Thrill Kill

by Don Bruns

  ‘Look, Detective Archer, I’m not a snitch. If someone breaks the law and it doesn’t hurt anyone I’m not the one going to the authorities. I work on shaky grounds as it is. The sex trade isn’t the most honest profession in this city. But I make damned good money. I’ve got a limited time to make this money before I age out, and I’m working it for all it is worth.’

  ‘Your point is?’

  ‘I chose this life. I do what I need to do to make this business work for me. Do you understand that?’

  ‘No. But I’ll accept that.’

  ‘Don’t be judgmental. It will make this story much harder to tell and harder for you to hear.’

  ‘You work your business. I get it.’

  ‘There are those of us who willfully work the club. We may swallow some pride but we do damned well. Detective, I can make two hundred thousand a year. Do you get that? Two hundred thousand. It’s all cash and I don’t have to pay tax on most of it. Who the hell is checking? Now, Mr Archer, what’s your salary?’

  He was silent. Wondering where he’d gone wrong.

  ‘That said, every other week or so we get the group walk-ins.’

  ‘Group walk-ins?’

  ‘There are two types of walk-ins. Girls or ladies who have worked in other cities. Girls who decide this is an easy way to make big bucks and they deliberately come down here to New Orleans to work the business. Local girls who decide to give it a try. Maybe they’re friends with one of the strippers.’

  ‘You were one once, right? A walk-in?’ He was still working on the two hundred thousand dollar figure. Forty-some-year-old men didn’t have that opportunity. If they did, he needed to do some serious research.

  ‘From Miami, Florida. Yes. We all were walk-ins. But there’s a second type. I call them the group walk-ins.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Every week or so a new batch of girls shows up. A group. Four or five, all at once. Some speak English, most speak a little English, some speak no English. I’m never sure that these groups are totally on board with the biz. I mean they’re hesitant. They don’t seem to know the rules and I always feel that they are a little shaky as to what goes on in the club. Very few of them last.’

  Archer folded his arms, studying the girl. Several hours ago he’d seen her almost naked. Now she was a fresh-faced young thing bundled up in a sweatsuit talking about her seamy business.

  ‘So what does go on in your club?’

  ‘You’re serious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Woody’s is the first strip club I’ve ever been in.’

  ‘Wow,’ she smiled, reaching over the table and touching his hand. ‘I don’t believe it. A virgin.’

  He closed his eyes for a second and pulled back his hand.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Lap dances? Table dances?’

  ‘Oh, Detective Archer, it can go a lot further than that. How much money do you have? I can give you services that will take every last cent you own. Just give me a dollar amount.’

  He took a sip of coffee, then another.

  ‘Alexia, I work homicide. You ladies are a little off my beat. As I said before I’m not on the vice patrol, OK?’ Sex crimes were on the same floor as homicide and in truth he’d worked several cases with that department, but he only got involved in killings.

  ‘My point is, these young girls, the group walk-ins, don’t really know what to expect. I’m certain that many of them have never even been naked in front of a man, and all of a sudden, they’re strippers. And they can easily become high-end prostitutes. I watch it on a regular basis.’

  ‘And that has to do with the sale of drugs?’

  ‘Warhead Solja brings these girls in. Nasta Mafia brings them in.’

  ‘Nasta Mafia?’

  ‘It’s another gang. I am not in the loop, but I’m not blind. No one seems to try and hide what’s happening. Look’ – she folded her hands in front of her, almost glaring into his eyes – ‘my job is to dance, take your dollar bills, sell you a drink, get you to go to a private room with me and—’

  ‘OK,’ Archer said. ‘You don’t have to go the whole route.’

  ‘These girls, they are glassy eyed, stoned from the day they start. My guess is that the gang, or their pimp, hooks them before they even start their first night. Give them a dose of H then hand them over. And then the salesmen show up.’

  Archer kept pushing. Sipping his coffee he gazed at the young woman. ‘These salesmen, they sell the drugs?’

