by Stan Jones
“Nah, I don’t remember anybody by that name,” he said after Active introduced himself and asked if Special Ed had seen Grace Palmer lately. “How come you want to know? You her husband?”
Active realized he was out of uniform. “No, I’m a state trooper from her home town. Her father asked me to find her. She hasn’t been back in a while.”
He handed Special Ed the two pictures, one of Grace in the mural, the other the battered, bloated Grace in the final mug shot. “Sometimes they call her Amazing Grace on Four Street, I guess.”
Special Ed took the pictures, studied them briefly, then handed them back. “Amazing Grace? Of course I remember her.” He shook his head. “She poke me in the eye with a dauber! Boy, she was mean!” He took a drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke towards Active, who sidestepped the plume.
“Yeah, I heard about that. I guess you had to ban her?”
“Oh, yeah. She always make the other players mad, especially the women. They say she’s too bossy.”
Active groped for the word and finally remembered. Lucy Generous had also applied it to Grace Palmer. “You banned her for being stuck-up?”
“Yeah, she never mark her sheets.”
“What?”
“She just remember them.” Special Ed grabbed a discarded bingo sheet from a table near the caller’s stand and showed it to Active.
“She never do this.” The caller pointed to the dauber blobs spotting the six cards on the sheet. “She leave her sheets blank. She just look at them couple minutes, then read a book and listen to the numbers. Somehow she know when she got a bingo and she yell it out. She daub them in her mind, I guess. When we check our machine against her card number, she’s always right, even though there’s no marks on it. Even if she’s drunk.”
Active took the sheet from Special Ed and studied it. Six cards on the sheet, each card with twenty-five numbers. “There’s a hundred and fifty numbers on here.” He looked at Special Ed. “You mean she memorized this and played the game mentally?”
“No, she play four sheets, maybe eight sometimes, remember them all.”
Active did some more math, then whistled. “Eight sheets would be twelve hundred numbers. You saw this with your own eyes?”
Special Ed nodded, looking indignant at the memory. “Sure I see it my own self. She sit there and read that book while them other ladies are flipping through all their sheets and using their daubers, getting ink all over their fingers–they don’t like it. That’s why they call her bossy.”
“So you banned her.”
“Yep, unless she use a dauber. That one time, she’s in here and reading her book with them sheets spread out in front of her. I go over and give her a dauber and say she have to use it like that friend of hers always do. She say, ‘All right, then, I will.’ And she jump up and turn the table over, poke me in the eye.”
Active studied Special Ed’s eyes. They both looked normal. “Did it hurt much?”
“Nah, my eye look like it’s bleeding from the red ink in that dauber, but I don’t hardly feel it. Still it mess up the game and then everybody’s really mad. So the boss call the cops, only they never arrest her because I won’t sign the complaint.” Special Ed shook his head with a disgusted look. “Not from getting poked in the eye by a girl!”
Active pulled out his notebook. “You say she had a friend with her that night?”
Special Ed nodded. “Just about every time she come in they’re together.”
“You ever catch the friend’s name? I don’t think it was in the police report.”
“Nah, the police never talk to her,” Special Ed said. “She take off when the fight start. I guess that Angie girl know Amazing Grace pretty good, know she’s trouble.”
“Angie, that was the friend’s name?”
Special Ed nodded and Active wrote it in his notebook, frowning because it seemed slightly familiar. “What about Angie’s last name?”
Special Ed thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “Don’t think I ever hear that.”
The players were finishing their Rippies and snacks now, and Special Ed began organizing his stand for the next game. Active realized the intermission was about over.
“What did Angie look like? Was she Native?”
“Don’t think so,” Special Ed said. “Kind of short, dark hair, dark skin, darker than mine. Not Native but Mexican maybe.”
Active wrote it in his notebook. “How about Amazing Grace?”
“Yeah, she’s Native, all right. Inupiaq like me, I think.” Special Ed squinted at Active. “You, too, ah?”
