“Oh, but you must have an opinion,” I pressed, “Some little thoughts of your own that you would like to share with the group.”
“I think I’ll hit you if you don’t come and talk to the boss,” he said, brandishing one large fist as an expressive illustration of his point.
“In front of all these customers?” I asked, leaning back so that I could gesture at all the other punters who were studiously ignoring what was going on in the booth in favour of whatever else they could find to look at.
The big man leaned forward until only I could hear him over the beat of the music powering the performer’s gyrations. “No, in front of her.”
There was no doubting to whom he was referring. I was impressed. He was a lot smarter than he looked, something that was fortunate for him. I stored away that information and silently reprimanded myself for being fooled by his appearance. I really ought to have known better than that.
“Let’s go and talk to the boss,” I said with a crooked smile, trying to save face. To Miranda, I added, “You stay here and don’t accept any drinks from strange men.”
“Is there any other kind in here?” she asked archly.
“Good point.”
I stood up and followed the doorman (though, their union apparently preferred the term Entry Point Supervisors these days) through the rapidly filling tables towards a door that was discreetly located to the side of the long bar and was marked only by a small, equally discreet, plaque stating that it was to be used by Staff Only. On the other side of the door was a staircase that took us up to the club’s offices. Unlike the dim interior of the entertainment areas, the lighting here was quite bright and it took a few moments for me to be able to look around without squinting. As far as offices went, they were pretty much as offices are everywhere – desks, tables, computers, hole punches, ledgers, lever arch files and unpaid invoices. Not many offices, though, have a section of files marked ‘G-string allocations’ on their shelves. I was expecting the boss’s office to overlook the main stage and to be opulent in its demonstration that he was the man in charge. Instead, it was just like all the others except that it lay at the end of the corridor and there were no files and fewer papers in evidence. This was an office for the carrying out business, not for the demonstration of power.
The manager himself (I had imagined him in a gangster outfit with a moll in a flapper’s dress sat on the edge of his desk) wore a nondescript dark tie in front of his white, short-sleeved shirt. He sported thin-rimmed glasses. A watch and a wedding ring were his only personal adornments. His hair was slightly greying at the temples and he had the harassed look of a man who was forever chasing the pounds needed to keep the balance at the bottom of the sheet marked in black ink. As we entered, he looked up from the sheets that he was reading and then dismissed his employee with a curt, “Thank you.”
When the doorman hesitated, he was waved away with an impatient gesture. Not having been given any other instructions, I sat down in one of the functional office chairs opposite the boss’s functional office desk. In the background, I could still hear the dull thump of the bass beat from the main stage, the only reminder that this was not the administration block of some anonymous widget-making factory on the nearby industrial estate.
“You are operating on my premises without permission,” the boss pointed out, putting the papers aside and looking at me through his glasses with eyes made red from looking at far too many balance sheets, order forms and invoices.
“Really?” I feigned surprise. “What makes you think that I’m not here just to enjoy myself like any of your other customers?”
He rolled his eyes in a way that just screamed how much he didn’t want to have to explain himself to the likes of me, but did so anyway, “because you are with a woman who happens to make my dancers look like Butch there…”
“His name is Butch?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking in disbelief. “I mean really? Butch?”
He waited for me to finish before continuing as though I hadn’t even spoken, “…and regular punters don’t flash official badges in the faces of my Entry Point Supervisors before bribing them with,” he glanced at his computer screen, “quite frankly silly amounts of money just to get in. What is it that you are looking for here officer?”
“Agent actually,” I corrected him. There didn’t seem a lot of point playing games since he was intelligent enough to see through them and was apparently tired enough to simply not play along. I took the picture of Miranda’s brother that had come with the file out of my jacket and passed it over to him. “I’m looking for this man and I have reason to believe that he might have been here.”
“Might have been here?” he shook his head wearily, picking up on the potential rather than the definite in my statement whilst looking at the photograph. “Pretty much everyone in the country might have been in here at some point. Except perhaps the Queen.”
“I’m a bit more sure about him than Her Majesty,” I told him. He was clearly used to talking to policemen and knew how to rankle them from the outset. That suggested that perhaps he was more of a player than his outward appearance would suggest. Everyone here seemed to be a bit more than the image they projected. That meant, in turn, that they were worthy of further scrutiny.
“I will have the staff take a look.” He pressed a button and a woman appeared in the doorway. She was obviously an ex-dancer of the club who could no longer defy gravity whichever way she was hanging from the pole, and had moved into the administration side of things. The downplayed business clothes and, again, thin-rimmed glasses couldn’t hide the way that she moved and the appraising way that she looked me over as she crossed to the desk. The skirt was also an inch or so too short and the shoes too high in the heel department. The choker at her neck and the dangling earrings that she wore were just a bit too overstated, as was her makeup. The wedding ring that she sported was her most conservative adornment.
“Yes, Mr Traske?”
“Please take this and see if any of the duty staff recognise him,” he handed over the photograph, which she glanced at and dismissed immediately.
“The dancers?” she queried.
“Those that aren’t on stage or otherwise occupied,” he allowed and she quickly departed.
