'Dom,' Jack said. 'You ain't done nothin' like this ever.'
'Hey,' Dom snapped. 'Try to leave me with some dignity, will ya?'
They wandered around a bit, through the maze of stages and tables. There was a room marked 'Private Club.' Jack asked about it and a waitress said that it cost a hundred dollars to go in there. They served champagne and there was more privacy. There was also another room that they stepped into. This room had tables and chairs but no stages. More romantic music was playing in here, and here you were allowed to slow-dance. As Jack looked, there were five couples on the dance floor. Each man was clothed, each woman naked except for a G-string and high-heeled shoes.
They walked out into the main room and Jack looked around. There were at least fifty, maybe seventy-five dancers and three or four times that many customers. Most of the audience were businessmen, many in their thirties and forties. Some were older. There was a decent percentage who were younger, in their late twenties. Quite a few of the men were Japanese. Some blacks but not many. There weren't many women customers but there were a few. All were with dates. Jack saw two who looked extremely uncomfortable and three who were enjoying themselves immensely. One woman not far from where they were standing had two dancers spinning tantalizingly over and around her while her husband or boyfriend watched. The woman was ecstatic; she couldn't take her eyes off the dancers' bodies and because she was a woman, more touching was allowed. Jack saw one of the dancer's breasts brush against the woman's lips and, briefly, he saw the woman's tongue pop out of her mouth.
'So what's your choice?' Dom asked.
'Let's try this room for a while,' Jack told him. 'And we'll see what happens.'
What happened was that a hostess – sexy by normal standards, plain-looking compared with the women who were dancing or strolling and looking for someone to dance for – led them to a table, where they were immediately descended upon. Jack was barely seated before a dancer with close-cropped dark hair, almost in a crew cut, did her best to crawl inside his shirt. Before he knew what to say, she was on his lap, her dress was yanked over her head, and she was grinding herself into his thighs and against his chest. The music blared as she pursed her lips and winked and smiled and teased and ran her nail down his cheek. Jack understood the frozen positions he had seen around the room because he'd assumed the same pose. He didn't know how to sit, didn't know what to do with his hands, so he stayed as motionless as possible and tried to figure out exactly where to look. When the music stopped for a moment, the dance was over – it had lasted maybe three minutes – and the dancer placed her perfect leg up on Jack's chair in her best Sally Bowles impersonation, nudging her toes under his thigh. She lifted up the garter belt and said, 'The minimum's twenty.'
Jack slid a bill onto her thigh and the belt snapped tightly down on it.
'Would you like another dance? I'm just warming up,' she purred.
Jack, feeling a little idiotic, said, 'You're not from Ohio, are you?'
The dark-haired beauty smiled as the music started back up and said, 'I can be if you want me to.'
He shook his head, so she shrugged and sauntered off to a nearby table. Within moments, her dress was off and she was wriggling on someone else's lap.
Jack turned and saw a blonde with enormous breast implants sidling up to Dom.
'I never saw you in here,' she said, eyeing the stub of his arm.
'Never been here,' Dom said, mesmerized by her breasts, which were so stiff they didn't even move when she walked. 'Where you from?' he asked her.
'Me?' the blonde said. 'Nowhere.' She waved her hand around the club. 'I was born here. Right in this little room.'
At midnight, after countless questions and even more twenty-dollar bills being passed around, Dom announced that he was leaving.
'I'm tired,' he said. 'I don't think nothin's gonna come of this, and my dick's had just about all the excitement it can take for the night. I'm gonna go home, sit in a hot bath, and wonder what kind of fuckin' world we're livin' in.'
'I'm staying,' Jack said.
'I didn't expect nothin' different, Jackie.' Dom started to say something else, changed his mind, and walked out the front door.
Jack turned back in the direction of the runway stage. A young black woman had her legs wrapped around one of the poles and was lifting herself off the ground without using her hands. Two Japanese gentlemen sitting nearby applauded as if the curtain had just come down on Swan Lake. Jack raised his hand, signaling for the waitress. He needed another beer.
The rest of the night dragged on in much the same manner. By 1 a.m. the flesh had become boring. Women who'd once seemed perfect and exciting now seemed only identical to others standing right next to them. Jack had been in the private room, where, the hostess was right, there was champagne, but it was more like ginger ale and it cost a hundred dollars a bottle. There was more privacy in there and perhaps a bit more physical contact, but the women were the same, they just rotated in and out of the various rooms. He'd also been in the slow-dance room again but declined several offers to hit the dance floor. By 1:30, Jack figured he'd spoken to forty women. He had passed out a small fortune in twenty-dollar bills and had asked the same questions over and over again: Are you from Ohio? No. Do you know Kid Demeter? No. Do you know anyone who knows Kid Demeter?
No.
He was leaning up against the bar, nursing one final beer. The music was still pounding, the dancers were as mechanical and energetic as when he'd first walked in the door. And the place was nearly as crowded as it had been three hours earlier. But he'd had it. He put his half-filled glass of beer down on the bar, turned to head out. There was a dancer blocking his way.
'You look bushed,' she said.
He nodded and smiled. She was lovely, this one, vaguely Latin-looking. In a flimsy gold-lame dress that barely came down to the tops of her thighs. The top of the dress was unbuttoned, revealing small but firm breasts – My God! he thought. Could they be real? A miracle in this place! – and her smile was a little bit crooked. It somehow seemed more genuine than most of the ones that had glistened at him all night long. She looked at him curiously, as if analyzing him, or just simply filing away his mental image for future use.
'You want a pick-me-up dance?' she asked. 'Better than vitamins.'
'You're not from Ohio by any chance, are you?' he asked wearily.
'Newark,' she told him.
Jack rolled his eyes upward, not that he was expecting any divine intervention in this place, and then threw his hands up, a defeated gesture.
'Good night,' he apologized to the dancer. 'I'm outta here.'
As he started to brush past her, she stuck her hip out, annoyed. 'Hey! I thought you wanted a girl from Ohio. Aren't you the one who's been asking everybody?'
'You said Newark,' Jack said.
'Yeah,' the Entertainer said back. 'Newark, Ohio.'
– '-'-'HER NAME WAS Leslee, she told him. That was her real name. She wasn't going to bullshit a friend of Kid's. Leslee Cesar. Her club name was Gwyneth. They liked to have the girls use actressy names and she was a big fan of Gwyneth Paltrow's, thought she was really and truly classy. She was an actress, too, she said. Well, she hadn't been working much lately. It was so hard. And dancing here was so easy. She made so much money, on a good night fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand, sometimes it didn't seem worth it, the whole acting thing…
He told her he was interested in talking to her about Kid's death and he saw her eyes narrow just a bit, then return to normal. She was happy to talk to him, she said. But she couldn't just stop work. She could sit with him, but he'd have to pay her. Otherwise the management would get on her case. She might have to sit on his lap every so often; it made her look like she was working harder to take his money.
They went to a table and the waitress came over. 'Just bring me a mineral water,' she said. And to Jack: 'They rip you off totally if you buy liquor for the girls.'
Jack said he'd also have mineral water and the waitress went scurrying away.
He didn't have to prod Leslee. She was anxious to talk, both about Kid and herself. He settled back into his chair, his eyes half closed, and she pulled her chair close to him so he could hear her easily over the music. Occasionally she would shift positions, swing her legs over his, wrapping herself around him as if they were
