“Thank him for that kindness from me, Lila Grace,” Peter murmured.
“He’s grateful for that consideration,” I said, nodding to the other chair before Willis’s desk.
“Have y’all come up with any idea as to why Mr. Smalls hasn’t passed on?” Willis asked.
“I have, but I don’t think you’re going to like it. I know I don’t,” I said.
Peter turned to me, and Willis leaned forward, his elbows on his desk. “Now, Lila Grace, I know you talk to ghosts, and it came in real handy with that Miller girl’s murder, but this is still a rural county in South Carolina. There ain’t going to be a lot of murders going around.”
I gave him a dirty look. “I know that, and I ain’t looking to be no hillbilly Jessica Fletcher. But did you know that the three-mile stretch of 49 where Mr. Smalls wrecked is one of the deadliest sections of highway in the state?”
Willis sat back. “Really? That doesn’t make any sense. Was there one bad wreck with multiple fatalities that’s screwing up the averages?”
“No. And you’re right, it doesn’t make any sense. All the top ten most lethal crash sites in South Carolina are intersections, usually with a blind curve, or some kind of logical, visible danger. Except this one. It’s a straight stretch of road with some hills, but the shoulder is plenty wide enough, it doesn’t wind through any tight places, and it doesn’t really see that much traffic. Now South Carolina’s a horrible state to drive in anyway. It ranks third in the country in deadly traffic accidents, but most of that is chalked up to rednecks drinking too much, driving too fast, and not wearing seat belts when they put the first two together.”
“How many people have died on that stretch of road?”
“Four last year, and three so far this year. It seems like just about every three months, somebody runs off the road into one of those deep gulleys and gets killed.”
“How did I not notice that?” he asked.
“Well, think about it,” I countered. “You just got here a little over a year ago, so you missed the first two fatal wrecks up there. Jeff may have responded to one of the other ones, Tommy another one, and it might have been that you were busy and just let the Highway Patrol handle it. You don’t go to every bad wreck in the county.”
“In fact, it’s pretty rare. I only went last night because I had my climbing gear in the car and wanted to try it out.”
“You mean show off,” I said. I was happy to see a little blush creep up from under his collar. Made me feel good that I still had a man wanting to show off for me. “So it ain’t all that strange for you to have not been to a fatal wreck in that part of the county until last night.”
“Well, that’s a lot of wrecks in one spot, and it’s an odd spot, but that doesn’t mean there’s something supernatural going on,” Willis said, ever the Scully to my ghost-talking Mulder.
“That’s true, but then you add in the other factors.”
“What other factors?” Willis and Peter said simultaneously.
I smiled at them for playing along so well and said, “All the fatal wrecks happened late at night. On a Sunday night. All of them were single car accidents. All the vehicles were driven by married men with children. And with a few phone calls, three nosy dead old ladies, and a little bit of social media stalking, I was able to determine that each man was at the same place of business within a few hours of the wreck.”
“You’re telling me…” Willis’s voice trailed off. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” I said, standing up and grabbing my purse from where it hung on the arm of the chair. “Let’s go, Sheriff. We need to go to Pole Cats and find out who’s killing patrons of Union County’s only doublewide strip club.”
I’m sure there are some places where if I referred to something as a “doublewide strip club” I’d be talking about a building with two stages, or a women’s side and a men’s side, or just a really big building. Those places are not Jonesville, SC. No, out in the wilds of the South Carolina upstate, the term “doublewide strip club” is meant in a much more literal sense. Pole Cats sat back in the woods on a dirt road next to Gene’s One Stop, just a little bit past where Highway 9 and Highway 12 ran together. You couldn’t see it from the road, and there were no neon signs advertising its presence. In short, you had to know it was there to find it.
