Private Dancer

by Suzanne Forster

  Private Dancer

  Suzanne Forster

  For Leslie Knowles, who must be a wonderful teacher. Thank you for the vivid insights and the gentle advice.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  A Biography of Suzanne Forster

  One

  “RAY BANS, A FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOW, and a black leather jacket.” Bev Brewster whispered the words into the silk flower pinned to her lapel, her eyes riveted on the man who’d just entered The Tearoom Pavilion. Then she glanced around the elegant restaurant to see if anyone had noticed her covert action. Luckily, with all the commotion at the reservations desk, nobody was paying any attention to a rather ordinary-looking brunette, even if she was talking into a flower.

  The entire restaurant seemed to share Bev’s fascination with the customer the maître d’ was discreetly trying to waylay. The man looked as if he’d wandered off a remake of Rebel Without a Cause. A poolhall roughneck, Bev thought. What was he doing in a place like this?

  “I’m sorry, sir, but our dress code requires a jacket.” The maître d’s agitated voice carried through the hushed room.

  “Then we have no problem, do we?” The roughneck indicated his leather jacket with a flip of the lapel, brushed past the maître d’, and entered the room. He hesitated long enough to case the place with one quick sweep of his eyes.

  Bev found herself taking in every detail of the man’s appearance, from his shoulder-length dark hair and unshaven profile to his street-brawler’s build. He was at least six four and an undeniably tough customer. She didn’t envy the maître d’s predicament.

  The roughneck strolled across the room without a backward glance. He had the long, rangy stride of an urban cowboy and a way of carrying himself that said “proceed at your own risk.” He also had the kind of dark, smoldering good looks that women left their husbands for. As he walked, his eyes flicked around the restaurant in a quick appraisal that sized up the trendy crowd with barely concealed insolence.

  Bev feigned sudden interest in her menu.

  It wasn’t just that she wanted to avoid being seen, it was the surprising tightness in her neck muscles. She didn’t trust herself not to wrinkle her nose, or to do something even more adolescent, if he looked her way. There was something about the man’s go-to-hell attitude that rankled.

  Or maybe it was his seeming command of a tense situation, she admitted, taking a quick sip of her oolong tea. Given her present state of insecurity, a show of confidence from anyone, including her pet goldfish, felt threatening. Frankly she didn’t feel equal to this assignment, or to any assignment. She wasn’t a bonafide private eye, and if she hadn’t insisted on helping out at her father’s detective agency after he’d had his heart attack a month earlier, she wouldn’t be here now. She’d still be designing and selling mail-order stationery from her small house in the San Fernando Valley.

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  The harsh whiskey rasp of a male voice sent shivers down Bev’s spine. Her jaw went slack and her head snapped up. “I beg your pardon,” she said, staring into empty air. An embarrassing second flashed by before she realized the man hadn’t been talking to her. He was two tables down, talking to—

  Bev snapped to attention. He was talking to Elayne Greenaway, the woman she’d had under surveillance for the past week. Bev barely had time to be grateful that neither of them had heard her before she registered the oddness of the situation. She wasn’t surprised that Mrs. Greenaway was meeting a man. She’d been hired because Mr. Greenaway thought his wife was having an affair. What surprised Bev was her subject’s choice of man. What could a sophisticated woman like Elayne Greenaway possibly want with a hoodlum like him?

  Unless it was the obvious, Bev thought, experiencing a tiny, involuntary shudder. Reckless thrills. Some women went in for that sort of thing, especially bored housewives with money to burn.

  No, it had to be a mistake, she decided, expecting to see security guards burst into the room at any moment and drag the intruder away. Instead, she watched him pull back a chair and sit down at Mrs. Greenaway’s table as though he’d been invited. A moment later he slouched back negligently, a booted foot propped on his knee.

  Bev lowered her menu, fascinated. This was going to be interesting, she decided. The fashionable Mrs. Greenaway hadn’t uttered a word of protest. In fact, she was smiling one of those dippy smiles that women often produce when they come flat up against a wall of male sensuality. And he had it to spare, Bev admitted. A six-feet-four-inch wall of it.

