“Meet my favorite girls,” Paul said.
He slipped his hand around the waist of the girl in the miniskirt, “This is Barbara … .” Then he put his other arm around the younger girl. “… And this is Gina.”
Gina sweetly said hi. A second later, Timmy leapt off his bike, and suddenly planted a kiss on Gina’s lips while at the same time grabbing her crotch.
“Get outta here,” Gina said, pushing Timmy away.
Casey couldn’t stop looking at her. She had olive-colored skin and long beautiful jet-black hair. There was something cool and mysterious about Gina.
“What? You don’t like my bra?” Gina asked Casey.
“No. It’s great,” Casey said.
“It don’t really fill out like it should. Does it?”
“Gina’s a fucking idiot,” Paul said.
“Why you say that?”
“Because you’re paying seven bucks a shot.”
“What’s the matter with that? Cheap.”
“Yeah? What do you expect for seven bucks?”
“The guy who sold ’em to me said they was okay.”
“Where’d he get them?”
“Mexico.”
“And you expect them to be good,” Paul said. “Think about it—seven bucks. They gotta be poison. Don’t keep putting that shit in your body.”
“Can’t stop, honey,” Gina said, pushing her breasts up with her hands, “Some of us gotta help Mother Nature out a little.”
Casey laughed. She got it. Finally.
“Why you laughing?”
“I’m sorry … Wow. Sorry,” Casey said. What an idiot, she thought—two inches from her and she still didn’t click.
Timmy again grabbed Gina’s crotch. “What? You didn’t know we’re talking chicks with dicks?”
Casey looked all around. Gina, Barbara, the rest of them—they were all boys. Pretty boys.
“I do now.” LA was like the world’s biggest sex store, Casey thought. Sunset Boulevard was for the girls and their pimps; Paul’s end of Santa Monica was for boys, and this part of Santa Monica was for the baby transvestites.
Gina arched her back, thrust her chest out, and looked at her profile in the reflection of a dusty Land Rover window.
“They’re perfect,” Paul said. “Just lay off the shots, huh?”
“Alright. Alright.”
“Now say it like you mean it.”
“Sweetie, for you, I’ll go pay double to the Russian doc down on Fairfax.”
“Right.”
“No. I will! But Paul, honey, I got something for you,” Gina said.
“What about me?” Timmy put in.
“And me,” Tracy added.
“Forget you and your stupid bikes. For Saint Paul.”
“What?” Paul asked.
“Last night, I do this judge up in the hills,” Gina said.
“How do you know he was a judge?” Paul said.
“He was, believe me.”
“What—while you were doing him, he told you all about his day in court?”
“No. I saw his I.D. card while I was getting paid.”
“While you were getting paid?!” Tracy yelled. “How about you saw the I.D. while you were ripping him off.”
Gina looked at Tracy like he was a cockroach, and then turned back to Paul.
“Well, he didn’t know nothing about ripped off … He was in the bathroom and I only took an extra two twenties. I could’ve taken a lot more. But when I was getting out of there, he wanted to know if I knew any blond, GQ-looking boys. So I tells him about you.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh yeah.”
16
Jimmy
Jimmy stood just outside the dressing room door checking out the girls as they passed by. He knew he probably shouldn’t—but try to stop. They were wearing little more than bikinis when they came out, and going back in, they held their tops in one hand and a wad of crinkled bills in the other. A Chinese girl in a leather bikini, singing Hey Jude to herself as she headed towards the stage, told him Dani wasn’t inside, so he scanned the room for her. The place was packed; four days a week, this was a dance club, but every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, it became the SR club, with three small stages around the room, each featuring a girl swinging around a pole. Jimmy recognized some faces in the pumped crowd. In one jammed booth was a kid in his twenties, who was starring in a shoot-’em-up movie that Jimmy thought was pretty good. His girlfriend, throwing down tequila shots, was an actress whose huge picture was on half the bus stops in Hollywood. On the poster, she was wearing a ruby necklace and a long white dress from the turn of the century—the picture of sophistication. Not tonight. She and the boyfriend were screaming with the rest. Just about everybody here was young and hip, and a lot were in the movie and music business. Jimmy had been a cop long enough to know this was a pretty unusual strip bar—no postmen and hardhats pawing skanky druggies here—the guys who came to the SR could get girls—this was a laugh for them.
