The Blue Room Vol. 5

The Blue Room

The Blue Room

VOL. 5

Kailin Gow

The Blue Room (The Blue Room Vol 5)

Published by Kailin Gow Books

Copyright © 2014 Kailin Gow

All Rights Reserved. No part of
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First Edition.

Printed in the United States of
America.

For my
readers

Prologue

Staci

           
W
e all remember moments from our childhoods:
the moments that change us. The moments when we realize –
I am not like
everybody else.

            There
is something about me that is different. There is something about me that is
strange.

            I
am alone, and there is a mystery in me.

           
I
was four when I realized it.

            But
of course, realization comes in stages. I was two when I first realized that
being hungry didn't mean you would get food. Most babies in Nevada, in Vegas,
they learn that when they cry for milk, they get it. When their stomachs growl,
they get fed. Not me.

            My
mother worked hard. In fact, my mother worked harder than anyone else I knew.
Even when I was a toddler, I knew that much. She always seemed so tired. When
she held me to her breast at the end of a long day, when she cuddled and
coddled me and held me tight, she always shook – just a little bit – like the
day was too much for her, like she couldn't bear my weight on top of all the
other burdens she was carrying: on her shoulders and in her heart.

            And
so, when I was too, I realized that milk was not always something we had in the
house, not when it no longer came from my mother's breast, nor was food
something we could always have. My mother gave me what she was able, but life
at the motel was expensive, and cleaning only paid some of the bills some of
the times, and so sometimes we lived in darkness when the electricity was out,
and sometimes we had no phone and my mother had to stand in a payphone to call
her clients, hoping against hope she'd find a quarter's worth of change on a
Vegas sidewalk.

            All
this I knew, slowly. All this I came to early in life.

            Vegas
is a place of highs and lows, joy and sorrows. It's a place when you can win
big or lose the shirt off your back. That much I learned before I could walk.
Some days my mother would be lucky. Some days she'd get a gig where the master
of the house tipped her a few extra dollars, and those dollars seemed like
enough to make us millionaires. Then she'd buy me ice cream and soda and all
the treats we could imagine; then we'd turn up the heat so hot the radiator
burned our toes just to feel warm, together, just to feel like we had
something.

            And
then there were times when work was slow, when people cancelled or refused to
pay, when my mother was too sick or too worn out and she'd miss a spot on
someone's floor and they'd dock her pay accordingly. Then we'd go without:
food, heat, even water, sometimes. Then we'd learn to adjust on rice, noodles,
bread, nothing. Whatever we could afford.

            Life
wasn't easy. Not in Vegas. Maybe not anywhere.

            And
the whole time life went on being not easy, it never occurred to me
why.
Why
my mother was poor and I was poor and we were both so hungry, so desperately
hungry all the time – I had no idea. I just thought that was the way the
universe worked. That was my big guess. People are poor and hungry because God
picks people to suffer. He says: this one shall live in a great glass house
with servants and gold and a view of the sea, and this one
shall live in
a motel and get kicked out, sometimes, and shall always, always be hungry.

            That's
what I thought, until I was four. I don't know how I even got that idea into my
head. My mother wasn't religious at all, and the only thing of religion I
learned about was whatever the street preacher said outside all the casinos,
those street preachers who cried THE DAY OF THE LORD IS AT HAND and wrote Bible
Verses on placards and tried to steer people away from sin, away from
degradation, away from vice. Away from sex.

            Sometimes,
now, at the Blue Room, I think about those preachers. I think about the way
they called warnings to all the businessmen who went into those glittering
golden dens of iniquity in search of money, or drink, or drugs, or flesh. I
think about them and how they warned so many people, but about how nobody took
them seriously, and nobody ever stopped to look at them.

            There
was no street preacher outside the Blue Room, but I wonder – what if there had
been one? What if he had said to me: “Staci, you're going down a dangerous
road, and there's no way out for you.” What if he had said to me: “Staci, this
is not the path the Lord would have you take.” Would I have listened?

            I
don't think so. But I don't know. Sometimes I like to think that I could have
stopped myself from ending up here: a prostitute in a high-end hotel, working
for some of the most powerful men in the world, yet feeling more powerless than
I had ever felt in my entire life. If I'd only cared less about what happened
to Rita, maybe – if my desire to track down what happened to my best friend, to
seek revenge, hadn't been so strong...

            If
I hadn't had such powerful feelings for Mr. X...

