“There’s left-over alphabet soup from Sam’s lunch.”
“Sam’s your kid?”
“Sam’s my kid.”
“Alphabet soup please.”
“Grilled cheese sandwich, maybe? Milk?”
I was a kid home sick from school.
“Grilled cheese, perfect. You wouldn’t have any kind of Coke, would you?”
“Diet Pepsi.”
I wasn’t going to insult my hostess. “That would be swell.”
She sat and watched me eat off a tray in bed and I began to feel vaguely human. The little boy came in, wearing a red t-shirt and blue shorts, and tugged on his mother’s arm and whispered something, and she went off and tended to that kid for a while.
When she came back, I was done eating, and I found a place for the tray on the little nightstand. “Why are you doing this? Why did you help me last night? I mean…night before last?”
“You helped me.”
“Candace,” I said, trying to impress her by not shortening her name to the more stripper-like Candy, “all I did was let you give me a free table dance. I have a feeling a lot of Good Samaritans would have done that.”
“You didn’t take advantage. You were nice. I’m a good judge of character.”
No, she wasn’t.
“Anyway, I’ve seen how people just disappear around the Lucky. And I didn’t want that to happen to you.”
“Those two bouncers who jumped me…do I remember you saying they were heading back for me?”
She nodded. “I’ve seen them do that before. They take somebody in the alley, work them over. Then they pull a car over and throw the poor person in the back seat or trunk, and drive off.”
That didn’t mean Jerry G had intended having me killed, just that they were going to dump me off the premises. A ditch somewhere, or a parking lot across the river. Or, they could have killed my ass, and tossed me in the river. Either way, Candace was a rare angel in Haydee’s.
“Why do you work there, Candace? You’re a pretty, intelligent girl. You could do better.”
She smiled and laughed. “I’m pretty, but I’m not that smart. I never got better than C’s, and I dropped out my sophomore year. I have a little boy to support, who the H knows where his father is, and I hope to do better for myself, so for right now? Nothing pays better than dancing at the Lucky. Not for me.”
I didn’t want to insult her, but I had to ask. I tried as delicately as possible: “That’s all you do at the Lucky? Dance?”
She didn’t take offense. “I’m not one of Jerry G’s party girls. They don’t make all that much more than I do, anyway, by the time Jerry gets his slice, and they risk a lot. Some of their customers can get rough.”
“Rougher than your biker pal?”
“Way rougher. That’s real sad, those girls. Jerry G gets ’em all hooked. Free drugs at first, then so much of their pay goes to it, they just sort of spin their wheels. I don’t take drugs. I don’t even smoke grass, anymore. Not around Sam, anyway.”
Good-naturedly, I reminded her, “You have Percodan around.”
“I work long hours, on my feet, shaking my bottom, always around a lot of smoke, and sometimes I get bad headaches. I can buy those pills at work, but I’m careful. You can get addicted to that shit, y’know.”
“I don’t smoke or drink much or do drugs,” I said. “I’m the clean-cut guy you’ve been dreaming about, Candace.”
She grinned; her gums showed a little, as her teeth were rather tiny-it was endearing. “What are you, a priest?”
“I didn’t say I was celibate.”
“I didn’t think you were.” Still grinning. “I was sitting on your lap the other night, remember?”
“I remember…I hope I don’t get you in any trouble. I’m sure your boss wouldn’t be thrilled with you, if he knew you’d bailed me out.”
She shook her head; the ponytail flounced. “Nobody saw me. We’re fine. We’ll just get you healed up and healthy, and you can find some other town to have fun in.”
I didn’t argue the point.
We chatted for a while, and she told me her long-term plans, which were to save enough money to sell the trailer, move to Des Moines where her older sister lived, and go to beauty school. She wanted to buy a nicer car, too. She had about ten thousand saved, and another fifteen thousand or so would make her dreams come true.
Which reminded me.
I’d had eleven thousand in cash on me. Surely part of the point of that roust in the alley had been to retrieve Jerry G’s poker losses; but I didn’t remember that happening. Not that I would, busy as I was getting the shit kicked out of me and bleeding out my nose and mouth.
“Could you bring me my pants?” I asked.
“You’re not getting up already?”
“No, I just want to check something.”
She jerked a thumb. “Well, I’m washing them, your shirt and pants. They were pretty filthy from that alley. But there was some stuff in the pockets.”
After disappearing briefly, she came in with my wallet and a thick fold of bills.
“You must have won,” she said, eyes big.
I counted it. Nothing was missing from the wallet, including the phony credit cards I was using.
Christ, they’d half-killed me, and left all that dough on me? Maybe they intended to clean me when they returned to take me for a ride. Or maybe the beating hadn’t been about the poker game at all. Maybe Jerry G’s pride in his own poker playing was too high to allow him to help himself to another player’s rightful winnings, even when he was planning to have that player beaten like a red-headed stepchild.
“What kind of boss is Jerry G?” I asked her.
She was perched on the edge of the bed again. “If you don’t cross him, he’s no problem. He doesn’t take a cut of my tips. If I sit and talk to a client, and get him to buy me a drink, that’s split between the house and the girl.”
“What does he pay you to dance?”
“Nothing.”
“You shitting me?”
“No. It’s strictly the dollars in our g’s, and the table dances and V.I.P. lounge tips. And we don’t date the customers. Jerry G says, if we want to do it for money, he’ll get us a little trailer out back.”
“What about Gigi?”
“Jerry G’s pop? He’s a nice enough old guy. He used to be a horndog, I hear-they say he used to audition all the girls who were tricking. But he’s been sick, lately.”
“How sick?”
“Well, I don’t know. But he goes to the doctor once a month. Otherwise, he hardly comes down from his suite. He sometimes has breakfast with Jerry G, at that little cafe downtown.”
“Not at the Wheelhouse restaurant?”
“No! Jerry G stays away from the Paddlewheel and the Wheelhouse. There’s a real rivalry there. The girls say Jerry G hates that guy, Cornell. Richard Cornell?”
“Ever been to the Paddlewheel?”
“No. That’s one world. The Lucky is another.”
“Pretty rough world, for a sweet kid like you.”
Her smile was a chin-crinkler. “Are you flirting?”
“Not yet. I just mean, prostitution, gambling, narcotics…”
“Those kinds of things have been around forever. Didn’t you ever hear of Sodom and Gomorrah?”
“Sodom, anyway. Doesn’t bother you?”
“I’m responsible only to myself, Jack. I have a nice body, and I don’t think being naked is sinful or evil or
