Between the Dark and the Daylight

by Ed Gorman

  Now, the transformation had gone the other way. A fullblown extreme TV makeover. The cute coed had blossomed into a picture-perfect butterfly. Honey blonde hair impeccably coifed, trimmed to nape length and swept to one side. Eyebrows plucked and patterned to perfection. Ice blue contacts, Donna Karan suit. Primped, polished and ready for prime time.

  “My, my, what a difference a few days can make,” I said, taking the chair facing her. “You look absolutely dynamite.”

  “I wish I could say the same, Malloy. You look like crap.”

  “I had some trouble sleeping in jail.”

  “I got you out as soon as I could. Did my best to keep your name out of it.”

  “I noticed that none of the news stories mentioned me. I guess I should thank you.”

  “No need,” she said briskly. “Mr. Shannon said you’re leaving town. Because of the Pig Party? Have either of you been threatened?”

  “Are you suddenly worried about my welfare, Silver? Or just looking for another byline?”

  “That’s unfair. If you’re having problems, you certainly can’t blame me for them. I never intended to cause you any trouble.”

  “No, I’m sure you didn’t. You smelled a story and went after it without a thought to what the fallout might be for me. Much less for Emily Kaempfert.”

  “Who?”

  “Come on, Silver, it’s Malloy, remember? Your partner in crime. We both know who Emily is. Emily Kaempfert. The underage girl I hauled out of the pig party. The one you took me there to find.”

  “But her name was never released,” she said carefully. “How do you — ?”

  “You called out to her at the bust, remember? And Westover’s a small campus. I had no trouble finding out who she was. And where she lived.”

  Sara’s face went suddenly still. Unreadable as a mask.

  “Kappa Rho,” I went on. “The sorority for promising academics. And Emily was very promising. A math whiz who graduated from high school at fifteen. Valedictorian. Precocious, but also pudgy and plain. With no social skills at all. But you know all that, don’t you? Because you live at Kappa Rho, too. In fact, you’re a mentor there. For freshmen like Emily. You knew her, didn’t you?”

  “I knew… who she was,” Sara said carefully. “That’s why I was so shocked to find her at that party.”

  “Bull! You knew damned well she’d be there. You helped her to get in. The security guard and Braxton both knew me but they still checked your ID. They must have checked Emily’s too. The papers ran pictures of the fake ID Emily used to get into the party. Pretty lame. It wouldn’t have fooled me. Don’t think it would have fooled that security guard or Braxton either.”

  “What is it you think you know, Malloy?”

  “I think Emily had a much better fake ID, maybe pro quality. But she’s only a freshman and a fifteen-year-old at that. She wouldn’t have a clue about how to find an ID good enough to get her past security. But you would. You did a story on it last semester.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Is it? When you grabbed Emily’s purse in the scuffle, I thought you were trying to help me get her out of there. But now I think you swapped the crude ID for the one she actually used to get into the party. The raid would be a very different story if the star reporter was guilty of setting up the crime she helped bust. My god, how could you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “A chubby geek like Emily probably never had a date in her life. Certainly not at Westover. So when she told you she’d been invited to the Delta House party, she had no idea what it meant. But you did. You should have warned her, Sara. Instead, you furnished her with fake ID, then hired me to help you get pictures. Knowing that kid was headed for total humiliation, or a whole lot worse.”

  “Pig parties have been an open sore on this campus for years. You said it yourself. They’re loud, lewd, and degrading to women. Somebody had to bring it down.”

  “The parties may be sophomoric but they’ve gone on quite awhile with no major damage done. But that’s not true anymore, is it? Nearly two dozen futures smashed up and one poor shlub looking at serious jail time. Thanks to you.”

  “With your help.”

  “True, and that’s what bothers me the most. That I came here looking for a fresh start and wound up wrecking a lot of innocent lives.”

  “Puhleeze!” she snorted. “There was nothing innocent about that party.”