One of Dani’s acting class friends, Andrea, stepped out of the dressing room wearing a glittery white bikini and came up beside Jimmy. She was small and cute, nineteen at most.
“Hi, Jimmy. I’m nearly blind without my glasses. That table by the corner of the stage—is the guy with the Cubs shirt back?”
“Sure—who is he?”
“Who is he?—only like the biggest agent in town. He’s here for a bachelor party or something.”
“Opportunity.”
“You got it. My girlfriend saw him two weeks ago at the Strip Sunset. Can you believe it? Look at the girls we got—we’re twice as good as them. I figure, I’ll lap dance him, and that’ll be it.”
“It?”
“Shit, Jimmy. He gets girls in the movies all the time. What do they have that I don’t?”
“Nothing. They got nothing that you don’t have.”
“Thanks. You’re nice. You looking for Dani?”
“Not doing such a good job.”
At that moment another girl came by, slipping on a thin pale pink tank top and looking like she could be a sophomore in high school. “I just saw her in the back room,” she said. “I’m Tara. Dani told me to keep an eye out for you.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem. She’s about to go on.”
As Jimmy watched her go into the dressing room, he thought, once they got their perp on the Chateau case, he was going to come back—and find out how many girls Tara’s age the scumbag that ran the place had working here.
By the time he pushed through the mob at the bar, Dani had taken the stage and had the crowd exactly where she wanted them. She was tall, twenty-four, with light blond hair and as she danced, Jimmy felt a little sad. He was sick of the feeling, but it was happening all the time now. As Dani whipped around the pole, thrusting her leg as high as any ballet dancer, he wondered what he’d be thinking if he was seeing her for the first time. He’d probably be like every other jerk in the room, where the only thing on his mind would be, when-oh-when was she going to unsnap that top and give him a taste of the eye candy he was dying to see.
But Jimmy knew too much. A year and a half ago, Dani was a kindergarten teacher in a pissy little town outside of Charleston. Since she was a little girl, she had always dreamed of coming to Hollywood and becoming an actress. When she finally got the courage to drive out in her VW convertible, a girlfriend from her junior college, who had arrived a couple of months earlier, told her the drill—cute girls with crazy fantasies of seeing their faces next on the screen next to Mel Gibson’s were a dime a dozen. If she wanted to get someplace, she’d better get some sort of competitive edge. Her girlfriend introduced her to a guy named Kevin, who worked for some of the biggest names in Hollywood, most of them studio execs, and some were big-time stars. Dani wanted to know what ‘worked for’ meant. This crowd would throw parties, which were usually in huge places in the canyons and Kevin supplied the girls. Amazing looking girls, he trolled all over town for. No
one told the girls they had to fuck the creeps at the parties, but the reality was, these were the guys who could hand out acting gigs.
Dani hated the parties—she came to Hollywood to be an actress, not a whore. And even if the girls didn’t go home with the guys that night, more often than not, there’d be a call from an assistant in a few days, and an invitation to the producer’s house to read for a microscopic role in some huge movie. The part required a nude scene, and, naturally, the producer would have to see in advance what the audience would see—after all you couldn’t have a hundred and fifty crew members, costing tens of thousands of dollars an hour, discover on the set that the girl had scars on her tits. Dani played the game for a while, and it led to a Budweiser commercial, and after that she did an episode on a late-night Cinemax series, which, of course, called for lots of nudity. Her first night on the set had her reeling—in a way she was living a dream, she was acting, in fact, starring in an actual show. But in the first scene they filmed she was in a tiny tank top and panties turning on a shower. A guy walked in, she said a few incredibly stupid lines, pulled off her tank top and was fondled by someone who enjoyed it too much. At the end of the night, she was in tears. No one was making her do this, but still, she never felt so bad. She did a couple more shows in the series, and at the same time Kevin began to take more than a professional interest in her. Dani finally clicked to what bad news he was and wanted nothing more to do with him. When she wouldn’t fuck him, he started threatening her.