It did have a website, which boasted “The Prettiest Girls in the Upstate” and a Facebook page, which shared photographs of pig pickin’s with men in camouflage and trucker hats cavorting with bikini-clad girls holding plates of pulled pork. It was also housed in a converted doublewide trailer with all the non-load bearing walls removed and a big deck built onto the front of it so the “bouncer” had somewhere to sit. I knew the bouncer, and I was being exceptionally generous to give him that much credit, since I think the last thing he bounced was his lazy behind out of high school at about fourteen. Ever since then, Lawrence “Big Baby” Nokt had bummed around town selling a little pot, beating people up for their lunch money, and picking up odd jobs when he actually had to break down and go to work for a living. Since his cousin Tina opened up Pole Cats after she aged out of her ballet career, Big Baby held down a stool by the front door and took five dollars from every sad sack who wanted to come gawk at naked boobs. Ten if they were underage.
“You sure anybody’ll be here, Lila Grace? It’s barely ten-thirty,” Willis asked as we turned off the main road. I’d let him drive, since I knew Pole Cats was on a dirt road, and it hadn’t rained in two weeks. I’d just washed Bessie, my truck, a few days ago. Let him get his car dirty instead, I figured.
“Teenie lives in the back, Willis,” I said. “And Big Baby spends more than half his nights sleeping on the stage.”
“How do you know all this?” Peter asked from the back seat.
“I have my sources,” I said. My sources are, of course, the three nosiest ghosts in three states, and they kept me well-apprised of anything the least bit prurient that went on in the fifty miles around my house. Barely a week went by without Miss Helen or one of the others regaling me with some story about who got too drunk to go home and had to sleep in their car out front of the strip joint.
We pulled up in front of the…bar, for lack of a better word, and I pointed at the two vehicles parked at one end of the trailer. “The truck is Teenie’s, and the Honda is Big Baby’s.”
“Running a low-class strip joint must pay pretty good,” Willis said, putting the car in park and opening his door. “That model F-150 will cost you fifty grand, easy.”
I got out of the car and stared in shock at the pickup. It was pretty, sure, but fifty thousand dollars? I just shook my head. “I heard she inherited some money when her daddy passed. And she runs a poker game in the garage behind the club most nights. I think that’s where most of her money comes from.”
“You know gambling is illegal in this state, right?” Willis asked, walking up the steps to the front door.
“I also know the District Court Judge plays here once a week,” I replied. “He’s not very good, though. Man’s got like half a dozen tells.” I don’t get to play cards much anymore. Ever since people decided I wasn’t lying about talking to ghosts my whole life, they assume I’ve got spectral partners hanging out over their shoulders telling me about their hands. I wouldn’t do that. Besides, most of the ghosts I routinely talk to don’t approve of gambling, so I wouldn’t trust them not to lie to me just to teach me a lesson.
Willis pounded on the door while I stood back on the ground and off to the side just a little bit. I’ve known Teenie and Big Baby ever since they were in diapers, but that doesn’t mean I want to wake them up. People who run illegal gambling parlors and shady strip clubs in house trailers are the kind of folks who might very well answer the door by shooting a shotgun through it.
But not this morning. Teenie yanked the door open and glared at Willis. “What?”
“Are you Tina McNaughton?” he asked.
“Yeah, and who the hell are you?�
� her tone was belligerent and her words were slurred, but her eyes were sharp and I noticed that I’d never seen her right hand. She held the door open just enough to lean a shoulder on the jamb, but not near wide enough for anyone to see past her into the darkened bar.
“I’m Sheriff Dunleavy, and we have a few questions about Peter Smalls.”
“Pete? Pete ain’t here. He left pretty early last night. Only had two beers, so if he got busted for DUI, it ain’t on me. He musta stopped somewhere else.” The slur was miraculously gone from her voice, and her posture improved noticeably. She looked at Willis and said, “Come on in. I reckon you probably are the sheriff. You smell like bacon.” She raised her voice as she turned to go inside, opening the door wider. “BB! Don’t shoot him. He’s the po-po!”
“Okay,” I heard from behind me and spun around to see Big Baby standing ten feet behind me with a twelve-gauge on his shoulder. “Howdy, Miz Carter. Ain’t seen you in a minute.”
“No, it’s been some time, Lawrence,” I replied, trying to keep the startled out of my voice and probably not succeeding very well. “I hope you’re doing well.”
