by Kailin Gow
The Blue Room
The Blue Room
VOL. 5
Kailin Gow
The Blue Room (The Blue Room Vol 5)
Published by Kailin Gow Books
Copyright © 2014 Kailin Gow
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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First Edition.
Printed in the United States of America.
DEDICATION
For my readers
Prologue
Staci
We all remember moments from our childhoods: the moments that change us. The moments when we realize – I am not like everybody else.
There is something about me that is different. There is something about me that is strange.
I am alone, and there is a mystery in me.
I was four when I realized it.
But of course, realization comes in stages. I was two when I first realized that being hungry didn't mean you would get food. Most babies in Nevada, in Vegas, they learn that when they cry for milk, they get it. When their stomachs growl, they get fed. Not me.
My mother worked hard. In fact, my mother worked harder than anyone else I knew. Even when I was a toddler, I knew that much. She always seemed so tired. When she held me to her breast at the end of a long day, when she cuddled and coddled me and held me tight, she always shook – just a little bit – like the day was too much for her, like she couldn't bear my weight on top of all the other burdens she was carrying: on her shoulders and in her heart.
And so, when I was too, I realized that milk was not always something we had in the house, not when it no longer came from my mother's breast, nor was food something we could always have. My mother gave me what she was able, but life at the motel was expensive, and cleaning only paid some of the bills some of the times, and so sometimes we lived in darkness when the electricity was out, and sometimes we had no phone and my mother had to stand in a payphone to call her clients, hoping against hope she'd find a quarter's worth of change on a Vegas sidewalk.
All this I knew, slowly. All this I came to early in life.
Vegas is a place of highs and lows, joy and sorrows. It's a place when you can win big or lose the shirt off your back. That much I learned before I could walk. Some days my mother would be lucky. Some days she'd get a gig where the master of the house tipped her a few extra dollars, and those dollars seemed like enough to make us millionaires. Then she'd buy me ice cream and soda and all the treats we could imagine; then we'd turn up the heat so hot the radiator burned our toes just to feel warm, together, just to feel like we had something.
And then there were times when work was slow, when people cancelled or refused to pay, when my mother was too sick or too worn out and she'd miss a spot on someone's floor and they'd dock her pay accordingly. Then we'd go without: food, heat, even water, sometimes. Then we'd learn to adjust on rice, noodles, bread, nothing. Whatever we could afford.
Life wasn't easy. Not in Vegas. Maybe not anywhere.
And the whole time life went on being not easy, it never occurred to me why. Why my mother was poor and I was poor and we were both so hungry, so desperately hungry all the time – I had no idea. I just thought that was the way the universe worked. That was my big guess. People are poor and hungry because God picks people to suffer. He says: this one shall live in a great glass house with servants and gold and a view of the sea, and this one shall live in a motel and get kicked out, sometimes, and shall always, always be hungry.
That's what I thought, until I was four. I don't know how I even got that idea into my head. My mother wasn't religious at all, and the only thing of religion I learned about was whatever the street preacher said outside all the casinos, those street preachers who cried THE DAY OF THE LORD IS AT HAND and wrote Bible Verses on placards and tried to steer people away from sin, away from degradation, away from vice. Away from sex.
Sometimes, now, at the Blue Room, I think about those preachers. I think about the way they called warnings to all the businessmen who went into those glittering golden dens of iniquity in search of money, or drink, or drugs, or flesh. I think about them and how they warned so many people, but about how nobody took them seriously, and nobody ever stopped to look at them.
There was no street preacher outside the Blue Room, but I wonder – what if there had been one? What if he had said to me: “Staci, you're going down a dangerous road, and there's no way out for you.” What if he had said to me: “Staci, this is not the path the Lord would have you take.” Would I have listened?
I don't think so. But I don't know. Sometimes I like to think that I could have stopped myself from ending up here: a prostitute in a high-end hotel, working for some of the most powerful men in the world, yet feeling more powerless than I had ever felt in my entire life. If I'd only cared less about what happened to Rita, maybe – if my desire to track down what happened to my best friend, to seek revenge, hadn't been so strong...
If I hadn't had such powerful feelings for Mr. X...
If I hadn't slept with Terrence, and even started falling for him, too...
So many if onlys.
So many what ifs.
Maybe that's what life is: in Vegas, in Hollywood, in all these places are made and lost. Just a whole lot of what ifs, ands, and buts. Just a lot of excuses for the way things turned out.
But of course, when I was four, something different happened altogether. When I was four, I noticed that it wasn't just God or dumb luck or blind fate that made me different from the other little girls I saw at school, with their neatly pressed dresses and the ribbons in their hair, the ones who always looked so well-cared-for, so well fed. It was something else.
Every morning, they had a mommy and a daddy to drop them off at school. Two parents holding them, kissing them, stroking their hairs, smoothing their forehead.
