Then Hang All the Liars (5 page)

“Miz Adams?”

The voice crept in through the just-cracked door. Sam jumped.

It was Shirley Cahill, Squirrely Shirley, the city room office manager.

“You've been on the hookup for twenty-two minutes.”

“Yes?” Sam spoke through her teeth.

“Well, you know we have to watch our pennies these days. So did you set your timer when you punched on?”

The Squirrel wasn't giving up. Sam knew she was playing to an audience in the room behind her. The fat-cheeked woman had been put up to this by other editors, Sam's independence having not exactly bought her a lot of friends on staff.

“I'm not boiling an egg in here, Shirl.”

“I know, but you're supposed to set your timer. Didn't you read the memo? You only get fifteen minutes at a time on the big system, unless you've got written permission.” There was giggling from the city room.

“I'm a grownup, Shirl. I don't bring notes from home.”

“But—”

“But squat.” Sam was advancing now, backing Shirl out the door. “Get out of my way or I'll break your glasses.”

Shirley jumped.

Sam smiled her sweetest as she trooped past her. The small knot of giggling reporters scattered, stepping on one another's toes.

Then Sam stopped and patted Shirley's bony shoulder. The woman recoiled. “Hell, I was only kidding,” Sam said. “I wouldn't touch your glasses for a million dollars. Never forgive myself if something happened to those rhinestones.”

Shirley raised her hand to the frames she'd been ever so careful with since high school.

Sam marched through the city room. She'd come back later when fewer of the troops were around and Shirl was home clipping laundry detergent coupons. Then she'd see what she could find about the ownership of Tight Squeeze. But right now she was itching to get out there and do some live-and-in-color field patrol.

As she wheeled her silvery blue BMW out of the parking lot, she peeled a little rubber for her favorite attendant, Buster. He waved his hat like a checkered flag behind her and she was off. At the first light she checked her watch. Still an hour before her lunch date with George and Emily Edwards, who had invited them both. Plenty of time for a look-see at Tight Squeeze. If it wasn't closed. Did women rip off their clothes for money in front of strangers before lunch?

She threaded her way through heavy downtown traffic, heading toward the faster artery of Piedmont. All around her was the mushrooming campus of Georgia State, blond brick buildings wedged among the gold-domed state capitol building, a maze of marble-faced state office buildings, and the freeway. She caught the light at Auburn and glanced eastward down the main drag of the old black business neighborhood. Down a couple of blocks were the Ebenezer Baptist and the Players theater. She thought about last night, the party, Margaret Landry, her golden daughter, Laura.

Then the light changed and she made her left and zipped along busy Piedmont, heading north past the sprawling civic center to the midtown area where gays were gentrifying old three-story apartment buildings, painting the whole neighborhood pink and gray and aqua.

She found a parking place on Crescent Drive, walked the one block back to Tenth and Peachtree.

This little four-block commercial strip seemed to undergo a sea change every five minutes, and the looming presence of the brand-spanking-new IBM tower up the street was going to make even more of a difference, the few remaining small shops soon to be bulldozed for smart shopping plazas, designer coffee boutiques. But in the meantime, there it was, a marquee with three bulbs blown flashing in the clear October sunlight.
TIGHT SQUEEZE.
George had said sometime he'd tell her the history behind that name, but as she pushed open the door padded in black leatherette and the rank aroma of sour beer and stale smoke hit her, Sam's concern was the here and now.

Her eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness, a single spot focused on a young redhead whose pelvis, encased in black lace panties about the size of a glove, listlessly rotated to Satchmo's “Mack the Knife.” Her magnificent breasts would be low hangers in a few years; for now, they'd knock your eyes out. But the girl wasn't enthusiastic about her current line of work. Shoulders tucked in, head down, the scarlet mane of hair was a curtain between her and the three men who were cheerleading. Except for them, the single long room was deserted.

“Off. Off. Take it all off,” one of them called.

Didn't anyone ever write new lines to use in this kind of situation?

Sam stepped closer and caught a glimpse of the dancer's face as the curtain of hair parted. She looked an awful lot like a girl Sam had heard reading at the Little Five Points Pub. Was stripping what young girl poets did now for a living? If so, Emily Dickinson would have found the eighties a tough row to hoe.

“I love you!”

Sam's glance flipped back again to the three men scrunched together at a table the size of a pack of cigarettes. Japanese businessmen already tanked up and ready for fun before the noon whistle.

“Help you?”

She turned. The man who was asking had to be a weightlifter; that is, when he wasn't collecting tattoos. The tail of a cobra disappeared up under his short sleeve. He could probably put on a hotter show than the listless girl on stage by flexing his blue-engraved biceps.

“A Perrier with lime,” she said.

“A
what
?”

“Glass of soda.”

“Ain't no yuppie sarsaparilla joint.”

“Haven't heard that word since the last time I saw a western.”

The bouncer/bartender smirked. She wasn't sure if he was being friendly or if he was thinking about excising her gizzard. He fingered his brown beard.

“You like westerns?” he asked.

“Uh-huh.” She pointed at a table. “Mind if I sit down?”

He pulled out a chair and joined her.

“Who's your favorite?”

The music ended, and the girl slouched off stage, her G-string about a hundred dollars heavier. The tourists didn't seem to care about her lack of enthusiasm. Now their heads touched across the table as they giggled in anticipation of the next act.

“Always liked Tim McCoy, Gabby Hayes,” she said. “On TV, the old Gunsmoke and Palladin.”

“Partial to Lash LaRue myself.”

