groaned. “Everybody’s got somebody they want us to ‘meet.’ We don’t hook. Not even for ‘sisters.’ Got that? Didn’t we go through all that last night? What part of ‘fuck off’ don’t you understand?”
“Yeah, what part?” Candy echoed without malice.
“No,” Anna said, feeling a fool for not knowing this was how her innocuous statement would be taken in the ladies’ room of Dick’s. “Not sex stuff. Serious stuff. You wait here.” Not trusting herself not to screw things up with more unintended insults, Anna set her beer down on the board near Candy’s makeup and let herself out of the bathroom. One elbow on the black plywood, she waited beside the bar, enduring the bumping of inebriated men making their unsteady ways back to the john in the rear.
Tanya was reworking a high school wet dream for the audience, the one where the pretty girl doesn’t snub the ugly fat boys. Finally Jordan delivered the last tiny bottle of booze on his tray and returned to the bar.
“Ready?” Anna asked.
“It’s pretty busy,” Jordan replied with a fretful look at the patrons growing ever more hot-eyed and thirsty as Tanya’s micro-mini pleated skirt rode up her brown thighs to expose the threadiest of thong panties.
“And you care about that why?” Anna asked.
Jordan’s lips curled into a sneer, and Anna braced herself for the onslaught of the four-letter words he was so fond of. Before the lips parted, she saw Clare come home. Pressed to describe it, Anna would have had a hard time. Anna’s back was to the stage, and the slow strobe of pink lights Tanya used for her act was in Jordan’s face, dying his skin the shade of a living person’s, and taking the bloodshot veins from the whites of his eyes. In this glow of artificial health Anna saw the irises change as Jordan left and Clare returned. The pupils grew slightly bigger, the hazel less brown and more gold. Eyelids relaxed infinitesimally, and brows lowered. The sense was of an evil spirit departing and the body’s original owner returning to look out through the eyes.
“I’m scared is all,” Clare said. She untied the black apron from over her black pants and laid it neatly across the black bar, leaving Anna to wonder what had really been accomplished.
“Afraid a teensy-weensy little thing like believing you are a child molester will make them not like you?” Anna asked with what she’d meant to be an encouraging smile.
“No,” Clare said. “Scared to death they won’t know anything, won’t help, won’t be able to help. Scared . . .” She let the word trail off and stared into the darkness at the rear of the club. “Let’s go,” she said and began walking ahead of Anna toward the ladies’ room.
Watching Clare square Jordan’s slouching shoulders, Anna guessed she wasn’t scared they would know nothing of her lost children but was terrified they would know something. They would know the girls were dead.
Odds were against any of that happening. At best, Candy would remember something that was useful or Star would know someone who might know someone who might know something useful.
That was if, in fact, Dana and Vee had gone missing and not been burned in their beds by Mom.
The worst that might happen was that, eager to please or to seem important, Candy would make up information that would delay them with wild goose chases. The girls had been gone nearly two weeks. If they were not dead already it would be a miracle. Any trail leading to them or, more likely, their corpses would have cooled.
Much longer and it would be cold beyond the abilities of a park ranger and an actor to detect.
TWENTY-FIVE
“Wait,” Anna said as Clare reached the bathroom. “Let me go first.”
Clare backed into the shadows so Anna could open the door.
The smoke was back. Star had lit up. Candy was planting kisses on the mirror in hot pink lipstick, then trying to match her mouth’s reflection to the greasy lips on the glass.
Anna took her usual place in the space between the toilet stall and the sink. “This isn’t Jordan,” she said by way of introduction as the skinny black-clad woman pushed in behind her.
“The fuck it isn’t,” Star snapped. “Get your bony ass out of here.” She started up from her chair, a hairbrush held like a billy club.
“Easy, Star,” Anna said. She was about to lay a calming hand on the other woman’s arm but decided she would probably get a black eye out of the deal. Star looked like she’d taken her self-defense classes on the streets and in the alleys of New Orleans. “It’s not Jordan. Jordan is a woman. Her name is Faye,” Anna said. They hadn’t discussed a pseudonym, but the less the dancers knew about Clare, the less trouble they could get into for helping her. “Faye disguised herself as Jordan because she’s trying to find her daughter. The little girl got snatched, and Faye was able to follow her as far as New Orleans. She thought if she got a job in the business she might hear something, and she couldn’t strip—”
“That’s for sure,” Star said unkindly.
“And she thought men might talk more easily in front of another man. So she went for bartending,” Anna finished in a rush, trying to get it all in before Star bodily threw Jordan into the hall and her after him.
