by Diane Kelly
Menger ran a search on the number. “The vehicle is owned by a Wesley Prescott.” He punched a few more buttons, accessing the state’s public-information and vital-statistics records. “Looks like Wes has been married for fifteen years. He’s got three kids, two boys and a girl.”
I jotted down his name and address. “What a coincidence,” I said. “Mr. Prescott will be receiving an audit notice for his business-related entertainment expenses.”
If the guy had taken tax deductions for his prostitutes, the auditor would make sure they were denied. I supposed he’d be legally entitled to medical-expense deductions for his gonorrhea and crab meds, though.
“You think he might be the one transporting the drugs?” I asked. After all, if he’d driven down from Iowa, he’d had to come through Oklahoma. Maybe he wasn’t just a land man for a windmill company. Maybe he moonlighted as a drug mule.
“It’s possible,” Christina said.
Menger rubbed his chin as he eyed Christina. “If Geils wants you to dance, we might be able to use that to our advantage. Maybe you can tell him you’d do it in return for some meth. Of course, you’d have to be careful. He’ll have to think that any information you have you learned from working at the club. We don’t want him figuring out that law enforcement suspects he’s got drugs in the place and that we think more than dancing is going on in the back room.”
Christina nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Work on Theo, too,” Aaron added. “Maybe he’ll sell you something.”
I dug my wallet out of my purse. “What’s a hit of crystal meth cost?”
“Around twenty-five dollars,” Christina said.
I fished out a couple of twenties I’d snagged at an ATM on my drive over and turned Andrew Jackson on his face. I marked the backs of the bills, using a ballpoint pen to draw a stick-figure bird flying over the White House depicted on the bills and putting a small slash through the number 2 in the upper left corner. I snapped photos of the two bills with my cell phone to record their serial numbers.
“Use these when you buy the meth.” I pushed the bills across the table to Christina. “I want to see if the bills come through the cash office.”
Aaron turned to me next. “Got anything?”
I told them about the girl Geils had fired, about the enormous tips reported by the dancers who worked the VIP room, about Theo’s unusually large bar take.
“Theo’s definitely on my radar, too,” Aaron replied. “I’m fairly certain he sent drugs back to the VIP room. He’s also the only bartender with keys to the storage room and he doesn’t let anyone else back there.”
I told them about the truck from Stillwater Spirits, about the rebates and bulk discounts Merle had mentioned. I also told them about the meat and produce trucks and the cash payments made to the deliverymen. “Any of them could be delivering drugs to the club or picking them up.”
Nick cocked his head. “You may be on to something there. See if you can get your hands on those invoices.”
“It won’t be easy,” I said. “I’ve already tried to access the computer files and couldn’t get in. The bookkeeping system is password protected and there’s a security camera aimed right at my desk.”
“There’s always Josh,” Nick suggested.
Josh could hack into any computer system in ten seconds flat. We’d already been authorized by a judge to execute a secret search and seizure, so we wouldn’t be violating any laws. The biggest risk would be me getting caught nosing around where I didn’t belong.
Aaron pointed at Nick. “Got anything?”
Nick leaned forward in his seat, resting his arms on the table. “I’m afraid I won’t be much help. The only thing I know is that Geils tells the security staff to keep a close eye on the girls and each other, to make sure all the money gets run through the cash office. We have to pat down everyone going in and out of the dressing room, VIP room, and administrative offices.”
“It’s weird,” I added. “Geils obviously has no scruples. I mean, he’s pimping out his dancers and dealing drugs. But when it comes to the money, he seems to be playing by the book. He may be laundering some of the funds, but as far as I can tell it all seems to be going into his bookkeeping system.”
Then again, he could have a second set of books somewhere, a set that had been cooked. I made a mental note to compare the data in the bookkeeping system to his tax return.
Aaron told us he’d have the plainclothes officer stationed in the parking lot to identify johns. He gave each of us a phone number to text with identifying features if we saw one leave the club. He also instructed Nick to step outside and give a signal to the officer in the parking lot when a john left. “Swipe your hand across your forehead. That’ll be the sign to the officer to follow the guy to his car and obtain his plate number.”
Our powwow now completed, Nick walked me and Christina out to our cars in the parking lot. Christina hopped into the same pink Cadillac she and I had used on an earlier case and took off with a honk and a wave.
Nick and I were alone now. Time for some action.
I grabbed him by the glittery front of his shirt and pulled him toward me, pressing my chest up against him now. “Lay one on me, big boy.”
Nick willingly obliged.
chapter seventeen
Downloading on the Down Low
Despite my vociferous protests, Alicia dragged me out of bed at ten the next morning and we set out on a quest to find the perfect bridesmaid dress.
She and Daniel had planned an early June date for their wedding. The perpetually organized and obsessive-compulsive Alicia had prepared a series of spreadsheets to stay on top of the wedding details. One spreadsheet detailed their budget, another listed the guests by the table number to which they’d been assigned, and the last one contained various to-do lists with the name of each person involved in the wedding at the top of the column.
My to-do list as maid of honor contained several entries, the first of which was to choose my dress. Frankly, planning the bachelorette party sounded like a lot more fun to me, but that task was currently near the bottom of the list.
