Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  “Call me Chris,” he says, and smiles. “So,” he says, “I understand you’re interested in modeling for Buttercup.”

  “Yes,” she says. “But I do have some questions about the job.”

  “Certainly,” he says. “What would you like to know?”

  “Well, it doesn’t involve any traveling, does it?”

  “What do you mean by traveling? You would have to travel back and forth to the venue, of course.”

  The word venue again.

  “Do you have transportation?”

  “Yes, I have my own car.”

  “Good.”

  “But I meant traveling out of town,” she says. “Would the job entail…?”

  “Oh no. No, no, no,” he says, reassuring her with his pleasant smile. “All of the venues are right here in Calusa. Most of them on the Trail, in fact.”

  Meaning U.S. 41, the Tamiami Trail, which is good because what she wants to do is spend most of her day in the studio on North Apple, designing toys while she does this modeling thing only part-time. This seems to suit Mr. Wilson quite well…Chris…since the venues are open from twelve noon to two A.M., and she can more or less choose her own work schedule depending on how much time she wishes to spend at it and how much money she chooses to earn…

  “It’s all entirely flexible, you see, entirely dependent on you yourself, Lainie…if I may call you Lainie,” he says. “Which is a very pretty name, by the way, if you choose to use it.”

  “I’m sorry?” she says.

  “Some of our mannequins prefer using different names.”

  “Different?”

  “Other than their own names.”

  “Why?” she asks.

  “Personal idiosyncrasies,” he says, and shrugs.

  She still does not smell a rat.

  By this time in her recitation, Matthew and Frank are way ahead of the pleasantly smiling Mr. Wilson. Even young Andrew seems to have caught the drift. But Lainie, to hear her tell it, is still blissfully unaware.

  “We do insist on a minimum of four hours a day.”

  Which would be perfect, she thinks. Four hours a day in a five-day week would come to twenty hours a week at thirty dollars an hour, for a total of six hundred dollars a week. Her fixed expenses are something like twenty-five hundred a month, so, actually, this would work, particularly if she could choose her own…

  “There should be some lingerie in your size in the dressing room,” Mr. Wilson says.

  Chris says.

  She blinks at him.

  “We stock only the finest imported brands,” he says, “Felina, lejaby, Jezebel, La Perla, I wonder if you’d mind trying something on for me? Just any bra, garter belt and panties, whichever color suits you. There’s matching hosiery in there as well,” he says, “you’ll find it. If you’ll tell Clarice your shoe size…”

  Who’s Clarice? she wonders.

  “…she’ll bring you a pair of heels as well.”

  Smiling pleasantly.

  “You mean you want me to…uh…try it on now?”

  “If you would.”

  “Well, I…I didn’t know I’d be…”

  “If you’d prefer coming back some other time…”

  “No, no. It’s just…”

  “Whatever makes you comfortable,” he says.

  Chris says.

  “Well…did you want me to come back in here?” she asks. “After I’m dressed?”

  “Yes.”

  Undressed, she thinks.

  “In the lingerie?” she says.

  In my underwear, she thinks. Their underwear, actually, she thinks. Buttercup’s high-priced line of underwear. But thirty dollars an hour, she thinks.

  “Yes,” Chris says. “Because that’s what you’d be doing, you know,” he says. “Modeling lingerie, you see. For upward of thirty dollars an hour.”

  Still smiling.

  Upward of thirty, she thinks.

  “Well…” she says.

  “Maybe you’d like to think it over?” Chris says, and starts to rise.

  “No, no,” she says. “Hey, I guess you have to see what I look like.”

  “Only if you feel comfortable about it.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I do.”

  “Shall I ask Clarice to come in then?”

  “Sure.”

  “Show you where the dressing room is?”

  “Sure.”

