Winning Texas

by Nancy Stancill

  “It doesn’t happen every day in this area, but it’s not uncommon for porn stars to make public appearances at clubs to extend their fan base,” he said. “Usually the vice squad is there, too.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Obviously, we don’t want them to step over the line of what’s legal,” Matt said. “Also, it could be rowdy, with too many people drinking even more than usual. I’ll just be there as an extra pair of eyes and hands for the vice squad folks.”

  “Well, as it happens, one of my reporters has been investigating the Texas Girls clubs’ mogul, Kyle Krause, so I’m curious enough to go.”

  “Holding out on me?” Matt asked. “Give me the scoop.”

  “Please keep it under your hat. It’s early in his investigation.”

  “Think I’d go running to Kyle Krause with that news? Hardly. I’ll pick you up at 7.”

  Annie was intrigued. She’d been researching Houston’s troubled history with strip clubs to help Nate with his project. The city currently was home to at least one hundred clubs, more than most other metropolitan areas, though it was hard to definitively keep track because they opened and closed with regularity. There were many theories about why Houston was such a magnet for topless entertainment, but Annie thought one reason was the proliferation of conventions Houston hosted that attracted large numbers of men, including the giant OTC. As a center for energy production, the city yearly welcomed more than 50,000 participants in the Offshore Technology Conference. The OTC was always a headache for the Times to cover, but it was a huge boon for bars, restaurants and strip clubs. Annie personally knew one local woman who broke off her marriage after a picture of her husband cavorting with a prostitute surfaced online.

  Also, though she thought of strip clubs as a sort of a hangover from the 1960s – prior to the feminist movement, when men were less evolved – the businesses were actually flourishing worldwide.

  She’d learned that Houston had tried for years to put too-exacting regulations on the clubs, such as trying to specify the number of inches dancers should be separated from customers – only to be sued by large chains. Now, the regulations had been simplified, and the largest clubs, or their chain ownership, paid into a special fund that supported the vice squad. It was a way to self-police that had both critics and supporters. The mom-and-pop clubs were usually the ones that would flout regulations with impunity. They tended to move out of the city to locations in the counties that were beyond policing. Overall, it was a strange system, but it seemed to work.

  Matt showed up at her door the next night, gave her a kiss and whistled appreciatively at her outfit – a short white denim skirt, a figure-hugging black top and white bejeweled sandals.

  “Wow, Carla Carmine will have nothing on you,” he said.

  “Thanks, Matt,” she smiled. “No badge or uniform?”

  “No, we need to blend in with the best of Houston’s lowlife.”

  The Texas Girls club fronted on the North Freeway, the section of I-45 that wound through downtown north to Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport and on up to Dallas. The big airport was named for George H.W. Bush, the much-beloved longtime Houston resident, not his less-esteemed son, who’d chosen to relocate to Dallas after his presidency ended. The 23-mile stretch from the airport to downtown vexed some city boosters with its low-rent billboards, sagging businesses and wilder-than-usual traffic. It seemed to showcase the worst of Houston for newly arrived visitors, but nobody did much about it. The Gulf Freeway, which led from the south side of downtown to Houston’s smaller Hobby Airport, was even tawdrier. When she first moved to Houston, Annie had been appalled by the city’s haphazard, anything-goes development, but after ten years, she had an unreasonable affection for it. Houston had resisted zoning for decades and wasn’t likely to ever embrace it. Now, she believed, along with other Houstonians, that market forces, not zoning, mostly dictated what a place looked like. Houston, by and large, didn’t look that much different than big cities with more conventional zoning laws.

  Matt drove around the jammed parking lot of the strip-center club and finally located a space. He opened the car door and took her arm, steering her toward the booth just inside the Texas Girls entrance. A meaty, shaved-head bouncer with a ZZ-Top-style beard and a cobra tattoo on his neck demanded their IDs. He looked at them closely and frowned when he saw Matt’s police identification.

  “What are you doing here, Mr. Detective? Trying to get your jollies?” He sneered in a belligerent tone. “We follow all of the rules.”

  “I expect you’ll see plenty of cops here – in uniform and civilian clothes,” Matt said in a neutral tone.

  A striking woman with long brown hair and a glittering outfit stepped out from the ticket booth and said, “Bobo, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, Miss Juliana,” he said with a chastened air. He walked outside.

  She looked at them as if memorizing their faces, examined their IDs and led them to the front of the large room, where some tables still remained empty toward the stage. She showed them to one with a forced smile and swept out.

  “Who’s that babe?” Annie wondered. “She acts like she owns the place.”

  “It must be Juliana Souza, girlfriend of the owner,” Matt said. “She helps Kyle Krause run the clubs, I hear. Bobo the bouncer has a reputation as a really bad dude, though he certainly minds Juliana. Did you ever see a big man slink away so fast?”

  Annie laughed. “You seem to know an awfully lot about the clubs. Didn’t think that was your specialty.”

  “I’ve just been helping one of the vice cops who’s looking at Krause’s whole operation. She’s here tonight,” he said, beckoning to a corner table. A woman came over, wearing a black slacks outfit rather than a uniform. She was in her thirties, Annie guessed, and attractive, with thick, curvy eyebrows and curly dark hair.