  ‘They do. And the girls, the regulars, we’re all too afraid to say anything. It’s like … it’s not our problem. And some of the regular dancers, the strippers, are actually the gang’s best customers. I think the girls who are hooked, they barely make ends meet because all their money goes for the next fix. And, I don’t have first-hand knowledge, but apparently it makes this job a lot easier to be totally fucked up while you do your shift.’

  ‘You don’t get fucked up?’

  ‘I probably am fucked up, but no. I don’t do the drugs. Once these girls do H, and a number of them do, they are hooked. They’ll do anything their pimp tells them to do. And these gangs, they get their claws into them.’

  ‘So here’s my question. Do you know anything about initiation into this gang? Warhead Solja?’

  ‘Initiation?’

  ‘I’m trying to tie a gang ritual into some recent murders.’

  He didn’t want to leak all the information. Not yet. ‘I was looking for information on how they get new members.’

  ‘That information I don’t have,’ she said.

  ‘Where do you think these girls come from? The groups that show up?’

  She sipped her coffee, a distant look in her eyes.

  ‘Alexia?’

  She finally focused on him. ‘I don’t know how much to tell you. You see, we’re not a close-knit group of people. We compete for men’s attention and dollars. Aggressively, I might add. You come in with one hundred dollars to drop in a G-string or for lap dances, I want that one hundred dollars. I’m very jealous if it goes somewhere else, you know what I’m saying?’

  He nodded. Not such a sweet, fresh-faced girl after all.

  ‘It breaks down like this. I could make fifteen hundred a night. If I work four nights a week, I pull down over three hundred thousand a year. Personally I don’t work that hard, but I still want what walks in that door. If someone is cutting my time, if that girl is more attractive, more interesting, I’m not happy.’

  ‘So there’s some serious competition.’

  ‘You think? Listen, Detective, there’s some serious shit here. We don’t talk that much. About who you are, where you come from. My job from sign on to shift end is to take as much money as I can from this sorry bunch of losers. Buy me another drink, let me grind your crotch, come into the back room with me. I could retire when I’m thirty-five, Mr Archer, but I’ve got to work the job and keep out of other people’s business. So I don’t ask questions. Especially when it comes to the gangs. If I get nosey, if I act like I’m interested, I could be on one of those trash piles outside, stuffed in a garbage bag and no one would notice. Actually, no one would probably care. You see? So it would be much better if I don’t say anything at all, but …’

  Archer gazed out at the street. Almost four a.m. and the costumed revelers still passed by, tipsy, loud, partying hard.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Old enough.’

  And here he was. Thirty-six and planning on working till he was ninety-eight.

  ‘You came up to me and suggested someone should look into drug sales in your strip club.’

  She nodded, her silky blond hair softly caressing her face. ‘I did.’

  ‘So it seems to me you’re conflicted. You don’t want to cause a scene, yet you’re concerned that people are going off the deep end. Getting hooked on drugs, depending on street gangs.’

  The girl pushed her coffee cup off to the s
ide of the table. ‘OK. Is there anything here like off the record. If I say something, I can’t get in trouble and you won’t tell anyone where it came from?’

  ‘Immunity? Sure. Tell me what you want and I’ll pretend it never happened. I can do that.’

  A drunken couple with faces grotesquely painted in purple, green and yellow staggered by them and sat two tables away. Jagged patterns of bright colors covered every inch of their exposed flesh. Archer saw a white-jacketed waitress shake her head in disgust.

  ‘No one checks IDs in the club.’

  ‘OK. So you’re telling me you’ve got underage drinkers. That’s it? It’s not that big a deal, Alexia.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure we do. Underage drinkers are everywhere in this city. If you carded everyone with a to-go cup … but we have underage dancers, Detective Archer. Underage girls who are professionally stripping. I know, first hand, some of these girls that come in are fifteen and sixteen years old. Some probably younger. Much younger. I said I didn’t talk to the other dancers, but the other day one of them talked to me. A girl named Fabiana approached me last week and told me that she’d been kidnapped, had been given heroin and was stripping to help her family.’

