“I damn sure do. I want to find out who killed her, and I want to find her family too so they can be informed and hopefully get that girl’s body back. She should be buried with her own.”
“If you really and truly mean that, then listen, mister. Anything I can do to help you, I mean anything at all, you just ask for it and I’ll jump to lend you a hand. Nancy, she was about the best friend I’ve had since well, since a real long time ago. I liked her a lot, and I’d be a pretty poor friend if I stood back now and didn’t help when I could. So you just ask, mister. Anything at all. If I can’t stand to tell you the truth, at least I won’t tell you no lies. Is that all right?”
“That sounds fair to me, Dawn.”
“Sit down, mister, and let’s you and me talk.” She patted the slightly soiled sheet beside her pale, pretty rump.
Longarm accepted the invitation.
Chapter 19
“Her name really was Nancy,” the girl who called herself Dawn said. “Isn’t that about the craziest thing you ever heard? She was using her real name. I mean, Nancy was honestly that dumb when it came to some things. I guess I shouldn’t say ‘dumb,’ should I? Speak ill of the dead and all that stuff?”
“Naive maybe?” Longarm suggested.
Dawn smiled. “That sounds a lot nicer, doesn’t it.”
“Go on, please. What was the rest of her name?”
“I don’t know.”
Longarm raised an eyebrow.
“No, don’t look at me like that, mister. I’m telling you the truth. Nancy was … what was that word you used? … she was real naive some ways. But she was learning.” Dawn gave him a wan little half smile. “A girl learns real quick when she goes into the life. You know?”
“Yeah, I can imagine,” he said. Although in truth he probably could not. Not really. Probably no male ever really could. “Well, Nancy, she was learning. She talked about her family a lot. She missed them. But she never told me what their family name was. A couple times she mentioned them being Smith or Jones. But the way she said it made it clear that she wasn’t telling me the truth. And she wanted me to know that that wasn’t really her name. It was like she wanted to protect them from even being mentioned under the roof of a whorehouse.”
“Was she ashamed of what she did?” Longarm asked.
“Christ, what are you? Some kind of innocent lamb? Everybody is ashamed of working in a whorehouse. Except maybe some of the men. The bouncers, I mean. They like it. But that’s because they get to fuck all the girls and don’t have to pay for it. They think that’s something to brag about to all the other guys, I guess.”
“But the girls?”
“Mister, nobody starts out in life and thinks, gee, I’d like to grow up and be a whore. You know? You ever see any little doll-babies dressed in short skirts or kimonos, stuff for little girls to play with and imagine themselves growing up to wear powder a pound at a time or lie around being like a public toilet for drunks to squirt off into? You think my dream when I was a kid was to suck the cock of some horny bastard that hasn’t taken a bath in six months? Mister, this business is something a girl just kinda lucks out on.” Her short, hard yap of laughter sounded something like the bark of a seal. But it contained somewhat less humor.
“Was it that way for Nancy too?”
“Of course it was. She was dumb. Like all the rest of us. And even younger than most. I mean, I started when I was nineteen. I was grown. But poor little Nancy, she wasn’t hardly past her fifteenth birthday when she was turned out.”
“Turned out?”
“That’s what you call it, getting started into the life. A girl is said to’ve been turned out when she’s turned her first full trick. Not just blow jobs, mind. Little girls whose mamas are whores can give blow jobs from the time they’re five or six. That stuff doesn’t count. When you’re turned out is when you’ve gotten paid for a real fuck for the first time. Of course, a girl going into the business will have lost her cherry a long time before that. Usually to an uncle or a traveling salesman or some such sharpie. And then, of course, whoever the boss is and the bouncers, they’ll always use a girl for a while to sort of get her started under saddle.” Dawn laughed. “That’s the way the cowboys talk about it. Started under saddle. It kind of fits, don’t you think?”
Longarm didn’t answer. He pretended to be busy with his cheroot.
“Where were we? Oh, yeah … Nancy. She was just past turning fifteen when she started. That was at a house in Cheyenne.”
“Cheyenne. Is that where she’s from?”
“No, I’m sure she wasn’t. She said something about … what the hell was the name of that town anyway? She talked about it sometimes. It was way east of Cheyenne. In Nebraska somewhere, I think. Freedom? Freeman? Free-something.”
“Fremont?” Longarm asked.
“That sounds right. Sure. Fremont.”
Fremont, Nebraska. Longarm knew the place. Not well, but he’d been there before. Sort of the way he’d known Kittstown before. Not well. But enough. So the child was Nancy from Fremont.
“Do you know why she became, uh …”
“A whore? Look, mister, it’s okay for you to say it. I mean, it isn’t like it’s something I’ve never heard before, and it isn’t an insult unless you say it nasty-like. I mean, Nancy was a whore. I’m a whore. It’s the truth. Okay?”
“Sure.” He drew on the cheroot and waited for Dawn to go on.