            If
I hadn't slept with Terrence, and even started falling for him, too...

            So
many if onlys.

            So
many
what ifs.

           
Maybe
that's what life is: in Vegas, in Hollywood, in all these places are made and
lost. Just a whole lot of
what ifs
,
ands, and buts.
Just a lot of
excuses for the way things turned out.

            But
of course, when I was four, something different happened altogether. When I was
four, I noticed that it wasn't just God or dumb luck or blind fate that made me
different from the other little girls I saw at school, with their neatly
pressed dresses and the ribbons in their hair, the ones who always looked so
well-cared-for, so well fed. It was something else.

            Every
morning, they had a mommy and a daddy to drop them off at school. Two parents
holding them, kissing them, stroking their hairs, smoothing their forehead.

            And
me, I just had my mother, who carried the weight of the world on her shoulders,
who always looked like tears were standing in her eyes

            Just
me and her. That's all I had. That's all the world to me.

            And
somehow I got it into my head that this,
this
was the source of the
difference between me and all those other kids, between my mother and all those
other safe, warm, well-fed mothers I saw after school in the hallways, on the
stairs. If I'd only had a father, I thought, it would be different.

            But
I didn't want to ask. At least, not at first. I didn't dare to.

            My
mother had so much on her mind, already. So much on her plate. And even at that
age, deep down, I knew that there were some things that would cause my
already-suffering mother great pain. Somehow I knew that this – this great,
gaping absence – was one of them. Children are smarter than adults give them
credit for. Especially if they've suffered. Suffering sharpens all the senses.
It doesn't build character, but it certainly builds strength. Children who
suffer don't have the luxury of waiting for things to happen to them. They have
to learn enough about the world around them to control it. That's what I did.
Or at least, what I thought I did.

            I
waited. I bided my time. I held off until such time as I was able to ask the
question, the great question, the question that now dominated my whole childish
life and became my only obsession.

            I
waited until Christmas Eve, which my mother never had off. I waited at the
motel, alone, under the watchful eye of Frank the receptionist, who smoked a
lot and cursed a lot and let a lot of prostitutes upstairs but had a soft spot
for me and made sure I didn't get abducted or run over by any unsavory
characters, which is probably the nicest thing he ever did for anybody his
whole life long, now that I think about it. I waited until my mother came home
that night, past midnight, so that it was actually Christmas morning. I waited
and waited until it was almost dawn. Then she came home.

            She
found me sitting on the motel stairway leading up to our room.

            “Honey?”
She looked worried. “Is is everything okay/”

            She
unlocked the room for me.

            “I
got you something,” she said. “Not much...but I wanted you to have a Christmas
present.”

            It
was beautiful.

            She
had taken a series of rags – probably cleaning supplies bleached past use – and
sewn them into shapes; these she'd stitched together with a few buttons and a
thread grin and made a doll with a crooked face. She must have spent hours on
it.

            I
hugged it tight. For a moment, I wanted to forget about my question there and
then; I was so grateful for her kindness. But my curiosity then – as it did so
many years later with Rita – won out. And so I asked her the question that had
been gnawing on my brain for months.

           
Mommy
,
I said.

           
Mommy,
where's my daddy?

           
I
could see my mother frown. I could see the tears spring to her eyes.

            “Why
do you ask?” she said. It was a careful answer.

            “At
school...” I lied. “Somebody asked me. And...I didn't know the answer. You
always say when I have a question and I don't know the answer to ask you,
right?”

            “Right.”
She turned away so I could not see her tears. “Your daddy...let's just say.
Once upon a time, there was a handsome prince. And that was your daddy. And he
fell in love with an ordinary peasant girl. And their love was so strong that
it made a baby – and that baby was you. But the laws of the prince's land were
very strict. And those laws said that princes couldn't marry peasant girls or
have babies with them. And so he had to go away before you were born.”

            “But
didn't he love us?”

            I
was horrified – I'd expected her to tell me that he was dead, or that something
had happened to him. Maybe he was even in jail, like some of the convicts I
used to see picking up trash on the side of the road. But no. He'd just left.

            “Didn't
he love us?” I cried in horror.

            My
mother sighed. “He was the most loving man I ever knew,” she said. “Believe me
when I tell you that. Loving and handsome. Just like a prince. But princes
don't make the rules in fairy tales. They don't get to decide things for
themselves. There are just rules...that's all.”

