Hard Fall

by Pascal Scott

  “No,” Zoe said.

  She considered her next question, deciding that she wasn’t really all that interested in John Adams’s real or imagined relationship with Raven. What she wanted to know was if he had a predilection for stalking.

  “What about Emily Bryson?” Zoe asked.

  “Who?”

  “Emily. She was another dancer at the Kitty Club.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  Zoe produced a photograph from her handbag. It was a picture of Emily standing in the quad at San Francisco State.

  “Oh, her. Yeah, she worked there. Looks different here. She was a student? I guess most of the girls are. Raven was pursuing her MBA. Did she tell you that? Raven is a bright girl. This one”—he looked again at the color photograph—“this one was not my type. I prefer the exotic.”

  “One more question. Where were you on the night of Thursday, October 12, 1989?”

  “I have no idea,” Adams replied. “I’d have to check my calendar.”

  “I can wait.”

  Setting his drink on the tabletop, he stood and went into his bedroom, returning a few minutes later with a day planner.

  “I was at Eddie Rick’s, with friends,” he said after finding the page.

  “Eddie Rickenbacker’s,” Zoe repeated. “The bar on Second Street?”

  “You’re familiar with it?”

  “I know of it,” Zoe said. “It’s a fern bar popular with…’’ She had started to say “straights” but caught herself. “…a lot of people. What time were you there?”

  “I’ve got 8:00 p.m. on my calendar. ‘Drinks with J and T’—that would be Joshua and Thomas, friends of mine. The New York Stock Exchange opens at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, which is 6:30 a.m. in San Francisco. I’m usually at my desk by 5:00 a.m. I don’t remember that night specifically, but since it was a Thursday, I probably left the bar by 11:00 or so. No later than 11:00 p.m.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m sure I went home and went to sleep. I don’t have a checkmark on my calendar, so I didn’t score.”

  “Score? As in bring a girl home?”

  “Right. It’s a private note I make to myself.”

  “Like a notch on the bedpost?”

  “Like that.”

  He was still standing. Zoe closed her notepad and returned it and the pen to her purse. She pulled a business card from her wallet and stood. “If you remember anything else…” she said, giving him the card.

  “Thank you. But actually, I don’t see how I can help you with your investigation. I wasn’t stalking anyone, if you’re still thinking I’m a suspect.”

  “What makes you think I suspect you?”

  Mr. Adams smiled. “You don’t survive in my world if you can’t read the room.”

  In the elevator ride down to the lobby, Zoe thought of a saying she’d heard around the office. Stalking is murder in slow motion. Maybe John Adams was stalking Kitties; maybe he wasn’t. Mr. Adams could have left Eddie Rickenbacker’s and driven to the Kitty Club to follow Raven when she got off work that night. But why would he have kidnapped and murdered Emily instead? He would have had the time, but he lacked a motive. Zoe believed him when he said Emily wasn’t his type.

  No, her instincts were telling her she was looking for someone else. But who?

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Do you want to talk about your drinking?” Maggie asked.

  It was Tuesday, their regular night since Stone had started therapy in November. After ten sessions, Stone had requested a change to twice a month, not because her mental health had improved, but because she couldn’t afford weekly sessions. Therapy was expensive, even with the sliding scale Maggie offered. And frankly, Stone wasn’t sure now why she was still in therapy. Was it making any difference at all? Her sleep was still troubled with memories of Emily, and the sound of her own sobs had awakened her more than once in the night. The problem was that she wasn’t ready to stop. There were so few things left in her life that she could count on anymore—her job, her family, her bar, her beer. And Maggie.

  “Not really,” she answered.

  “Stone, I can’t help you if you’re not going to help yourself. You know my rule. You can’t show up to our sessions under the influence.”

  “What makes you think I’m under the influence?”

  Maggie gave her that therapist look, the one that says, don’t bullshit me.

