Paradise Burning (11 page)

Delilah pulled at the hem of the lime green
spandex, which kept sliding up to six inches above her knees. “I
know you tryin’ to help, but everybody say I hopeless. You jes’
wastin’ yo’ time.”

“
You shut your black mouth and listen,
girl,” Jade spat out. “They’re offering you a chance. Are you
bullshitting us with that ‘I can’t read’ crap? If so, just get back
out there and see how many tricks you can turn between now and
tomorrow morning. But if you want to maybe join the human race,
listen to these people and do what they say. What’ve you got to
lose?”

“
Don’t know what I’m doin’ here with
all these know-it-alls,” Delilah muttered, grumbling loud enough
for everyone to hear.

“
You think about it, Delilah,” Peter
advised, handing her his business card. “You want to learn to read,
you call me. No strings.”

“
Can you get by on the street with
straight sex?” Mandy asked, deliberately switching the
subject.

Delilah pursed her blood red lips, cocked her
dark head to one side. “Well . . .,” she said, “for what I kin
charge on the street I have to turn a lot of tricks to keep from
starvin’. Mostly, there’s not time for more’n a quick head job, but
sometimes—if a john wants something special—he’ll pay for a room
and extra time. I kind of get off on the domination stuff. Whips,
spankin’, jes’ plain yellin’—tellin’ them how bad they is—I do that
real well. Kinda fun to make the johns suffer. I don’t even mind
playin’ baby, for the guys who like ‘em young, but Golden Shower,
rim jobs, ice cubes—that kinda stuff—if I know that’s what a guy
wants, I send him to this other ho who’s so weird she actually
likes it.” The black teenager shot a quick look at Mandy. “Uh,
sorry, lady, but you asked.”

“
I appreciate your being so candid,
uh–truthful,” Mandy replied steadily, wondering if there were such
a thing as a hooker’s dictionary.

Peter gave himself an inward sigh of relief
as he realized Mandy hadn’t quite gotten all that. “What about you,
Fawn?” he asked the delicate dancer. “Would you mind telling us how
you feel about dancing at a topless bar?”

Fawn spoke so softly they all had to strain
to hear her. “You said you wanted to know about being forced. Well,
when Max took me on was the happiest day of my life. I was so glad
I cried. So my dancin’s got nothing to do with being forced.”

“
Max is the owner?” Peter asked. “And
he treats you well?”

“
Yeah, he’s the best. He makes sure the
bouncers don’t let no one touch me. You know,
Look But Don’t Touch
. He’s got signs that say
that all over the walls. I just have to go out there and dance. I
got different costumes, so I can do a little stripping first, but
mostly I just dance. And I get paid for it, and I get to keep my
tips, ’cept for what I give Dave and Steve and Eddie. Those’re the
bouncers, but they don’t all three work at once, so’s it’s not too
much out of my pocket.”

“
Come on, girl,” Delilah challenged,
“don’t tell me you never take on private customers?”

Fawn shifted her body, a wraith lost in the
oversize chair. “Some girls do. I don’t.”

“
But what does Max get?” Jade
demanded.

Fawn’s blue eyes suddenly sparked fire. “He
don’t get anything ’cept me dancing. Max don’t do girls.”

“
Well, pardon me,” Jade snipped,
clearly skeptical.

“
Why did you become an exotic dancer,
Fawn?” Mandy asked, also speaking softly, hoping to keep the shy
young dancer talking.

“
There’s ads in the newspaper all the
time. Big money, but you have to be over eighteen. I’d been wanting
to leave home forever, but I knew I couldn’t make it by myself
working a fast-food drive-thru. So I just kept gritting my teeth,
promising myself what I’d do the minute I was old enough.” Fawn
plucked at her black slacks, twisting a pleat between her fingers.
“Only the day came I couldn’t wait any longer. I wasn’t quite
seventeen when I walked out. If it hadn’t been for Max . .
.”

“
Why did you have to leave home, Fawn?”
Although Peter sensed the question was crucial, he kept his tone
calm, with just enough authority to nudge the girl where he wanted
her to go.