All that black leather and whips. Sure.

Then the music picked up and a black woman who wasn't so young slid out on stage like cold molasses to the tune of Armstrong's “Why Am I So Black and Blue?”

“Great music.”

“You drop in to have a glass of water and listen to the sounds or you into girls?”

First Hoke had called her sexual preferences into question, now this redneck bruiser. Maybe she'd lived in San Francisco too long. It had rubbed off.

“Neither.” Sam reached in her bag for the card she'd placed on the top of a deck of possibilities.

“Cheryl Bach.
The Peachtree Ad-Visor
,”
the man read aloud.

“I'm selling advertising. We're a new weekly bargain newspaper that'll be distributed free in the neighborhoods. Can give you a great rate.”

“You think the yups in the burbs are interested in strippers?”

“Never can tell.”

“Lady, you don't strike me as dumb, and I hope I don't look
that
stupid.”

The woman on stage was doing something with her hips that presupposed being double-jointed. Or maybe triple-jointed. One of the men made a paper airplane out of a green bill and tossed it. It made a perfect hit on her left tassel. She grabbed the money, nodded a smile, and tucked it into her G-string.

“Well.” Sam shrugged slowly, pretending she was embarrassed to be caught out. Always a good ploy, to let them think they'd snagged you for something little. As if you'd play it straight from then on. “I do sell advertising. But I didn't really think you'd be interested. Actually, the daughter of a friend of mine bragged that she was working here. I didn't believe her. We made a bet.”

“What's her name?”

“Jackie Randolph.”

It was one she always had ready in her back pocket.

“Nope.”

“Pretty girl. Blonde. About sixteen.”

He shook his head. “Are you kidding? Chicken like that'll get you busted.”

“You ask for their birth certificates?”

“Nope. No more than I asked you for your badge.”

She smiled. “I'm not a cop. Actually, I'm with the NOW patrol. I'm casing the joint before we burn it down.”

It slid right off his massive back. “P.I.,” he guessed again. “Private ticket. Who you looking for?”

Then they both glanced up, for one of the men had materialized beside their table, his hands neatly folded in front of his thousand-dollar suit. He bowed.

“Dance?”

He was speaking to her.

“No, thanks.”

Even if she were interested, she had at least half a foot on him. He'd have planted his nose in her cleavage.

Then he pointed at the girl on stage.

“Dance?”

“
Me?
Like that? Oh, no,” she said and laughed.

He bowed again and pulled an eel-skin wallet out of his jacket pocket and peeled off two hundred-dollar bills and held them out to her.

“No.” She shook her head.

He added another hundred.

“You don't understand.” She could feel the blood rising. She didn't look at the bouncer. She could feel the heat of his grin.

Now the fanned-out ante was five hundred.

“More than you made for ten minutes of work in your life, ain't it?” The bouncer was loving this.

The tourist was reaching into his wallet again.

Sam pushed back from the table. It was a long way to the exit sign, but that didn't stop her admirer from trailing her every step. She didn't look back to see how many bills he was waving by the time she reached the door.

“Hey, cowgirl,” the bouncer called, “you want the rest of your soda water?”

Next he'd be hollering not to let the door hit her in the butt.

Four

“My dear,” said George as she slipped in beside him on a stool at the Trotters bar. “I was afraid you weren't going to be able to make it.”

“Sorry I'm late,” she said and kissed his cheek. “I got held up by a dancer.”

She turned to order her standard bottled water and lime from the white-jacketed man standing behind the massive carved bar, but he was already tucking a napkin under her glass and pouring it. “Ms. Adams,” he said and nodded.

Trotters is that kind of restaurant—where, if you come three times for dinner in one year, they know your birthday, your wedding anniversary, your place of business, and your preferences in wine and drink. This is high-tech Southern hospitality, aided and abetted by a computer that sends you a birthday card and invites you in for a bottle of wine, puts you on the mailing list for the restaurant's newsletter featuring your most recent promotion. An ailing regular might be delivered his favorite meal at home or in the hospital, compliments of the management. For one international stockbroker who makes Trotters his lunch hangout, the restaurant has installed a telephone at his regular table beneath a pink-fringed lamp copied from the Orient Express. He has never been sent a phone bill.

It's smart marketing in the Buckhead neighborhood that houses, wrote
Fortune
magazine, the top encampment of business executives in the Southeast.
Buckhead
—it's uptown New Atlanta, mirror-faced office towers, a crystal-chandeliered Ritz-Carlton, art galleries, high-prep commercialism abutting Tuxedo Park, the city's richest in-town suburb filled with mansions and castles. Buckhead is rich, almost exclusively white upper crust.

Sam, one of the three women in the room, sipped her drink and surveyed the well-tailored, carefully barbered crowd. No casual eccentricity here, no Giorgio Armani linen slouch, no Miami ease. Atlanta business wears a conservative, spanky-clean uniform.

She leaned toward George's ear. “Where do they keep the cookie mold that stamps out these guys?”

George's blue eyes twinkled. “In the basement of the Buckhead Men's Shop. They send 'em out onto Peachtree all wound up and ready to go.” Of course, George had always worn the prescribed haberdashery, too, but he enjoyed a joke.

“Speaking of clothes.” He stared down at Samantha's bow tie. It wasn't one of those not-quite-a-tie, not-quite-a-scarf affairs that women dressed for success wear, but a big green-and-black polka-dot one that was great with her green silk blouse, antique black tuxedo jacket, and a pencil-slim white linen skirt. “You look wonderful, my dear, but whatever are we going to do with you?”