At the end of Anna’s impromptu speech there was silence. The pulse of Tanya’s dance music came through the thin walls as faint and all pervasive as if it were the building’s heartbeat.
Star stared at Jordan, then Anna, her eyes hard as she looked for the trick, the hoax, the hook that was hidden behind the words.
“Bullshit,” she said finally. “You want to play games, do it in the men’s room.” Stubbing out her cigarette, she turned to face the mirror and began touching up her eyebrows, Anna and Jordan as dead to her as the sink or the bowl.
Clare unbuttoned the black shirt.
“None of that shit,” Star said without turning. “I can whip both your butts and will.”
Clare undid the last button and pulled open the shirtfront to expose the Ace bandage wrapped around her breasts to flatten her chest. “My little girls—” she began, then stopped herself. If she told them too much, if there were two missing daughters in her story, they might realize she was the woman on the run for a quadruple homicide and stop listening in their rush to dial 911. “My little girl,” she amended, “is seven years old,” she said softly, letting the shirt fall to the floor. “She loves animals and is a good swimmer. She beat the third graders at the last meet. Her hair is brown and soft as a kitten’s fur. On windy days it looks as if it has a life of its own.”
As she spoke in the quiet clear voice, she removed the butterfly closure and began to unwrap the bandage from her chest. “She calls me Momsy and loves me to French-braid her hair and recite e. e. cummings to her in funny accents.” The bandage was off. She started unbuckling her belt.
“Her father is dead, and the police won’t help me. They think I’m insane, and more and more I do, too.”
Leaning her fanny against the door to the hall, Clare pulled off one shoe, then the other, dropping them to the floor with a thud. “The night she was kidnapped I heard a man say he was taking her to ‘the Bourbon Street Nursery.’ He had a Cajun accent. There was an awful boy with him, no more than twenty, but so sick he should be put down like a rabid dog.” One leg was free of the trousers, and, balanced on one foot, she was easing off the other.
“I’ve seen the boy here in the Quarter. I chased him, but he pulled a knife and got away. I think they’ve got my little girl. I think they are going to sell her into sexual slavery or use her for a while, then kill her.”
The panties were off, and, naked but for a pair of men’s black socks, Clare stood before the strippers. “Could you help me?” she asked, and she spread her hands in the universal gesture of supplication.
Star’s mouth was pursed and tight, as if she were on the upslope of a roller coaster and they’d just crested for the fall. Tears were in her eyes. Before she h
ad a chance to speak, Candy burst out sobbing.
“You’re a girl, and I’m not a lesbian. I hate you! Fuck you! I hate you! You said you liked me!” She wailed like the child she was, makeup running down in the tears and the snot.
“I do like you,” Clare said, dropping on one knee, her nakedness forgotten, her arms going around Candy. “I like you a lot, a whole, whole lot.” Candy kept wailing. “I like you better than me cutlass,” Clare said in a perfect pirate’s voice. “Better than high tea,” she said in tones Maggie Smith would have to work for. “Better than a leprechaun.” This in a brogue.
Candy stopped crying to snuffle at her. Amazement had taken the place of betrayal on her face. “You’re like everybody rolled up,” she said with wonder.
“And every one of us likes you more than anything. Forgive me for not being a boy?” Clare smiled, and Anna realized it was the first time she’d seen a smile on either her or Jordan’s face. It changed everything. Without the smile, Anna had believed in her innocence. With it, she was sure. Almost sure.
Candy looked at Clare for a moment longer, then turned back to the mirror, saying, “But you’re not a boy.” Candy’s interests were limited, it would seem.
“I can do tricks, though. Magic. Want to see?”
“Beer!” came a roar from beyond the door. Then, louder, as more voices joined what was becoming a chorus, “Beer! Beer! Beer!” The chant was accompanied by rhythmic banging of bottles on plywood.
“Put your clothes on,” Star ordered. “We’ll stay after. Without booze and bare breasts those monkeys’ll tear the place apart.”
Clare jammed herself back into her black clothes. The Ace bandage she left on the floor.
As she left, Star laughed. “Half those jackasses are going to see those boobs under the shirt, get hot, and think they’ve started batting for the other team.”
At twenty after four in the morning, Dick’s was finally closed for the night. Customarily, Jordan would clean the men’s room, empty and wash the ashtrays, stack the chairs, and sweep and mop the floor. Tonight, he didn’t bother. Neither Jordan nor Clare was coming back to Dick’s Den any time soon.