smoke. I guess they probably can’t smoke in those places anymore. But the rest of it has to be the same—a few hundred horny, drunk guys drooling out there at the tables while you try to ignore them and hear the beat of the music over the noise. Do you even dance?”
Sylvie lied. “No,” she said, then wondered why.
“Well, you can learn as much as you need to, I guess. The key to this is to get the money in your hands and invest it. Buy a house. Start a retirement plan, if you haven’t already. Then keep putting the rest in stocks and bonds. That’s why I own a movie studio with Eddie Durant, and the girls from my day who were better looking and better actresses and better everything are, well, wherever they are. Just make sure I always know your schedule.”
Sylvie took everything Cherie said seriously, so she took this seriously, too. She had been saving her money, but now she began to invest it. At the end of the next week, McKee called her again. “Hello, baby,” he said in his strange raspy voice. “I got you booked. We do fifteen cities in three weeks.”
The first club was in San Diego. On her first night, she stood behind the curtain on the stage and looked out at the men in the bar while the lights were still up. She realized that they weren’t scary. They weren’t anything. They had nothing to do with her or what she was going to do up onstage. When she came out, the room was too dim to make out their features clearly. She began to dance. She was in a blue spotlight, and as she moved her body the dance was no more personal, no more Sylvie than it had been when she was assuming the classic poses of ballet.
At the end of each night, she was tired and covered with sweat, but the crowd of men had given her so many bills that each time her set was over, she had to gather the money and pile it in stacks in her dressing room. Darren McKee insisted on staying at her side and having one of the club bouncers take them to the hotel so she wouldn’t get robbed.
Darren was better to her than she had expected him to be. For the whole tour, he went with her so she wouldn’t have to make any travel arrangements or haggle with the management of the clubs. Sylvie formed the theory that there had been earlier girls who had arrived late or gotten lost, and that he was determined never to let it happen again. He talked to her while he drove her from city to city, telling her funny stories about people in the business, and about others he met in hotels. He ordered healthy food for her when they were in restaurants, and even gave her vitamins after meals. He booked hotel rooms adjoining hers, and made sure she turned off the television and switched off the lights in time to get eight hours of sleep every night. He was reliable and strong and in control, and she felt safe and protected.
After all these years, it seemed to Sylvie that what happened was partly her fault. She was on the tour because she had been in a couple dozen adult movies, and the reason she was on the tour was to take her clothes off onstage. It would have seemed idiotic to close doors and make a point of hiding herself from Darren. She would have been embarrassed to put on clothes just because he was around.
The part that was Darren’s fault was that he had effectively taken over her life. It had not occurred to her that at twenty she was almost exactly half his age. She didn’t think of him as being her mother’s age, and he didn’t look it. She just thought vaguely that he was older and wiser, and therefore it was logical that he was in charge. He was always walking from his room to hers and back, handling her clothes, her luggage, or something. It became so unsurprising after a few days that one time when he came in while she was coming out of the shower she didn’t bother to get dressed, and he began to make love to her. She accepted him without giving the change in their relationship as much thought as she might have a year earlier. She had become used to men, and used to Darren, and had figured that everything he did was good for her, and this probably was, too.
It made their relationship unambiguous, and now she knew how to behave: how to interpret his touch, how to respond to things that he said to her and did for her. They weren’t boss and employee, or star and manager, or dancer and agent. They were a man and a woman. She knew how to do that. She had never traveled with a man before, but she liked it. She liked living with someone who paid attention to her.
At the end of the tour, while they were driving toward Los Angeles, he said, “You made a lot of money this trip.”
“Yes,” she said. “More than I ever imagined I would.”
“I think the clubs aren’t good for you.”
“It’s not fun,” she said. “But I liked traveling with you, and it’s safer than working for Cherie and Eddie in the movie business. I’m not going to catch some disease and die from stripping.”
“I want you to quit the movie business, too. Especially that.”
She looked at him for a few seconds. “I don’t get it. Why do you have an opinion?”
“Because I love you. As soon as we get back home, I want you to marry me.”
Sylvie looked at Darren and considered his offer. Thinking about it meant allowing herself to acknowledge what she had decided not to feel—that she hated her life. There had been particular moments of humiliation and hurt and revulsion that she had known would make her want to die if she let them, so she simply hadn’t. As she sat in the car beside Darren McKee that day, she found herself remembering all of it. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll marry you.” As Sylvie considered that moment, all these years later, she realized it was the last big decision she had ever had to make.
The plane reached its apogee and the pilot began to mutter into the microphone in the cockpit. Sylvie looked at Paul, gave him a quick, perfunctory smile, squeezed his hand once, and looked out the window at the jagged brown rocks below. In a few minutes, they would be on the runway in Las Vegas. All they had to do was find Jack Till’s car and follow it to Wendy Harper. Once the woman was dead, maybe Sylvie could get Paul to spend a few days here.
14
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Jack Till took a cab back from the mailbox rental to the MGM Grand and went up to his room. He showered, unlocked his suitcase, and dressed in fresh clothes, then retrieved the parts of his gun. It was a black 9mm Beretta M92 pistol like the police-issue sidearm he had carried when he was a homicide detective. He had dismantled it so the slide, the recoil spring, barrel, frame, and the loaded magazine were in different parts of the suitcase. He laid the pieces out on the bed and assembled them. He had picked that particular gun because it had the right presence. It was blocky and utilitarian, and it was the model that civilians like Wendy Harper had seen strapped to cops a thousand times. He hoped it would make her feel safe.
He had to make her feel that she would be protected, or she might be reluctant to go with him. There was also the fact that the trouble she was hiding from was not imaginary. The men who had buried the bloody bat in her best friend’s back yard had been trying to get her to show herself.
Till laid out the other items he had brought with him. He had a very good quality women’s brown wig made of real hair cut in a short, wavy style that was not at all like Wendy Harper’s long blond hair. Her figure had been very thin and small, and the quilted jacket he’d brought would add twenty pounds. He had chosen glasses for her: one set with dark-tinted lenses for the ride in the car, and the other clear for walking in the halls of the DA’s office and the police department. Till was sure he would have to take her to both places. Assistant DA Linda Gordon would be predisposed to believe she was being hoodwinked, and would insist on having Wendy fingerprinted, photographed, and positively identified. Till supposed he would have to prepare Wendy for the hostility and suspicion she would face. But the fact that nobody except Till would be planning to protect her once she was in Los Angeles he would keep to himself for now.
Till searched his suitcase, found a small battery-operated transmitter, switched it on, and used the receiver to test its battery. He planned to leave it in Ann Delatorre’s apartment and telephone to listen to anyone who entered after he drove away with her.
He put the bug into his coat pocket, and slipped the gun into the belt holster at the left side of his body where he could open his coat and allow Ann Delatorre to see it. Then he gathered a few of the newspaper articles about the arrest of Eric Fuller into an envelope and locked his suitcase again.
He went downstairs to the casino, made his way through a crowd of people standing in front of an enormous glass case where a family of African lions draped themselves over a real-looking outcropping of rock on a veldt on the hotel floor, stepped into a shop beyond it, and bought a map of Las Vegas and its suburbs. He went to the front