  “All right, but I don’t drink on the job. I’m usually at Mabel’s by this time, and it’s just hard not to have a beer by 7:00 in the evening.”

  “Next time, I’m going to insist. No drinking before we talk. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Now the last time we spoke, you had hired a private investigator to examine the circumstances of Emily’s death. How is that going?”

  Stone shrugged. “It’s not, really. Nothing has turned up. Zoe has tracked down a couple of suspects and interviewed them, and I met with the medical examiner. But nothing yet.”

  “Zoe?” Maggie asked.

  “Zoe Martinelli. She’s the woman I’m working with.”

  “This is the unlicensed psychic?”

  “Well, yeah, but that makes her sound flakey. She’s not flakey. At all. She’s really very brilliant. And nice.”

  “Brilliant. And nice,” Maggie repeated.

  “Yeah.”

  Maggie paused, rocking. “Would you like to say more about that?”

  Stone straightened her backbone. “No.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “I only hire girls who are comfortable with their own sexuality. At the Kitty Club, we create the illusion of intimacy. My girls have to be able to smile and flirt and make eye contact with customers. They have to like what they’re doing. And they have to be able to suggest an exchange of sexual energy despite the glass between them and the men.”

  Zoe was sitting in the Embarcadero office of May Cooper, owner of the Kitty Club. Zoe guessed Ms. Cooper’s age at forty-something, but a forty-something who wore her age well and looked good in a tight, chocolate-colored sweater, dark brown stretch pants, and high-heeled, laced-up boots. Zoe was sitting in front of May’s desk, her back to a bay window that gave May a picture-postcard view of the San Francisco waterfront.

  “And they need to have fun with the job,” May continued. “Being an exotic dancer is hard work. I reward my girls by giving them a livable wage, sick leave, life insurance, and protection from angry customers. I have two bodyguards on every shift. My girls know all they have to do is nod in the direction of one of my guys, and he’ll take care of any problem.”

  “Why do clients get angry?” Zoe asked.

  “Look,” May said, canting her head so that a strand of dyed-red hair fell into her face, over her black-framed, cat-eyed glasses. “I employ seventy-five beautiful girls who are naked and unapologetically sexual. Some men think they can handle confident women, but they can’t. Those men end up feeling manipulated, and then they get angry. No man likes to think that he’s being led around by his cock.”

  “What about a client named John Adams? You filed an injunction against him.”

  “Yeah, yeah, that guy. A real douche. We bounced him once for a D and D and told him to stay away. When he came back, we wouldn’t let him in; he made a fuss; we called the cops, and I got a restraining order.”

  “Was there anyone else? Anybody else who was trouble?”

  “There are always guys who are trouble, men who won’t accept the rules of behavior. I require my girls to treat our customers with courtesy and respect, and I expect our customers to treat my girls the same way. Just because this is a sex entertainment business doesn’t mean that it’s any less legitimate than any other business in San Francisco. Customers who are rude or disrespectful get their butts tossed out on the sidewalk by one of my guys.”

  “What about Emily Bryson?”

  “Of course, Emily. Venus. That was her stage name. That was so sad. She was one of my
favorites. I heard she killed herself. Everyone here was shocked.”

  “There’s some question about the cause of her death, actually.”

  May drummed her long red fingernails on the glass top of her desk. “Really? You don’t think it was suicide?”

  “I don’t think anything,” Zoe said. “I’m just gathering information.”

  “Let me ask you something. If I promised to keep it between us, would you tell me who it was that hired you? To gather this information?”

  “No. I’m afraid that’s confidential between me and my client.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “One other thing,” Zoe said. “I’ve been told this is a union shop. Is that correct?”

  “It is now. The girls walked out on the job last summer. I hired Littler Mendelson to represent me. The girls brought in the Service Employees Union. We negotiated and signed a contract last September. ”

  “You opposed unionization,” Zoe said.