  ‘And how did that help her family?’

  ‘She’s under the impression her pimp was sending money to her family so they didn’t lose their home. Somewhere in South America. But my guess is that no money is ever sent south.’

  ‘They’re dancing topless at fifteen and sixteen?’

  ‘The club owners say as long as that’s it they don’t see a problem. As long as all they do is dance. But that’s not all it is, Detective. I watch them. They go to the booths, the private rooms. This girl, Fabiana, said some of the Spanish girls even have a quota. They’ve got to interact with a certain number of guys every shift.’

  ‘You’re telling me that these girls are engaging in prostitution? And they’re under eighteen years of age?’

  ‘Oh, don’t act all righteous, Mr Archer.’ She removed a colorful elastic ribbon from her wrist and pulled her long hair up into a ponytail. Rolling her eyes, she said, ‘I see guys your age every day who slobber over young girls. But from a purely personal standpoint, it cuts into my income. I do this for a living, Detective Archer. But it’s sometimes hard to compete. You and I both know a lot of guys prefer younger girls.’

  ‘And a quota?’

  ‘She says, and this isn’t me telling the story, she says they’ve got to turn at least twenty-five guys per shift. Lap dance, booth or private room. And their pimps, usually a member of some gang, they check on them. They have to make so much money a day and turn it in. Sometimes these guys will sit at the bar, watching. I guess that puts a little more urgency in the girls’ hustle.’

  ‘So where are the cops? Don’t we interact here?’ He was still relatively new to the city’s police force and only involved in homicide. Maybe he was missing something.

  ‘You show up when there’s a customer complaint. Now you saw our crowd tonight, Detective. You saw the girls. Beautiful, young, some of them, I’m sure, are under eighteen year of age. How many of our clients, the fine upstanding men that they are, how many of them are going to call 911 and register a complaint? They’re getting their joint sucked, a first-class hand job and some sixteen year old girl is pushing her tits in his face. They’re living a fantasy they don’t get at home. Their wives, their girlfriends, they don’t give them that kind of action. No way. There are no dissatisfied clients that I know of in my club. No, I don’t think 911 is getting very many calls complaining about what goes on. I would guess there are no calls at all. Zip.’

  ‘And you’re saying that according to her, this Fabiana, young girls are told they are working for their families, helping pay the rent, and therefore they have to keep pushing their product?’

  ‘You used that phrase, not me.’ She gave him a grim smile. ‘When their families are threatened I’ll guarantee you, these girls are not going to call in complaints. So as far as you guys are concerned, everything is fine. No one is calling 911 so there are no problems.’

  Archer nodded, sipping his now cold drink. The drunken couple had passed out, their brightly painted faces bleeding a strange mix of purple and orange in a puddle of spilled coffee on the table.

  ‘One more thing, Detective. It may be important, it may not.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Fabiana, she lasted four days.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s not unusual. Like I said, a lot of them leave shortly after they start. This girl, she hated the work. I know she wasn’t making her “quota” because she told me so, and then she never showed up again.’

  ‘And you think …’

  ‘I’d rather not think. Please, don’t ask. I told you, I’m better off when I mind my own business.’

  ‘And I told you, I’m not involving you in any way. What you’ve said so far is hearsay, right?’

  Alexia took a deep breath and folded her hands in front of her. ‘OK, I’ll tell you what I think. Only my thoughts, and, Detective Archer, I don’t pretend to have answers. I don’t believe she got along with these guys and I think there’s one of three things that could have happened to her. They moved her to one of their massage parlors, they beat the crap out of her or they killed her. That’s what I think. They don’t care what happens to these girls. They’re just pieces of meat.’

  She stood up, never looking at him, and walked away. It was several minutes later when he glanced down and saw that she’d left a phone number on his napkin. Well, this was one way to get a girl’s number. He would have preferred more positive circumstances.