  “Hi, Monica,” he said. “May I present my friend, Annie Price? Monica Gardiner is a colleague of mine who’s here to see that Carla Carmine behaves herself.”

  “Seriously?” Annie asked. “How does a porn star behave herself in a strip club?”

  “We just want to make sure there are no sex shows,” she said. “We’ll shut them down very quickly if that happens. They can strip all they want, but they have to obey the public decency laws.”

  “My goodness,” Annie said. “You have your work cut out for you.”

  “Indeed we do. Can you excuse us for a moment? I need to talk to Matt privately,” Monica said. “See you, Annie.”

  He went to Monica’s table and the two of them talked for a while with a man Annie assumed was another plainclothes officer. She looked at the strip clubs’ magazine she’d picked up at the entrance. It was glossy, with big photos of women in lacy underwear and flashy ads for local clubs. She noticed a two-page feature previewing Carla Carmine’s appearance.

  The feature story noted that Carmine had worked for “major XXX film companies, including Bang Brothers, Naughty America and New Sensations.” The tall blonde’s shapely body was praised as “all natural” and her interests were described as “men, women and threesomes.” Some day she wanted to run a cupcake shop.

  Annie put the magazine down, annoyed that she was wasting time reading such inanities. She guessed there was a market for that sort of thing, but it sounded so phony. She hoped that she’d never be reduced to writing PR for sleazy enterprises.

  She saw a familiar-looking man stopping at the table and smiled, trying to remember where she’d seen him. To her surprise, she recognized State Senator Sam Wurzbach, the champion of the German-Texas movement.

  “Hi, Annie,” he said, looking sheepish.

  “Hey, Sam,” she said. “What’re you doing here?”

/>   “Last week, you asked me whom I was seeing in Houston,” he said. “Now you know. Kyle Krause and I were high-school wrestling buddies in Fredericksburg.”

  “The plot thickens,” she said. “I’d heard he might be a supporter of the German-Texas movement.”

  “Kyle is a terrific businessman and really believes in what we’re doing,” Wurzbach said. “So I support his ventures whenever I can. I was in town today, so I decided to stop by. My wife even knows I’m here.”

  “How’re things going in the Hill Country? Any new threats?”

  “Nothing of a serious nature,” he said. “Hope you and your reporter can come to Austin soon. We’ll be having our first German Texas fund-raiser.”

  “Sounds interesting. We’ll call you,” Annie said.

  Matt returned to the table as the lights went down and they drank their $7.50 beers in silence. The crowd grew hushed as a breathless-sounding deejay ran through Carmine’s resume from California.

  “She’s a native Texan who loves horses, ranches and longneck beers,” he added. The deejay put on music, some hard-rock anthem Annie recognized from the 1980s.

  Carmine came out, tall, blonde and natural, and twined her legs around the pole on stage. She looked pretty good, Annie thought, and seemed to know how to dance. After the first two numbers, though, the novelty of her performance wore off. Annie chugged the rest of her beer, feeling restless.

  The tempo sped up, Carmine smiled knowingly and a man in a leopard bikini danced on to the stage. He looked handsome but seedy, like Matthew McConaughey in the strip-club movie, Magic Mike. The man moved closer to Carla Carmine and they began dancing together.

  Suddenly the lights went out and Annie heard worried murmurs. After a few minutes of uncertainly, a stage light went on and Monica Gardiner, the policewoman she’d met earlier, spoke briefly.

  “The Houston Police Department is closing this establishment for the rest of the night,” she said. “Please leave by the normal exits in an orderly fashion.”

  Annie got up with Matt and they began walking to the door.

  “What happened?” Annie asked.

  “The man on stage with Carla Carmine is also a porn star,” Matt said. “We agreed that if he appeared, we’d have to shut down the show. Heard rumors that there might be a sex show in the making. Houston ain’t New Orleans, you know.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Annie sat in her glass cubicle office editing one of many stories she needed to send over before the afternoon news meeting. Her day had started off with a couple of editors’ meetings, lagged until after her solitary lunch at her desk, and gathered speed as the afternoon wore on. Assigning editors always had to wait for reporters to file their daily stories, some at the last possible moment. Annie couldn’t begrudge their last-minute work because as a reporter, she’d done the same thing, hoping for one last phone call to be returned. But her tension would mount as the stories piled up, and today she felt winded, as if she was running a race she couldn’t possibly win. She wondered if she ought to have her blood pressure checked. She looked up and saw Travis Dunbar standing outside the door.

  “Hey, boss,” he said. “Can I come in?”

  “Sure, Travis,” she said, trying to sound welcoming. “What’s going on?”

  “You remember the floater in the Ship Channel? Finally got Sharpe to talk on the record about what they found.”

  “Was it a Russian Mafia smuggling deal?”

  “No,” Travis said, plopping his bulldog body into a creaky chair. “He thinks the body is that of a young woman from Eastern Europe. They found a label in clothes fragments that they traced to a shop in Tirana.”

  “Tirana? Where’s that?”

