by David Bishop
After a few minutes he heard someone turning the knob. The door opened narrowly. Jena Moves wouldn’t get paid to dance on many laps in the outfit Jack saw through her chained door—a snugly tied, pink terrycloth robe, a sleep-creation hairdo, and no makeup.
“Miss Ziegler?” Nora asked, leaning around to be seen through the crack. “Phoebe Ziegler from Durango, Colorado?”
“Yeah. So?” She ran the words together as if they were two syllables of the same word. She yawned and thumbed a wick of hair back behind her ear. “Do you know what fucking time it is? I work nights.”
Jack opened the unlatched screen far enough to wrap his hand around the edge. “We’re private investigators. We need your help on a case. It does not involve you directly. Take a minute and call your boss, Donny Andujar. Tell him Jack McCall is asking for your help.”
She brought her hand up to hold back her brassy hair, her right breast rising with the effort, and stared at Jack. “May I shut my screen while I call Donny?”
Jack smiled and released his hold on the screen door. She engaged the latch, and her pink slippers disappeared.
After a few minutes she came back and again flipped the latch off the screen. “Come in. This doesn’t involve any charges against me, right?”
“None,” Jack said as he handed her his card.
She pinched the card with two fingers along the outer edges, bowing it slightly, and looked at it as if it were radioactive.
The young dancer turned and walked further inside. Her pink robe had crusted grayish-tan splotches around her hips and on her butt. A brown throw rug centered the hardwood floor. The room had a faint musty odor Jack couldn’t identify. A half full bottle of gin sat on the side table beside its screw cap.
“Miss Ziegler, this is my partner, Nora Burke.”
Nora smiled. “Like Jack said, we’re not cops. We bring you no trouble.”
The lap dancer gnawed at her lip.
“Miss Ziegler,” Jack said, “I’ll bet you’re often treated a certain way because of the notions people have of what a dancer in a club like Donny’s must be like.”
She emitted a short humorless laugh.
“That happens to us, too. People react to us like we’re cops or out to give them a hard time. That’s not so. May I tell you why we’re here?”
Her eyes darted back and forth between the detectives. She was an attractive woman with a body whose forward thrust had not yet been pulled off course by gravity. Her wholesome look not yet spoiled, but Jack could see hardening taking root around her edges.
He motioned toward a blue fabric couch with a cigarette burn on one cushion. “Could we sit down?”
“Yes. Please. Have a seat.” Saying that, she sounded more like the honor student she had been in high school. “I apologize for forgetting my manners. You know, it’s just … well, you kinda caught me off guard. Ya know? Would you like some coffee? I have instant.”
“That would be nice,” Nora replied.
Phoebe lost the hold on her bathrobe; she grabbed it back, clutched it against her stomach and headed for the kitchen.
Jack looked around the living room. There were no family pictures. The shelves next to the TV held books on art, a few novels, and a college English Lit text. A table bathed in light from the window held a lumpy-looking shape covered with a soiled damp cloth. Whatever was under it would likely be the source of the damp odor.
He heard a microwave oven beep, then the scrape of stirring. After another minute Ms. Ziegler came back carrying a tray with three cups of steaming coffee, a small carton of half-and-half, a bowl of sugar, three spoons, and three square napkins folded half over. She had also put on some lipstick and pulled her brassy hair back into a pony tail. Her face had nicely-spaced features although her mouth was a bit large, her only visual imperfection.
“I hope the coffee’s okay.” When she sat the tray down, the morning light from the window blinked off her tightly pulled hair. “I’d really like to know why you’re here.”
Jack surmised she had grown up in a solid middle-class family. She had no streetwalker in her style—at least not yet.
He poured a little cream and stirred while he spoke. “Please call me Jack. Okay if I call you Phoebe?”
Her mouth curled a little. “I don’t get called by my real name very often.”
“Phoebe, our man was watching at the hotel during your recent tryst with Mayor Molloy. We have pictures of him entering the room and of the two of you in the hallway when the mayor left.” He handed her copies of the photos.