“
Same reason lots of girls do,” Fawn
mumbled, ducking her head until her face was completely hidden
behind a waterfall of shining brown hair.

“
And what reason is that?” Peter
inquired gently.

“
Could I have more of that stuff?” the
dancer asked, pointing toward the liqueur Peter had served after
lunch.

“
The Grand Marnier? Sure.” Peter
refilled her small glass. “Good stuff, isn’t it?”

“
Yeah.” Fawn sipped the liqueur, rolled
it around on her tongue. This day was going to have to last a long
time. Until she had enough to book out of this town and buy some of
these things for herself. No man was ever going to buy her
anything. Not ever. She was done with men for all of her life. They
were meaner than snakes and only interested in what hung between
their legs. And stupid enough to get off on a girl they could look
at but not touch.

“
My stepdad,” Fawn said, “he was one of
those guys who like ‘em young. Real young. Only he didn’t have to
go to some street ho to playact being a baby. He had all he wanted
right at home. I was only four when he began to do me. Told me I
was sweet and precious, daddy’s little darling. Told me how much he
loved me. I had trouble understandin’ that ’cuz it hurt like hell.
When I got older and had sense enough to figure it wasn’t right, he
told me it was all my fault. If I hadn’t been so pretty, I wouldn’t
have enticed him to be bad. That’s the word he used:
enticed
. Said I was a bad girl, and
if I told anybody, the cops’d send me to jail. And, stupid kid that
I was, I believed him.”

Though sickened, Mandy managed a glance
around the room. Jade was nodding her head; so was Delilah. Fawn’s
story was something they had heard many times before. “But what
about your mother?” Mandy demanded.

“
Oh, her? She didn’t want to know,”
Fawn replied with a sudden lift of her head, revealing golden eyes
that flashed contempt. “My stepdad made good money. He was white
collar, with a good county job. Really respectable. My mother
wasn’t about to lose a meal ticket like that. He could have both of
us as long as she could pretend everything was all
right.”

“
And then?” Peter prodded
gently.

“
And then he got kinky,” Fawn said.
“The night he tried it with a curling iron, I left. It was that or
bleed to death. Max took me in, and I been dancing ever
since.”

Mandy choked on the usual sympathetic words,
so trite, so inadequate. Even Peter looked stunned.

In the end it was Delilah who once again
broke the appalled silence. “Y’ think . . . well, any o’ the
dancers at yo’ place . . . any of ’em black?”

“
Yeah, but Max don’t like his girls
strung out,” Fawn shot back, staring the other girl straight in the
eye.

“
So maybe I c’d kick it if I didn’t
have to give head ten times a day.”

“
Maybe you girls should get together
later, see if you can work something out,” Peter suggested,
struggling to keep his tone casual.

Fawn eyed the black teenager’s figure as
critically as a madam eyeing a prospective call girl. “I guess what
you’ve got’s real?” she asked.

“
Hell, girl, you think a ho like me kin
go for silicone? Where yo’ brains?”

“
Okay,” Fawn nodded, “we’ll
talk.”

So much for learning to read, Mandy
thought sourly, then wondered if she were wrong. Maybe if Delilah
was off drugs and off the streets . . . The
ifs
were pretty big, but she supposed faint hope
was better than rock bottom despair. If nothing else, rescuing
Delilah might help the bitter, sad-eyed little dancer feel better
about herself.

“
There’s something else you ought to
know,” Jade offered. She sat back on the sofa and crossed her legs,
looking cool, elegant, and perfectly composed. Mandy sighed.
Envying a callgirl hadn’t been on her list of expectations for the
day.

“
Being in beauty pageants costs a
bundle,” Jade began, “so my mother started me in modeling when I
was about six. By the time I won Miss Manatee Bay and went to Miami
for the Miss Florida pageant, I was pretty well known in the
Florida market and making good money. So even though I didn’t win,
I wasn’t really surprised when I was approached after the pageant
with an offer of a modeling job in Rome. It seemed like a great
break. All expenses, plus five thousand for a week of draping
myself over some old statues and ruins.”