  “The capital of Albania. Has about a half-million people. Not a common hot spot for trafficking, though the Russian Mafia has tentacles everywhere in Eastern Europe. But Sharpe doesn’t think it was the Mafia.”

  “Why not?”

  “The body was basically in good shape. Some of the girls who get tossed overboard have broken bones and worse. The Mafia treats them like garbage and throws them away.”

  “So how does he think the girl got here?”

  “A stowaway, perhaps a girlfriend of a seaman. He’s trying to trace the ships that have moved in and out of the port in the last few weeks.”

  “Doesn’t sound like big news,” Annie said. “Maybe a six-inch story?”

  “All right,” Travis said. “But I think there’s something bigger behind it. It smells rotten to me.”

  “Keep tabs on it, but you’ve got lots of other things going. What about that drug lord from the Valley who landed in jail here yesterday? Can you get his lawyer to talk?”

  “I’m trying. I’ll write the other story and send it to you. Then I’ll head over to the courthouse.”

  She resumed her editing, noticing it was almost 4 p.m. She’d be here really late if she didn’t hurry, but it was hard to concentrate with the interruptions. She noticed Maggie Mahaffey tapping on the glass. Drat, she thought. Maggie wasn’t exactly her favorite reporter and she tended to be longwinded.

  “Come in, Maggie,” she said, mustering a smile. “What can I do for you?”

  The reporter sat down, smoothed her hot pink skirt and crossed her legs, showing off high-heeled ankle boots that encased tiny feet. Petite women who dressed like Barbie dolls had a tendency to raise Annie’s hackles. She felt guilty for hoping that Maggie wouldn’t prolong the interruption, but she couldn’t exactly tell her to state her business and go away.

  “I’m giving you my two-week notice,” Maggie said. “I’m moving to Austin for a new job.”

  “Oh? What’s the job?”

  “I’m going to be a morning anchor on WFAB-TV, the Fox station. I’ll make almost twice what I’m making here and won’t have to worry about these stupid layoffs.”

  “Congratulations,” Annie said, resenting her triumphal air. “We’ll miss you, but it sounds like a good opportunity. You haven’t done TV before, have you?”

  “No, but Senator Jake Satterfield thinks I’m a natural,” Maggie said. “He knows the station’s owner in Dallas and put in a good word for me.”

  Annie felt as if she’d been slapped, just hearing her former fiancé’s name come out of the mouth of the preening prima donna. She kept a neutral look on her face and tried to sound normal.

  “Jake knows practically every big donor in Texas. He’s hit up most of them for money.”

  “I know you and he were an item once,” Maggie said. “How could you give up that gorgeous guy?”

  Annie bristled, angry with the reporter for trying to make it personal. Why was Maggie tormenting her? Annie vowed to remember this encounter if she ever had to write the self-obsessed sexpot a recommendation.

  “That’s a rather rude question, Maggie. Why are you asking?”

  “Sorry,” Maggie said. “I just wondered, since he’s a free man again. Says he’s getting a divorce.”

  “I’ve heard that before. But it’s really not my business or yours, is it?”

  “You could say I’m making it my business,” Maggie smiled. “Jake and I are seeing each other. That’s one reason I’m moving.”

  Again, Maggie’s words felt like a sucker punch to her chest, but she wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of a reaction. She couldn’t resist a barb.

  “Well, best of luck. You’ll need it with Jake.”

  Annie got up and extended her hand across the desk, wanting to end the meeting and lick her wounds privately. Maggie stood and shook her hand daintily.

  “You’re not upset, I hope?”

 
Talk about twisting the knife, Annie thought. What an obnoxious bitch she is. Don’t stoop to her level.

  “Of course not,” she said. “As you said, there’s probably another layoff coming. It’s good that you’re leaving – you’ll probably save someone else’s job.”

  “That’s one reason I’ve been looking. This is such a depressing place and newspapers are a dying industry. Television is a much better platform for me.”

  “You’re probably right,” Annie agreed. She walked Maggie to the door. “It’s getting late, so I’ll catch up with you next week on the details.”

  Annie shut the door more emphatically than she’d intended. She sat quietly, giving herself time to calm down. She felt like putting her head down on her desk and wailing like a kindergartner deprived of a nap. But she resisted, knowing that any change in her behavior would stir gossip among the reporters on the other side of the glass wall. That was the down side of having a fishbowl office – lower-level staffers were always watching, trying to decipher the office politics.

  Just the mention of Jake had made her chest tighten. She was furious that he was seeing Maggie, but she hoped she’d masked her feelings.

  She walked out with a smile, her back ramrod straight, and looked for Greg Barnett. Formerly her investigative editor and still her boss as managing editor, he’d need to know the news about Maggie right away. She spotted his lanky frame leaning into a reporter’s desk, discussing a story. She stood nearby and waited.

  “Want to get a cup of coffee in the tunnel?” She asked him in a low voice. They smiled their way through the newsroom, got on the elevator and descended to the row of shops underneath the building before he turned to her. “What’s going on, Price?”

  “Maggie Mahaffey is leaving for Austin. Going to be the Fox station’s next blond It-Girl.”

  “I should have guessed. She’s always been too much of a diva. Newspapering’s not quite glamorous enough for her.”