“I’m awright,” he said, giving me the big, goofy grin that earned him his nickname. “Y’all go on inside. I’ll be in there in a minute. Gotta take a whizz.”
“You know you can use the toilet indoors, Lawrence,” I said.
“I clean them bathrooms, Miz Carter,” he said. “I pee in there, I’m going to have to clean the toilet again before we open for the lunch rush.”
I shook my head and turned to follow Willis indoors, wondering exactly what constituted a “lunch rush” at Pole Cats.
“Coffee?” Tina called over her shoulder as we followed her into a large room that defied all comprehension of the norms of mobile homes or nightclubs. It was the size of a living room and a couple of bedrooms put together, with a normal home-sized ceiling, which made for not much of a “stage” for the dancers to work with. There was a small runway about ten feet by four feet, with a shiny brass pole at each end. It was about six inches off the floor and outlined in strands of LED rope lights.
Along the side of the room closest to the door was a fully stocked bar, with four cracked black vinyl-seated stools. In the opposite corner was a DJ booth that consisted of a folding chair behind two folding tables with a laptop computer hooked into a sound board. Orange drop cords ran from the DJ booth to various lights bolted to the ceiling throughout the room. I did not want to think about the aneurysm the county electrical inspector would have if he ever set foot in this place as anything more than a customer.
There were three small cabaret tables with a few chairs scattered around the room, and two burgundy vinyl couches that looked like they’d been rescued from a bankrupt Shoney’s against the wall perpendicular to the bar. The carpet was dark with neon patterns throughout, and the walls were painted a gray so dark as to almost be black. The entire room smelled of cheap perfume, cheaper whiskey, body odor, and bad decisions. I waved off the proffered coffee as I slid onto one of the bar stools and took my first good look at Teenie in fifteen years or more.
They hadn’t been a kind fifteen years, apparently. She was pretty, but her eyes had gone hard sometime in the past, and the set of her jaw told of a woman who had seen some things, and done some things, and they might not have always been good. “So, what’s wrong with Pete? He didn’t hit his wife, did he? She’s pregnant, you know. I like Pete, but if he laid a hand on a woman, even if it wasn’t in here, he’s banned for life.”
“He was in a car wreck last night on his way home from here. He didn’t make it,” Willis said. He was a big man, a strong, stout man with a stern demeanor and a solid build, but when he was delivering the news about a fatality he was as soft and gentle as a lamb. I don’t know if he had that same kind of empathy with people in the big city or not, but it was awful welcome here.
“Shit,” Teenie said, turning around and pulling down a Jameson’s bottle from the top shelf. She poured a slug into her coffee and tipped the neck toward Willis’s cup. He shook his head, and she screwed the cap back on, then took a long draught of her fortified drink. “Another one. Well, hell. Rest in peace, Pete. You were a good dude, and whatever happened to you, you didn’t deserve it.”
“Thanks,” Pete said from beside me. I looked at him and was surprised at the level of emotion on his face. Then I looked back at Teenie and saw that her face mirrored his.
“Were y’all…” I let the question trail off, a fishing technique I’d learned from Matlock.
“No!” Teenie said sharply. “I don’t mess around with married men. Unless the wife’s there. That’s a whole ‘nother story. But not Pete. He was faithful as could be.”
“As faithful as a man who left his pregnant wife alone to come out in the middle of the woods to watch naked women parade around for dollar bills,” I replied, and couldn’t keep the judgement out of my voice. I felt bad about that, but I couldn’t stop it.
“Topless, thank you very much,” Teenie shot back. “We don’t do full nude here. And last night was game night. Mostly everybody watched football. The girls just danced during commercials and halftime. Don’t nobody want to listen to Terry Bradshaw anyway.”
“You said ‘another one,’” Willis said. “What did you mean by that?”
Teenie looked at him, then down at her cup. “Nothing. I spoke out of turn.”
