Crimes of Passion

by Toni Anderson

  The folly had been a favorite place of Cosmo’s. He and Riva had often had coffee there on summer mornings while they watched the sun rise. She had hardly been out there at all since his death. It was too much of a reminder of loss.

  It felt strange, then, to see Doug Gorsline strolling in that direction, trespassing beyond what she felt were the acceptable precincts. It was all right for him to invade the pool area, but the place he was heading to was too private.

  A moment later, Riva saw the reason. Erin and the two children had left the pool and were at the folly. They were having a picnic at the feet of the great Buddha.

  “Who is that?”

  Riva jumped, startled by Margaret’s question. She had been so absorbed in the scene below that she hadn’t heard her sister come out onto the gallery.

  “That’s Doug Gorsline,” Riva answered, then waited for the explosion.

  “Doug—But isn’t that the name of the photographer who…What is he doing here?” Margaret’s voice rose until it was a near shriek.

  “Calm down. He wanted to see Erin.”

  “Are you crazy? You knew he was coming, didn’t you? When you said something about a photographer this morning, I never dreamed you meant him! I thought it was something to do with the campaign or maybe with school.”

  “It has to do with an attractive young man being interested in Erin. Someone other than Josh.”

  “He’s with a newspaper!” It was as if Margaret could not believe Riva understood the situation, as if yelling would make it plainer. Her eyes were wide with horror as she watched the young man reach the folly and, once inside, drop to one knee as if to join the picnic in progress.

  Riva took her sister’s arm and gave it a small shake. “Get ahold of yourself. Do you want everyone in the house to know what’s happening?”

  “They might as well. It will be no secret once that cretin gets his nose into the story.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he’s after.”

  “You’re a fool,” her sister said.

  “For heaven’s sake, Margaret. He took a picture. That isn’t a crime.”

  “It is if he comes sniffing around for more. I can’t believe you let him come here, that you as good as invited him!”

  Riva, however, was paying no attention to the diatribe. She made a quick gesture for silence as she stood in stiff concentration. There were voices coming from just below them. As they watched, a man emerged from under the gallery. He skirted the pool at a quick lope and headed toward the lake. As he left the shade of the live oaks, the sun caught his hair and was reflected in it by soft blond gleams.

  It was Josh Gallant, apparently done with his duty at his father’s headquarters. Erin saw him coming, for she called out, her voice floating joyful and welcoming across the lake. She got to her feet and ran down the path and over the bridge that led across the water to the templelike building. She flung herself into Josh’s arms and lifted her mouth to be kissed. The two clung together for what seemed like endless moments before finally breaking apart and turning back toward the folly.

  “Did you see that?” Margaret hissed. “Did you? It has to stop. You have to do something! If you won’t do it, if you can’t do it without making matters worse, then I will. Do you hear me, I will!”

  Jerking away from her, Margaret stepped back, then turned toward the wide doorway into the house. Riva made no reply, for they were no longer alone. Noel’s ex-wife stepped aside as Margaret passed her just inside the door, then Constance strolled out onto the gallery to stand with her hand shading her eyes while she stared at the folly. She smiled when she saw her children on the bridge behind Erin.

  The two of them watched in silence as Erin, with Coralie and Pietro holding her hands and the two young men trailing behind, formed a group and moved in the direction of the house.

  It was the first Riva had seen of Constance since the night before. The other woman had returned quite late and still was not dressed for the day. Her dark hair was tousled, she had no makeup on, and a robe in vivid sea-green cotton with matching slippers was wrapped around her. She was hardly more than thirty-five, and she was stunning.

  To break what was becoming an uncomfortable silence, Riva said, “Did you sleep well?”

  Constance gave her a smile that carried an edge of mockery. “Very. I quite like your friend, Dante. He’s most sympathetic, an amusing man.”

  “Yes,” she agreed politely. “You needn’t worry about your children, as you can see. Erin has been entertaining them.”