And me, I just had my mother, who carried the weight of the world on her shoulders, who always looked like tears were standing in her eyes
Just me and her. That's all I had. That's all the world to me.
And somehow I got it into my head that this, this was the source of the difference between me and all those other kids, between my mother and all those other safe, warm, well-fed mothers I saw after school in the hallways, on the stairs. If I'd only had a father, I thought, it would be different.
But I didn't want to ask. At least, not at first. I didn't dare to.
My mother had so much on her mind, already. So much on her plate. And even at that age, deep down, I knew that there were some things that would cause my already-suffering mother great pain. Somehow I knew that this – this great, gaping absence – was one of them. Children are smarter than adults give them credit for. Especially if they've suffered. Suffering sharpens all the senses. It doesn't build character, but it certainly builds strength. Children who suffer don't have the luxury of waiting for things to happen to them. They have to learn enough about the world around them to control it. That's what I did. Or at least, what I thought I did.
I waited. I bided my time. I held off until such time as I was able to ask the question, the great question, the question that now dominated my whole childish life and became my only obsession.
I waited until Christmas Eve, which my mother never had off. I waited at the motel, alone, under the watchful eye of Frank the receptionist, who smoked a lot and cursed a lot and let a lot of pro
stitutes upstairs but had a soft spot for me and made sure I didn't get abducted or run over by any unsavory characters, which is probably the nicest thing he ever did for anybody his whole life long, now that I think about it. I waited until my mother came home that night, past midnight, so that it was actually Christmas morning. I waited and waited until it was almost dawn. Then she came home.
She found me sitting on the motel stairway leading up to our room.
“Honey?” She looked worried. “Is is everything okay/”
She unlocked the room for me.
“I got you something,” she said. “Not much...but I wanted you to have a Christmas present.”
It was beautiful.
She had taken a series of rags – probably cleaning supplies bleached past use – and sewn them into shapes; these she'd stitched together with a few buttons and a thread grin and made a doll with a crooked face. She must have spent hours on it.
I hugged it tight. For a moment, I wanted to forget about my question there and then; I was so grateful for her kindness. But my curiosity then – as it did so many years later with Rita – won out. And so I asked her the question that had been gnawing on my brain for months.
Mommy, I said.
Mommy, where's my daddy?
I could see my mother frown. I could see the tears spring to her eyes.
“Why do you ask?” she said. It was a careful answer.
“At school...” I lied. “Somebody asked me. And...I didn't know the answer. You always say when I have a question and I don't know the answer to ask you, right?”
“Right.” She turned away so I could not see her tears. “Your daddy...let's just say. Once upon a time, there was a handsome prince. And that was your daddy. And he fell in love with an ordinary peasant girl. And their love was so strong that it made a baby – and that baby was you. But the laws of the prince's land were very strict. And those laws said that princes couldn't marry peasant girls or have babies with them. And so he had to go away before you were born.”
“But didn't he love us?”
I was horrified – I'd expected her to tell me that he was dead, or that something had happened to him. Maybe he was even in jail, like some of the convicts I used to see picking up trash on the side of the road. But no. He'd just left.
“Didn't he love us?” I cried in horror.
My mother sighed. “He was the most loving man I ever knew,” she said. “Believe me when I tell you that. Loving and handsome. Just like a prince. But princes don't make the rules in fairy tales. They don't get to decide things for themselves. There are just rules...that's all.”
“I hate rules!” I cried.
“I just want you to think of him as a prince,” she said. “Like a handsome prince. That's how I like to remember him, too. And whenever you think of him, I want you to remember that the love we had – it was just like a fairy tale. But now it's better, just the two of us.”
“But Mommy,” I cried. “Don't fairy tales end with happily ever after?”
My mother took a deep sigh.
“They do,” she said.
“So why doesn't this one?”
The tears kept falling from her face, onto me.
“I don't know, Staci,” she said, weeping softly. “I'm so sorry. I just don't know.”
Chapter 1
I need a break.
Well, I need a lot of things, but right now, a break's at the top of the list.
What I've been through in the past couple of weeks is enough to drive anybody crazy, let alone someone as prone to obsessive thoughts as me. I've lost my virginity, slept with not one but two men, become a prostitute in order to find out what happened to my missing best friend, seen my new colleague's brains blown out against a wall, been robbed, been threatened, met my long-lost father, found out my mother's maybe not going to die after all, and fallen in love – and not necessarily in that order. My mind can't handle it.
And now Terrence is gone.
Terrence – my first friend at the Blue Room, the first man I'd ever let put his hands on me in ways that made me scream and sigh, my first...many things, and my second lover. Terrence, my pimp, my not-boyfriend, the man who drives me wild.
I should have picked up his texts. I should have answered his calls. I should have realized that when he said we need to talk, that meant that things were urgent, that if I didn't go then, I might never see him again. But I didn't. I was lost – in love, in the fantasy, with Alexander Blue, my mysterious Mr. X., at one of his posh LA parties, lost in how that silky dress he'd bought for me felt against my skin, lost in the ecstasy of making love to him, in pretending that I was really his girlfriend, not the hooker he'd paid for for the evening. I'd let myself fall into comfort, let myself get used to that fantasy – the fantasy Terrence used to call the most dangerous of all.