  A waiter approached hesitantly and the roughneck ordered a beer. The waiter reappeared almost instantly, apparently eager not to offend, but when he tried to pour the beer into a chilled glass, the man stopped him.

  He drinks from the bottle, Bev thought, watching him rip off the screw top and take a long swallow. Why didn’t that surprise her? He probably chewed on toothpicks and kept a pack of Camels in his rolled-up T-shirt sleeve. He probably didn’t even shut the bathroom door!

  Bev understood that the first priority of good detective work was emotional distance, but she decided to indulge herself this once. She was already nurturing a dislike for Elayne Greenaway’s hoodlum boyfriend, just on principle. He was too cocky and self-assured for his own good—or so she told herself several times over the next few minutes. And then, when she saw him chugalug the first beer and order a second, she made up her mind that he drank too much and probably treated women abominably.

  And yet, when Elayne Greenaway leaned across the table and touched his hand, Bev’s breath caught. It happened so suddenly she felt a wave of lightheadedness. Elayne’s crimson fingernails mesmerized Bev as they drifted lightly across the man’s forefinger. Even more bizarre was how Bev could almost imagine herself doing the same thing! For a split second, she envisioned herself in Elayne Greenaway’s place. Touching him.

  The roughneck glanced down at Elayne’s hand, then raised his eyes to hers. It was a scene right out of a sizzling midnight movie, Bev realized, one with Bogart and Bacall. She didn’t dare blink for fear of missing something. Riveted in place, she watched as Elayne took a slender cigarette from a gold case and waited for him to light it. He dug a tattered book of matches from a zipper pocket of his jacket and leaned forward, staring into her eyes as he slowly struck the match.

  Bev nearly slithered off the chair as he touched Elayne’s hand to steady it. It was over in an instant, just the lightest contact of his fingertips against Elayne Greenaway’s wrist, but to Bev it ranked sky-high on her list of ecstatic moments. In all her twenty-seven years, she’d never seen anything so sexy!

  They began to talk then, in hushed, conspiratorial tones. Bev found herself leaning toward them instinctively, so engrossed that she nearly toppled out of the chair when the roughneck suddenly stood up. He nodded at Mrs. Greenaway. She smiled back at him, and then he turned and walked away.

  Bev barely had her pulse rate under control before he’d disappeared from the room. She sat there, oddly shaken, and wondering what to do. Who was he to Mrs. Greenaway? And what had their brief meeting been all about? She’d been following the woman for days and this was the first indication that there might be something clandestine in her life.

  Abruptly Bev’s instincts took over. Check it out, she told herself. See where he’s going!

  She had no idea how much oolong tea cost, but she plunked down a ten-dollar bill and made tracks for the exit. The roughneck was getting into a vintage red Mustang convertible as Bev came out of the restaurant. He obviously hadn’
t used the valet parking service either. He was parked down the street, just two cars away from her Buick Skylark.

  He gunned the Mustang’s engine and pulled back, tires screeching, then wheeled out into traffic like a destruction derby veteran. Irresponsible, too, Bev thought, ringing up another character defect. She had quite a list by now.

  As he sped down the street, Bev sprinted for her car. Her heart was pounding wildly. She was halfway across the street before she realized that she was actually going after him! She wasn’t sure when she’d made that decision, and she suspected her reasons weren’t entirely professional, but she simply had to find out who Mrs. Greenaway’s hoodlum boyfriend was.

  Had she put the blackjack in her purse?

  It was the foremost question in Bev’s mind as she followed the Mustang through neighborhoods that got progressively seedier. The graffiti grew more explicit by the mile, and the tattooed riffraff loitering on street corners looked as if they were planning their next convenience store heist. Parole violators at best, Bev decided.