“Nice assistant,” I let my gaze linger after her longer that was necessary. “Hot body.”
I was watching his eyes when I said it, looking for a flash of annoyance, or worse, to confirm what I believed to be the case; that the boss and the assistant were married. How else to explain the similar choice in wedding rings and spectacles? It was slender evidence on which to base a supposition perhaps, but not insignificant. Not that it mattered very much, if at all, but sometimes small details can reveal much bigger things and it is always best to know everything you can about the people that you are dealing with. You never know when you might need an advantage and where that advantage might come from. There was no reaction. Nothing at all. That was significant in itself. There should have been some reaction, even if it was just to agree with me or surprise that I thought it worth mentioning or confusion because it was something that he had never even thought about. Instead, the statement was met with an utterly blank expression. That meant that Mr Traske was indeed hiding something and that he had been well trained at suppressing his reactions. Very well trained. That was the kind of things that only professionals were trained to do.
“Whilst Cynthia, my assistant, is doing the rounds of the staff, is there anything else that we can do for you, Agent?” He stressed the word with just enough disdain to stay the right side of giving open offence. Probably feeling very pleased with himself, he wasn’t aware how much he was giving away to a trained observer.
“Yes, I’m going to need copies of your CCTV recordings for the last, say, six months,” I suggested with a carefully modulated smile.
“We don’t have CCTV inside the club,” he replied without a pause. It was a request that he had been expecting.
“Yes, you do,”
I countered matter-of-factly, “You just don’t want your clients to know that you do. Probably something to do with an invasion of their privacy and the risk of personal embarrassment to them.”
“And you have some sort of documentary support for this request?” It was a fair question, though most people would have just asked to see the warrant.
“I can have it here in, oh” I consulted my watch, “about seventeen minutes.”
Which wasn’t bad considering the lateness of the hour.
“Of course you can.” I thought for a moment that he was actually going to challenge me to get the warrant, which I could do just as I said. On the same timescale I could also get a full evidence gathering team to go over the place with a fine tooth comb and get statements from every member of the club’s staff as well as all the clients, which wasn’t something that either of us would really want. Instead, he added, “It also happens that the policy of the club is to co-operate fully with all our law enforcement agencies.”
Again the sneer in his tone was just the right side of being overtly offensive and since I was going to get what I was asking for I let the implied insult slide. I wasn’t about to get into comparing ethical stances with him. I’m too comfortable in my masculinity to need that kind of support. He typed in some commands on the keyboard in front of him and then went over to a cupboard off to one side of the room, which he opened to reveal a bank of electronic equipment. He slipped a new disc into a drive that whirred into life and then spat it back out again a couple of minutes later. Putting the disc back into its case, he offered it to me.
“I would hope,” he suggested as he did so, “that anything not connected with your case will be dealt with delicately.”
“Discretion would be my middle name,” I assured him, “if it wasn’t already Jason.”
“Then I have nothing to fear, do I?” he handed me the disc and I took it, stowing it away in my pocket for later examination.
“Apart from fear itself, I don’t suppose you do,” I responded. “At least not from me.” I took out the flyer from Arnie’s flat and showed it to Traske. “What’s all this about?”
He examined the flyer briefly, “Hawaiian night? It was just a theme that we tried. We try themed evenings all the time, to broaden the clientele and attract new members. This had a southern pacific theme as I recall. It’s all in the pictures.”
And it was too; girls in grass skirts and not much else, exotic and no doubt highly-priced cocktails, flower leis for the guests and water games. All good clean adult fun, of course.
“And nothing special about it that isn’t in the pictures?”
“It wasn’t very successful as I recall,” he handed the flyer back. “Turned a profit, but not enough to make it worthwhile. It was perhaps a little too obvious for our regular customers.”
Considering the pink neon hippopotamus adorning the front wall of the club I found it hard to believe that anything was too obvious for their regular customers.
“I doubt that we shall be running it again. If you’re interested the theme nights this month are ‘biker babes’ and ‘secret agents’. Perhaps you would enjoy that one.”
I was saved from answering by the return of Cynthia. She handed the photograph back to Traske with a small shake of her head and departed immediately, not even looking at me directly.
“It would appear that none of my employees remember seeing your man,” he handed me back the photograph. “Though that’s hardly surprising. We get so many people in here and he is hardly memorable now is he?”
Which was true enough. Arnold Harcourt was not a memorable man in his looks. Thin, lanky, heavy black spectacles and with a floppy fringe line; he was an almost archetypal geek. The photograph from the file wasn’t brilliant quality and I had thought that it was slightly blurred until Miranda told me that was how he looked in real life.
I stood up, “Well thank you for your time, Mr Traske. You won’t be going very far any time soon will you? In case I have any more questions.”
“No, you can find me here,” he said with a slight shake of his head, but there was the merest hint of a sneer on his lips. “Our doors are, apparently, always open to you.”
“For a price,” I replied and left, making my own way back down to the main area. By the time that I returned, Miranda was surrounded by so many men that there was no space left in the booth and the hungry looks from one or two of the other clients suggested that if any opened up it would be filled instantly. She was holding court and the centre of the group, gaily laughing and thoroughly enjoying herself with all the attention.