  “How sweet of her. And I see that, like her aunt, she prefers her men in pairs.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” Constance said, retreating before the coolness of Riva’s tone. “You just seem to have so many men friends. It occurred to me to wonder if you could spare Dante.”

  “He isn’t mine to keep or to spare,” Riva said evenly. “He makes his own friends.”

  “How magnanimous. Then you won’t mind if I annex him?”

  “For the length of your stay?”

  “Or longer, if it happens that way.” The woman’s smile was predatory.

  Riva turned to face Constance. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at, but it makes no difference. As I said, Dante chooses his own friends.”

  “Strange.”

  “What is?”

  The other woman shrugged. “You are serious. I find it odd that this is your reaction instead of jealousy.”

  “You have to be afraid in order to be jealous.”

  “And you aren’t afraid of me. Such confidence.”

  “Does that bother you?” Riva asked. “Maybe it’s because I know that Dante has other things on his mind at the moment.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  The skepticism in the other woman’s accented voice drove Riva on. “For instance, the sudden appearance last night of the drug XTC, otherwise known as Ecstasy, at his place on the lake. He’s always managed to keep the premises clean of pushers and dopeheads before, but not now. And he doesn’t want it to become known as another ‘X’ place, after this Ecstasy. He’s worked too hard for it to come to that.”

  “You have spoken to Dante this morning? He came to see you?”

  “He called.”

  “And he did not ask to speak to me?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Constance gave a pettish shrug. “I suppose he must have been concerned with this drug then, as you say. I’m not familiar with it.”

  The comment made it sound as if the XTC could not possibly be dangerous then. Riva said, “It’s not exactly new, according to Dante, just rediscovered, but it’s fast becoming a major problem. It’s made with amphetamine in combination with the mescaline of the Southwest Indians, but is more lethal than either. I understand it causes some extremely strange reactions, both physical and mental, though the great attraction at the moment is that it’s supposed to be an aphrodisiac.”

  “Ah, I begin to see.”

  Riva doubted it. Her own worry was for the threat to Dante, rather than the effects of this latest designer drug. There were many, her sister Margaret among them, who felt that Dante knew more about drug dealing than he admitted, that he made such a big deal out of keeping his place on the lake clean so that he would look innocent. There had been whispers for years, since his days among the Italians around the French Market, connecting him with underworld figures and their unsavory ventures. She knew Dante had friends whose finances and activities would not bear close scrutiny, but the two of them, she and Dante, went back such a long way together that she could believe nothing really bad of him. He was a devout Catholic and the product of a conscientious upbringing by his Cajun mother. In all the years Riva had known him, through all manner of provocation, she had never seen him do a dishonest or dishonorable thing. That was good enough for her.

  Now she said, “Yes, and can you also see that if your aim is a brief fling, you have the wrong man?”

  “You think he won�
�t be interested?” Constance stared at her with a challenging tilt to her chin.

  “I couldn’t say. I only know that Dante is…special.”

  “Oh, yes, a Cajun playboy.”

  “Not really.”

  “I hear otherwise.”

  “You hear wrong. Oh, he has his women, but only a certain type, never the kind who will be hurt.”

  “Are you saying that I—”

  “By no means,” Riva said hastily. “I’m only trying to let you know that Dante is the sort of man who, if he really decides to play, will play for keeps. It’s possible he might be attracted to you, in which case I would warn you to take care. He could be easily hurt by the wrong person.”

  “I’m sure you ought to know.”

  Below them, Erin and the others were gathering around the pool. Riva felt a sudden urge to be with them, to join in their laughter, their uncomplicated banter. She swung away from the other woman. Over her shoulder she said, “Yes, I ought to know.”

  “I’m so ashamed,” Rebecca had wailed to Dante on the evening when she had, for the first time, danced on top of a barroom table wearing nothing more than a pair of three-inch white heels with rhinestone bows and a piece of white nylon fringe held in place by a G-string.