  “Emily was innocent. God knows what’ll happen to her now. The pig party was idiotic but it was just one night. The fallout from the raid will go on for years. I can understand your wanting to end it, but I can’t believe you sent Emily in there, knowing what might happen to her.”

  “Believe what you like,” she said acidly. “If you want more money, maybe we can work something out. But if you try to go public with this crock, my editors will sue you into the poorhouse.”

  “Don’t worry, Sara, I can’t talk without throwing Emily to the sharks and she’s suffered enough already. I don’t want to hurt anyone else. Not even you.”

  “As if you could,” she sneered, rising. “Good luck with your career, Malloy. Maybe I’ll look you up, sometime. If I need a drink.”

  And she walked away. The prettiest, smartest woman who’s ever asked me out, or probably ever will.

  And the coldest.

  Oddly enough, I think I preferred the Sara from the party, braces and all, to the perfect, plastic Barbie Doll she’s become.

  Beauty’s a tricky business. We all think we can define it, but one guy’s woofer is the next guy’s true, true love. In the years between, I’ve watched the mating game play out a thousand times and I’ve decided real beauty comes down to character. When people respond to each other, soul to soul, everything else suddenly becomes very small change. A plain woman in love can take your breath away. A cover girl without a heart is only a picture. And a flat one at that.

  But if beauty’s complicated, ugly’s a lot easier. Because looks don’t have a damned thing to do with it.

  Pig party rules are simple. Bring the ugliest date you can find.

  For most guys, that means a plain Jane or the Wicked Witch of the West, not a media babe like Sara Silver.

  But for me? I’ve only been to one pig party. Wildest night of my life.

  And I definitely took the right girl.

  Award winning author DOUG ALLYN is a Michigan writer with an international following. The author of eight novels and nearly a hundred short stories, his first short story won the Robert L. Fish Award for Best First from Mystery Writers of America and subsequent critical response has been equally remarkable. He has won the coveted Edgar Allen Poe Award, (plus six nominations), the International Crime Readers’ Award, three Derringer Awards for novellas, and the Ellery Queen Readers’ Award an unprecedented eight times. Published internationally in English, German, French and Japanese, more than two dozen of his tales have been optioned for development as feature films and television.

  Perfect Gentleman

  BY BRETT BATTLES

  You won’t like me.

  Whatever. I’ve stopped caring.

  I’m not a bad guy, but you’re not going to believe that. People like you never do. You hear about what I do. You see how I live. You think, sleaze or deviant or something like that. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m all those things. I certainly don’t think God’s waiting for me to show up at his front gate.

  Again, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t really about me, is it? It’s about Joseph Perdue.

  Now there was a guy you really hate. A real asshole. But you people only chose to see one side of him. You made him out the hero. Someday you’ll probably call him a martyr for the cause. For the American way. That’s what happens to the dead, isn’t it? No one cares about the truth.

  I remember the first time he came into the bar.

  That’s not really surprising. I remember every time someone new comes in. It’s part of my job. First I need to make sure the guy (they’re always
guys) doesn’t look like an obvious problem. If he’s too drunk or too belligerent or has got a bad rep, I point them to another bar and say they got a special show that night and he shouldn’t miss it. Works every time. If he doesn’t seem like he’ll be a problem then I size him up, figure out how much we can expect to get out of him, and what he might be looking for.

  On the evening Perdue came in, the usual pop crap was blaring out of our far too expensive sound system. Occasionally I’ve been known to sneak in an old Skynyrd album or Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. God, I love that album. But the girls always protest, and I seldom make it through “Speak to Me” before I have to flip back to Christina Aguilera or Gwen Stefani or Gorillaz. When Perdue walked in, I’m pretty sure the song playing was “Perfect Gentleman” by Wyclef Jean.

  Perhaps I should have taken that as a sign.

  It was a slow night, a Tuesday. Our big nights are Thursdays, Fridays, and Mondays — the first two because around here everyone is ready to start the weekend a little early, and Mondays because that’s when we hold our weekly body-painting contest. Nothing like some fluorescent paint, some beautiful young women, and a few fluorescent black-light tubes to fill up the place and bring in the cash.

