forgetting something?
There was a knock on the bathroom door. “John, are you in there?” It was Susan’s voice.
I raised myself to a sitting position. “Yes. I’ll be out in a minute.”
“That’s all right, I just wanted to know if you’re okay.”
I stepped out of the tub gingerly, holding onto the towel bar for balance. “Okay might be putting it too strongly,” I said. “But at least I’m clean.”
“That’s an improvement.”
I smiled. “Hang on.” I wrapped a towel around my waist and opened the door. She was wearing a pair of men’s flannel pajamas and holding a toothbrush and a tube of Colgate in one hand. Her hair was up, her makeup was off, and she looked She looked irresistible. I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her. I didn’t do it, but I wanted to.
She looked me over, lingering at the old bruise over my right hip and the new ones beginning to discolor my shoulder and my left side under my arm. “Damaged goods,” I said, but it didn’t make her smile. “It’s okay. I’ve had worse.”
“God, John. Why do you do this?”
“Get beaten up? I try not to.”
“Why do you work in a job where you have to try?”
I could have given a glib response – I’d given them often enough when other people had asked the same question. But somehow it didn’t feel right this time. She was asking seriously and I owed her a serious answer. “I like to think I can do some good,” I said. “Not a lot, maybe – but some. The papers, the news channels – Miranda’s only been dead a few days and they’re already onto the next story. The police, it’s the same thing. But meanwhile, a woman was murdered. She deserved better, Susan. Even if she did the things they’re saying, she didn’t deserve to die for it.
“The way I look at it is, if I don’t do something about it, who’s going to? Now, maybe Leo’s right and I’m not going to accomplish anything, but maybe he’s wrong and I will. And if it takes me getting a few bruises to do it, well, I’m still better off than she is.” Susan didn’t say anything. “That’s all.”
She stepped into the bathroom, pulled the door closed behind her. She put one hand on either side of my face gently and stroked the hair above my ears. It hurt when I took her in my arms. I didn’t let go.
Chapter 16
There was barely room in the bed for the two of us to lie side by side. She lay with her head on an unbruised portion of my chest and we breathed slowly, recovering. I stroked my fingertips along the back of her neck and she traced hers through the hair below my navel. Neither of us said anything.
I was thinking about how much had changed, and how little. Here I was again, in the same apartment, in the same bed, looking up at the same bookshelf. The hook was still there. Only the bird was gone.
I kissed her when she came back from her shower, then limped out to the bathroom to take one of my own. My duffel bag was still there, and I dressed in a fresh pair of jeans and a warm shirt. I was still sore, but it wasn’t so bad now that some of the soreness had been gained in a good cause.
She met me at the door to my room with a handful of notes. “Let me fill you in on what I found out last night. I made a lot of calls.”
“Coffee first.”
I found the filters hidden in the butter compartment of the refrigerator, next to a small bag of hazelnut coffee. It was the sort of thing I’d never buy for myself, but now, as it brewed, it made me very happy. The smell was wonderful: warm and rich and domestic.
I poured each of us a cup, and Susan flattened out the first sheet of paper. “Steven Dubois. Runs a club outside Dallas called Cooter’s.”
“Cooter’s.”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. I danced there once. It’s a good place for beginners, and Steven’s not a bad guy. He won’t push you to do anything you don’t want to do. Holds open auditions and amateur nights and wet T- shirt competitions, and the crowd he gets isn’t too raunchy, more southern gentlemen than good old boys.”
“Southern gentlemen and wet T-shirt competitions don’t sound like a natural combination.”
“You’d be surprised. Anyway, I called him, and he said yes, sure, he remembered two Rianon girls showing up at his door in ‘96.” She read from her notes. “He said they were ‘green as grass, but gorgeous and game.’z”
“Did he actually say that? Green and gorgeous and game?”
“That’s how he talks,” she said. “The first night I was there, I remember when he announced me he said
‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I present, from the sunny shores of Fremont, California, the feisty and fabulous Rachel Firestone.’z”
“Ladies and gentlemen?” I said.
“They get a few ladies.”
“Well, I can’t argue with fabulous.” I drank some coffee. “Fabulous Firestone. I like it.”
“You don’t think I’m feisty?”
“You could teach courses in feisty. What else did Mr. Dubois have to say?”
“That’s it. He remembered them, said they danced there for a couple of weeks and moved on. He said the men loved them. They did this act where they’d dance together and instead of undressing themselves, they’d undress each other.”
I remembered the photo, Miranda resting her head on Jocelyn’s shoulder, arm around her waist. It wasn’t so hard to picture them dancing together, peeling off each other’s clothes.
“The second place I found where someone remembered them was a club called Sans Souci in New Orleans.” She looked up from her notes. “I’m just telling you about the yesses. There were something like twenty who said no or just weren’t willing to talk to me. Your mom is going to have one hell of a long distance bill.”
“That’s okay.”
“So, Sans Souci. I’ve never been there, but Matt Callan – he’s a booking agent I used to work with – Matt said they hire a lot of unagented girls there. I figured Miranda and Jocelyn probably hadn’t signed with an agent at this point, although I suppose they could have. Anyway, I talked to the manager, and after I got through to him that I wasn’t looking for a job myself, I managed to get him to think back, and he remembered them, too. That act of theirs seems to have stuck in people’s minds.”
“Was it that unusual?”
“Two girls stripping each other? I haven’t seen anything like it. There are girl-girl acts in the champagne rooms sometimes, but that’s usually just a sex show, not a dance routine. From what people are saying, Miranda and Jocelyn had a really nice number worked out, with choreography and everything.”
“Must have been something to see.”
“Well, that brings us to number three. Matt told me about a guy named Morris Levy who operates a string of clubs in the Southeast. As far east as Jacksonville, as far north as Atlanta. According to Matt, he bought up a bunch of failing clubs in the eighties, renamed them Mo’s, put the waitresses in hotpants and matching Tshirts, repainted the bathrooms, and reopened. The clubs are still in business twenty years later, so I guess it worked.”
“You ever work at one of them?”
Susan shook her head. “Wait till you hear why. Matt said he never books his dancers at Mo’s because Mo Levy has a habit of shooting videotapes of his dancers without their permission. Not just their acts – I’m talking about in the dressing room, the bathroom, the whole nine yards. All the decent agents avoid him, which means he has to rely on lots of amateurs and girls who don’t know any better. A couple of dropout college girls would be a perfect fit for him.”
“What does he do with these videotapes?”
“He used to sell them through classified ads in sex papers until he got in trouble for it. These days, I don’t know, he probably swaps them over the Internet. Or maybe he just watches them himself, or shows them to his friends. But Matt says he never stopped making them.”