  Beyond that, Elayne Greenaway’s roughneck wasn’t an easy man to tail. He drove as if he’d been put on earth to test everyone else’s defensive driving skills, including Bev’s. She’d nearly lost him twice, and suddenly that didn’t seem like such a bad idea. She was just about to make an illegal U-turn and head back when he pulled the Mustang over.

  He parked in front of a rundown beer joint called The Red Monkey. The bar was housed in a two-story building with a sign in the window that advertised rooms to rent upstairs. Bev pulled over half a block down the street and waited, sizing up the situation. It was possible this was where he and Elayne Greenaway met, although she couldn’t imagine the attorney’s wife stepping foot in such a place. Unless Mrs. Greenaway was a closet thrillseeker, she reminded herself, the sort who sought out danger to relieve the tedium of her privileged life.

  Twenty minutes later, Bev had accepted the fact that, tedious life or not, Mrs. Greenaway wasn’t going to show up. Still burning with curiosity, she told herself she’d come too far not to follow through. She removed her blazer, taking care not to jostle the silk flower. Its petals concealed a tiny microphone attached to a miniature voice-activated tape recorder that Bev had hidden in the breast pocket of her jacket. It was her own brainchild, and she was quite proud of it.

  The collar of her linen blouse was lace-trimmed, but Bev flipped it up anyway and freed a couple of buttons. A quick glance in the rearview mirror told her it wasn’t enough. With a mother-of-pearl headband restraining her shoulder-length brunette hair, and her unembellished gray eyes, she still looked like the Bev Brewster who shopped at the neighborhood supermarket on Saturday afternoons and recycled aluminum cans.

  What bothered her more—far more—was that there were still traces of the Bev Brewster whose husband had left her two years ago for another woman, one who was younger and more fertile. She yanked the headband from her hair and shook her head hard.

  Bev entered the bar cautiously and stayed just inside the door, searching the gloom for the roughneck. The Red Monkey was dark, noisy, and crowded, exactly the sort of dive where mayhem loved company and felonies were committed in the alley while no one noticed or cared.

  Bev’s rapid pulse told her what she already knew, that she was out of her depth. She’d been expecting a den of iniquity, but this was a den of thieves. A concealed-weapons crowd. Even the women loitering at the bar looked like the sort who lured men to the rooms upstairs and then had their boyfriends roll them.

  The roughneck was nowhere in sight. Caution wrestled with curiosity and won by a landslide. The only thing that kept Bev in place was her own personal demon. She’d had her share of things to feel like a failure about in recent years, and she was determined not to do a repeat with the present situation. She’d gone to great lengths to reassure her father that she could handle a routine surveillance case like this one; the last thing she was going to do was to turn tail and run.

  “You’re not very good at this, are you?” he said.

  A cold chill shimmied down Bev’s spine. The sensation was familiar and so was the voice. She’d heard husky undercurrents before, but this guy’s voice could crawl up your arm and tap you on the shoulder. She turned and saw him leaning against a wooden post, not five feet away. “Not very good at what?” she asked.

  “At following people.”

  He strolled over to her, and his nearness forced Bev to admit something she’d been trying to ignore in her earlier preoccupation with his defects. He was a highly attractive hoodlum. Even dark glasses and a heavy five o’clock shadow couldn’t conceal the strong, slightly asymmetrical bones of his face. His right side was more angular, had more depth, and the effect was strangely sensual. Even his mouth conveyed sensuality. Then Bev noticed the scar that hooked down from the fullness of his lower lip and snaked along his jawline. Had he been knifed? she wondered. Or shot?

  “That is what you’re doing, isn’t it?” he said. She guessed that behind his Ray Bans his gaze was drifting to her unbuttoned neckline. “Following me?”

  Bev cocked her head and boldly returned his stare. He had the oddest effect on her. Her heart was racing, her common sense was shouting at her to back off, and yet there she was, sizing him up as though she faced down men in black leather jackets every day.

  “My, aren’t we vain?” she responded, pleased at the ice-cold tone of her voice. “A woman walks into a bar, and you assume she’s following you. Some of us might have better things to do. Or didn’t that occur to you?”