  Event evening or not, we still had a full complement of girls, somewhere between twenty and thirty at the beginning of the shift. That number would depend on how many girls were sick, how many had found someone for an extended absence, and how many just didn’t show up.

  No idea what our exact total was that night. I do know that Ellie was there. She was up on the stage with five or six others grinding away. But I’ve gotta say, whenever Ellie was onstage, it was as if she were dancing alone. That was her power. She was a superstar. The killer bod and the killer personality and that killer something that wouldn’t allow you to take your eyes off her.

  You don’t get a lot of superstars. Maybe one or two per bar. Ellie was our one.

  In strip bars in the States, the girls had routines, elaborate moves choreographed to the latest hip-hop favorite. But not here.

  Of course, my place isn’t really a strip bar. And it’s nowhere near the States. It’s in Angeles City in the Philippines. Perhaps you remember Clark Air Base? Used to be the biggest U.S. base outside of the States. The old main gate is only a couple miles from the door of my bar. But then there was Mt. Pinatubo erupting ash over everything, and the Filipino people threatening to erupt in anger if the U.S. didn’t finally withdraw.

  We withdrew.

  Well, the government did. Us ex-pats, we stayed. And over the years we’ve been joined by more.

  This is the part where you realize you hate me. Yeah, my bar is one of those kind of bars. A go-go bar. At my place, you can watch them dance, buy them a drink, talk to them, and then take a girl out for the night or for a week if you want. You just gotta pay the bar fine, and it would be nice if you tipped the girl after.

  And this is the part where I tell you I take care of my girls. I try not to let them go out with jerks — it happens, but not as much as it does at other bars. I do what I can to protect them. I try to keep them out of too much trouble. I know it won’t matter, but there are a hell of a lot worse Papasans around than me.

  So go ahead and hate me, but the business will still be here. The guys will still come. And so will the girls. Because for them the money’s better here, and there’s always a chance they might get taken out of the life to live in Australia or the UK or America.

  Perdue, if I remember correctly, glanced at the narrow stage — more like a runway down the center of the room back then before I remodeled — then took a seat in an empty booth on the far side.

  He wasn’t alone for long. That’s not why people come to the bars in Angeles City. They come for the laughs, for the cold bottles of San Miguel beer, but most of all they come for the brown skin girls so willing and available.

  A couple of my waitresses in their uniforms of tight, pink hot pants and white bikini tops approached him together. Only half interested, I watched the encounter, still unsure if the guy was one of those who was only gauging the talent and would soon be leaving, or was someone we could milk a few pesos out of, maybe even hook him up for the night.

  One of the waitresses, Anna, giggled while the other one, Margaret I think, looked over in my direction and said something to our new guest. Perdue looked at me, then removed a wad of bills from his pocket and handed a couple of notes to each of the girls.

  Now I was intrigued. Guys usually didn’t pay for anything the moment they arrived. What happened next surprised me even more. Perdue got up from his booth and walked around the stage to where I sat at the bar.

  He nodded at the stool next to the one I was sitting on. “May I?”

  “Please,” I said.

  “Thanks. I think the view’s better from over here.”

  Indeed it was. Superstar Ellie with the do-me-now looks was swaying back and forth less than ten feet away.

  “Joseph Perdue.” He held out a thin, rough hand.

  “Wade Norris,” I said.

  His grip was stronger than I expected. Whoever Perdue was, he was more powerful than he let on.

  “You American, too?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Ohio. Columbus.”

  “Never been there. I’m from Wyoming, myself.”

  “Yellowstone?” I asked. It was the only place I knew in Wyoming.

  He smiled at me. “Nah. Laramie. Cowboy country.”

  Anna walked over and handed Perdue a San Miguel, then set a cup on the bar behind him with a slip of paper inside noting the beer.

  He held his bottle out toward me. “Cheers, Wade.”