  Clarice, she learns, is a nineteen-year-old college dropout who is trying to earn enough money so she can go to Jackson, Wyoming, “away from this freakin heat,” she says, where she can become a ski instructor, though she’s never skied in her life. She tells Lainie that she only helps out here once a week because she and Chris have a sort of a thing going, but most of the time she models under the name of Kristal at a venue on the South Trail and Beaver Street, “appropriate, huh?” she says, and smiles a dazzling teenybopper smile, and still Lainie doesn’t catch on, sweet little cockeyed girl who grew up singing hymns in l’il ole Winfield, Alabama.

  What is finally explained to her by Clarice is that Buttercup Enterprises, Inc., runs a string of lingerie-modeling shops along the Trail. These shops have names like Satin and Lace, or Midnight Lingerie, or Silk ‘n’ Garters, or Lace Fantasies, and their ostensible purpose is to sell lingerie. Toward that end, the chain employs what Clarice calls “a bevy of young girls” to model the lingerie for potential customers. All of these potential customers are men who pay an initial fee of fifty dollars a half hour for the privilege of seeing these girls in their scanties. Of this fifty, the house takes thirty-five and the girls get fifteen. An hour-long session costs ninety-five dollars, of which the house gets sixty-five. The modeling takes place in cubbyhole rooms—two at some locations, more at others—clustered around the main showroom. There are low platforms in these rooms and the girls stand on these platforms while they parade their wares. Nobody ever buys lingerie.

  What the men who frequent these shops pay for is a variety of services…

  “No touching allowed,” Clarice says, “supposedly.”

  …ranging from a slow striptease for which every article of clothing dropped costs another ten dollars over the initial entrance fee, to stripping oneself while the girl gyrates, which costs another ten dollars, to masturbating while the girl lies on the platform and spreads her legs to you…

  “Twenty dollars for that privilege,” Clarice explains,

  …to allowing the girl to take your penis between her breasts…

  “This is not considered touching,” Clarice explains, “since her hands never make contact with the organ.”

  …subsequently stroking the client to climax mammillarily, to coin a phrase, which—speaking of coin—costs another fifty dollars. Since this usually occurs after the girl has taken off her bra for ten, this means she earns an additional sixty for a half-hour Tit Job, as it is known on the circuit, a total of seventy-five dollars all told, or ninety for a full hour. The girls prefer negotiating up front for whichever little service they’re going to perform, carefully explaining to the client that no one is selling sex here…

  “Ha!” Clarice says.

  …and that touching is strictly prohibited by law.

  “Some of the men like the slow strip while they jack off,” she says, “they like being teased, you know, enjoy tossing the ten-dollar bills on the platform each time they order you to take off another piece of clothing, makes them feel like big financiers. Some of them like you to take off just the panties and spread for them while they do their number. There are girls who tell me they actually like the tit jobs, ick, because they’re not just gyrating while some guy does himself. Maybe they have sensitive breasts, which I don’t. Even so. I mean, ick. Some weeks, I go home with three, four thousand dollars, it depends on how many hours I want to work, and how far I want to go, because—just between you, me, and the lamppost—if nobody’s looking, a handjob or even a blowjob isn’t entirely out of the question provided the guy is nice and the p
rice is right. This doesn’t mean you have to do anything you don’t want to do. “You’re hired to model lingerie, and if that’s all you want to do, the guy comes in and sits down in a chair, and you model whichever lingerie he asks you to put on—there’s a screen in the room, you dress and undress behind it and you get your fifteen bucks for the half, or thirty for the full, which is a lot better than you get at McDonald’s, honey, believe me. What’s your shoe size?”

  At first, Lainie is astonished.

  She listens to all this while she is putting on a black garter belt and sheer black panties and a black Wonderbra, fastening the garter snaps front and back to black nylons, listening in amazement to all that Clarice tells her, wondering what she’s supposed to do when she goes back into Mr. Wilson’s office. Chris’s office. Chris with whom Clarice has “a sort of a thing going.” Will she have to do a little dog and pony act for him, prove to him that she will be a moneymaker at one of his little sex emporiums called Nylon Legs or whatever the hell?

