by Gow, Kailin
I shake my head.
There's too many suspects, I think. Too many sick, twisted people in the world of the Blue Room. But which one of them is the killer?
I know what I have to do, if I want to get any closer to solving this mystery. I'm going to have to stay away from Terrence Blue, if I want to keep my heart and my virginity intact. And I'm going to have to get my hands on the mysterious Mr. X.
The latter part is no easier than the former. All the girls want Mr. X. as their next assignment. He's loaded, from what I gather, handsome, good in bed, a long-term prospect, looking for a courtesan, not a one-night gig. Sure, he might be a cold-blooded murderer, but that doesn't seem to bother the girls I eavesdrop on in the cafeteria too much. Mr. X. is the only thing on their minds and on their lips. Terrence and his affairs are a forgotten memory.
“I heard he's heartbroken,” said one girl, who couldn't possibly have heard anything at all. “I heard he cried all night when he heard Roz killed herself. I heard he's never going to come back to the Blue Room again – that nobody could take Roz's place.”
“I heard he had already picked out the engagement ring,” said another.
“So why'd she kill herself?” another girl pointed out.
She shrugged. “Maybe she had a secret in her past. Maybe she was pregnant by a different client. Maybe she had a disease.”
“How would she get a disease, stupid? They test all our clients beforehand.”
“Maybe she slept with someone who wasn't a client.”
“Why would she do that? She loved Mr. X!”
Her companion shrugged. “Roz is a mystery,” she said, throwing up her hands.
The question of who Mr. X's new pick would be, occupied the girls of the Blue Room for the rest of the afternoon. Before dinner, however, it was Ben who found me in the hallway.
“Psst...” He beckoned me into the corridor. “Staci. I heard the real news.”
“What is it?”
“They told Mr. X.,” he said. “About Roz. He's heartbroken.”
“Apparently,” I say.
“Apparently he really loved her.” He sighs. “He says he's done with the Blue Room.”
My heart skips a beat. If Mr. X. is done with the Blue Room, there goes my chance at ever learning what happened to Rita – or to Roz.
“There's got to be something we can do to convince him,” I say.
He shrugs. “I overheard Terrence talking on his cell phone. He tried everything.”
Somehow I don't believe him. Terrence might have money, but I have one thing he doesn't have. Desperation. This is my last chance to learn the truth now that Rita's dead, and I'm not about to let it slip away.
“Wait right here,” I say.
I march straight to Mrs. Walters' office and demand to see her immediately. Her secretary looks flustered, confused, but I keep insisting until finally she gives up and lets me in.
“Miss Atussi?” Mrs. Walters looks up coolly when I arrive. “What a surprise!” Her voice is faint. “What can I do for you, Miss Atussi?”
“I want Mr. X.,” I say. I keep my voice calm, businesslike.
Mrs. Walters looks bemused. “So does every girl here,” she says. “I'm afraid Mr. X. is grieving, and is indisposed to visit us all at the moment.”
“I've got something they haven't got,” I say. It's my trump card, and it makes me sick to use it, but right now I haven't got a choice.
“What's that, dear?”
“I'm a virgin.”
Technically, anyway, but men like Mr. X. are probably big on technicality. Men like that just want the idea of a woman, all innocent and sweet, to deflower.
If he thinks I'm innocent and sweet, boy, he's got another thing coming.
Mrs. Walters looks amused. “A few days ago you were fretting about losing your virtue – now you're barging into my office demanding to sell your virginity to a man you've never met.” Her eyebrows arch. “My, how you've grown.”
“Not sell.” I keep my eyes steely upon her. I have a plan, and I'm going to put in into action.
“No?”
“Give.”
She looks at me in surprise. “In market terms – your virginity can probably net you at least twenty thousand dollars more than a single...evening.”
“I know.”
“There are other patrons,” she says, “patrons richer still than Mr. X., who can offer you even more than that. Granted, their tastes are a bit more...extreme...”
“I don't care,” I say. This has to work – this has to – or all I've been through now will be in vain. “Call him up. Tell him you're sending him a virgin, on the house, to help make up for the damage of what he's been through.”
If he really loved Roz and Rita the way he said he did – not all the virgins in the world would be enough to tempt him.
“That's unprecedented, Miss Atussi. May I ask why the insistence?”
“It's an investment,” I say. “I hear a girl can go a long way with Mr. X. If I'm going to get into this business, I'm going to do it right. After all, I didn't say I wouldn't charge in the future...”
Now Mrs. Walters smiles.
“You are a businesswoman,” she says. “If you don't mind stepping outside – I'll telephone him and relay your...offer.”
The waiting is excruciating. I tap my toes so often the secretary looks like she's about to throw her desktop monitor at me. But at last Mrs. Walters opens the door and greets me with an inscrutable smile.
“It looks like your proposal has made an impression on our Mr. X.,” she says. “He has agreed to see you next Saturday night, the 19th. Eight o'clock.” She arches her brow. “Mr. Blue will be away next weekend on business.”
Immediately I want to fall through the floor in shame. But I don't let her see.
“Perfect,” I say, as cool and collected as she is. “I'll put it in my calendar.”