            “I
hate rules!” I cried.

            “I
just want you to think of him as a prince,” she said. “Like a handsome prince.
That's how I like to remember him, too. And whenever you think of him, I want
you to remember that the love we had – it was just like a fairy tale. But now
it's better, just the two of us.”

            “But
Mommy,” I cried. “Don't fairy tales end with
happily ever after
?”

            My
mother took a deep sigh.

            “They
do,” she said.

            “So
why doesn't this one?”

            The
tears kept falling from her face, onto me.           

            “I
don't know, Staci,” she said, weeping softly. “I'm so sorry. I just don't
know.”

Chapter 1

           
I
need a break.

            Well,
I need a lot of things, but right now, a break's at the top of the list.

            What
I've been through in the past couple of weeks is enough to drive anybody crazy,
let alone someone as prone to obsessive thoughts as me. I've lost my virginity,
slept with not one but two men, become a prostitute in order to find out what
happened to my missing best friend, seen my new colleague's brains blown out
against a wall, been robbed, been threatened, met my long-lost father, found
out my mother's maybe not going to die after all, and fallen in love  – and not
necessarily in that order. My mind can't handle it.

            And
now Terrence is gone.

            Terrence
– my first friend at the Blue Room, the first man I'd ever let put his hands on
me in ways that made me scream and sigh, my first...many things, and my second
lover. Terrence, my pimp, my not-boyfriend, the man who drives me wild.

            I
should have picked up his texts. I should have answered his calls. I should
have realized that when he said
we need to talk
, that meant that things
were urgent, that if I didn't go then, I might never see him again. But I
didn't. I was lost – in love, in the fantasy, with Alexander Blue, my
mysterious Mr. X., at one of his posh LA parties, lost in how that silky dress
he'd bought for me felt against my skin, lost in the ecstasy of making love to
him, in pretending that I was really his girlfriend, not the hooker he'd paid
for for the evening. I'd let myself fall into comfort, let myself get used to
that fantasy – the fantasy Terrence used to call the most dangerous of all.

            And
now I might never see Terrence again.

            I
am shocked at how ruthless the Blue Room could be: even to its own. Terrence
wasn't just some outsider – he was a Blue. He was family. And yet someone had
decided he wasn't right for management. Someone had decided to oust him. Could
it be his own father? No, Clarence Blue wasn't in good enough health to make
any
major decisions at the moment, especially about something as important as
the company he owned. No, I thought, it had to be someone else. Someone
altogether more devious. And I already had my suspicions about who it might be.

           
Veronica
Taylor.

            Ronnie
Blue.

           
Terrence's
stepmother and ex-girlfriend, former cheerleader and cocktail waitress turned
the most powerful trophy wife this side of the Upper East Side.

            The
most dangerous woman I had ever met.

            I'd
heard tell of her. She'd taken control of Blues Industries – from the hotels to
Blues Records – the moment her husband went into that suspicious coma. She'd
had a roving eye, too, from what I heard; she wasn't interested so much in
Clarence as in his two handsome sons, and apparently she'd made Never Knight,
Danny Blue's girlfriend, Public Enemy Number One. I only hoped she wasn't
planning on doing the same thing to me.

            Was
she behind Terrence Blue's ousting, I wonder.

            But
I don't have time to wonder. Right now, all I want to do is escape. Spend some
time with my family. With the father I never knew I had, and who even now I
don't fully understand. He's refused to tell me why he stayed away all those
years – or rather, I'm not sure he even knows himself. He tells me that he
never even knew my mother was pregnant, that it was
Mom
who left
him?
Do I believe him? I don't know what to believe anymore, but right now, he
and Mom seem like safer bets than the people at the Blue Room, especially now
that Terrence isn't around. I'm not safe here, and whatever happened to Rita
could maybe happen to me.

            And
what did happen to Rita, anyway? She'd been involved with Mr. X. – who I had
thought was the same man as Alexander Blue. That's why I'd taken the Mr. X.
job, after all. To find the truth about Rita's disappearance. But they'd
shuffled up the names. Mr. X. had been reassigned to Xander Blue, who was, like
me, looking into corruption at the Blue Room. And the old Mr. X? Gone into the
ether – or else back into that alphabet soup.

            I
would have to get through twenty-five men before being sure that I had the
right one.  And maybe not even then. Not exactly the best of odds. And a good
way to do your back in, if nothing else.