Her hand went to her mouth, the first knuckle of her clenched fist white against her teeth. She shook her head with enough force to dislodge the tears welling in her eyes. She wasn’t declaring no to anything, just spending the energy of not wanting to accept she had become the way she appeared in the pictures.
“Phoebe,” he said, “we aren’t trying to cause you any trouble. This is not about you. But I can tell you it will all come out in the end. Donny is cooperating. It would be best if you did too.”
“I got nothing to hide.” She put her cup down and closed her eyes, tears squeezing out through her lashes. She hid her face in her hands and peaked through her fingers as if they were bars on a private prison.
Nora said, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, don’t hide nothing.”
Phoebe’s body began to shake, her voice escaping in little more than whispers. “If it’s not Donny or I, who are you after?” She put her cup on the table and crossed her arms under the mounds of her breasts. “Oh, my God. Not the mayor?”
“We are not at liberty to say,” Nora answered in her gentler way, “not until we get more answers.”
Phoebe crossed her legs and tugged the robe up to cover her exposed knee.
She dances naked, yet she’s self-conscious about an exposed knee.
She retrieved her coffee, scrunched back into the big chair, and stared into the blackness that filled her cup. After a long moment she looked up, the whites of her eyes revealing her stress. “What do you want to know?”
“It would be political suicide for the mayor to leave his wife for you, so nothing will—”
“I want him to leave me alone,” she interrupted, “not leave his wife. He’s a pig.” The tip of her tongue darted out to wet her lips. “I argue with Donny every time, but he always offers me so much money that I do the mayor again. I hate myself for always giving in.”
“May I use your bathroom?” Nora asked.
“Through the curtain. On the right.”
Phoebe’s eyes watched Nora until Jack spoke to her. “We also know that you have had multiple sexual rendezvous with retired police detective Arthur Tyson, some that included his girlfriend.”
“Yes, Mr. McCall, I’m a whore! Okay? There. I said it. Are you satisfied now?” She pressed her eyes with her thumb and index finger, then dropped her hand and spoke in a lower tone. “I sell my body.” Through her sobs, she stammered, “Can you imagine a man who farts while he’s fucking? Arthur Tyson is a worse animal than the mayor.”
Nora came back through the curtain. When Phoebe looked away, Nora gave Jack a short headshake. She had found nothing indicating Phoebe had an addiction to anything.
“Why, Phoebe?” Nora asked. “Why do you do it? Sex is a gift, not a commodity.”
Phoebe took in a long, slow breath and let it out the same way. “DC has fabulous sculpture art. I came to see it, to study it, to work while researching schools that taught sculpting.” She fussed with the hem on her robe. “I thought I would work a few months while deciding on a school. I waited tables some back home at the Ore House in Durango, so two years ago I took a job at Donny’s waiting tables. They provided outfits just big enough to stay on, and the girls taught me how to move and lean in toward the guys to improve my tips. Some of the girls at Donny’s kept urging me to do the deed, saying I could make a lot of tax-free cash. It wasn’t their fault though. They didn’t make my decision; I did.”
Phoebe see
med comfortable talking with Nora, so Jack took their cups and went into the kitchen to make fresh coffee. Sometimes you can hear what people are saying between the lines better when you’re not also watching them. Her story came out as one she had wanted to tell for a long time, but couldn’t say to her family.
“Donny introduced me to one of the regular customers. A harmless older guy. His name is Randolph Harkin. He’s a curator at the National Portrait Gallery. Donny knew I loved art and sculpture. On my shift Donny would let me just sit and talk with Mr. Harkin. He was really shy around the girls, but he would relax when I got him talking about art. He was always inviting me to come to the National Portrait Gallery. Finally I went. He gave me a private after-hours tour. No funny stuff. He was a perfect gentleman.”
She wedged her hands between her clasped legs, the pink robe pushed down by her fingers.
“We spent hours. He let me look and patiently answered all my questions. It renewed my longing to be a sculptor. I spent a very long time looking at Ferdinand Pettrich’s marble bust of Andrew Jackson, our seventh president. Pettrich sculpted Jackson in 1836. It’s still as spectacular as the day he finished it. Jackson’s hair. The definition in his face. If you’re ever there, you must see it.”
