Simone Kirsch 01 - Peepshow

by Leigh Redhead

‘God, I don’t know exactly. I’m a size twelve. About five seven?’

  ‘Bra cup?’

  ‘B.’

  He made a note, put out his cigarette and leaned back in the chair with his hands behind his head, ‘You can make a lot of money in tabletop,’ he said. ‘A lot. But you’ve got to be motivated. You can’t just sit on your arse and expect it to come to you. It won’t.’

  I nodded, pretending to take him seriously.

  ‘You’ve got to be able to talk to the guys, flirt with them. You’ve got to be bubbly and outgoing. There’s an art to it.’

  ‘To hustling?’ It just slipped out. Jim gave me a sharp look. ‘We see it as customer service. Hustling’s something prostitutes do. If you don’t understand the difference then maybe you’re in the wrong place.’

  Ouch. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—’

  He waved my apology away. ‘It’s OK, don’t mind me, I’m just tired.’ He offered me a conciliatory smile.

  ‘Diet Coke?’ He pulled two cans from a bar fridge under the desk. ‘We have to be really careful here. The laws are outrageous. You get too close to a customer during a dance—the wowsers can say that’s prostitution, close us down.’ He took my contact details and photocopied my driver’s license, which I wasn’t real crazy about. ‘We need girls Friday and Saturday nights. Are you right for tonight?’

  ‘Sure.’ I sipped my Diet Coke. It tasted like wet cardboard.

  ‘Good, be here at eight so we can show you around.

  By the way, what’s your working name?’

  ‘Vivien.’ My alter ego for the past three years.

  Jim made a note, stood up and unlocked the door. I followed him out across the club. A man with a vacuum cleaner harnessed to his back sucked cigarette butts off the carpet. As we descended the stairs Jim asked, ‘I’m curious, why did you come to the Red Room? Why not Goldfinger’s or Men’s Gallery?’

  ‘A friend of mine used to work here. Chloe?’

  He looked blank.

  ‘Paris was her working name.’

  ‘Oh yeah, little blond chick, great tits.’

  ‘Plus I heard it was really busy now after the, you know . . .’

  ‘After Frank was murdered?’ We were at the front doors and he stopped and looked at me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I winced. ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Very well. But don’t be sorry, you’re right. The place is pumping. You know what they say about any publicity being good publicity . . .’

  ‘See you tonight,’ I said. ‘It was nice to meet you.’

  ‘Ditto.’ Jim locked the heavy doors behind me.

  I took the number 96 tram from Bourke Street to St Kilda. I didn’t drive my car into the city—it was impossible to find a park. Plus I’d never got used to turning right from the left lane and there was a strong possibility the Futura would stall and a tram would run up the back of me.

  I wrote down everything I could remember about my encounter with Jim. Like they said at detective school: if it’s worth a mental note it’s worth a written note. Every time I thought of Chloe my guts clenched up. I was desperately worried. I was also paranoid. If someone glanced in my direction I imagined them working for Sal.

  I got off the tram at the end of Fitzroy Street and walked towards Elwood along the path that followed the bay. It would conveniently take me past the stretch of water where Frank had bobbed up, the closest I’d ever got to a crime scene.

  I passed the new St Kilda Sea Baths complex. I’d considered going to the gym there until I found out the annual membership fees cost four times what I’d paid for my car. It was for expensive people, the kind who never sweat because they don’t have any pores. Rollerbladers and bike riders whizzed past and the fashionable crowd sat at outdoor tables in front of the Stokehouse, drinking champagne in the sun. It seemed wrong that the day was so beautiful when Chloe was locked up somewhere.

  My slingbacks began to chafe so I kicked them off and walked barefoot in the sand. Sunbathers lazed on the beach and some folks were actually swimming in the flat, polluted water of the bay.

  I sat on the sand in front of Donovan’s restaurant where Frank’s body had eventually been dragged to shore. I’d read all the newspaper reports. Pity the poor tripper who’d mistaken him for a dolphin. The Westgate Bridge gleamed in the distance and I tried to figure out how Frank’s body had ended up in the bay.

  He’d only been in the water for a few hours so he must have been dumped somewhere around St Kilda beach. If it was from a boat the police hadn’t located it.

  I supposed someone could have just dragged him in, but the foreshore was so public, there were people around all hours of the day and night.

  A small rocky headland jutted out to the left of the beach. It adjoined the marina and had a small lighthouse.

  You could dump a body off there in relative privacy. To my right the pier stretched five hundred metres into the bay. It was wide enough to drive a car down. I wrote the theories in my notebook, sketched the scene for good measure and felt like a proper detective.

  I brushed the sand off my butt and continued home.

  On the way I bought a red icy-pole from a kiosk and ate it quickly before it melted. The path went right through the marina and I admired all the boats. The big ones were very ‘Miami Vice’ drug dealer and I wondered what had become of Don Johnson. I passed the sailing school at the southern end of the marina. A middle-aged man was cleaning one of the school’s yachts with a bucket of soapy water. It was twenty foot long and not very flash.

  No images of big-haired bikini-clad babes or guys called Pablo sprang to mind. I leaned on the high wire fence and watched him.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘Hello.’ The man straightened up to talk to me. ‘Can I help you with anything?’ He wore khaki shorts, deck shoes and a navy polo shirt.

  ‘A couple of things actually. Do you teach the sailing school?’

  ‘I certainly do.’

  ‘Good, because I jog past here a few times a week and I keep meaning to ask about sailing lessons.’