  “Better things?”

  “Yes, as it so happens, I’m meeting someone here—later. I come here often.”

  “A regular?”

  She wondered if his eyes were making a leisurely pass over her body as he mulled over that possibility. Her nerves began to prickle with heat.

  “There are two kinds of women who frequent this place,” he said, hooking a thumb in a zippered pocket of his jacket, “serious drinkers and private dancers.” His smile was as dry as the sawdust on the bar floor. “Which are you?”

  There was no doubt what he meant by the latter reference. Bev had already had a look at the female patrons. She might have bluffed about the drinking, except that she had no tolerance whatsoever for alcohol. Two glasses of wine with dinner and she was on her ear. What would Harve Brewster’s daughter do now? she thought.

  “I dance ... a little,” she finally said, wondering at her less-than-confident tone. The ice in her voice was melting.

  His smile turned raffish. “Can I afford you?”

  “I doubt it.”

  He liked that. She could tell by the way he snapped back his head, flicking dark hair off his face. His sunglasses glowed, picking up the neon lights from the bar’s beer signs. “I’ll take up a collection,” he said. Then, pointing out the warped wooden dance floor with a silent jukebox to one side, he added, “Let’s do it.”

  She turned to look, unaware that he was checking her out. He knew she would have blushed if she could have heard his two-word summation of her backside.

  Nice butt, he allowed, his eyes following the tailored lines of her slacks as they curved over her hips. Her legs weren’t half bad either. Made a man wonder if she knew how to use them. She didn’t look as though she’d had a whole lot of practice, he concluded, easing back to survey the whole woman. In fact, if he had to tell the truth, she wasn’t his type. He didn’t go for fresh-scrubbed complexions and lace collars on grown women. He had noticed her eyes, though, even in the bar’s gloom. They were dove gray and soft enough to crawl into. Soft enough to ease a man’s pain, he thought.

  A muscle flexed in his jaw as he let his eyes drift back over her. She might even be a knockout with the right clothes, some makeup, or whatever it was that women did to turn themselves into babes. But who the hell was she?

  In the restaurant he’d had her figured for a bored housewife, but bored housewives didn’t follow men for ten miles to a bar in one of the roughest parts of town.
No, she hadn’t come to The Red Monkey for an afternoon of unbridled passion. The moment’s regret he felt at that realization didn’t make him any less determined to find out what her real motives were. In his business it was dangerous to take anyone for granted, even Ivory soap types with lace collars.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  She turned back to him and his breathing held for a split second. The liquid softness of her gaze hit him again, as though it reflected something soft in him, some need. He rejected the idea as insane. There wasn’t anything soft in him. Not anymore. And as for needs, they got a guy burned. A woman had taught him that.

  “Do private dancers have to have names?” she asked.

  The anger flickering inside him had little if anything to do with her. It was old business, but its heat had aroused him nonetheless. He couldn’t tell if her voice had gone raspy from fear or excitement, but it was clear she intended to play out the game. He resisted the desire to shake his head and laugh. She wasn’t a pro, not unless the church-lady look was selling on the streets these days. Whoever she was, it shouldn’t take much to call her bluff, especially since he’d been playing this kind of game all his life.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s better without names.”

  Say when, lady, he thought, reaching out and capturing a dark tendril of her hair, testing its silkiness with his fingers.

  Bev went very still as his skin brushed the delicate flesh just behind her ear. A moment later he was drawing those same fingers along the curve of her throat as lightly as he’d touched Elayne Greenaway.

  She was afraid to move as his hand descended, afraid that any sudden gesture would unlock the anticipation trembling inside her. What was he going to do? Actually, she had a fairly good idea, but she hoped fervently that she was wrong. It would be easy enough to stop him, but she knew this was a test of her mettle.

  Her heart leaped at the intimacy of his touch, but she willed herself to stay still, unflinchingly still ... even as his fingers drifted over the rise of her collarbone and down toward the opening of her blouse.