“Ms. McNaughton, I don’t even want to think about the building code violations I’m standing in the middle of, not to mention the zoning laws being broken every single night. Now I don’t care about your card game. I don’t care about the fact that your liquor bottles still have the Frugal McDougal’s stickers on them instead of a tax stamp like they’re supposed to. I don’t even care that this place looks like it’s about one bad thunderstorm from falling apart or catching fire. But if there is something strange with Mr. Smalls’s death, and you withhold that information from me… Well, let’s just say that will very quickly become something I care a great deal about.”
There was none of the gentle peace officer in his voice this time. He was the voice of authority, and it was not to be questioned. I found myself unconsciously sitting up a little straighter in my chair, and he hadn’t even aimed that thing at me.
Teenie drank down the rest of her coffee, then poured another healthy slash of Jameson’s in the mug, not bothering with the coffee this time. She took a slug of that and looked at us both. “You’re going to think it’s stupid.”
“I can’t think anything if you don’t tell me anything,” Willis said, his voice soft and coaxing again.
“I swear to you child, whatever you’re about to tell us, I’ve said stranger. You know who I am, and you know what this town’s been saying about me for longer than you’ve been alive. If you think you’ve seen something can’t be believed, I promise you I’m the one person in this county that’s likely to believe it,” I added.
She looked me in the eye and nodded. “I reckon you probably are, Ms. Carter. Well, it kinda makes sense you’d be here.”
“Why’s that, Tina?” I asked, gently prodding.
“Because I’m pretty sure my bar is haunted, and the ghost is killing my business. Literally.”
You couldn’t have heard a pin drop in the room, but only because the floor was carpeted. Neither Willis nor I spoke for a long moment, then he broke the growing silence by asking, “Why do you think you’re being haunted, Miss McNaughton?”
Tina took a deep breath, another sip of her whiskey, then started talking. “Well, like I said, I don’t expect you to believe me, but all this started happening a few months after Chastity died.”
“Was Chastity one of the girls who danced here?” I asked. “Her stage name?”
The woman across the bar from me let out a little bark of a laugh, harsh and grating in the silence. “Nah. That’s the funniest part, you see. Chastity was her real name. Chastity Adler. I always thought it was friggin’ hilarious, a woman named Chastity wo
rking in a joint like this, but most of the other people here don’t appreciate irony the way I do. Anyhow, Chastity danced here for about a year, maybe eighteen months. She was saving up to move away and go to school. She’d just turned eighteen and graduated from high school in Spartanburg. I think she mighta went to Byrnes, I don’t know. Said she came down here to dance because all the clubs up there were too big for her and she was scared somebody she went to school with might see her. Or worse, one of her teachers.”
“I can see how that might be an issue,” Willis said.
“I don’t,” Teenie shot back. “Hell, my preacher comes in here every Wednesday night after choir practice for a couple shots and a lap dance. I ain’t embarrassed about what I do for a living. It’s honest work, and the money beats the hell out of most of what a woman with nothing but a high school diploma and C-cups can get in this part of the world. But that was Chastity’s hang-up. She didn’t want nobody she grew up with seeing her boobs. I didn’t care why she was here; I just like having her. She was young, she was pretty, and she’d had more than one ballet class when she was six, which is all most of us here ever got. She made good money for a while, until everything went to shit.”
“What happened?” I asked. I have to admit, I was drawn into the story of the small-town girl stripping to earn money to make her life better. It was like redneck Flashdance, only without the welding mask.
“She was in the middle of a set on the stage when… Do you know how strip clubs work?”
“No,” I said, at the exact same moment Willis said, “Yes.”
“Our girls dance two or three-song sets, depending on how many girls we’ve got working that night. They come out in a skimpy outfit, and they get down to a bikini by the end of the first song. They dance around the stage, flirt with the guys, work the pole if they can do that. Not too much, because the floor ain’t what it used to be, so they can’t swing out too far or the whole damn roof might fall in again. Anyway, the second song is where the boobs and the dollar bills both come out. They’re topless and down to a g-string by the end of the second song. If there’s a third song, they dance around some more, grind on some of the guys near the stage, then they collect their money and spend the time until their name comes up in rotation again walking around the room giving lap dances. That’s where they make their real money.”
Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails Page 9