  She has passed these little shops in the strip malls along the Trail, the discreet orange neon OPEN sign in the window, but she actually believed they were legitimately selling lingerie to women, and that the “models” advertised in the window were genuine models in some sort of trunk show that moved from store to store. Calusa is, after all, the city where women are arrested for wearing thong bikinis on the beach. It is also the city where a famous comedian was arrested for masturbating in a pornographic movie theater. So how can these thin disguises for whorehouses be allowed to stay in business? Because, yes, that is what these are. They are whorehouses. And, in effect, she is being asked to become a whore. That is, if she does anything more than merely pose for the nice gentlemen callers.

  As she takes the size seven, very high-heeled pumps Clarice hands to her, she remembers that this is the nation where Dr. Jocelyn Elders was fired as Surgeon General because she dared to suggest that schoolchildren be taught the meaning of masturbation. Not taught how to masturbate, no one even remotely suggested that. And she remembers that right here in Calusa the famous comedian was convicted for the heinous crime he’d committed—whereas the theater was still open and still showing dirty movies. America.

  Besides, she needs the money.

  The following Monday night, she begins working as Lori Doone in a shop called Silken Secrets, and in six hours, from eight P.M. to two A.M., she earns ninety dollars without once having to take off a single article of clothing and certainly without once touching anyone, which she carefully explains is strictly prohibited by law.

  ———Then how about touching yourself?

  ———No, we’re not allowed to do that.

  ———Be worth fifty to me if you took off your panties and showed me how you do yourself.

  ———I’m sorry, we’re not permitted to do that.

  ———Jenny does it for me.

  ———She’d get fired if anyone found out.

  ———Come on, who’d ever know?

  ———They make spot checks.

  “How long were you doing this?” Frank asked.

  “Only until I did the video.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A photographer came in one night.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Why do you have to know?”

  “We don’t, Frank.”

  “All right, we don’t. Tell us what happened.”

  “He said I could make some very good money if I posed for a video.”

  “This video?”

  “Yes. As it turned out.”

  “Did you know what kind of video it would be?”

  “I had an idea.”

  “When did you learn precisely what he had in mind?”

  “He made it clear.”

  “When?”

  “That same night. The money was good.”

  “What did he pay you?”

  “A thousand dollars. For what turned out to be a half-hour’s work. He edited it down to fifteen minutes later. There were three other girls on the tape. I know them all, one of them is only sixteen.”

  “When did he shoot the video?”

  “That same week.”

  “Where?”

  “He has a studio not far from here. On Wedley.”

  “Did he pay you the money?”

  “In advance.”

  “What did you think he was going to do with the video?”

  “He said there were collectors for this sort of…well…specialty act, he called it. All of us…well…you saw the tape.”

  “Apparently Brett saw it, too.”

  “I don’t know how he got hold of it.”

  “But he did.”

  “Apparently.”

  “And you say he didn’t show it to you?”

  “No. But he showed me the holder. I knew he had the cassette, too. He wouldn’t have tried to blackmail me otherwise.”

  “Do you know what the prosecution could make of this video? If they knew it existed? If they knew it was on the Toland boat the night you went there? The night he was killed?”

  “Yes,” Lainie said. “I know what they can make of it.”

  “They’ll say you killed him to get this damn tape!”

  “Yes, but I didn’t.”

  “They’ll say…”

  “And I didn’t get the tape, either, did I?”

  “She has a point, Frank.”

  “Why’d you remove this from the boat, Matthew?”

  “No reason I shouldn’t have.”

  “No reason?”

  “He’s right, Frank.”

  “No reas—?”

  “Thank you, Andrew.”

  “How about tampering with evidence? How about obstruction of…?”

  “How do you figure that?” I said. “Lainie’s already been indicted, the grand jury’s finished, no one told me I couldn’t remove evidence from the scene. Since when am I not allowed to gather evidence in support of a client’s defense?”

  “Do you intend to submit this tape to the Court?”

  “Come on, Frank. We’re under no obligation to turn over any evidence we don’t intend to use in our direct case.

