She shrugged. “He’s the only one of our customers been in the papers lately.”
“And?”
“He was a customer. That’s the grand total of what I know about him.”
“Except that he’s a professor.”
She shrugged. “Some of the customers don’t know enough to lie about who they are.”
“What else didn’t he lie about?”
“To me? I never even spoke to the man except to take his drink order.”
DeMarco nodded and sipped his whiskey. He was feeling more comfortable now, playing a more familiar role. Ariel’s scent and warmth and touch had unnerved him for a few minutes, took him to a place of uncertainty he had not visited in a very long time. It had reminded him of how easily a man could succumb to such an invitation, how quickly he could find himself lost in that beguiling place.
But, he asked himself, a man like Thomas Huston? Huston had been married to a beautiful woman and, by all accounts, blissfully so. On the other hand, thirteen years of married life can make a man restless. Curious. Wistful for the unknown, the only imagined. Maybe even fearful of the slow slide into old age and all the loss it portends.
And what was it Bill Clinton had said when asked, Why would a man in your position, Mr. President, a man who has achieved everything he could ever want, ever stray?
Because I can, Slick Willie had said. He had done his best to look remorseful, repentant, self-chastising, but had been unable to banish a sly and arrogant smile from his lips.
Had Thomas Huston succumbed to a similar weakness?
“If you never spoke to him,” DeMarco asked, “how did you find out he’s a professor?”
“Girl talk,” she said. “Besides, just because I work in a place like this doesn’t mean I’m totally illiterate. I read the paper every once in a while.”
“That’s what puzzles me,” DeMarco said. “Why a man so well-known would jeopardize his public image by—”
“Fraternizing with us lowlifes?”
DeMarco considered her face. It was beginning to look familiar.
“Let me save you the trouble,” she said. “You took me in a couple times maybe ten, twelve years ago. Me and a couple of friends.”
“For keeping a disorderly house.”
“So they said. Personally, I consider myself a meticulous housekeeper.”
“Meticulous,” he repeated and smiled.
“Dust bunnies run at the mention of my name.”
“On Fourth Street,” he said. “Just up from the marina.”
She nodded. “There’s a gift shop there now. Some guy gives glass-blowing demonstrations in the basement.”
The way she said “glass-blowing” made him smile again.
“Guess who taught him his technique,” she said.
He grinned and shook his head. Another sip of whiskey. Then it came back to him. “Bonnie,” he said.
“Good for you. You remember the names of all your busts?”
“Just the ones who proposition me with sex.”
Again, she shrugged. “Use what the good Lord gave you, that’s what my mama always told me.”
“I imagine that’s a popular opinion around here.”
“More like gospel. The eleventh commandment.”
“You remember the other ten?”
She rattled them off without cracking a smile. “No spitting, no swearing, no touching the dancers, no fighting, no smoking, no cell phones, no cameras, no minors, no food near the stage, no drinks that weren’t purchased at the bar.”
“I bet you can name the seven dwarves too.”
“We have them booked for New Year’s Eve. You should come. They put on quite a show.”
DeMarco chuckled, then felt guilty when he realized how much he was enjoying himself. “Maybe we’d better get back to the subject.”
“Let’s refill that glass first.”
He considered it. He wasn’t officially on duty. In fact, if he were home right now, he would have a glass in hand and his eyelids would be drooping. “A small one,” he told her.
She poured his glass half-full.
“You call that a small one?”
“I don’t call any of them small. Just hurts a guy’s feelings.”
“Stop it,” he said.
“I would if I thought you really wanted me to.”
He turned his back to the bar so she would not see his unmanageable grin. From that position, he could peer into the stage area. Around a low stage built of plywood, its floor boxed in by low plywood walls, were several inexpensive chairs with black seat pads. Eight customers were already seated around the stage in anticipation of the first dancer. A mirrored ball hung above the stage and flickered shards of light throughout the room.
The rear and one sidewall of this room each had three openings cut into them. Two of the open doorways on the rear wall led to tiny rooms with nothing inside but another chair; in one of these rooms, a naked girl was straddling a fully-clothed man who sat with his head back, eyes closed, arms dangling limp at his sides while the girl writhed atop him, sluggishly bumping and grinding to Usher’s “Nice and Slow.” The third tiny room appeared empty, but DeMarco thought he could make out another door deeper inside. The dressing room, he told himself.
Each of the three doorways on the far wall had a dark, heavy curtain hanging over it. Couch dances, he thought. Fifty dollars for twenty minutes.
He turned back to Bonnie. “So what was Thomas Huston’s preference? I’m guessing the couch dances.”
“Couch dance. Singular. One per night.”
“That was it? Twenty minutes and then he’d leave?”
“He’d watch the dancers for a while first, have a couple of drinks. Then the couch dance. Then good night.”
“Always with the same girl? In the room, I mean?”