            I
go to the office of Josephine Waters, madam extraordinaire, to put in my
official request for time off. I have it all planned out. I'm going to cite
family reasons: my mother's slow and unexpected recovery from her illness, my
father's reappearance. I'm going to ask for a weekend off, at least. And then –
maybe I can just disappear. Buy  a car in cash in Vegas and drive to where
nobody knows me. Where nobody can find me. Not even them.

            But
to my surprise, Josephine Walters refuses my request.

            “Terrence
may have given you special treatment,” she says with a little sniff. “But I'm
not in the habit of playing favorites. You've already gotten several days off
this month, and I simply cannot allow you to have another. Not after I've
already booked you a client.”

            “Mr.
X?” My mouth falls open. I hadn't expected him to book me again so soon after
our last steamy encounter.

            Mrs.
Walters rolls her eyes. “No, not Mr. X.,” she says, with a sigh. “Mr. O.
Someone new. It''s not good for you to become so reliant on a single...patron,”
she says. “You need to get used to diversification if you want to survive in
this business.”

            “But...”
I try to protest. I have enough on my plate at the moment without worrying
about sleeping with yet another man, especially one I've never met before.
Work's the absolute last thing on my mind.

            “No
ifs, ands, or buts,” she says sharply. “You do your job or you quit. It's that
simple. We're putting you up in this hotel – it's time you started to earn your
keep. I hate to be harsh, but this is the way the business is for all the other
girls here, the ones Terrence wasn't...ahem....seeing. And I have no interest
in being unfair to
them
by giving you extra time off. Do you
understand?”

            “I
understand,” I say, miserably, shuffling out of there. I feel like an unruly
student taken down a peg by a particularly sharp teacher. Why does Mrs. Walters
always have that effect on me?

            I
sigh as I make my way back to my room.

            Maybe
I should just quit, I think. Maybe I should just run. I've gotten all out of
the Blue Room I'm ever going to get, and every day I spend here makes me aware
of just how rotten this place is, and just how little I want to stay. I'm not
safe here, I know that much.

            It
would be so easy to just leave. Never come back. Forget everything.

            Then
I pass by a familiar hotel room, and my heart stops.

            The
door is open.

            I
see ghosts: images. Roz's back arched, her mouth an O of ecstasy. Roz's long
lustrous hair. Roz dead, her brains blown out, her glassy eyes.

            Just
as it was that day some weeks ago when I saw Roz with her lover, hours before
she was killed. Minutes, even. Just as it was the day Roz was killed, and
nobody ever found her murderer. Was it the man she'd been sleeping with?
Someone else?

            If
I left, I'd never know. The world would never know. And there would be no
justice. Not for Roz. Not for Rita. Not any of the lost girls that the Blue
Room takes in and destroys.

            No,
I think. I couldn't let them down. I couldn't betray their memory. I had to do
whatever it takes in order to get closer to the truth: the truth about what
happened to the woman I loved, to the girl who could have been my friend. If I
had to sell my body, so be it. At least they'd never have my honor. They'd
never have my soul. They'd never have me.

            I
go back to my room. According to the briefing notes Mrs. Walters has left on my
pillow the client, Mr. O., wants to see me “as I am.” No special tricks. No
nice dresses. Just...normal clothes. He'll come visit me in my room tonight.

           
Normal.
Just me.
I don't even know what that means anymore. I'm so used to playing
a part that I have forgotten who I really am. I go through my wardrobe and
find...something, anything.

            My
eyes fall on the simple jeans and T-shirt I wore when I arrived at the Blue
Room. Not clothes anybody bought for me. Cheap, normal clothes I purchased
myself, because they were what I could afford, because I liked them.

            Is
that what the client wanted? Probably not.

            Finally
I choose a pair of simple silk pajamas and a white lace bra.

            I
guess this is what passes for normal in the Blue Room, I think.

            I
sit in my bed, waiting for that knock on my door.

            I
look at the clock nervously. What if this man is the one who killed Roz? Will
he be violent with me, too? I look around the room at vases, at the poker for
the fireplace – anything I might be able to use for protection if he gets
rough. Or what if this man is nice, gentle? Will I start to fall for him, too,
to get attached the way I'm already more attached than I should be to Terrence
and Xander? All these worries rush through my mind.

           
I'm
not really cut out for this gig, am I,
I think.

            I
go on thinking that as at last I doze off.