At first it was just a couple of nasty phone calls but then things got worse. Ten or twenty times a day she’d get paged the number 187. She had no idea what it meant, until her girlfriend told her it was the California penal code number for murder. She was freaked by it. Then it wasn’t just 187’s, it became full-out stalking, where she’d see him in her rear-view mirror or in the bushes outside her apartment. That’s where Jimmy came in. He was the detective assigned to deal with it. Jimmy put cops in shifts around Dani, so that for the first time in months, she felt safe. She told Jimmy he was the only truly decent person she had met since coming to LA. They never got enough on Kevin to send him to jail, but he backed off—at least for now. The checks from the Bud commercial stopped coming, and so did any other acting gigs. Dani ended up here, at the SR club. As the Kevin mess was going down, Jimmy would speak to her every day, sometimes a couple of times. They started going out. She was pretty and fun, and despite everything that had happened to Dan in Hollywood, the kindergarten teacher from South Carolina sweetness never left her.
Now, she was swinging around pole, about to take off her top as a room full of drunken assholes cheered and stuffed her bikini bottom with bills.
Jimmy looked at her, and for the tiniest instant, their eyes met—and in that moment, he knew she was glad he was here—that there was at least one person in the room who understood what she was feeling. He went to the bar, and as he ordered a Sam Adams, he was grabbed by Josh, a writer in his late twenties, whom he knew from the Peking. When Jimmy first met Josh, he was eating Cheerios three meals a day—the only thing he could afford. He lived in some shit-hole apartment in Hollywood, blasting unlistenable soundtracks of horror films, and writing screenplays that were re-hashes of old horror movies. He’d find a long-forgotten movie with a plot hook he loved, move the setting to LA, or some suburban high school, and hip it up. But unlike a lot of the pretentious phonies in the movie business that Jimmy met all the time, Josh was completely sincere. He knew he wasn’t writing Chinatown—he loved horror movies. The scarier the better. Jimmy must’ve spent a small fortune buying the kid drinks. His film ideas were all pretty lousy, but hearing him talk about movies with such passion was worth the price of admission. One day Josh came into the Peking and offered to buy. Jimmy almost fell off his stool. The kid had sold one of his bad ideas for two hundred and seventy-five G’s. The Bad Idea went on to make a gillion dollars and after that they made two sequels of The Bad Idea. He hardly saw the kid anymore—Josh was spending his time at the poker tables down at the Bicycle Club in Gardena, which he had the good sense to avoid in his Cheerios–diet days.
“Man, great to see you,” Josh said, giving Jimmy a hug “but cheating on the Peking?”
“Don’t tell them. Who’s warming your seat at the Bicycle Club?”
“Don’t ask.”
“I won’t.”
They both glanced at the stage. A small blonde was doing flips like she was going for the gold.
“Okay, ask,” Josh said.
“What am I asking?”
“Why I’m here, and not down at the Bicycle Club?”
“Okay, Josh, why are you here, and not get getting your clock cleaned at the Bicycle?”
“Because I’d been spending a bunch of time there. And when I say a bunch, I mean a bunch.”
“What’s a bunch?”
“Let me put it this way. Last week, I went down after dinner. I played Texas hold-’em all night. Before I go, I tell my girlfriend I’m gonna leave at twelve, no matter if I’m up or down. Twelve o’clock—I’m a pumpkin. No matter what.”
“Right. What happens at twelve?”
“Twelve comes, twelve goes. I’m still there. One comes, and one goes, and I’m still there. But shit, if I’m gonna stay again until the sun comes up. I finally drag my ass out around two-thirty and drive back home—I got a house in Laurel Canyon now, you know that?”
“Nah. Not bad.”
