Strip Search (9 page)

“Working the music. We take turns.”

“What’s your name, please?” asked Max.

The man sighed with exaggerated patience and ran his fingers through his stiff hair, then patted it back in place over a high forehead. “Thomas. Charles Thomas. I’ve had this place for three years. I was here the last night Angela was. I saw her make her split with the bartender, and I didn’t see her after that. She missed a few days, which is par for the course in this line of work. Next thing I hear from the cops, she’s been killed. I don’t know who did it.” He flapped a hand at the music thumping against the closed door. “Somebody out there. That’s my guess.”

“Why?”

“Who else?”

“Maybe a boyfriend,” said Wager. “Or her ex-husband.”

“Maybe. That’s your job to find out, right? All I know is, it wasn’t me.” Thomas leaned back and stared at the ceiling a moment. “I hear her husband—ex-husband—moved away. California or somewhere. Boyfriends. … She had a couple, I guess. Nobody she met here,” he added quickly. “No hustling the customers—that’s a house rule. Some nights I got more Vice cops here than I do legitimate customers. And the cops,” he added, “don’t buy worth shit.”

“But you know she had boyfriends?”

“Sometimes a guy might pick her up after work.”

“Did you ever see him? His car?”

The man thought a moment. “Not him, no. I saw his car once. A Chevy, I think. Dark green, maybe. Or blue.”

“License number?”

“Give me a break, man! This was a month, six weeks ago.”

“Did you tell the other officers about it?” asked Max.

“I only just remembered it.”

“Did you know Annette Sheldon?” asked Wager.

“Who?”

“Annette Sheldon. Shelly. She danced over at the Cinnamon Club.”

“That dump?” Thomas frowned with thought. “No. But a lot of the girls move from club to club and some change their names. They’re so bad they got to. You got a picture?”

Wager just happened to. He handed Thomas the copy of her publicity shot.

“No. … She’s got nice boobs, but I don’t recognize them.” He looked up. “This is the other one that got killed, what, a couple weeks ago?”

“That’s right. You never heard Angela mention her name?”

“No. Jesus, we got somebody killing the merchandise now. Business is that bad, and now we got this maniac.”

“We’d like to talk to your girls.”

“Shake them up a little more? That’s what you want to do?”

“Right.”

“That’s what I figured.” His hand waved over the stack of newspapers. “You know how hard it is to find a good dancer even when they’re not scared?” Neither Wager nor Axton did, and Thomas sighed. “Come on.”

He led them through the half-empty club to a tiny, filthy room. The smell was close with strong perfume riding on the odor of a stopped-up toilet half-glimpsed through a doorless frame. A lone girl sat at the smeared mirror and quickly pulled on her barmaid’s costume. She was the same one who had been onstage when Axton and Wager came in.

“Silhouette, these guys are cops. They want to ask some more questions about poor Angela. I’ll tell the other girls what they’re after. Help them out, right? And then it’s back on the floor as soon as you can—oh, yeah, you got an extra set tonight.” He explained to Axton, “We’re short. Two of the girls didn’t show up.” He left, shaking his head, “The help these days, Jesus!”

Silhouette looked better in the flashing lights; up close you noticed her face and the heavy flesh that was barely held taut by still young skin. She was, officially, twenty-one. But Wager suspected she was a couple years younger than that. This was her first dancing job; she never knew Angela Williams very well; she had never heard of Annette Sheldon; she was a little nervous at the idea of a murderer who specialized in exotic dancers.

“It sounds like, you know, Jack the Ripper or something. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t for the money. Some of those guys…” She gave a little shudder. “They’re real creeps.”

“Does anyone in particular bother you?”

“No. There’s a rule: no touching the girls. It’s just some of them, they say things … you know … like they want you to do kinky things.”

“Do you?”

“No! But some of the girls do—if it’s a big house and things are rolling, there’s a couple who do those things. They laugh about it.” She added, “They get the big tips, too.”

“What’s the owner, Thomas, say about that?”

“What the hell does he care? One of the first things he told me was that I’m a piece of meat to him. A ‘marketable commodity’ he called me, and as long as I bring in the cash I’m on the payroll.” She shrugged. “But that’s show biz, right?”