  “Of course I opposed it. What business owner wants her shop unionized? But the vote was seventy-five in favor of the contract and zero against. I had to accept that it was what the girls wanted. We’ve gone on from there.”

  “Who led the effort?” Zoe asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “To unionize. Who were the organizers? Was Emily one of them?”

  May hesitated for a mini-second before answering. “Yeah, she was. But so was Stella. Stella was really behind the effort, as you call it.”

  “Stella. Is that her stage name?”

  “Yeah. Like in Streetcar Named Desire. Her legal name is Johanna Bonn.”

  ****

  Zoe found Johanna in the club’s changing room.

  “I have nothing personal against May,” Johanna began. She looked at Zoe in the makeup mirror in front of her chair and then back at her face as she lengthened her eyelashes with thick, black mascara. She had shoulder-length blond hair and a slim, fit body. A perfect Kitty.

  “But she was exploiting us. There was a girl named Pepper who couldn’t get enough hours to cover the cost of her child care and all because she was black. May told her, ‘Dark-skinned girls aren’t a draw. Paying customers don’t want to see them.’ May said that.”

  “That’s terrible,” Zoe said.

  “It was. So there was that. Then there were May’s requirements for getting hired. Besides favoring white girls, she insisted that we have no tats, no body piercings, and our hair had to be at our neckline. No belly fat, not even bloating from your period. You wouldn’t get your shift if you showed up bloated.”

  “She was strict,” Zoe said.

  “She was unfair,” Johanna retorted. “And there was another thing. We work in glass booths. There’s a window blind between us and the customer, and once he puts his money in the slot, the blind goes up. He buys viewing time with us. That’s why it’s called a peep show. He gets as much time as he’s willing to pay for. In most of the booths, the dancer can see the customer and interact with him. But there were two booths at the club with one-way mirrors, and if you got assigned to one of those for the night, all you could see was the red light of the video camera that May had installed, supposedly for security reasons. You could see that the red light was on so you knew there was somebody watching you, but you couldn’t see who it was on the other side of the glass. It could have been anybody—your landlord, your professor, your boss from another job—you had no way of knowing.

  “So we took our complaints to May, and she listened, but nothing changed. That’s when we called SEIU, the Service Employees International Union. We held a meeting and didn’t invite May, but she heard about it and showed up anyway. So did the Randall Brothers. They own a strip club and X-rated theater in the Tenderloin. A couple of thugs from the Galli family turned up, too.”

  “The Galli family? The Mafia was there?”

  “Well, yeah. Most of the clubs in North Beach are owned by the mob. May wasn’t part of the family, but you couldn’t be in the sex trade in San Francisco and not pay your dues to the syndicate. Extortion. You know. May had to give a percentage of the club’s profits to the Gallis.”

  “These Mafia thugs who showed up at the meeting. Do you know their names?”

  “Sure. Chippy Carelli and Scarface De Luca.”

  “Scarface? Was that really his nickname?”

  “That’s what they called him. I guess a lot of wise guys get their faces scarred. Occupational hazard.”

  Like everyone at Coppola Investigations, Zoe had heard about the Galli family. The Gallis had been part of the criminal history of San Francisco since the bootlegging era of the 1920s when they had muscled their way into the city’s political structure. It was widely known that a former mayor had mob connections.

  “How about Emily? Was she at the meeting?”

  “Sure she was. Emily and I led the fight.”

  “And when, exactly, was that meeting held? I’m trying to get a sense of a timeline on this.”

  “It was before we went on strike—that would have been April of last year. It took us about two months after that meeting to get enough dancers to sign union cards to bring in a rep. That’s when May changed tactics. At first, she had tried to play the sympathy card. She came down here to the dressing room and cried and said we had betrayed her. When that didn’t work, she tried a new strategy—intimidation. She threatened to fire us, one by one. I said, ‘Go ahead, me first.’ And she did. But then she hired me back two days later when the other girls threatened to quit in solidarity.”