  NINETEEN

  As he walked back to his cottage, hundreds of revelers on Bourbon Street were bobbing, weaving, stumbling drunk. Old men, one in a pinstripe suit, young women in tight little black dresses and several in leather pants, and a stocky black girl who hugged him and called him handsome. Slurring her speech, she asked if he would buy her a drink. He shook his head, pushing on. He heard her screaming behind him, ‘You just don’t like black people!’

  Garbage bags were still piled six feet high as far as the eye could see, and the street was no longer a surface of concrete, but a blanket of broken green Hand Grenade drink cups and purple-, yellow- and green-colored beads that crunched with every step.

  It was four forty-five in the morning. In another four hours things would appear about normal. Normal for New Orleans. All energy feeds on a fuel. This town ran on high-octane alcohol.

  Alexia had mentioned that Nasta Mafia was one of the gangs that sold drugs in the club and possibly provided some of the girls. Archer thought back to Hector Sanchez, one of the first victims of the Chill thrill kills. He was a member of Nasta Mafia. Hector wasn’t a bank teller, a Christian janitor, a councilman or an attorney. He was a gangbanger from Little Woods. And Blake Rains, the councilman who’d been found at the amusement park, it appeared he’d been killed in the Little Woods area. It may mean nothing but it was the only link he had. Other than cans of Chill. Did Blake Rains have an association with Nasta Mafia? Was that the reason he was in Little Woods when they killed him? What possible affiliation would that be?

  Now he knew a little more about two of the NOLA gangs. No surprise, they both ran drugs. He was from Detroit. Hell, members of his own family ran drugs. His fellow officers ran drugs. Same shit, different city.

  Why did two victims get killed in Little Woods, the neighborhood bordering Lake Pontchartrain? And why did someone move one of the bodies to the deserted amusement park? He had some more whys. If he answered those two questions, he would be a lot closer to solving the crimes. It played on his mind as he walked the path to his cottage. He checked the tape on the door. Still in place.

  Five o’clock in the morning and he was wide awake. It could be the strong black coffee from Café du Monde. More likely it was the ideas and questions swirling in his head. There were dozens of things he should have asked the young blonde. He hope
d for a follow-up interview, but he didn’t want to put her at risk. He liked her. A girl who made a living with her body. And apparently a very good living. Two hundred thousand a year?

  Archer stripped off his jacket, put his holster and gun on the bed and lay down, his hands behind his head. What could he do with two hundred thousand a year? Two hours later he was still wide awake. It was going to be a miserable day.

  At eight ten a.m. Case Blount was sitting on a stool in the Camellia Grill devouring a piece of grilled chocolate pecan pie, a cheese omelet, five strips of bacon and a pot of strong coffee. The gleaming white marble countertops reflected sun coming in the Chartres Street windows and he glanced at the iconic Mickey Mouse clock on the wall. He had another forty minutes to indulge in some of the most decadent food in the Quarter. He wiped at a smudge of chocolate on his shirt and swore to himself that he would lose some weight. Spreading the morning paper in front of him he studied the Metro section of The Times-Picayune. The story about the possible removal of Confederate statues honoring General Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard was front and center. He shook his head, wondering when this political correctness would finally settle down. The next story involved a killing over a bicycle and below that an article about a murder in Central City followed by a drive-by shooting in the Garden District. Too damn many killings in this town.

  The grill in front of him was sizzling with breakfast steaks, sausage, and hash browns. He should have ordered some of those delicious hash browns, damn. Flagging down a white-jacketed waiter with a weathered face and a Richard Roundtree ‘Shaft’ mustache, he asked for an order of the potatoes. Too many good dishes, and a man couldn’t eat everything. But he could try.

  Scanning The Times-Picayune, he noticed the death of the adoption attorney Trevor Parent had already been relegated to the second page of Metro. In a city where murders were an everyday occurrence, you could only devote so much time per killing to the front page. Still, the story was getting some strong coverage. The paper was conducting a background investigation into the man, apparently hoping to uncover the reason why he was singled out in this violent killing. That couldn’t be good.