“And you make good money in tips?”

“Wages. We get hourly wages—six-fifty—and ten percent of the tips. We turn it over to the bartender every night.”

The girls at the Cinnamon Club did a lot better. “But you still make good money?”

Her head went back with a little gesture of defiance. “A lot of times I make seventy, eighty dollars a night. I couldn’t make that nowhere else—I quit high school. It was for creeps. Now I got a car and my own place and I do what I want with my life.”

Which, if it was true, was what a lot of people hungered to say. Wager watched her go out to do her stint at the tables, and Axton gave a half-shake of his head, his blue eyes heavy with a vision of the girl’s future. Wager, too, could guess what would happen to her in a couple years. But he didn’t worry about it; he’d seen too much of it already, and he bet she had a good idea of what was coming herself. Like she said: it was her life and her choices, and that kind of freedom was worth a lot. And many times it was only found at the edge of the law.

Silhouette sent the next girl back from the floor; Sugar Plum was a tall girl with negroid features and pale yellow skin. She wore the tight shorts and thin blouse of the barmaid, and spoke aggressively. “They told me you wanted to ask some questions about Angela.”

He did, and got the familiar answers. Then he asked what Lee had not: “Did you know Annette Sheldon? She danced over at the Cinnamon Club.”

Sugar Plum looked at the photograph. “Yeah. I knew her. I used to work at that dump.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Seven or eight months ago. But my agent got me a better deal here.”

“Your ‘agent’?” asked Wager.

Her face darkened slightly. “I’m in the entertainment business. I have an agent.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Axton. “A lot of these girls don’t and they get taken advantage of.”

“It’s their own fault, then. There’s always a demand for good dancers. Like me.”

“How well did you know Shelly?”

“Enough to say hello to and goodbye to.” Her lips twisted slightly in one of those grins that shattered a pretty face and Wager understood why she smiled so seldom. “In show business, you don’t make many friends.”

“Why’s that?”

“Everybody’s after something, and nobody’s in it for their health.”

“Was Annette Sheldon—Shelly—after something?”

“Like a shark. She’d go after your regulars if you didn’t watch her. She tried that shit on me once.”

Axton asked, “What’d you do?”

“I told her to cut that shit out. I saw what she was doing—she kept her eye out for any big tipper, anybody’s regular, and then she’d play up to him, you know. Thought she could dance!”

“But she did pretty well?” Wager asked.

Sugar Plum’s smooth shoulders bobbed. “Everybody wants more, and she wanted more than most.”

“Did she go after it off the dance floor maybe?”

“What’s that mean? What’re you trying to say?”

“Did she do any hustling?” Wager asked. “Did she peddle her tail to anybody after work?”

“She might have—I don’t know. If there was money in it, I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“Did you ever see her with anyone in particular? Any favorite customer?”

“Sure, her regulars. Listen, a lot of men won’t buy drinks from anybody but their favorite girl.” She started to smile but caught it. “Real fans—they come in three or four times a week and order drinks from one girl.”

“Is that all they want?” insisted Wager. “To buy drinks?”

“No. But most of them don’t come on. Real gentlemen, right? I think they want you to give it to them for free—not just a screw, but real love, you know? Very polite and smooth when they’re here, and then they go home and dream up all sorts of weirdo things they’re doing to you.”

This time the crooked smile broke through. “Go home and make love to old lady five fingers!”

“Did Angela have many steady customers like that?”

“Not so many she didn’t want more.”

“What about the same man?” asked Wager intently. “Did you ever see the same man talking to both Angela and Shelly?”

She shook her head. “Not that I remember. Maybe … I just don’t remember. Unless they’re tipping me, I don’t even see them. I don’t go after nobody else’s regulars.”

Axton handed her a business card. “If you do remember, miss—think it over carefully—if you do remember, please give us a call. Any time of day or night. It could be very important.”

Her tongue, round and pink, slid across her lower lip. “You think the same john might have killed them both?”

“We don’t know what to think. But it’s a good possibility.” Wager added, “If so, he might join another girl’s fan club.”

“Well, it’s not like working in a church, that’s for sure.”

“Has anyone ever followed you or threatened you, miss?”