  It was the only job she could find. The position as dishwasher at the restaurant had been filled, during the time she was recovering from childbirth, by a mechanical monster that used water far hotter than human hands could stand and soap strong enough to eat gold-plating. She wasn’t sophisticated enough or old enough to work as a restaurant hostess, and the only interview for a shop-girl position she could get was conducted by a buxom gray-haired woman with a mustache who had turned up her nose at Rebecca’s shabby clothes and made her feel stupid because she only had a ninth-grade education. She had answered an ad for a maid, very nearly using her last nickel to ride the bus all the way out to Kenner, only to be told that a reliable middle-aged black woman was required.

  She had been desperate. Margaret still insisted that she could not come home for her mother’s sake and that Boots’s salary just would not stretch to cover two households another week longer. Her sister had supported Rebecca for nearly two months after the baby was born and felt that was enough. Rebecca’s rent was due, her electric bill was overdue, and the last can of cheap tuna was gone. For two nights in a row, Dante had shared his supper with her. When late one afternoon she had seen the Help Wanted sign on the barroom door, she had gathered her courage and walked inside.

  The man who talked to her was so grossly overweight that his body bulged in odd places like a huge balloon filled with water. His head was bald, his eyebrows were like yellow caterpillars, and his expression was sour. Regardless, he didn’t ask how old she was or how much education she had. He made her turn slowly around in front of him, then wanted to know if she knew how to dance. She said she did. It wasn’t a lie since she and Beth and Margaret had learned the jitterbug, the waltz, and the rhumba, not to mention the twist. The man had then handed her the pair of white shoes with the shiny buckles and told her to try them on. They had fit. The man had jiggled his double chins in what could be taken for a nod and told her to come back that evening at six.

  It was when she returned that he gave her the G-string. She understood what it was at once but didn’t have the least idea how to put it on. One of the other girls showed her, a coffee-with-cream-colored black girl who called herself Trixie. She brushed out Rebecca’s hair so that it reached to the middle of her back in a shining cascade and adjusted the fringe of the G-string so that it hung just so. The width of the little piece of fringe, she said, was carefully monitored by the police, so it had better cover what it was meant to cover. Talking up a storm about how much money the girls made in tips and the many ways the men tried to sneak a peek or a rub, Trixie had urged Rebecca to hurry before the boss man came to find out what was taking so long. He was a fat old bastard who expected his girls to waggle their tits and asses as if they meant it. And, by the way, if the police came around, Rebecca was to say she was eighteen and not a day less.

  There was no mirror in the drafty closet of a room in back of the bar. Regardless, Rebecca could see enough of herself to know that she was as nearly naked as made no difference. She had walked past the door of the Bourbon Street bar with Edison once or twice, glancing in at the women waiting on the tables and sometimes dancing on them. She knew what was expected. Still, those women had never looked as naked as she felt.

  “I can’t do it,” she said, and reached for her panties.

  Trixie, wearing a piece of green fringe and green boots with turned-down cuffs like those of a Sherwood Forest archer, frowned and put her fists on her bare hipbones. “What is it?” she demanded. “You think you’re better than the rest of us?”

  “No, but I just can’t.”

  “Maybe you got a sugar daddy to pay the bills? Maybe you’re a rich bitch doing this for kicks?”

  “I need the money or I wouldn’t be here. But I’ll just make a fool out of myself if I go out there!”

  “You’ll get used to it. All you have to do is not think about it.”

  “How? How can I do that with all those men looking?”

  “Let ‘em look! What does it hurt? Anyway, what’ve you got that’s so special?” Trixie’s gaze was cool and yet somehow blank, as if she had no memory of the feelings Rebecca was trying to explain, as if she had pushed them far back into some dark corner of her mind.

  “Nothing, I only—”

  “Listen, if you don’t get out there, we’re both going to find our asses in a crack. That fat bastard don’t mess around. He put a girl in the hospital once for skimming off the drink money. If he has to go short-handed tonight, he could decide to take it out of your hide.”

