Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (25 page)

“Oh no. No, no, no,” he says, reassuring her with his pleasant smile. “All of the venues are right here in Calusa. Most of
them on the Trail, in fact.”

Meaning U.S. 41, the Tamiami Trail, which is good because what she wants to do is spend
most
of her day in the studio on North Apple, designing toys while she does this modeling thing only part-time. This seems to
suit Mr. Wilson quite well…Chris…since the venues are open from twelve noon to two
A.M.,
and she can more or less choose her own work schedule depending on how much time she wishes to spend at it and how much money
she chooses to earn…

“It’s all entirely flexible, you see, entirely dependent on you yourself, Lainie…if I may call you Lainie,” he says. “Which
is a very pretty name, by the way, if you choose to use it.”

“I’m sorry?” she says.

“Some of our mannequins prefer using different names.”

“Different?”

“Other than their own names.”

“Why?” she asks.

“Personal idiosyncrasies,” he says, and shrugs.

She still does not smell a rat.

By this time in her recitation, Matthew and Frank are way ahead of the pleasantly smiling Mr. Wilson. Even young Andrew seems
to have caught the drift. But Lainie, to hear her tell it, is still blissfully unaware.

“We do insist on a minimum of four hours a day.”

Which would be perfect, she thinks. Four hours a day in a five-day week would come to twenty hours a week at thirty dollars
an hour, for a total of six hundred dollars a week. Her fixed expenses are something like twenty-five hundred a month, so,
actually, this
would
work, particularly if she could choose her own…

“There should be some lingerie in your size in the dressing room,” Mr. Wilson says.

Chris says.

She blinks at him.

“We stock only the finest imported brands,” he says, “Felina, lejaby, Jezebel, La Perla, I wonder if you’d mind trying something
on for me? Just any bra, garter belt and panties, whichever color suits you. There’s matching hosiery in there as well,” he
says, “you’ll find it. If you’ll tell Clarice your shoe size…”

Who’s Clarice? she wonders.

“…she’ll bring you a pair of heels as well.”

Smiling pleasantly.

“You mean you want me to…uh…try it on now?”

“If you would.”

“Well, I…I didn’t know I’d be…”

“If you’d prefer coming back some other time…”

“No, no. It’s just…”

“Whatever makes you comfortable,” he says.

Chris says.

“Well…did you want me to come back in
here?
” she asks. “After I’m dressed?”

“Yes.”

Un
dressed, she thinks.

“In the lingerie?” she says.

In my
underwear,
she thinks.
Their
underwear, actually, she thinks. Buttercup’s high-priced line of underwear. But thirty dollars an hour, she thinks.

“Yes,” Chris says. “Because that’s what you’d be doing, you know,” he says. “Modeling lingerie, you see. For upward of thirty
dollars an hour.”

Still smiling.

Upward
of thirty, she thinks.

“Well…” she says.

“Maybe you’d like to think it over?” Chris says, and starts to rise.

“No, no,” she says. “Hey, I guess you have to see what I look like.”

“Only if you feel comfortable about it.”

“Yes,” she says. “I do.”

“Shall I ask Clarice to come in then?”

“Sure.”

“Show you where the dressing room is?”

“Sure.”

Clarice, she learns, is a nineteen-year-old college dropout who is trying to earn enough money so she can go to Jackson, Wyoming,
“away from this freakin
heat,
” she says, where she can become a ski instructor, though she’s never skied in her life. She tells Lainie that she only helps
out here once a week because she and Chris have a sort of a thing going, but most of the time she models under the name of
Kristal at a venue on the South Trail and Beaver Street, “appropriate, huh?” she says, and smiles a dazzling teenybopper smile,
and
still
Lainie doesn’t catch on, sweet little cockeyed girl who grew up singing hymns in l’il ole Winfield, Alabama.