“No, I mean, how did she look?”
“She look like Amazing Grace, I dunno.”
Active laid the two pictures on Special Ed’s counter and touched each in turn. “More like this, or like this?”
Special Ed bent over the photographs in concentration, then touched the Miss North World shot. “More like this, I guess.”
Active looked at the picture, then at Special Ed. “You sure?”
Special Ed shrugged. “I guess.”
Active scooped up the pictures and put them in a shirt pocket. “That was, what, about three years ago when she poked you? She ever come back?”
Special Ed laughed. “Not that I ever hear about. She know the boss will call the cops again.”
“You ever hear what happened to her?”
“Nah, I never—wait a minute, seem like somebody say she’s working at the Illusions.”
Active wrote it down. “The Illusions? The strip club over in Spenard?”
“I guess.” Special Ed turned to the microphone in the booth. “Game Seven, the Blue Game, is starting now.”
The players hurried to the tables, plunking down their bingo sheets and foil-wrapped orders of fried chicken or fish and chips in plastic baskets.
Active went to the pay phone at the back of the room, between the doors to the men’s and women’s rooms, dropped in a quarter, and dialed Dennis Johnson’s home. “I have to go to the Illusions and check out a tip,” he said when Dennis answered. “You know who to talk to there?”
“She’s working at the Illusions?”
“Maybe. Or she might have in the past.”
“I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.”
“I thought you had a hockey game.”
“I did. We won.”
“Well, you don’t have to come with me. Just tell me who - .” There was a click, then silence on the line, and Active realized Dennis had hung up. He sighed and hung up, too.
“All right, boys and girls, this game is Double Hollywood, the Double Hollywood,” Special Ed was saying over the public address system as Active stepped through the doors of Aurora Bingo into the sun. It had swung towards the west now, but was still as bright as when he had come in an hour before. As he unlocked the rental, he noticed that, with the sun hitting the front of the building from a different angle, it was possible to make out the faded lettering of the old “Muskeg Outfitters” sign beneath the newer paint that said “Aurora Bingo.”
He could even make out the famous Muskeg slogan that he had been unable to recall on the way in: “We cheat the other guy and pass the savings on to you.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
It took him only eight minutes to reach the Illusions, a rundown one-story building with brown T1-11 siding and a flat roof on a curve in Spenard Road. A plastic sign over the door spelled out “Illusions” and “Topless-Bottomless” in stick-on black letters.
Active considered waiting in the Neon for Dennis. Then it occurred to him that Grace Palmer might, at this moment, be dancing on the stage not fifty yards from where he sat. He locked the car and walked across the asphalt parking lot, paced by a long shadow that gave him an uneasy feeling of being followed by a spirit. He hurried through the door and stepped into the gloom of the strip club.
A huge bouncer, a Samoan, Active thought, gave him the once-over and waved him in, apparently concluding he was not too young for the Illu
sions, or too dangerous.
The club was split into two levels. The one nearest the door, where he stood, had a bar, some video games, and a few tables where near-naked dancers drank with men who looked a little too casual about the expanses of bare flesh surrounding them. Without a break in the chatter, several sets of eyes flicked over him and were gone, leaving him with the feeling he had just been measured for a suit, or for a girl.
He moved past the tables of cash-register eyes and down two steps into the club proper. A stage took up the back wall. Perhaps a quarter of the tables and chairs facing the stage were filled with men who definitely looked like customers, their eyes fixed on a heavy-bodied, thick-featured blonde who was dancing naked to throbbing rock music he didn’t recognize. A few of the customers sat on chairs pulled up to the edge of the stage.
Active took a table a few rows back and watched idly as the blonde worked the crowd. Her act incorporated a hula hoop, which she occasionally straddled as if it were a horse or a bicycle. One of the men at the edge of the stage laid down a bill. The blonde undulated over, turned her backside toward him, bent forward, and peered at him between her knees.