Nick had been disappointed I wouldn’t be able to spend the day with him, but I couldn’t break my promise to Alicia. Of course, when I made the promise I hadn’t realized the Guys & Dolls investigation would prevent Nick and me from getting time alone. Our ten-minute make-out session in the police department parking lot last night had left me wanting more.
Lots more.
“Only seven months to go!” Alicia sang as she slid hangers aside in the bridal shop, sorting through the offerings.
Though she and Daniel planned to host a black-tie wedding, she’d agreed to let me, her maid of honor, wear a dress in my signature red.
Alicia pulled a dress from the rack. “What do you think of this one?”
The dress was sleek and sophisticated. It also featured tightly crisscrossing laces down the back. “I don’t know. It looks kind of complicated. What if I tie myself in a knot when I go to take a pee?”
Her lip quirked. She returned the dress to the rack, rejected the next three, and pulled the fourth one out, holding it up with the skirt draped over one arm. “How about this one?”
This choice was pretty and feminine, but the abundance of ruffles was a bit over the top. “I’d look like a flamenco dancer in that.”
She exhaled her impatience. “I’ll get you a rose to clamp between your teeth.”
“Let’s keep looking.”
Alicia’s next choice had potential. It was a sleeveless model with a knee-length skirt underscored by layers of netting that made it flounce. It had a cute, retro look to it. Unfortunately, when I tried the dress on, it itched worse than that darn ballet tutu had.
Alicia scowled as I scratched the back of my thigh. “We can’t have you standing up in front of all of our guests scratching like you’ve got chiggers.”
I cringed. “Sorry.”
We stopped for a quick lunch a
nd tried a few more stores afterward, including Neiman Marcus. Unfortunately, nothing felt quite right.
“How about we try again on Black Friday?” Alicia suggested. “The stores will be having sales then.”
“Good idea.” I slipped back into my jeans and red sweater.
By the time we returned to my town house, it was after four o’clock. Alicia headed off to spend the evening with Daniel, while I wolfed down a quick frozen dinner before heading off to Guys & Dolls.
* * *
I’d recruited Josh to hack into the Guys & Dolls computer network. While Nick, Christina, Eric, and I were busy inside with the Saturday-evening crowd, Josh sat in the parking lot with his laptop, attempting to worm his way into the club’s wireless system. Unfortunately, given that the building was windowless, he couldn’t get a decent signal in the car. He sent me a text. Signal too weak out here.
I excused myself and went to the ladies’ room. Luckily it was empty. I placed a quick call to Josh. “What are our options?”
“I’ll have to come inside,” he said.
“It’ll look suspicious if you bring a laptop in here.” I wasn’t even sure security would allow it. I’d seen them toss out more than one patron who’d attempted to take videos of the dancers on their cell phone cameras.
“I’ll see what I can do with my cell.”
As I walked back to the cash office, I spotted Christina at the bar, working her charms on Theo, flirting with the lunkhead in an attempt to gain his trust and make a buy. Meanwhile, five girls paraded around onstage to the Donna Summer classic “Bad Girls.” Three wore hooker outfits, while two wore black go-go boots, navy blue hot pants, and blue shirts with gold police badges over their left breast. They’d topped the look off with whistles, dark sunglasses, and cop hats, swinging their plastic nightsticks around to the beat of the music. While the dancers had a fairly entertaining dance routine going at first, they took things a bit too far when one of the cops cuffed a hooker to the pole and began to frisk her while the other stuck her nightstick between her legs and ran her hands suggestively up and down the shaft. The men in the audience went nuts, of course.
“Men are disgusting,” I said as I stepped back into the cash office.
“Yes,” Merle agreed. “We are.” He raised his glass of scotch in acknowledgment and took a drink.
I didn’t totally believe it, though, at least not insofar as Merle was concerned. He never ogled the dancers, even averted his eyes when girls were undressing in the changing room. Then again, he only seemed to have eyes for one girl. A girl who hadn’t been a girl in three, four, maybe even five decades.
As I set back to work, I saw Josh come in and sit at a table near the back of the room, using his stylus to peck away at his cell phone as his girlfriend, Kira, also an expert hacker, looked over his shoulder and offered suggestions. Kira wasn’t the only female customer in the club. At least two other men had brought women with them. I supposed some couples got off on this type of thing, but all I’d ever need to get turned on was Nick.
Around ten o’clock, my phone vibrated in my pocket with an incoming text. Josh had decoded the password for the accounting system. BerniceVasilakis.
Sheesh. Merle was as bad as an adolescent girl with a crush, doodling what her name would be if she married the man of her dreams. Still, I was proud I’d come close earlier when trying to guess his password. Maybe I wasn’t such a bad judge of character after all. Part of me felt for Merle. He’d never married or had children. The poor guy had to be lonely.
Merle stood from his desk. “I’m going on break. You can handle things, right?”
“Yes, sir!” I gave him a salute and he gave me a smile.
