walk in, she flowed like water to the edge of the stage and hooked a thumb in the garter so I could slip in a dollar and give her butt a pat.
“Thanks, Mulligan,” she said.
“The pleasure is all mine,” I said, and meant it.
I chose one of the empty booths in back, started to slide in, noticed a beer spill on the seat, and chose another with a decent view of Marie, who was hanging upside down now from the stripper pole.
A few years ago, the place would have been packed, but six new strip clubs had opened up in the last few years, most of them down in the old Allens Avenue industrial area. They’d drained a lot of the regulars from Good Time Charlie’s and were pulling in customers from all over New England, some of them arriving on chartered buses from Boston, Hartford, and Worcester.
The boom had gotten underway after a bright young lawyer representing an escort service actually read the state’s prostitution law and discovered it referred to the crime as “streetwalking.” That, he argued, meant the law explicitly criminalized the stroll but was silent on the legality of sex for money when the transactions occurred indoors. A judge agreed, and suddenly there was no need to fly to Thailand or Costa Rica anymore. The new clubs featured strobe lights, DJs, and private booths where local girls, reinforced by silicone-enhanced talent from New York and Atlantic City, performed thirty-dollar private dances and hundred-dollar blow jobs.
So far, the only thing the state’s lawmakers had done about it was make some indignant speeches. Call me a cynic, but I suspected money was changing hands. The old fart who’d operated Good Time Charlie’s since the seventies limited touching to the occasional fanny pat. No wonder his business was flagging.
I was on my second club soda when Polecki showed up a half hour late and squeezed in across from me, the space between the seat and the table not quite wide enough to accommodate his Kentucky Fried girth.
“What is it now, asshole?” he said.
I didn’t say anything, just slid a copy of the credit-card charges across the cigarette-scarred Formica.
“Yeah, I got that this morning from the helpful folks at Fleet Bank,” he said. “All it took was the threat of a subpoena. How the hell did
“I’d rather not say.”
“Break a few laws in the process?”
“Not any important ones.”
He tried his poor excuse for a hard look on me, saw it wasn’t working, and gave it up.
“He’s got alibis for four of the other fires, too,” he said. “We’re still checking them out, but it looks like they’re gonna hold up. You sent me on a wild goose chase, shithead. Your Mr. Rapture’s not our guy.”
“Guess not. I wonder why he ran that time when I tried to talk to him on the street.”
“Who knows? Maybe he was holding and made you for a narc. Maybe he thought you was gonna mug him. Maybe he don’t like meeting new people. Maybe he just don’t like assholes.”
“So what happens now?”
“We got forty-eight hours to charge or release. The chief wants to lose him in the system for a while, let the twelve-year-old public defender who caught the case try to figure out where he is. Might buy a little time to find the right guy and avoid the public-relations disaster of letting Wu go when we got nothin’ else.”
“I see,” I said, and his face scrunched up with worry.
“Christ! This is all off the record, right?”
“Come on, Polecki. You know nothing’s off the record unless you say so before you start talking. Something to keep in mind if you ever find yourself with another reporter, one who’s a stickler for the rules.”
The skinny black girl who’d been the entertainment on our last visit sashayed up in fuck-me heels and a G- string to take Polecki’s order.
“Get him a Narragansett on me,” I said, and he looked at me funny.
“Figure on doing a piece about the arson chief drinking on duty?”
“Yeah, right. I buy you a beer, then do an expose on you drinking it. Even I wouldn’t stoop that low for a byline.”
“You’ve stooped lower.”
The waitress came back with his beer. I handed her five bucks, peeled off another dollar, and slipped it in her G-string, not seeing an ass worth patting.
“So we’re back to square one,” I said.
“There is no
“No other leads?”
“Just that ex-fireman.”
“Jack Centofanti.”
“I’m not confirming that. If you’ve got the name, it didn’t come from me.”
“Understood.”
“Roselli’s got a hard-on for him, but I still don’t think he’s good for it.”
Polecki pulled a Parodi out of his shirt pocket and lit it with a paper match. The cheap black stogie smelled like shit laced with citronella.
“Don’t take this wrong,” I said, “but maybe you need some outside help on this.”
“Look,” he said, “the state fire marshal’s got just three arson investigators for the whole state, and he’s already assigned two of them to work with me. One of them, Leahy, he used to be the fire chief in Westerly, and he’s pretty good. The other one, Petrelli, got the job because his cousin’s the Democratic state party chairman. Thinks he knows it all because he took a two-week federal Fire Administration course, but he don’t know shit.”
“What’s the federal Fire Administration?”
“Another one of them Homeland Security agencies with no idea what the fuck it’s supposed to be doing.”
“What about the FBI?”
“Since 9/11, if it ain’t about terrorism they ain’t interested.”
“Still nothing to suggest it’s more than a firebug?”
“Not a thing. You always think insurance scam first, but with five different companies owning the buildings …” He shrugged his meaty shoulders and his voice trailed off.
“The mayor is all over our ass. The city council is screaming for answers. They don’t understand that arson investigations are a bitch. Any evidence the perp leaves behind usually gets burned up. Hell, if the fire’s bad enough, you can’t even prove how it started. Chances are this nutcase is just gonna keep setting fires till we get lucky and catch him in the act.”
The stink from Polecki’s stogie was strong enough to make me gag. To mask the smell, I drew a Cuban from my pocket and set fire to it with the Colibri.
“Nice lighter. Get that from your hoodlum friend Whoosh?”
“Maybe.”
He smirked, finished his beer, and unwedged himself from the booth.
“Later, asshole,” he said, and headed out.
As soon as I got back to the office, I was going to make a photocopy of the credit-card charges and mail it to Wu’s lawyer. Public defenders rarely have time for anything besides routine court appearances, and I didn’t trust Polecki to do the right thing.
Marie was shaking her stuff in the red stage lights, bopping to “Ladies’ Night” by Kool & the Gang. I stood and carried my club soda up front for a closer look. Several minutes later I snapped to the fact that my face was inches from Marie’s nipples, and my mind was on Veronica.
37
That evening, she cooked for me.
She arrived toting three grocery bags, prepared to whip up something elaborate, then discovered that my cookware consisted of a single scarred saucepan. Undeterred, she used it to boil penne and tossed it with olive oil on my ancient stove while grilling bell peppers, eggplant, zucchini, and mushrooms on a sheet of aluminum foil in