Bonnie looked away for a moment. She gazed at the mirrored ball. When she returned her gaze to DeMarco, she smiled. “It’s not my job to notice things, you know? Just the opposite.”
“It’s not your job, but you notice them all the same. You’re too clever not to.”
“All I know is that he doesn’t come here anymore, and because of that, I’ve lost a regular source of not much income.”
DeMarco nodded. “You own this place, Bonnie?”
“More or less.”
“So tell me about the girls who work here.”
“What’s there to tell? If you’re pretty, if you’re friendly, you can make a lot of money. All cash.”
“How much is a lot?”
“On a busy night? Five, six hundred. Sometimes more.”
“Is this a busy night?”
“Around eleven o’clock it will be. That’s when the really pretty girls come on.”
“The ones here now aren’t pretty?”
“You’ve looked at them all. You tell me.”
“I think Ariel’s a beautiful young woman.”
“She could work second shift if she wanted to.”
“So why doesn’t she if it would mean more money?”
“She likes to tuck her little boy in at night.” Then, after seeing the look of surprise that crossed DeMarco’s face, “What, you think none of these girls have maternal instincts?”
“You know them better than I do. You tell me.”
“We’ve got our crack and heroin whores, sure. You’ve probably spotted a couple of them already. We’ve also got our girls trying to put themselves through college. Then we’ve got our single mothers trying to feed their babies. And then we’ve got the usual assortment of head cases.”
“Tell me about the head cases.”
“How long you been a cop? You know them better than I do.”
It was true; he remembered them all. He remembered the sadists, the masochists, the ball b
ashers, the cutters, the little lost girls, the thrill junkies, the sin lovers, the nymphos, the fetishists. He knew why women fucked when they didn’t fuck for pleasure or money. They fucked because they wanted to be loved or they wanted control or they wanted to hurt themselves or somebody else. They fucked for annihilation, temporary as it might be.
“Did Professor Huston have a favorite?”
“I just pour the drinks.”
“I know, it’s your job not to notice. But I’m asking you, Bonnie, okay? I’m just asking if you happened to notice a pattern of any kind.”
“Most nights after nine, ten o’clock, I’m so busy pouring drinks that the only thing I pay attention to is the money coming in. Speaking of which, you owe me thirty dollars. Plus tip.”
“Thirty dollars? I didn’t order that triple you poured me.”
“I didn’t charge you for it. It’s twenty for the champagne, five each for your single Jacks. The rest was on me.”
Scowling, he laid two twenties on the counter. “A night at Whispers doesn’t come cheap, does it?”
“You want cheap, there’s places for that. You probably know them all already.”
He let the comment pass. Then, “So he comes in every Thursday night…”
“For the past month or so. Maybe a little more.”
“At about what, ten o’clock?”
“Sometimes a little earlier. And he’s always gone by eleven.”
“He watches a few dancers. He has himself a couch dance…”
“Pays his bar tab and calls it a night.”
“Uneventful.”
“An ideal customer.”
“Now then, as to those couch dances…”
“I’ll get Ariel for you.”
“Not for me. I’m talking about Huston’s.”
“You sure? I could swear I saw something special between you two.”
“Knock it off now.”
“I think I saw love in bloom.”
“Bonnie, please.”
“She could use a nice daddy for that little boy of hers.”
“I’m not interested in being anybody’s daddy. Sugar or otherwise.”
“She played the French horn in high school. She tell you that?”
“Tell me this: What actually transpires inside those rooms?”
“You see those curtains?”
“I do.”
“Can you see what’s behind them?”
“No.”
“Neither can I.”
“Does the eleventh commandment apply behind those curtains?”
“I don’t go there myself, except to vacuum. So I don’t really know.”
“So who would?”
“You, for fifty dollars.”
“Plus tip.”
“You’re a fast learner, DeMarco.”
“Not as fast as you.” With that he drained his glass and set it softly atop the bar. “I need to know who Huston’s regular girl was. She would be young—”
“Nobody here under twenty-one.”
“—or at least she looks very young. Green eyes. Long legs. Maybe even a limp but very subtle, something most people wouldn’t even notice.”
“No limpers here,” Bonnie said. “Green eyes and long legs we’ve got by the bushel. Stay awhile and see for yourself.”
“She keeps herself in shape. Jogs in the park probably.”
“I don’t fraternize with joggers,” she said.
“Could you please be serious for a minute?”
“Look,” she said. “Give me something specific and maybe I can help you.”
“Young, pretty, long legs, and green eyes. That’s not specific enough for you?”
“That’s about as specific as a telephone psychic.”
“Then how about this? Names and addresses of all the girls who work here.”
“Not even if I knew them.”
“You don’t know their names?”
“I don’t take résumés here, okay? Everybody’s an independent contractor. They give me a name, and that’s what I call them. They come and they go. I don’t get personal with them.”
“None of them ever need a little mothering?”
She winced, a momentary thing. “I’m not the mothering type.”