What is finally explained to her by Clarice is that Buttercup Enterprises, Inc., runs a string of lingerie-modeling shops
along the Trail. These shops have names like Satin and Lace, or Midnight Lingerie, or Silk ‘n’ Garters, or Lace Fantasies,
and their ostensible purpose is to sell lingerie. Toward that end, the chain employs what Clarice calls “a bevy of young girls”
to
model
the lingerie for potential customers. All of these potential customers are men who pay an initial fee of fifty dollars a
half hour for the privilege of seeing these girls in their scanties. Of this fifty, the house takes thirty-five and the girls
get fifteen. An hour-long session costs ninety-five dollars, of which the house gets sixty-five. The modeling takes place
in cubbyhole rooms—two at some locations, more at others—clustered around the main showroom. There are low platforms in these
rooms and the girls stand on these platforms while they parade their wares. Nobody ever buys lingerie.

What the men who frequent these shops pay for is a variety of services…

“No touching allowed,” Clarice says, “supposedly.”

…ranging from a slow striptease for which every article of clothing dropped costs another ten dollars over the initial entrance
fee, to stripping oneself while the girl gyrates, which costs another ten dollars, to masturbating while the girl lies on
the platform and spreads her legs to you…

“Twenty dollars for that privilege,” Clarice explains,

…to allowing the girl to take your penis between her breasts…

“This is not considered touching,” Clarice explains, “since her
hands
never make contact with the organ.”

…subsequently stroking the client to climax mammillarily, to coin a phrase, which—speaking of coin—costs another fifty dollars.
Since this usually occurs after the girl has taken off her bra for ten, this means she earns an additional sixty for a half-hour
Tit Job, as it is known on the circuit, a total of seventy-five dollars all told, or ninety for a full hour. The girls prefer
negotiating up front for whichever little service they’re going to perform, carefully explaining to the client that no one
is selling sex here…

“Ha!” Clarice says.

…and that touching is strictly prohibited by law.

“Some of the men like the slow strip while they jack off,” she says, “they like being teased, you know, enjoy tossing the
ten-dollar bills on the platform each time they order you to take off another piece of clothing, makes them feel like big
financiers. Some of them like you to take off just the panties and spread for them while they do their number. There are girls
who tell me they actually
like
the tit jobs,
ick,
because they’re not just gyrating while some guy does himself. Maybe they have sensitive breasts, which I don’t. Even so.
I mean,
ick.
Some weeks, I go home with three, four thousand dollars, it depends on how many hours I want to work, and how far I want
to go, because—just between you, me, and the lamppost—if nobody’s looking, a handjob or even a blowjob isn’t entirely out
of the question provided the guy is nice and the price is right. This doesn’t mean you have to do anything you don’t want
to do. “You’re hired to model lingerie, and if that’s all you want to do, the guy comes in and sits down in a chair, and you
model whichever lingerie he asks you to put on—there’s a screen in the room, you dress and undress behind it and you get your
fifteen bucks for the half, or thirty for the full, which is a lot better than you get at McDonald’s, honey, believe me. What’s
your shoe size?”

At first, Lainie is astonished.

She listens to all this while she is putting on a black garter belt and sheer black panties and a black Wonderbra, fastening
the garter snaps front and back to black nylons, listening in amazement to all that Clarice tells her, wondering what she’s
supposed to
do
when she goes back into Mr. Wilson’s office. Chris’s office. Chris with whom Clarice has “a sort of a thing going.” Will
she have to do a little dog and pony act for him, prove to him that she will be a moneymaker at one of his little sex emporiums
called Nylon Legs or whatever the hell?

She has passed these little shops in the strip malls along the Trail, the discreet orange neon OPEN sign in the window, but
she actually believed they were legitimately selling lingerie to women, and that the “models” advertised in the window were
genuine
models in some sort of trunk show that moved from store to store. Calusa is, after all, the city where women are arrested
for wearing thong bikinis on the beach. It is also the city where a famous comedian was arrested for masturbating in a pornographic
movie theater. So how can these thin disguises for whorehouses be allowed to stay in business? Because, yes, that is what
these are. They are whorehouses. And, in effect, she is being asked to become a whore. That is, if she does anything more
than merely
pose
for the nice gentlemen callers.