And now I might never see Terrence again.
I am shocked at how ruthless the Blue Room could be: even to its own. Terrence wasn't just some outsider – he was a Blue. He was family. And yet someone had decided he wasn't right for management. Someone had decided to oust him. Could it be his own father? No, Clarence Blue wasn't in good enough health to make any major decisions at the moment, especially about something as important as the company he owned. No, I thought, it had to be someone else. Someone altogether more devious. And I already had my suspicions about who it might be.
Veronica Taylor.
Ronnie Blue.
Terrence's stepmother and ex-girlfriend, former cheerleader and cocktail waitress turned the most powerful trophy wife this side of the Upper East Side.
The most dangerous woman I had ever met.
I'd heard tell of her. She'd taken control of Blues Industries – from the hotels to Blues Records – the moment her husband went into that suspicious coma. She'd had a roving eye, too, from what I heard; she wasn't interested so much in Clarence as in his two handsome sons, and apparently she'd made Never Knight, Danny Blue's girlfriend, Public Enemy Number One. I only hoped she wasn't planning on doing the same thing to me.
Was she behind Terrence Blue's ousting, I wonder.
But I don't have time to wonder. Right now, all I want to do is escape. Spend some time with my family. With the father I never knew I had, and who even now I don't fully understand. He's refused to tell me why he stayed away all those years – or rather, I'm not sure he even knows himself. He tells me that he never even knew my mother was pregnant, that it was Mom who left him? Do I believe him? I don't know what to believe anymore, but right now, he and Mom seem like safer bets than the people at the Blue Room, especially now that Terrence isn't around. I'm not safe here, and whatever happened to Rita could maybe happen to me.
And what did happen to Rita, anyway? She'd been involved with Mr. X. – who I had thought was the same man as Alexander Blue. That's why I'd taken the Mr. X. job, after all. To find the truth about Rita's disappearance. But they'd shuffled up the names. Mr. X. had been reassigned to Xander Blue, who was, like me, looking into corruption at the Blue Room. And the old Mr. X? Gone into the ether – or else back into that alphabet soup.
I would have to get through twenty-five men before being sure that I had the right one. And maybe not even then. Not exactly the best of odds. And a good way to do your back in, if nothing else.
I go to the office of Josephine Waters, madam extraordinaire, to put in my official request for time off. I have it all planned out. I'm going to cite family reasons: my mother's slow and unexpected recovery from her illness, my father's reappearance. I'm going to ask for a weekend off, at least. And then – maybe I can just disappear. Buy a car in cash in Vegas and drive to where nobody knows me. Where nobody can find me. Not even them.
But to my surprise, Josephine Walters refuses my request.
“Terrence may have given you special treatment,” she says with a little sniff. “But I'm not in the habit of playing favorites. You've already gotten several days off this month, and I simply cannot allow you to have another. Not afte
r I've already booked you a client.”
“Mr. X?” My mouth falls open. I hadn't expected him to book me again so soon after our last steamy encounter.
Mrs. Walters rolls her eyes. “No, not Mr. X.,” she says, with a sigh. “Mr. O. Someone new. It''s not good for you to become so reliant on a single...patron,” she says. “You need to get used to diversification if you want to survive in this business.”
“But...” I try to protest. I have enough on my plate at the moment without worrying about sleeping with yet another man, especially one I've never met before. Work's the absolute last thing on my mind.
“No ifs, ands, or buts,” she says sharply. “You do your job or you quit. It's that simple. We're putting you up in this hotel – it's time you started to earn your keep. I hate to be harsh, but this is the way the business is for all the other girls here, the ones Terrence wasn't...ahem....seeing. And I have no interest in being unfair to them by giving you extra time off. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” I say, miserably, shuffling out of there. I feel like an unruly student taken down a peg by a particularly sharp teacher. Why does Mrs. Walters always have that effect on me?
I sigh as I make my way back to my room.
Maybe I should just quit, I think. Maybe I should just run. I've gotten all out of the Blue Room I'm ever going to get, and every day I spend here makes me aware of just how rotten this place is, and just how little I want to stay. I'm not safe here, I know that much.
It would be so easy to just leave. Never come back. Forget everything.
Then I pass by a familiar hotel room, and my heart stops.
The door is open.
I see ghosts: images. Roz's back arched, her mouth an O of ecstasy. Roz's long lustrous hair. Roz dead, her brains blown out, her glassy eyes.
Just as it was that day some weeks ago when I saw Roz with her lover, hours before she was killed. Minutes, even. Just as it was the day Roz was killed, and nobody ever found her murderer. Was it the man she'd been sleeping with? Someone else?