  “Which doesn’t change the fact that you removed this from the boat without prior permission and without…”

  “I was gathering evidence at a crime scene. Is the S.A. the only one entitled to gather evidence? This is America, Frank.”

  “Yeah, bullshit,” Frank said. “You removed this tape from the boat to make sure Folger wouldn’t get his hands on it.”

  “No, I gathered evidence so I could present it to my client…”

  “Bullshit.”

  “…and question her about it. Which we’ve now done. Would you have preferred Folger surprising us with it later on?

  “How the hell can he surprise us if he doesn’t even know it exists?”

  Which suddenly worried me.

  “Lainie?” I said. “I’m assuming there are other…”

  “I’m sure there are,” she said at once.

  “Huh?” Frank said.

  “Copies,” she said.

  “In which case,” he said, “what is that photographer’s name?”

  9

  The photographer’s name was Edison Alva Farley, Jr., and he told Guthrie at once that he had been named after Thomas Alva Edison, the man who’d invented—among other things—the incandescent lightbulb and the motion picture camera.

  Farley’s great-grandfather—John Winston Farley—was living in West Orange, New Jersey, when the great man moved his laboratory there in 1887. The two men became fast friends, and John Winston’s son Arthur—who was twelve at the time, but who would later become Farley’s grandfather—had idolized the inventor. At the turn of the century, when Arthur was twenty-five, his young wife Sarah gave birth to a baby boy whom they promptly named Edison Alva, avoiding the more obvious Thomas Alva Edison, which when attached to the family name would have become Thomas Alva Edison Farley, a somew
hat cumbersome handle. The first Edison Alva Farley later grew up to be the father of the current Edison Alva Farley, Jr.

  “Such are the wonders of naming babies in America,” Farley told Guthrie, “though everybody calls me Junior now.”

  Guthrie, no stranger to the transmogrification of given names, not to mention surnames, took the photographer’s extended hand, and said, “Everybody calls me Guthrie now,” which was true.

  “So what can I do for you?” Farley asked. “A passport photo? A portrait photo to send to your fiancée in Seoul?” and here he winked. Guthrie winked back, though he didn’t get the joke.

  “What I need, actually,” Guthrie said, “is some information about a video you made back in March sometime.”

  “Was this a wedding?” Farley asked. “A graduation?”

  “No. This was a private session with a woman. Just her and the video camera.”

  Farley looked at him.

  “Would you remember making a video such as that?” Guthrie asked.

  Guthrie already knew that last March Farley had shot a video of Lainie Commins, aka Lori Doone, in a half hour interlude that could have been construed as compromising, not to mention dirty. He gave Farley a little time to think things over. It was always best to get the percolator boiling before you started pouring the coffee.

  There was, in fact, a percolator bubbling away on the little hot plate in one corner of Farley’s studio, though the photographer had not yet offered Guthrie a cup. The studio was in what was called a “cluster unit” on Wedley and Third, close to the Twin Forks Shopping Mall in “downtown” Calusa, such as it was. The mall had been a disaster. There was talk of turning it into a huge multilevel parking lot that would service the entire “downtown” area, though everyone in Calusa knew there was, in reality, no true “downtown” now that all the shopping had moved further south on the Trail into far more successful malls than Twin Forks.

  The studio was somewhat small, as was true of most spaces in these beautifully but sparingly designed cluster buildings that had become the vogue over the past few years. One entire wall was composed of floor-to-ceiling windows that slid open onto an interior courtyard spilling good northern light. Another wall was covered with standing bookshelves that held an array of cameras, boxed film, and a stereo system complete with a tape deck, tuner, CD player, turntables for both 78 and 45 rpms, and a pair of giant speakers. Guthrie had never been in a photographer’s studio that didn’t have its share of very expensive stereo equipment. Many junkie burglars broke into photography studios not to steal the cameras, which were often etched for identification, but to steal the audio equipment, which was easier to fence. Along a third wall a battery of lights was set up to illuminate a seamless backdrop against which a stool was positioned.