As she takes the size seven, very high-heeled pumps Clarice hands to her, she remembers that this is the nation where Dr.
Jocelyn Elders was fired as Surgeon General because she dared to suggest that schoolchildren be taught the meaning of masturbation.
Not taught
how
to masturbate, no one even remotely suggested that. And she remembers that right here in Calusa the famous comedian was convicted
for the heinous crime he’d committed—whereas the theater was still open and still showing dirty movies. America.

Besides, she needs the money.

The following Monday night, she begins working as Lori Doone in a shop called Silken Secrets, and in six hours, from eight
P.M.
to two
A.M.,
she earns ninety dollars without once having to take off a single article of clothing and certainly without once touching
anyone, which she carefully explains is strictly prohibited by law.

———Then how about touching
yourself?

———No, we’re not allowed to do that.

———Be worth fifty to me if you took off your panties and showed me how you do yourself.

———I’m sorry, we’re not permitted to do that.

———Jenny does it for me.

———She’d get fired if anyone found out.

———Come on, who’d ever know?

———They make spot checks.

“How long were you doing this?” Frank asked.

“Only until I did the video.”

“What do you mean?”

“A photographer came in one night.”

“What’s his name?”

“Why do you have to know?”

“We don’t, Frank.”

“All right, we don’t. Tell us what happened.”

“He said I could make some very good money if I posed for a video.”

“
This
video?”

“Yes. As it turned out.”

“Did you know what kind of video it would be?”

“I had an idea.”

“When did you learn
precisely
what he had in mind?”

“He made it clear.”

“When?”

“That same night. The money was good.”

“What did he pay you?”

“A thousand dollars. For what turned out to be a half-hour’s work. He edited it down to fifteen minutes later. There were
three other girls on the tape. I know them all, one of them is only sixteen.”

“When did he shoot the video?”

“That same week.”

“Where?”

“He has a studio not far from here. On Wedley.”

“Did he pay you the money?”

“In advance.”

“What did you think he was going to do with the video?”

“He said there were collectors for this sort of…well…specialty act, he called it. All of us…well…you saw the tape.”

“Apparently Brett saw it, too.”

“I don’t know how he got hold of it.”

“But he did.”

“Apparently.”

“And you say he didn’t show it to you?”

“No. But he showed me the holder. I knew he had the cassette, too. He wouldn’t have tried to blackmail me otherwise.”

“Do you know what the prosecution could make of this video? If they knew it existed? If they knew it was on the Toland boat
the night you
went
there? The night he was
killed?
”

“Yes,” Lainie said. “I know what they can make of it.”

“They’ll say you killed him to
get
this damn tape!”

“Yes, but I didn’t.”

“They’ll say…”

“And I didn’t get the tape, either, did I?”

“She has a point, Frank.”

“Why’d you remove this from the boat, Matthew?”

“No reason I shouldn’t have.”

“No reason?”

“He’s right, Frank.”

“No
reas
—?”

“Thank you, Andrew.”

“How about tampering with evidence? How about obstruction of…?”

“How do you figure that?” I said. “Lainie’s already been indicted, the grand jury’s finished, no one told me I
couldn’t
remove evidence from the scene. Since when am I not allowed to gather evidence in support of a client’s defense?”

“Do you intend to submit this tape to the Court?”

“Come on, Frank. We’re under no obligation to turn over any evidence we don’t intend to use in our direct case.

“Which doesn’t change the fact that you
removed
this from the boat without prior permission and without…”

“I was gathering evidence at a crime scene. Is the S.A. the only one entitled to gather evidence? This is America, Frank.”

“Yeah, bullshit,” Frank said. “You removed this tape from the boat to make sure Folger wouldn’t get his hands on it.”

“No, I gathered evidence so I could present it to my client…”

“Bullshit.”

“…and question her about it. Which we’ve now done. Would you have preferred Folger surprising us with it later on?

“How the hell can he
surprise
us if he doesn’t even know it exists?”

Which suddenly worried me.