Which made me the party-pooper.
“Time to go, Miranda,” I said, standing over the seated men, trying to look imposing, but a mere shade compared to Butch’s masterclass in the art of looming.
“Really? So soon?” She checked the dancing set list on the table, “I haven’t seen the ‘dental hygienist’ yet and the ‘snake charmer’ sounds intriguing don’t you think?”
“At the very least,” I agreed, “but we have what we came for so we should leave.”
“Hey buddy,” one of the men, identified as American by his accent and his inability to keep his neck wound in, challenged in a voice that was made louder by the amount of alcohol consumed, “the lady said that she doesn’t want to leave.” To Miranda, he added, “Who’s this, your uncle?”
Everyone at the table roared at that, with the exception of Miranda.
“No,” I replied as soon as the humour had died down enough for me to be heard, keeping my tone light and pleasant and wearing a thin smile. Threats have much more effect when delivered that way. “I’m the man who’ll be handing you your spleen on a plate if you don’t keep your nose out.”
There was a moment’s pause whilst he reconciled the tone and the content of the message and then he jumped to his feet, “Now wait a minute.”
I didn’t wait a minute. I didn’t even wait a second. He was a big man and in reasonably good shape, so he could have been a handful in a fight, but I wasn’t about to get involved in a fight, not least because there were half a dozen others who just might decide that he was their friend in need and alcohol and that they needed to get involved too. I stiff-finger jabbed him hard in diaphragm and he immediately doubled over, all the breath rammed out of him, finding it hard to breathe. Grabbing the back of his head, I slammed it onto the table top hard enough to hear his nose crack and to render him unconscious immediately. The whole process took a couple of seconds and left everyone around the table in a shocked state of silence, which was pretty much the aim of the exercise.
“Now I don’t want to tell you what to do,” I said to Miranda in the sudden quiet that seemed to be enhanced by the drum beat that was underscoring the Indian Squaw’s pole dance moves rather than destroyed by it. “You’re a big girl, as you’ve already indicated, and you can do what you like, but I’m leaving now.”
“Oh no, I’m coming,” she agreed immediately, somewhat chastened, and the men around her slid quickly out of the booth to let her pass. They sidled past me warily and were lost in the gloom of the interior quickly. The injured man was apparently not their friend after all.
As we left, I mentioned to Butch, “There’s an American inside who is in immediate need of medical attention.”
“What happened?” he asked with a frown. He was normally the one who was the first to know that someone needed medical attention inside because he was the one who usually created that need.
“Put it down to cultural differences,” I suggested and walked away.
Miranda walked back to the car with me in silence and it wasn’t until we were halfway back to the hotel that she finally spoke in a tone that was respectful, disapproving and confused all at the same time.
“Was that really necessary?” she asked, “What you did to that man? He was just a bit tipsy and didn’t mean any harm.”
“I know his type,” I kept my eyes on the road. I didn’t want her looking at me. She’d se
en enough of the real me for one evening. “He might have been all fun and frolics there, but what about later when he decided that he wanted to take you back to his place to keep the party going?”
“I could have handled it,” she assured me and I believed her. What I couldn’t tell her, though, was that I also needed to send a message to Traske, and whoever was above him, a message that said that I was not someone to be trifled with. The American had just offered himself up as a convenient delivery system for that message. He had certainly been a lot easier than taking on Butch would have been, that having been my original plan.
“I’m sure that you could, but the Agency assigned me to look into this case and that means looking after you. I’m sorry, but there it is.” It was weak, but the best that I could come up with. This was the side of my business that I would have liked to protect her from seeing, not least because of what it said to her about me.
“I suppose that it’s rather sweet you protecting my honour” she decided meekly, spoiling it by adding, “If you ignore the blood and the sound that his nose made.” She then made it worse by continuing, “And as for my honour. Well, that hasn’t been worth defending for a good few years now.”
“I think that you might be confusing ‘honour’ with ‘virginity’,” I suggested.
“Well now that is sweet,” she lapsed into silence, but it was a more companionable silence than the earlier, colder one had been, and that’s how we stayed until we reached our rooms in the hotel. I walked her to the door of her room, as much because I wanted to as to make sure that nobody tried to kill or kidnap her on the way. That sort of thing doesn’t happen often even on proper cases, but management were still asking questions in some quarters about the last occasion.
She turned to me outside the door and it was clear what she was going to ask even before she did so, “Would you like to come in?”
Her lovely face filled my vision, and what she was offering was alluring to say the least, but she was replaced momentarily by a vision of Director Grayson, giving me a lecture on the inherent dangers of getting involved with someone that you are supposed to be investigating. There were rules about that sort of thing, of course, and all of them said that you weren’t allowed to do it unless the case controller expressly requested it as a way of getting information you shouldn’t have or gaining access to somewhere that you weren’t supposed to gain access to. Since I was the only person on the case, and it didn’t officially exist, I could argue that rules didn’t apply and even if they did then I was the case controller and so could expressly order myself to accept her offer. On top of which it wasn’t Miranda that was under investigation, but her brother. I could have justified it in a dozen ways if I chose to.
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. - the Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist Page 8