Jade’s classically beautiful face darkened;
perfect white teeth bit down on her invitingly full lower lip.
“You’ve heard that saying, ‘If it sounds too good to be true, it
probably is’? Well, I don’t know how I could have been so stupid,
but even Mom thought the job was legit.” Mandy noticed Peter come
to attention, eyes alight with avid interest.

“
There were three other girls going to
Rome,” Jade said. “All of us flying first class. We were real
impressed. Anyway, we were met in Rome by this
long-haired hunk with a limo who took us to a suite in the
most gorgeous hotel I’d ever seen in my life. We all thought we’d
hit the big time for sure. There was a cabinet full of liquor and a
bathroom stocked with more drugs than Walgreen’s. At first I
thought,
Wow!
And then I
thought about all the other modeling jobs I’d been on—the early
hours, the long days under hot lights, the absolute discipline so
you look perfect in a close-up. And I got to wondering.”

Jade suddenly glanced at Peter. “You’re
thinking what a bunch of naive idiots we were, aren’t you?” she
challenged. “Well, you’re exactly right.”

“
To be blunt,” Peter admitted, “I was
trying to keep from shouting ‘Eureka!’ over finding somebody who’s
actually had this experience.”

Jade shot him a sharp look, nodded her
acceptance. “Okay, so we’d been told to help ourselves to the
goodies, order room service if we wanted, and someone would come by
later to give us our instructions. For some reason—maybe the first
smart thing I ever did in my life—I only ordered food and washed it
down with a bottle of mineral water I found in the fridge. When the
hunk who met us at the airport came back about eight that night, he
had two guys with him. They were half a head taller than the hunk,
and each must have outweighed him by fifty pounds or so. Talk about
intimidating!

“
The hunk just smiled that heartthrob
smile of his and said the men had to check our passports. The other
girls were shittin’ bricks because they had these big guys pegged
for cops and they were trying to look like Miss Prim and Propers
when they’d been doing coke and popping pills for four, five hours
straight. So we all handed over our passports, and those big kazoos
didn’t even look at them, just stuffed them inside their jackets
and left. Right away I knew we were in big trouble.

“
The other three girls—well, their
brains were fried—they just stared at Mr. Hunk with this kind of
dumb-blond look on their faces. And he just smiled his big old
Italian smile and said, ‘Okay, girls, come on. Now we
party.’

“
So I asked him how we could party if
we had a photo shoot the next morning. He looked at me and winked
one of those gorgeous bedroom eyes and said, “Don’t you get
it,
cara mia
, this is a
party
shoot.”

“
You brought us here to
party!
I think I screamed it. This had been my big
break. I had to be absolutely sure I understood him.
You brought us here to be whores?

And he just grinned and said,
‘
Ah, si.
Exactamente.
’”

“
Gawd!” Delilah breathed. “What’d you
do?”

“
I told him,
Hell, no!
” Jade said. “So he pulled a gun and
made me pack my suitcase. He took my airplane ticket and what money
I had and made me get in the limo with the other girls. By that
time I was wondering if they had deep rivers and cement in Rome.
But when we were in some real mean-looking back street, he dumped
me out on the sidewalk with my two suitcases and left me standing
there while he took the other girls to the party. Or at least he
said that’s where they were going, kinda twisting the knife as he
waved goodbye.”

“
You were damn lucky,” Peter
said.

“
Yeah, I know,” Jade replied. “At the
time I was just pissed. It wasn’t until a lot later that I realized
just how lucky I was. He could have beat me, raped me, or locked me
in the room and had those guys come back and take me to wherever it
is they sell their merchandise. Namely, me. But at the time I
didn’t know about things like that, and I stood on my rights as a
U. S. citizen, passport or no passport, and he let me
go.”

“
So what did you do?” Fawn asked,
echoing Delilah.

“
Well, there I was on the streets of
Rome with no passport and no money. The part of town I was in
wasn’t that great, but I walked—dragging my suitcases—until I came
to a business that looked fairly respectable. I went in and asked
for the Police. I didn’t know the word in Italian, but I had an
idea it was pretty close to the English.”