  “Did any of the thugs threaten you? At the meeting or after?”

  “No, but they didn’t have to. Their presence was threat enough.”

  “What about the last night you saw Emily? According to Raven, the three of you left the club about twenty minutes after it had closed at 2:00 a.m. October 12 last year. You said good night, parted ways, and that was the last time anyone saw Emily alive. Is that how you remember it?”

  “Yeah, that’s how I remember it. It was a regular night. The only thing different was that the fog had rolled in, and I remember that because I was cold.”

  “And you didn’t see anyone on the street? Anyone hanging around? Or a car with someone in it?”

  “No, I don’t remember seeing anything out of the ordinary. I’m sorry I can’t help you.”

  “October 12,” Zoe said. “So you had already reached agreement? About the contract, I mean.”

  “Yeah,” Johanna confirmed. “We were back at work. We had won.”

  Johanna held her red lipstick in midair and turned from the mirror to look directly at Zoe. “You always wish you could have known, don’t you? The last time with someone. You never know it’s the last time. If I’d known, there would have been things I would have said to Emily.”

  She returned her focus to the image in the mirror, turning herself into Stella.

  “What things?” Zoe asked.

  Johanna bit her bottom lip. “Private things. Just a few private things.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Get some rest.” That was what Zoe had told her, and that was good advice that Stone didn’t take. Instead she went drinking. Twelve Steppers said you drank until you hit bottom. Stone said she would drink until the bottom hit her. It happened at Mabel’s on the second Sunday of February during a charity tournament called the February Freezer, to benefit the Women’s Building. Stone was sitting on her favorite bar stool, the one back by the women’s restroom, listening to Mabel’s Marauders gloat about their victory over The Diamond Divas of Pat’s Place, a lesbian bar in the avenues. Earlier in the afternoon, the Marauders had trounced their softball competitors at Jackson Park.

  During the game, there had been one small incident. Halfway through the second inning, a lone male biker had ridden in and parked his Harley next to the other motorcycles on the asphalt lot behind the catcher’s box. Getting off his chopper, the biker stood watching the game. Everyone on the diamond noticed him. After a few minutes, the biker
had placed his dirty blue-jeaned ass on the seat of a motorcycle that didn’t belong to him. As it happened, the blue Sportster belonged to Dory, who had recently joined Mabel’s Marauders.

  From first base, Dory observed the biker’s challenge and called for a timeout. Taking off her mitt, she strode across the clay and sand dirt. As she approached him, the biker tried to stare her down from behind tinted sunglasses, sneering beneath his horseshoe mustache. Dory took three steps, pulling her right arm back as she marched toward him. At an arm’s length away, she struck, her knuckles connecting solidly with his jaw, knocking him off her bike and onto the asphalt, where he hit his head and lost consciousness. Amid the cheers of the lesbian crowd, Dory stomped back to the diamond. The umpire then resumed the game. Eventually, the biker came to. Shaking his head, he mounted his Harley and rode away, giving the team a middle-finger salute as he left.

  Now Stone glanced at the neon clock on the wall behind the bar. It was 9:48 p.m. The celebration was winding down. Tomorrow was a workday. She’d have one more drink and then go home. Glancing around the room, she saw that there were only about a dozen dykes still drinking. Dory was seated next to her on a stool closer to the door. MC Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This was playing from the jukebox.

  Suddenly, Hammer’s rap was interrupted by the sound of crashing glass as a red brick flew through the entrance window. A moment later, the front door banged open and four bikers rushed inside. Chaos erupted. The women seated at the front of the bar were the first to engage. Stone quickly assessed what was happening and stood. As she did, a ponytailed biker in a black leather vest and baggy jeans lunged at her. Sidestepping his bulging biceps, Stone placed a karate chop on the side of his AFFA tattooed neck. He turned, shook off the hit, and lunged again. Stone met his rage with her fist. At the same time, a guttural wail rolled up from her chest and out of her mouth.