Nora promised she would.
Jack came back into the room with fresh coffee, just as Phoebe said, “It was the most inspiring evening of my life.”
Her long fingers overlapped when she wrapped them around the warm cup Jack handed her. She looked at Nora with moist eyes and spoke through almost unmoving lips.
“I’m not a whore. I don’t … not with just anybody. It started with Harkin, then the mayor, then Tyson. There’s been no one else.”
She tapped the cup with her red fingernails, then extended her fingers, frowning when she saw the chipped polish. “I never gave a lap dance to anyone before Harkin. The girls keep telling me Donny’s is a great place to meet wealthy, important men. One night the bartender gave me a typed note that had been left for me at the bar: ‘When Harkin comes in tonight,’ the note said, ‘give him anything he wants.’ Folded inside the note was a thousand in cash! That night I did the deed for money for the first time.”
“When was that?” Jack asked.
“A long time ago.”
Nora asked, “How long?”
“Well, I’d only been at Donny’s about two months—no, less than that. I’d guess twenty months back, around that.”
“Who left the note with the thousand dollars?”
“Donny swears he didn’t, but I still believe he did. I mean, like, who else? Right? After that first night, Harkin became what the girls called a monther and he paid me. Toward the end he was paying twelve hundred each time.”
Jack held up his hand like a traffic cop. “What do you mean ‘toward the end?’”
“About two months ago Harkin stopped coming in the club, mid-February, I think.”
Jack moved around and sat on the edge of the coffee table close to Phoebe.
“When all this comes out,” he said, “the mayor and Tyson have the power and connections to leave you holding the bag. It’s time to tell what you know. Why did Donny push you to have sex with Harkin?”
“I don’t know what made Harkin special,” she said, punctuating each syllable with short, jerky shakes of her head. She wiped her eyes with the end of the dirty robe tie. “I should never have left home.”
“Are your folks still alive?” Nora asked. “Are you okay with them?”
“Yeah … It would just kill my mom if she knew what I was doing.” Phoebe sat still. Her eyes fixed on the brown carpet. A truck went by. A fly landed on top the wet cloth over what Jack now realized had to be a sculpture in progress. Then Phoebe continued as if she had not paused. “Mom thinks I work in the office at Donny’s. They don’t even know what kind of club it is. I love the money, but I hate myself for being weak.” She interlaced her fingers and hung her hands over the crown of her head.
“Life is really weird, you know? I used to think of my hometown as dull, now my memories of it seem, I don’t know … safe, I guess.” She gave a glimpse of a quirky smile. “In another year I should have enough money to go home and then go through school without having to work part time.”
“May I look?” Nora gestured toward the towel-shrouded figurine on the sculpting table.
Phoebe nodded and blushed. “Let me remove the cloth.”
Nora gasped and moved aside so Jack could see. The lump turned out to be a clay sculpture of a woman in a ragged dress, gazing heavenward. The face was Phoebe’s.
“Oh,” Nora breathed, “this is beautiful. Do you have more?”
“I have some at a friend’s house. She’s a photographer. Do you really like it?”
“You stay with this, girl. You’ve got talent.” Nora glanced at Jack, who retook the lead.
“Phoebe, did you keep the note the bartender gave you?”
“Yes. I’m probably silly, but somehow I figured it might prove something if I ever got … I don't know. In trouble, I guess.” She shrugged. “Do you want to see it?”
“No,” Jack said. “I want it. If you ever need me to return it, I will.”
“What are you gonna do with it?”
“For starters, I’ll find out whether or not the note was from Donny. I’ll let you know.”
“I guess it won’t hurt and I would like to know for real if he sent it. I’ll get it.”
Phoebe came back into her living room and handed Jack the note. She also brought Polaroids she had taken of several of her other sculpted pieces, the ones she had dropped off to have professionally photographed.