  I obliged by clinking the bottom of my bottle against the bottom of his. We both took drinks, his deeper than mine.

  “I hear you’re the Papasan. You run things.”

  Run would be a good word for it, I thought. I wasn’t the owner. He was thousands of miles away in the Netherlands. But I was the decision-maker, and gatekeeper.

  I shrugged, then said, “You enjoying Angeles?”

  “Seems pretty nice. But, you know, all these bars around here seem pretty much the same. You all got the neon, the mirrors with all the names painted on them, the big bells. The only difference I can see is the girls. Some places have a better group than others.”

  I couldn’t argue with his assessment. There are over a hundred go-go bars in Angeles City, all offering pretty much the same thing: prerecorded music and liquor and women.

  “So how does ours rank?”

  “About average.” He nodded toward Ellie. “Except for her. She brings your score way up.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. The fish was circling the bait. Now all I had to do was hook him.

  While Perdue took another drink, I caught the attention of Kat, the bartender. With a quick, almost undetectable motion, I indicated our new customer’s interest in our superstar. Less than a minute later, Ellie had made her way off the stage and walked across the room to where we were sitting.

  “Hey, Ellie,” I said. “How you doing?”

  “I was getting hot,” she said. She pulled at her bikini top, like she needed to get air between the flimsy fabric and her C-cup breasts. She looked at Perdue and smiled. “Who’s this?”

  “Another Yank,” I said. “Joseph Perdue.”

  She held out her hand and gave him a look even the most disinterested man would be hard-pressed to resist. “Nice to meet you. I’m Ellie.”

  “Hi, Ellie,” Perdue said. Instead of shaking her hand, he kissed it, the whole time his eyes never leaving her face.

  I knew the deal was done then, and twenty minutes later I was proved correct.

  “He wants to pay bar fine, Papa. What do you think?” Ellie asked me. She and Perdue had moved to the booth he’d occupied when he’d first arrived. Now she had walked back over to me alone while her potential boyfriend for the night waited.

  “He seems all right,” I said. “What do you think?”

&
nbsp; “I think he has money,” she said.

  “Then, by all means, have a great night.”

  It didn’t surprise me when Perdue came in the next night and bar fined her again. And I wasn’t particularly shocked that he’d decided to bar fine her not just for that evening, but for the rest of the week. The fish had not just swallowed the hook, but the hook and the line and the rod. Ellie was a hard one to resist.

  Of course, the deal was good for everyone. I was happy to collect the cash. Ellie was happy to be out of the bar for more than just a few hours, and was definitely happy about her cut of the bar fine. And Perdue, presumably, was happy to be spending time with a beautiful girl at least twenty years younger than he was.

  Honestly, after that night, I thought I wouldn’t see the guy again. I figured he’d probably bar fine her for the remainder of his trip and when she came back to work, it would mean he was on the long flight home to the U.S. But two days later, he showed up in the middle of the afternoon.

  It was Friday, but we wouldn’t really get busy until after dark. At the time, we only had two customers, so the day shift girls — about half as many as I’d have on that night — were huddled together in cliques talking or sitting alone texting their boyfriends, both foreign and Filipino, on their mobiles.

  I had only been there about thirty minutes, but as usual, my ass was glued to my favorite stool at the bar. If anyone else ever tried to sit there, Kat or one of the other bartenders made them move. “Papa Wade’s chair,” they’d say.

  When Perdue came in, he took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust from the bright sunshine outside to the dim interior, then spotted me and walked over.

  “Alone?” I asked.

  “Ellie said she had to run home to take care of something. I’m meeting her at Mac’s in an hour.”

  Mac’s was the main restaurant in the district everyone ended up in. But Perdue didn’t sound happy about it. In fact I’d say he was pretty annoyed. But I didn’t push. My job was to make the customer feel as good as possible about his time in Angeles. Getting into the middle of a relationship between one of my girls and her honey ko was never a good idea. Unless, of course, it was because he was treating her badly.