  “He can’t make me do it,” Rebecca said, her lips tightening. She twisted around, searching for the fastening of the G-string.

  “No, but he can make you wish you had. Anyway, if you leave he’s liable to think I said something and come after me. You wouldn’t want that.” When she saw Rebecca hesitate, Trixie went on. “Besides, who’s to know or care what you do, anyway?”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah, but it’s your body; you can use it to make money if you want. If there was anybody who cared about it, cared about you, then you wouldn’t be here.”

  There was enough truth in that to hurt. Rebecca had discovered that she could deaden the pain by refusing to think of it, refusing to feel. She could sense that numbness stealing over her, taking away her anger and her righteousness, leaving only desolation. When Trixie took her arm, urging her toward the barroom, she did not resist.

  It was like stepping into a nightmare, something terrible and scary and yet somehow unreal. The music was so loud it boomed in a solid echo off the walls. Men sat at tables so close together that the customers’ shoulders touched, and Rebecca could not pass between them without bending this way and that over and around them, brushing against them while a few reached out to trail their fingers over her body. The smell of cheap whiskey and sour, acid wine hung with the gray blanket of cigarette smoke in the air, catching in the back of her throat and making breathing a chore. Within minutes, her body and her hair smelled just like it. The only good thing was the dim lighting. It not only made counting out bills for the drinks difficult—and leaving a good margin for tipping errors by befuddled patrons, according to Trixie—but gave a false illusion of modesty.

  It may have been her freshness or her air of awkward embarrassment or possibly the long golden-brown swath of her hair and the sweet curves of her body with their fullness after her pregnancy that made her popular that evening. Whatever the cause, she was a favorite. Everywhere she looked, men stared at her, talked to her, beckoned to her. The first time she was helped onto the top of a table, Trixie was there. She leaned to whisper in Rebecca’s ear, “Don’t think, just do it. And make it sexy. Make it good.”

  Rebecca didn’t know how. Instead she tried desperatel
y to forget where she was and how she was dressed, or rather undressed, forget the man staring up at her from below with red-rimmed and avid eyes, the man who had bought this dance. She closed her own eyes and thought instead of Erin and her mother and the bills lying unpaid on her table. Then she let the music’s hard, fast beat take her. It was a job, she told herself. It was just a job.

  Dante was waiting when she finally came home in the early-morning hours. His face went pale, then red when she told him where she had been, what she had been doing.

  “My God, why didn’t you tell me? I’d have found something else for you, anything else!”

  The feelings so carefully held back sprang forward with full force. Her face twisted. “There was nothing else. I looked, really I did!”

  “They say the fat guy who runs that place is in with the mob, that he sets up the girls as dancers, then hires them out. He’s a pimp, Rebecca.”

  “A pimp?”

  “He sells women, sells their bodies to other men.”

  She stared at him as what he was saying penetrated. Her eyes filled with tears that spilled over her lashes and dripped down her face in warm tracks. “There’s nothing else. What am I going to do, Dante? What am I going to do?”

  He touched her shoulder in concern, then sighed and took her in his arms. “It’s all right,” he said into her hair. “It’s all right. It’s just that you are so far above it.”

  “I danced for one old man six times,” she sobbed into his shoulder. “Six times. He never tried to touch me like the others, didn’t try to put the money in my—my costume. He gave me twenty dollars every time, every time! When he gave it to me, he bowed and kissed my hand. I felt terrible.”

  “Forget it,” he said, his voice low as he stroked her hair.

  They stood in the middle of the living room of her apartment where he had been waiting for her when she got home. It was May, and the windows stood open to the balmy night air. The glow of the bare bulb hanging on its cord from the ceiling was yellow and not too obtrusively bright. His heart beat with a steady rhythm under her ear. His arms around her were warm and strong; there was comfort in them, and safety. She leaned against him. She was so tired, so very tired.