He watched her face for another reaction, but none came.
“I need your help here, Bonnie. Otherwise, I might have to come back again. Maybe interview all the patrons as they come through the door. Maybe just park a patrol car out front.”
She stared at him again. He stared back. Finally she said, “Two names. That’s the best I can do. No phone numbers, because I don’t have any.”
“Real names or working names?”
“As far as I know, they’re real.”
“I appreciate your cooperation.”
She reached for a pen and small pad on the cash register, wrote on the top sheet, tore it off, folded it, and handed it to DeMarco. She said, “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it’s been to see you again. Let’s do it again another ten or twelve years from now.”
He stood, slid the paper into his shirt pocket without looking at it, gave her a smile, and turned away.
“I’ll tell Ariel you said good night.”
“Don’t,” he answered without looking back.
“I know love when I see it,” she said.
Thirty-Three
Like some character out of a Flannery O’Connor story, Huston thought. This was what he had come to. Hiding in a shed. A misfit. Hunted. Hated. Huddled like a criminal in the dirty darkness.
He had lain beside the fire ring for a while, falling through his darkness. Eventually he realized he was not going to get his wish and he would never hit the bottom of that darkness. He had no choice but to live awhile longer. When he stood and reached down to set the kitchen chair aright again, he saw that he had the tool he needed right there in his hands. If he could work one of the metal legs loose from the rusty screws that held it to the seat pad, he could flatten one end and use it for a pry bar. Thirty minutes later, he was safely inside the equipment shed at Bradley Community Park.
The shed had no windows, but he had wedged the door open with the handle of a baseball bat. Through the inch-wide gap along the doorframe, the night’s darkness seeped into the shed and lightened what would have been pitch-blackness. He could make out the three long shelves holding boxes of dirty baseballs and softballs, bases, batting helmets, and two sets of catcher’s equipment. Beneath the shelves were two fifty-gallon plastic drums, one holding baseball bats, the other, softball bats. His two grocery bags and the nearly empty jug of orange juice sat an arm’s length away.
In his wallet were two tens and four ones. Two credit cards with a combined credit limit of fifty-four thousand dollars. Two ATM cards giving him access to another thirty-eight thousand. He owned a beautiful home filled with the mementos of a hard-won comfort, but the home was no longer habitable, it was a cursed place now. It cried out to him for fire and obliteration.
He knew that O’Connor would have rendered this scene with a gentle humor. The narrative would unwind slowly, building to a moment of grace for the desperate man. Huston had been an admirer of O’Connor’s stories and the sometimes-wild incongruity of their characters’ lives. The incongruity of his own situation would have made him smile as O’Connor’s stories had, if only he were not so acutely aware of its permanency. He knew that his life would never get better than this. He could never climb higher than this, his lowest point.
He knew he should eat something, but just the thought of food made his stomach roil with nausea. It seemed a very long time ago that he had eaten the pizza. He had only one thing left to do, and then, if all went well, he could return to his beautiful house and gather his family around him one last time and send all their spirits wafti
ng into the clouds on the rising thermals. He knew too that he would have to sit there among the flames and watch the spirits rise, but he was prepared for that as well.
Another incongruity, Tom. He heard those words in Claire’s voice. He let her speak for him. Her voice could be trusted, but his own could not.
You’re going to send our spirits to heaven, she said, when you don’t even believe in heaven? How does that work? He could feel her fingers playing with the hair at the nape of his neck, could feel her sweet breath on his face.
Yes, he told her. I want you all in heaven.
And what about you? Have you started to believe in hell now too?
Only this one, he said.
And is this where you will always be?
He stared at the crack of gray light along the door, but he could discern no answer there. No answer in the scent of dry dust on the floor. No answer in the grocery bags or in his wallet or in the nausea that never left him.
I love you, baby, was all he could think to say. Please forgive me. Please try to forgive me someday. Please, baby. Please.
Thirty-Four
DeMarco felt too restless to go home. His last cup of coffee had been at least eight hours earlier, yet he felt as if his nerves were spiked with caffeine, as if his skin did not quite fit and he wanted to wiggle out of it. If he drove straight home, he would get there before ten thirty. And then what? Turn on the television, unscrew the Jack, sip, and stare until sleep overtook him.
So leave the television off and think about Huston, he told himself. Try to figure the guy out. Get inside his head. Walk around inside his brain awhile.
But he was too restless to maintain the necessary focus. Ariel’s scent had gotten under his skin, seeped into his pores. And Bonnie’s wisecracks, her quick, easy sarcasm… God, how he missed the company of a woman. He missed the touch and scent and warmth of a woman. A woman’s kindness and playfulness. A woman’s soulful gaze.
He could go back and sit with Ariel awhile longer, tell her that police officers are men too. Not that she would need to be told. He had detected, or believed he did, a sweetness beneath the playacting. Something real. If she had green eyes instead of brown, he might have wondered if she was Huston’s Annabel.
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