“I don’t give them a chance.” She ran a hand down the sides of the sheer blouse that revealed her nipples as dark, pert shadows. “A lot of men follow me, mister. But the only ones that catch me are the ones I want to.”

“But you didn’t see anyone following Angela or Shelly.”

“No. But I know this much: it was their own fault if they let somebody rape them. A woman doesn’t have to put up with that shit. In this business, you learn what to do.”

Three other girls were called off the floor, one by one, and Axton and Wager went through the same questions with them, urging them to call the number on the business card if they remembered anything else. It didn’t seem likely. Their answers all boiled down to the same familiar response: they did not know Angela well; they saw no one with her; they never heard of Annette Sheldon. And they weren’t very eager to call the cops about anything. One other theme emerged—business was bad and getting worse, and four or five girls worked only on weekends now. Wager and Axton would have to come back if they wanted to interview them.

They sat for a few minutes in the unmarked car and watched the thinning traffic beneath the line of marquees. Even the radio transmissions from normally busy District Two were slow; scattered reports told of accidents, of domestic disturbances, of frightened women listening to a prowler snip at their window screens. Now and then an officer replied to the dispatcher, his microphone catching the pulsing wail of a siren, and a slight tightness in his voice the only indication that his car was hurtling down some dark street guided by one white-knuckled fist. But most of the radio traffic was the dispatcher’s periodic status requests from the fleet of silent uniformed officers cruising the alleys and byways of the city.

“Do you want to go by the Cinnamon Club again?” asked Max.

Wager shook his head. “Angela never worked there.”

“So what’s the next step?”

“I think I’ll talk to her mother in the morning. Maybe Lee missed something.”

“It’s a good thing you’re not a union member.” The union limited the uncompensated overtime a cop could do, whether he was willing or not.

“I don’t think the killer is, either.”

Angela Williams’s mother was dark-complexioned. Her black hair, streaked with gray, was cropped short over a face whose brown eyes still showed the weariness of crying as well as a certain blank acceptance of one more heavy blow. She glanced at Wager’s identification and then held open the screen door. “Come in, please,” she said tiredly. “You want some coffee?”

“No, ma’am. Just some questions about Angela.”

She led Wager into a small front room where a toy dump truck and a scattering of brightly colored plastic tools littered the worn carpet in front of a large television set. The TV flickered with a morning talk show, the audio a faint murmur, and a smiling emcee leaned back to exchange pleasantries with a wild-haired starlet who showed a lot of very white teeth. “He’s still asleep.” She saw Wager’s glance. “I let him stay up and watch ‘The Fall Guy.’ He likes all the excitement. People getting blown up—people getting killed.”

“How old is he?”

“Five. Six in November.” Her shoulders lifted and fell in a sigh. “And just as sweet as the day is long.”

“Is his father going to take him?”

The first spark of life came to her eyes. “His father! Ha! I wouldn’t let that… that …”

“Yes, ma’am. Is his father still out in California?”

“Oregon. And he wouldn’t even come for the funeral.” Angrily lighting a cigarette, she gestured for Wager to sit on one of the chairs whose arms and back looked overstuffed and hot.

They were, and puffed out the faint aroma of stale dirt. “I understand Angela had a boyfriend. Brad Uhlan.”

“Yes. I think they were going to get married, maybe. He’s a nice boy. He’s been good to Eddie since it happened.”

“He was at work when it happened?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of car does he drive, Mrs. Sanchez?”

“It ain’t a car—it’s a truck. A Dodge pickup with one of them camp shells on it.”

Wager took a moment to leaf through the scribbled lines in his small green notebook. “Did she have any other boyfriends? Anybody else she went out with?”

“Not for a long time. She didn’t have no time. She worked nights and slept late. Afternoons, she liked to spend with Eddie. She was a good mother—and with no child support from that crud.” The cigarette crackled as she drew fire into it. “She worked at that place because it paid real good money, but she was a good mother. She was a good girl, too.”

“Did she ever go out with anyone who drove a dark blue or green Chevrolet—a late model?”

“I don’t think so … not that I remember. That other policeman, he didn’t ask that. Did you find out something more about who did it?”