If the customer liked what he saw, he didn’t show it except to lay a second bill on the first. The blonde reached between her ankles, grabbed the two bills, straightened, and danced away, folding the money around her fingers like expensive silk.
“Hi, I’m Gina. Can I get you something?”
Active turned to see a skinny, pallid brunette in high heels, a G-string and bikini top leaning over the table. Ordinarily, he would have been happy to look down her front, as she apparently intended, but she seemed so wasted, so nearly used up with her dead-white complexion, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he found himself checking the stick-like forearms for needle tracks and, finding none, wondering if she had AIDS, a meth habit, or just an eating disorder.
“Can I get you something?” She said it louder this time, almost shouting to be heard over the music pounding from the boom-box on the stage behind the blonde.
“A Diet Pepsi, I guess.”
She looked so disappointed that he said, “I’m waiting for someone. Bring him one, too.”
Her expression didn’t change, and he decided that what he had taken for disappointment might just be numbness, or perhaps she was high.
“OK? Two Diet Pepsis?”
“Two Diet Pepsis, right.” She wobbled away on the high heels. As he followed her with his eyes, unable to stop himself from checking the backs of her knees for needle tracks, he saw Dennis Johnson near the bar, peering toward the stage. He stood and waved and his friend hurried over.
“Nathan!” he said. “She here?” Dennis peeled off a windbreaker, dropped it on the next table and slid into a chair beside Active.
Active shook his head. “Haven’t seen her if she is. Who do we ask without setting off a dumb grenade?”
Dennis chuckled. “Yeah, the hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil, at-least-to-cops, syndrome.”
Active looked toward the tables on the riser by the door, where the skinny brunette was now talking to a young guy in a leather jacket and absolutely no one was looking at Nathan Active or Dennis Johnson
“You think they know we’re cops?
“Of course they do,” Dennis said.
“But we’re not in uniform.”
“They’ve got their own radar. Look.”
Active looked and saw Leather Jacket was headed their way.
“Evening, officers,” he said tightly when he reached the table. “I’m Ian, the manager. Anything I should know about? Do we have a problem tonight?”
Dennis smiled a huge smile, his teeth fluorescing in the black-light around the stage. “Nope, no problem. Just dropped in for a visit with Feather. She around?”
Ian looked relieved. “She’s back there.” He pointed at a door beside the stage. “Go on back if you want.”
Dennis looked at Active. “Nathan?”
Active didn’t know who Feather was, but he was sure he didn’t want to ask her about Grace Palmer with a bunch of half-naked strippers hanging around, maybe a few bouncers and boyfriends too. “Can she come to the table?”
“I’m sure she can.” Ian started away, then turned back to them with a thin smile. “The Diet Pepsis are on the house, by the way. Tell your waitress I said so.”
“Who’s Feather?” Active asked as Ian disappeared through the door beside the stage.
“You never heard of Feather? She’s the head stripper here. Famous body-builder, too. Won a bunch of national awards—Geez, look at that.” Dennis pointed at the stage, where Gina had replaced the fat blonde. Some sort of angry-girl piece had replaced the rock and Gina was drifting about the stage like a zombie. “Pathetic, huh?”
“She said her name’s Gina. You know her?”
Dennis shrugged. “No, but I knew a couple dozen like her when I worked vice.”
He paused as the fat blonde, now clad in a tube top and a mini-skirt, set down two Diet Pepsis. “It’s five bucks,” she said.
Dennis nodded toward the door leading behind the stage. “Ian said it was on the house.”
“Yeah, right.”
Dennis shrugged, gave her a ten and she padded away in her bare feet. “What about the change?” he shouted.
“Yeah, right,” she shouted back.
He laughed. “That one ’ll probably make it. But the girl on the stage there? Look at her, practically a ghost already. Some of them seem to eat this up, they support a couple of kids or put themselves through college on it, get on with life. Others, they just get eaten. Come back in a month, that one up on the stage there will be gone, nobody will know where.”