“Cool place. Blue Jay Way. I’ll get you over sometime. Anyway, I get home. Completely beat. My girlfriend’s asleep. I crawl into bed next to her, and a minute later, know what I’m thinking?”
“What a schmuck you were for leaving her in your bed all night, while you lost your money to the low-lifes?”
“Nah. I was up a couple of hundred, anyway. So I’m staring up at the ceiling. Can’t sleep. All I can think about is the Bicycle Club—all the hands I’m missing. I can’t get it out of my mind. Finally, I can’t take it any more. I get out of bed, get dressed, and spend an hour driving down again. I didn’t get back home till eleven the next morning.”
“With your shirt or without?”
“I ended up losing a few hundred. I can take it. But when I got back, my girlfriend was all pissed, which, given what happened, isn’t so crazy, right? She wants to talk about our relationship. Our fucking relationship—and how I’m spending more time with the jerks at the Bicycle than with her, and is it worth ruining what we got over the stupid card tables? But I’m not hearing her at all. Which only makes things worse. All I can think about is crashing. But when she finally lets me alone and I drop down to sleep, I can’t sleep. She was right. That was the bottom. Now I’m trying to kick it.”
“Any luck?”
“Sorta. That’s why I’m here. Watching the girls. And they’re fucking cute, right? I figure as long as my dick’s hard, I don’t want to leave. And as long as I don’t want leave, I’m not at the Bicycle.”
“I hate to tell you, but sooner or later you’re gonna get bored with it.”
“So far, so good. I can’t believe I never went to the strip bars before. I mean, you can do all this shit to the girls, have them lap dance you, rub their tits in your face, say hot stuff to them—everything—and still go home and face the old lady. It’s great.”
Good luck, Jimmy thought. Anybody who comes home from the tables in Gardena, only to drive all the way back down again, has bigger problems than the girls here were going to solve.
Josh jerked his head to the side, riveted on a girl just lowering her top. Reflexively, he drifted towards her. Jimmy watched him go, not saying anything. How could he? Josh was in therapy, after all.
Through an archway, Jimmy looked into a smaller room without a stage for the girls, so it was nearly empty. In a back booth, pulling a smoke from a box of Dunhills, and talking on his cell, was the sleazebag who owned the club, Sean. He was half-a-foot smaller than Jimmy, but had tough, broad shoulders and a nose that had been broken more than once during his
days as a London street thug. He had been a bass player in a punk band which came to LA a decade ago to cut a CD. But the lead singer OD’d, and once Sean lived LA, there was no way he was shipping back to the Old World. As Jimmy looked at Sean, it frothed him that the guy was getting over. For all the shit Sean did, he never spent a day in jail. There were girls in here like Tara who were guaranteed to be underage, more than one sicko Saudi prince had paid tens of thousands for Sean to provide the entertainment with his jail-bait, LA’s drug flavor of the month was guaranteed to be available here, and the club was laundering drug money for the Russian mob. Sean always managed to be around for the money, but never to do the time. Jimmy thought if there was a drug connection to the killing of the mayor’s buddy, Sean might know something about it. He played with the idea of grilling the guy, but figured Sean would never give up anything real, and it would only depress him.
Dani found Jimmy by the payphones, the one place in the club where he knew he wouldn’t have to deal with anyone. Dani gave him a kiss. She was wearing a blue satin Yankees jacket and smelled sweetly of sweat.
“It’s so nice of you to get me,” she said in a soft South Carolina accent.
“Come on.”
“Wasn’t a hassle, was it? With work?”
“Kidding? You’re the one page I don’t dread getting.”
“Thanks, baby. I just needed to see you.”
She moved close behind him, slipped her arms around his waist and rested her chin on his shoulder. She wrapped her arms tighter and he felt her pressing into his back. He was going home with her. He was happy to be going home with her … but then he wondered if there was a way out. He was crazy. She had a body that ninety-nine percent of this room would kill to crawl into bed with—hell, ninety-nine percent of LA for that matter. She was sweet, she was good to him. What the fuck was wrong with him?
“Smile, baby,” she said.
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