After Merle left the cash office, I turned my back to the security camera and bent over as if to retie my laces but actually eased a thumb drive out of my shoe before sitting up again. I’d strategically placed my tall glass of soda next to the USB port on the desktop computer. I took a sip from the glass, then slid the thumb drive into the port as I returned the glass to its spot. I figured another soda spill might look suspicious, so I tried a different tack this time, pretending to be cleaning fingerprints off my computer screen while actually repositioning the monitor away from the watchful electronic eye of the security camera.
Moving as quickly as I could, I logged in to the expense files using the newly decoded password and copied them to the thumb drive.
“Come on, come on!” I whispered under my breath, urging the computer to go faster as I kept one eye on the screen and another on the window that looked out over the club. Unfortunately, from my vantage point, I could see only three quarters of the space. The main floor and stage were visible, as were the far walls, but I couldn’t see along the perimeter of the walls nearby.
What seemed like hours later, but was in actuality only thirty-seven seconds, the computer finished downloading the files. I exhaled in relief and logged out of the account.
Bam! Bam!
Shit! Reflexively, I came up out of my seat. I looked up to see Theo peering in at me through the square glass panel in the door.
My pulse pounded. How long had he been standing there? Could he have seen me slip the thumb drive into the computer? And could I slip it out now without him noticing?
I felt flushed and warm, though I did my best to act casual. I raised a finger to let him know I’d be right with him and reached for my glass of soda. I tossed back a gulp and returned the glass to its spot, discreetly snatching the thumb drive out of the port and slipping it into the pocket of my blazer.
I stepped over to the door and pulled it open. Was it just me, or did the barbed wire tattoo on his neck seem extra pointy tonight?
“Hey, Theo,” I said, hoping he didn’t notice the tightness in my voice. “It’s crazy out there, huh?”
“Saturdays are always crazy.” He handed me his tip jar and the bank bag that contained his register receipts.
I emptied them both and returned them. “Here you go.”
He walked off without another word. Phew.
I added up Theo’s tips first and entered them into the bookkeeping system. I grabbed the bar receipts next. I ran the coins through the machine counter and printed out the ticket. Working through the stack of bills, I separated them into piles of singles, fives, tens, and twenties, turning them to make sure the bills all faced the same direction. I paid careful attention to the twenties, my eyes scanning the backside of each bill. There were no birds dropping poop on the White House, no stray slashes through the zero in the upper left corner. Nope, none were the marked bills I’d given to Christina. Looked like she hadn’t scored yet. But I knew she was doing her best.
Tarzan was working the door to the VIP room tonight. Over the course of the evening he brought me nine hundred dollars in cover charges for the room. The girls working the back room garnered no less than three grand in tips. There sure was a lot of money changing hands back there. I could only imagine what else was being exchanged. Saliva. Body fluids. Herpes. Crabs. I shuddered involuntarily at the thought.
At the end of the night, as I was retrieving my purse from the dressing room, Tarzan came into the room and began poking around in the locker two down from mine, a locker that belonged to a dancer named Angelique. Angelique was one of the girls who’d been working the VIP room tonight. She’d looked a little dazed when she’d brought me her tips, and I’d suspected she’d taken a hit of something. Why had she given Tarzan the combination to her lock?
The three dancers in the dressing room exchanged glances. One of them, a black woman named Shawna who went by the stage name Sweet Molasses, stood. “What are you doing in Angelique’s locker?”
“None of your business,” Tarzan said.
“Angelique is my friend,” the woman said, holding her ground. No easy feat in four-inch black satin stilettos. “I want to know what the hell you’re doing or I’m going to tell Mr. Geils.”
Tarzan tossed her a dismissive look. “He’s the one who sent me b
ack here.” He grabbed a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, and sneakers, and left the room.
Shawna looked at the other two dancers for help, but they both turned away and resumed dressing. Shawna frowned and hurried out of the dressing room wearing an odd amalgamation of high heels, a zebra-print G-string, and an argyle cardigan. I followed her out of the room and into the club.
Aaron glanced up from the bar across the room where he was stacking clean glasses on the shelves. Nick watched, too, as he stacked the last of the chairs on top of the tables.
Shawna stormed back to the VIP room, where Donald Geils and another bouncer stood at the door. “What the hell is going on?”
As the bouncer disappeared into the VIP room with Angelique’s clothes, Geils yanked the toothpick from his mouth and appeared ready to tell Shawna off. He stopped himself, though, apparently thinking better of it. “Angelique isn’t feeling well. The boys are going to help her get dressed.”
Shawna stepped toward the door. “I want to see her.”
The bouncer stepped in front of her, blocking her way.
“You’ll see her in a minute,” Geils said. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”
Hard to get your knickers in a twist when you aren’t wearing any.
Nick stepped up behind me.
Geils cut his eyes to us. “What are you two doing?”
I lifted a shoulder, trying hard to appear nonchalant. “Just thought I’d see if I could help.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “Me, too.”
Geils scowled at us. “If I need your help, I’ll let you know.” He thumped me on the forehead and jerked his head toward the front doors. “Your shift is over. Beat it, pipsqueak.”
One more thump or “pipsqueak” and I’d stab this guy in the eye with his toothpick.