sign. Hobart nodded gravely, then looked down to spray soda into a customer’s scotch and slide the glass across the bar on a cocktail napkin.
As Prescott walked out into the sunlight, he assessed his progress and felt pleased. He was halfway in now, and the resistance was beginning to soften. The next part had to be done carefully.
26
The apartment complex looked like an island fortress surrounded by a lake of asphalt. There were low ramparts along the sides that held captive plants, but there were no trees. Prescott pulled up to the west end, parked the Corvette, and got out to look for the right staircase. Almost instantly he heard the click of high heels, turned, and saw Jeanie hurrying toward him.
She was wearing a simple black dress and small diamond studs in her ears, and carrying a tiny handbag. Her shining dark brown hair was pulled back in a tight coil that Prescott noticed was more than merely reminiscent of the style she had worn when she was taking off the business suit in Nolan’s. He felt a pang of sympathy for her: maybe it was her uniform to signal she was on her best behavior.
He stepped toward her, his expression anxious. “You didn’t have to wait outside for me.”
She paused about five feet from him, as though she were wondering how to get by him without touching him. “I didn’t want to make us late.”
He said, “You look terrific.” It wasn’t a lie. She had a pretty little face with large brown eyes that looked much better without the sparkling blue smears of eye shadow on the lids and the heavily rouged cheeks. Her figure was what she used to make a living, her one reliable asset, and the cut of the dress showed that she was confident about it, relying on it to make everything all right.
She disguised her need to stay five feet from him by using the distance to appraise him critically, looking at his suit, shoes, and tie. “So do you.” Then she made a sudden, evasive step to the passenger door of the Corvette. Prescott held it open for her, then went around the back of the car and got in. She seemed to have a list of questions she had decided to ask him, and she started as he drove. “I see you hanging out at Nolan’s during the day. What do you do for a living?”
He turned to her and saw that she was nervous, her head quiver-ing slightly as she waited. He looked at the road. “I guess you’d have to say I’m a bum at the moment,” he said happily. “I owned a couple of car-wash places in Los Angeles, but I sold them a few months ago, and came east. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do when I grow up.”
“If you didn’t have a plan, why did you sell them?” she asked.
“It seemed like the right time.”
“The right time?”
“Yeah,” said Prescott. “I was doing okay—not getting real rich, but okay. People in California care about cars. I picked the places up when the price of land was way down, and anything that happened to be on it was down lower. So I bought the corner and got the first car wash almost for free. I hadn’t planned to be in that business, but there I was, so I kept it going. A little later the second one was available, so I bought it. Then, about three or four years ago, land prices shot up again.”
“And you couldn’t resist.”
“I did resist,” he protested. “I waited for a long time. But I kept asking myself, ‘Am I in this because I like the smell of carnauba wax, or am I in it for the money? If I’m in it for the money, I have to sell at the time when there are a lot of people who want to buy, not wait through a boom.’ So I sold. One of the car washes is probably a shopping mall by now. The other is going to be a parking lot for the Bank of America.” He looked at her again. “How about you? Do you always have a plan?”
She shook her head. “Nope.” Then she changed her mind. “Yes, I guess I do, but none of them works so hot.”
“Do you have a plan now?”
She looked at him in anticipation of an approaching disappointment. “I’m going to college at night, picking up a degree. That’s why I work the lunch hour now.”
“That’s a lot better than my plans usually are,” he said. “What are you studying?”
She said, “Let’s talk about you.”
He looked at her, puzzled. “What’s wrong?”
She sighed, and glared at him with a mixture of frustration and sadness. “I don’t like talking about me. You’re curious about how I arrived at making a living in a dark saloon taking my clothes off so a bunch of sad, lonely men can stare at my tits. You’re too polite to ask straight out, so you work up to it gradually. Only there’s no way you can broach the topic without my sitting here cringing and waiting for that part of it to arrive. I can see it coming from a long way off. It’s a conversation I’ve had too many times.”
Prescott drove in silence for a few seconds. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. How about if I promise not to ask you about that, and you just tell me what your major is in college?”
She stared at him with hard hostility, then seemed to see herself. A laugh escaped from her lips. “Accounting. I’m in a CPA program.”
“That sounds great,” said Prescott. “I admire and approve of it. And I hope you’ll notice that it hardly hurt at all.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and put her hand on his arm, then seemed to think better of it and pulled it back into her lap. “I just get so tired of it.” She sat quietly for a few blocks, but no other topic seemed to fill the void. It weighed on her. “How about if I just tell you quickly, and then we forget about it?”
“No,” said Prescott. “I don’t think so.”
She was very surprised. “Why not?”
“You think I have some eagerness to hear all the intimate details, so I was weaseling my way up to that. Actually, I wasn’t. You don’t find out much about people by looking into all that. It’s mostly decisions they don’t feel like defending, and luck. I learn more about people by hearing what they want than by hearing what they have. So if it’s a sad story, I don’t want to hear it.”
“It’s a pretty good story,” she teased. “And it’s not sad.”
“You sure?” he said skeptically.
“Yes. I was from a small town west of here, eighteen, and couldn’t afford college. I—”
“You said this wasn’t going to be sad,” he reminded her.
“I know,” she said. “That part’s over. I came to the big city and waited tables in a restaurant. I was very good at math, so I did a little of the bookkeeping, too: cashing out at the end of the day, and helping with the records. A girl in my apartment building was working at a strip place, and one day while we were doing our laundry, we compared notes.”
“Did she work at Nolan’s?”
“No, she worked at a different place, called the Harem,” she said. “But here’s the comparison. I worked at my restaurant five to eleven every night, doing setup, waiting for dinner from five-thirty until ten on my feet, then cleanup after. I made five dollars an hour plus tips, which all added up to about a hundred a night, because it was a nice restaurant and I was really sweet and eager and looked young and pretty. My friend spent two hours at work, which amounted to forty-five minutes of getting made up and in costume, two fifteen-minute dance shows on stage a half hour apart, and fifteen minutes getting the makeup off and changing to street clothes. She got two hundred for the two dance numbers, and her tips came to about three hundred a night. She was making five times what I was making, and working a third of the hours—meaning that she was getting fifteen times what I got on an hourly basis, and was actually doing what I call work for only a quarter of that time.”
“That’s quite a difference.”
“I was off on Sunday night because I worked the Sunday brunch, so I went to see her work. There were four girls on that night. None of them was especially good-looking. They all had lots of long, bleached hair and reasonably good shapes, but that was all you could say. They weren’t even very good dancers, except one. It turned out that my friend wasn’t exaggerating. They were all making more than she was. They had an amateur night just like Nolan’s does on Saturday night, so I signed up for it and called in sick at my job. It isn’t nuclear physics. If you can dance and you’ve seen four or five other people do it, you know about as much as you’ll ever know, and if you’re