Jack looked at one picture, the sculpted painful expression on the face of dead actor James Dean, and another of a picador driving a lance into the shoulder of a bull. He handed them to Nora. After they complimented her work, Jack startled her back to the present.
“Tell me about Troy Engels.”
“Donny says he’s a V.I.P. He hoots and ogles the girls. He always comes in alone. We give him verbal foreplay because he sticks twenties in our G’s. He’s no big deal.”
She doesn’t know who he is.
Jack took the cup from her hand and set it on the table. “Are you ready to quit? Right now.” He tapped the table with the tip of his index finger. “Today.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Walk away. Don’t go in today. Quit. Go home. See your folks. Return to school. Become a sculptor. If you’re ever going to do it, why not today?”
Nora scooted down the couch so Phoebe could see her face.
The young lap dancer sat as still as one of her sculpted figurines, then said, “Maybe in another six months.”
Nora reached over and put her hand on Phoebe’s arm. “This will blow up before six months; we’d like to see you clear of the explosion. You’re in a bad life with a bad end. First, you hustled drinks. Then you started stage dancing, next came lap dancing. The number of men you’ve had sex with for money has grown from one to three. Soon there’ll be a fourth, then why not a fourteenth? It’s a slippery slope. Get off, or you’ll slide lower.”
Phoebe’s hands were shaking. “You’re right. I need to stop what I’m doing. I’ll tell Donny no more sex with the mayor. And I’ll gladly cut off that pig, Tyson. And if Harkin comes back, him too.”
“Phoebe, I meant quit totally. Cold turkey. Leave and go home, then back to school.”
If greed could be seen in the eyes, Jack saw it in hers.
“I want to, Mr. McCall, but I don’t have enough money. Not yet,” her sizeable bosom rose and fell with her animated speech. “I’ll only wait tables, stage dance, and do laps. There’s good money in lap dancing and most guys don’t take that long. I promise you, no more full sex. I will become a sculptor.”
They tried to persuade her for another ten minutes; then Phoebe arched her back. “Mr. McCall. Ms. Burke. I appreciate your interest in me and my art, but this is my decision. I’ll leave Donny�
��s by the end of this year and I’ll stop fucking for money immediately.”
The young lady was correct. It was her decision. Jack and Nora exchanged niceties with Phoebe Ziegler and left.
After three blocks, Nora looked at Jack. “The limping, rumpled old man Max saw visiting Donny’s club, that was you.”
They both laughed.
“That’s when you got Phoebe’s identity and set Donny up to tell her to cooperate.”
Jack nodded.
“Excuse me,” Nora said, after removing the grin from her face, “but, well, dumb is the word that comes to mind. You went to Donny’s from the hospital. In your condition you couldn’t have punched your way out of a paper bag.”
“I had the angles covered.”
“Oh? You had the angles covered? I’ll tell you what you had. You had a concussion. What if you’d passed out? What about that angle, Mr. 007?”
He stopped at the light.
“Well? What if you had passed out?”
“How long you know’d me, missy?”
“Damn it. Drop the cute cowboy crap.” She put a stern look on her face and crossed her arms, elevating her cleavage, a bra strap teasing his eye. “I’ve known you the better part of two years,” she said. “Now answer my question.”
He curled his hand around his wrapped steering wheel and squeezed. “If I could walk, I had to go. Donny didn’t expect me.”
Jack drove on in silence, figuring she knew he was right.
He knew she was right, too.
Chapter 26
After another mostly sleepless night watching old movies, and a late call to Nora, Jack didn’t call Clark’s Janitorial Service until ten in the morning. He gave his name as Walter Bartholomew.
“I’ve recently acquired two local office buildings,” he said, “for which I need a new janitorial service.” Gladys Clark quickly agreed that she and her husband Alan would meet Mr. Bartholomew for lunch in two hours.
Jack arrived at the restaurant fifteen minutes early and, after arranging for a quiet rear booth, he called Nora at the office. “I’m sorry I called you so late last night. I didn’t realize it was nearly two. You should have told me to take a flying jump and hung up.”