Chapter 3
So much is rushing through my mind. I can't even focus. I know that I've just set myself up for one of the biggest – no, the biggest – challenges of my life. What will happen next? I have no idea. All I know is – the last two women who slept with Mr. X. ended up dead or disappeared. And now I've just given up everything I have, including the shot at a pretty bundle of cash, for a chance at being #3. What are you thinking, Staci? My own voice, judgmental and disapproving, echoes through my brain. What are you setting yourself up for? I could end up shot in an alley somewhere, like Roz. Or I could end up like Rita: completely vanished, with no trace of me anywhere in the world.
And still I want the gig. Still I'm willing to do it: if doing it is what it takes. Right now, I can't think about my own life, my own safety, whether or not it'll be my body some other girl finds in a hotel room someday next week. I can't think about Terrence Blue and his beautiful, brilliant blue eyes and those hands that make me scream in ecstasy, those hands that could have been responsible for so many murders. I can't even think about Roz or Rita, really, right now. What I want is something purer, something simpler, and something more straightforward than a person or a place. What I want is the truth. The truth, I feel, will set me free. If I could only know who killed Rita, who killed Roz, whether it was the same person or somebody different, whether Terrence Blue was responsible for both, my work here will be done. I'll stop feeling this ache in my heart, this emptiness, this feeling that something is missing. The truth, I tell myself, will fill that gap. It will make me whole again.
At the same time, though, I can't help but regret the money I'm giving up. Virgins fetch a high price on the open market – that much I know. I could have paid off a heck of a lot of family bills with the money I'm giving up. But there's a part of me that relishes that element of the truth. I'm not taking any money to have sex with Mr. X. I'm not taking his dirty money. What I'm doing gets paid in facts, and facts only.
My body is coiled tight from stress, from trauma, and from – I suspect – a certain degree of sexual frustration. After all, I've gotten u
sed to Terrence Blue's touch, to the way he can make my back arch and my toes curl. Going cold turkey is like quitting smack. My whole body's still craving him. It's a hunger I cannot feed, an itch I cannot scratch.
I pick up the phone and briefly consider calling the Never Knights. After all, Steve and Luc's cards still lie on my dressing table: the hope they offer glimmering before me. How easy it would be, I think, to just dial, to record a demo, to get into singing and get out of hooking – all before I'd even started. It would be like none of this ever happened.
But something has happened. One person is definitely dead, a second almost certainly. And there will be no rest for me, no peace, until I know.
I need to get out my tension somehow.
Head to the gym, I tell myself. Sweat it out. It'll have the added benefit of ensuring I'm extra buff when it comes to impressing the mysterious Mr. X. soon. I want a killer body – I'm hoping I don't mean in more ways than one. So I change into my lycra yoga pants and a tight-fitting white top and tie up my hair into a ponytail and head for the treadmill.
When I'm running, everything feels better, more intense. My sweat is pouring out of me, staining my white top so that my bra is visible beneath its contours; I can't even bring myself to care. All I want to do is run – run faster, run harder, run with more conviction, as if somehow running on this treadmill with enough effort will bring me where I want to go.
I'm in so much pain I don't even notice the numbers on the speedometer go up. I tell myself that pain is normal, to be expected, that I'm casting out pain, that I'm casting out darkness, that I'm casting out the worst parts of myself. I want to cast something else out, too – the part of me I don't want to face. The prostitute. The detective. The girl who can't stop thinking about what Terrence Blue can do. I want to cast out all those selves and be me again.
“Careful!”
A voice behind me makes me whirl around sharply so that I almost lose my balance.
“What do you want?” For a second I forget I'm supposed to be a Blue Girl – compliant, fulfilling every fantasy. I'm just me – and I'm annoyed.
“I just wanted to make sure everything's OK,” the man says.
He seems almost familiar, but I can't place him. He's very handsome – devastatingly so – with a chiseled face and neatly cut dark hair that shows off his hazel golden eyes perfectly, eyes framed with long lashes that women would kill to have. His sensual lips are the color of rosy pearl. He's the handsomest man I've seen here – the Blues brothers excluded, and I give a little gasp in spite of myself.
“Why wouldn't it be?”
His eyes flicker over to the treadmill dashboard.
With surprise I note that I've been working out for three hours. A red flashing light is indicating something bad.
“You're pounding it pretty hard, there.”
His voice is friendly, non-threatening, barely even registering my outright hostility. I soften up. At once I remember that real people stay in the Blue Towers – not just hookers and patrons. Business travels. Captains of industry. Real people. Not like me. I feel embarrassed for how angrily I reacted.
“I'm sorry,” I say. “I get kind of out of it when I work out.”
He hands me a fresh towel and a cone of water from the water machine.
“Hey, I get you,” he laughs. “When someone tries to disrupt me, I'm a regular lion. I bite their heads off. I should have known better than to try and interfere with someone else.”
“It's cool,” I say.
“But health and safety and all that,” he gives a little laugh. “I'm pretty sure you need some water before you collapse on the treadmill.”
“Let's say I have a lot of tension to work out,” I say.