Active worried over this for a moment. “Even Feather doesn’t keep track of them? I thought Feather would know—”
“Feather would know what?” said a feminine voice from behind him. He felt a hand on his shoulder and the same voice said, “And who’s asking, anyway?”
He turned to see a honey-blonde with muscles like gilded marble slide into the chair next to Dennis and give him a quick peck on the cheek. She set down a glass teacup filled with an amber liquid, a slice of lemon impaled on the brim. She was barefoot, wearing blue satin bikini briefs and a policeman’s blue tunic, all of the buttons open.
“Feather! Its been too long!” Dennis cried.
“I been right here, honey. Where you been?”
Dennis looked down, looked sideways, took a swallow from his Diet Pepsi, and looked embarrassed.
“Home with the little woman, huh?” Feather winked at Active and turned back to Dennis. “Well, that’s right where you should be. You keep it up.” She patted the back of his hand and looked at Active. “Who’s your friend here? Another lonely cop?”
“Nathan, meet Feather. Feather, Nathan Active, of the Alaska State Troopers in Chukchi.”
Active put out a hand and Feather took it. Hers was dry, warm, and small. “Welcome to the Illusions, Nathan.”
“Pleasure,” he said.
“Those new?” Dennis pointed at the tunic. “They look bigger.”
Feather opened the tunic and eyed her breasts critically, as did Active and Dennis. They were large, round, and totally sag-free.
“Whatta ya think?” Feather asked. “Too much?”
Dennis narrowed his eyes appraisingly. “Well, I always thought of you as the itty-bitty-pretty-ones type. You’re not a large woman. These are a little out of proportion.”
She sighed and covered herself. “I know. A girl’s gotta keep up, though. And they got this hot new plastic surgeon who just hit town. He was doing introductory specials so five, no, six of us here got new ones.”
She sipped amber liquid from the cup and studied Active. “So what brings you two in?”
“Nathan here is looking for a girl.”
Active started to object to this characterization of the situation, but Feather spoke first, with a mock frown.
“Now, Dennis, you know we
don’t provide that kind of service here at the Illusions.” She grinned and Dennis grinned. “But if we did, what kind of girl would he be —”
She stopped as Active shook his head and raised a hand.
“Please, Ms. Fea … er, Feather. Don’t listen to this idiot. I’m trying to track down a girl from Chukchi as a favor to her father.”
Feather sipped again and raised her eyebrows. “Native girl?”
“Yes, half Eskimo, half white.”
He pulled out his two pictures of Grace Palmer and laid them on the table. “I heard she might be working here, or may have in the past. Her name’s Grace Palmer.”
Feather picked up the mural shot, looked at it, and whistled. “Miss North World?” Then she picked up the final police mug shot, looked at it, and winced. “How does she look now?”
Active and Dennis shook their heads simultaneously, then Active spoke. “I’m not sure. Nobody’s seen her in about three years. The last guy to see her said she was looking more like this.” He touched the mural shot.
“Well, I can tell you nobody here looks like that. And even the Illusions wouldn’t hire someone who looked like this.” She tapped the mug shot.
She glanced at the back of the room where Gina the Stick Girl was finishing her routine and gliding offstage. Feather shook her head and picked up the mural shot.
“We don’t hire many Native ladies in here,” she said. “They tend to be a little short in the leg and flat in the hip, to be perfectly frank. But I can tell you, if this girl had come in, I’d have hired her in a minute, and I’d remember her. Sorry, Nathan.”
Active took the mural shot from her and studied it. Feather stood and picked up her tea cup. “I’m on.”
“What is that stuff, anyway?” Active pointed at the cup.
“Ginseng and honey.” She curled her arm and popped up a biceps. “You don’t get a body like this from Diet Pepsi, Nathan.”
She winked and disappeared through the door that led backstage and reappeared in a moment on stage, the police tunic now buttoned all the way up. She was wearing a police cap, too, the brim pulled low over her eyes, and pointing a Colt .45 straight at the audience. Something loud, pulsating, and jazzy boomed out, and Feather began to move.