He laughs again, and I too can't help but smile. It's nice, I think – so nice – to be talking to someone normal, someone from outside the Blue world. Just another guest at a hotel. Who thinks I'm just another guest at a hotel. Someone treating me like a person again, not just a slab of meat.
“What's on your mind?” he says.
“Work stuff.” It's all I can say, really.
“Mergers and acquisitions,” he asks, with a wink.
Well, merging is certainly part of it, isn't it? “I'm in the entertainment industry,” I say.
“Oh,” he looks impressed. “Might I have seen you in anything recently?”
I flush, trying to come up with a good lie. At last, the truth seems easiest. “You're not exactly an actor, are you?”
“And here I was hoping you thought I was a Hollywood heartthrob,” he grins.
“Quick tip,” I say. “When you're in LA – if you have to ask 'have I seen you in anything,' the answer is usually no.”
“I find that surprising,” he says. “You've got presence.”
“I'm aspiring,” I say. “You'll find a lot of us here in LA.”
“I'm afraid it's all pretty new to me,” he says. “I'm from New York. I'm in finance.”
“Huh,” I tease him. “Own any companies I've heard of?”
He flushes slightly, and lets loose a boyish grin that brings out dimples so charmingly sweet that I can’t help but smile back at him. His teeth are Hollywood white. He could so easily be mistaken for a leading man actor or a GQ model.
“If you have to ask...”
“So you're an aspiring financier.”
“Something like that.”
Somehow, I doubt it. There's something about his easy charm, the way he takes my teasing straight on the chin, which makes me think he owns at least one company I've heard of, if not more.
It's nice to pretend, I think. I'm a failed actress, flirting with a finance guy in a hotel gym. I'm an aspiring singer, on the verge of her big break, flirting with just another guy she meets-cute in a typical place.
“In town for business or pleasure,” I ask him.
“Why can't it be both?” he winks at me. “That's the problem with our culture these days. Business or pleasure. Some of us love our work. Don't you?”
I'm all smiles. “Oh, it's the best profession.” And the oldest one, but I don't have to tell him that. “I love every minute of it.”
“You here long?”
“Oh, I live here..I mean, not here, here,” I lie. “I've just got the gym membership. It's important to have a good membership – if you're auditioning and things. Keeping in shape.”
“Looks like you're doing OK to me.”
“Thanks to the Blue Towers.”
“Well,” he says. “Will you be working out tomorrow?”
“That depends on how my quads feel,” I say.
“For my sake,” he says. “I hope they feel better very soon. Or at least before I fly back to the city. It’ll be nice to have something to look forward to while working out at the gym.”
“I'll be sure to let them know.”
And with that, I grab my gym bag and head out.
I sit for a while in my room after I shower, thinking about his smile, his easy charm. His golden eyes, and how they were so clear, so bright, so honest. How nice it would be, I think, to be with a man like that, to flirt, to laugh, to joke, to never have to explain. A world I might have belonged to, once upon a time. But with a heavy heart, it hits me: so violently I have to stop the tears springing to my eyes.
That's not my world anymore. And to tell the truth, I don't know if it ever will be again.
Chapter 4
The next few days, I find it difficult to concentrate. I have too much on my mind to focus on anything, least of all the approaching date with Mr. X. I tell myself that I get one shot at this guy – so I'd better blow his mind. Among other things, I think, nervously. The truth is, I don't know how to do too many of those other things. Aside from a few drunken fumbles here and there, my experience with Terrence is all I have. And while I know I enjoyed it, there's a part of me that still worries about my own skills. I know the scientific basics of the male anatomy, and I've figured out a few more tips and tricks from my time with
Terrence, but I still don't know half of what a guy like Mr. X. might expect.
I think back to Rita, to the time I spent with her. Anything she said to me that might help me better prepare for what comes next.
“Oh, you know.” I remember her smile, the glitter in her eyes as she sailed in one morning from one of her regular “dates.” “He's a very special man. And he shows me things...”
I remember how curious I was, not wanting to seem too naïve, not wanting to ask too many questions. I remember how I tried to ask what it was like without coming across like some little inexperienced co-ed.
“What kind of things?”
“I mean, sex – I always thought it was pretty cool, you know, but with him,” she sighed. “He really blows my mind.”
I remember how Roz looked – in those final moments before her death – her back arched, her hair falling long down her back, her eyes closed in such ecstasy and passion. Is that how I would look, with Mr. X's head between my legs?
I could hardly imagine it. I still didn't know what he looked like. I still didn't know whether or not he was responsible for Roz's death – or Rita's. All I knew was that, in a matter of days, Mr. X. would take my virginity, and I'd have to hope that I impressed him enough with my bedroom skills for him to take me into his confidence.
I get assigned to shadow duty on the Blue Room for the rest of the week: my way of scouting out patrons – and their ladies of the evening. I watch Scarlett, Brandi, and Julie as they perch seductively on various knees all evening, flitting from shadowy table to shadowy table until someone or other grabs their hand and slips a blue, sapphire bracelet on their wrists: the sign, I learn, that they've been “chosen” for the evening.
“Psst...” Ben whispers into my ear. “No staring.”