  ‘I can give you information about that.’

  ‘I also wanted some information about tides.’

  ‘Tides?’

  ‘That’s right.’ I smiled encouragingly. So far this inquiry agent business was a piece of piss.

  ‘Hang on a sec.’ He put down his bucket and climbed off the boat onto the wooden decking, let himself out of a gate in the fence, and offered his hand.

  ‘Reg Bannister.’

  ‘Simone Kirsch.’

  ‘You have a pink tongue, Simone.’

  ‘Red icy-pole, Reg,’ I said. ‘Can’t be helped.’

  He laughed and I followed him to the school headquarters, a prefab shed that shook when we walked inside. The walls were covered with posters of sailing boats and complicated looking marine charts.

  ‘Do you have any sailing experience?’ Reg asked.

  ‘I worked on a prawn trawler when I was seventeen,’

  I said. ‘Does that count?’

  ‘’Fraid not. What you’d need is the beginners’ course.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Private lessons or group?’

  ‘Group. That would be cheaper, right?’

  Reg picked up a brochure from a stack on his desk.

  ‘We run group lessons for beginners at ten am Saturday and Sunday right through the summer. It’s thirty dollars for an hour and a half and you need to book. The information’s all there.’ He handed me the leaflet. ‘Now what was it you wanted to know about tides?’

  ‘Say something washed up on St Kilda beach,’ I said, ‘right in front of Donovan’s, at about seven in the morning on the third of November this year. What direction would it have come from?’

  ‘What are we talking about? A plastic cup? A life raft? A boat?’

  ‘A dead body.’

  It dawned on him. ‘You’re talking about that bloke, Mafia guy, with the strippers, some Italian name . . .’
<
br />   ‘Parisi.’

  ‘That’s the one. Cops were all over here a week ago, checking out boats, talking to people. Didn’t ask about tides though. Guess they got their own people for that.’

  He looked at me intently. ‘What’s it to you? You know the bloke?’

  ‘I’m a private detective, assigned to the case.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Reg had a good old chuckle. ‘You’re not a private detective.’

  ‘Yes I am.’ I took out my wallet and showed him my license. Reg examined it, still chuckling, and handed it back. Wait till he told the boys at the sailing club. He tapped some keys on his laptop and connected to the Internet. ‘I’m just going to the VCA Victorian tide tables site,’ he said. ‘Let’s see, tide had been coming in for about an hour . . .’

  ‘He was in the water for about two hours,’ I said.

  Reg rubbed his chin. ‘I’d say he’d have come from somewhere near the lighthouse.’

  ‘What about from the sand or the pier?’

  ‘Doubt it. The way the currents move, it was most likely the lighthouse or a boat near there. If he’d been chucked off the pier he would have ended up at West St Kilda beach.’

  I wrote the information in my notebook, along with Reg’s name and the date and time.

  ‘Thanks, Reg, you’ve been very helpful. I’ll give you a call about the sailing.’

  He showed me out the door. ‘How long have you been a private detective?’ he asked.

  ‘Eighteen hours,’ I said, and walked back to the headland to have another look.

  I stood on the rocks and gazed down. More rocks and dirty water. I turned to Marine Parade and noticed a car park. I’d read the papers and watched the news and knew the cops hadn’t found blood or other evidence, so maybe Frank was killed elsewhere and his body driven here. Then the killer had to get the body from the car, over the bike path and across one hundred metres of grass. Frank was a big guy so it had to be someone strong. Or maybe a couple of people. I looked around on the ground for some clues—perhaps the murderer had dropped his business card. I wasn’t that lucky.

  Chapter Five

  The Red looked better at night. Low lighting made the poles gleam and hid the stains on the carpet. It was six pm and the place was empty, waiting for the night ahead.

  I walked up to the bar, my backpack bulging with clothes, shoes and makeup. A plump blond girl with enormous tits was polishing glasses.

  ‘Hi.’ I tried desperately to look her in the eye. ‘My name’s Vivien, it’s my first night.’

  ‘Hi, Viv, I’m Emma.’ She was English and sounded like a Spice Girl. ‘I’ll get Jimmy for you shall I?’ She talked into a phone behind the bar and Jim popped out of his unmarked door and called me over.

  ‘Hey, Vivien, follow me and I’ll take you to the girls’ room.’

  The girls’ room was behind the ‘staff only’ door.

  Jim knocked briefly and barged in without waiting for a reply.

  The room was long and narrow and a mirror with light bulbs took up most of the far wall. On either side of the mirror battered lockers were covered in sparkly stickers and names like Cleo and Misty. The floor was cracked grey lino and the walls were dirty off-white.

  So much for the glamorous world of table dancing—it wasn’t so different from the change room at the Shaft.

  To my right a door opened onto a small bathroom and the left side of the room looked like it joined onto the backstage area. Six girls were in front of the mirror getting ready.

  ‘Everybody, this is Vivien. It’s her first night so I want you to make her feel welcome, show her around the place.’ Jim handed me a locker key. ‘When you’re ready and had a look around come see me in my office, OK?’

  I’d done my hair and makeup at home so I quickly got changed into my favourite outfit. It was a doozey: red latex hotpants with a matching low-cut sleeveless top. The top zipped down the front and the shorts had Velcro at the sides. I wore a sparkly black bra and matching G-string with plastic clips for easy removal.

  I could tell the girls were surreptitiously watching me so I sucked in my stomach while I changed. I wasn’t offended because I’d done it myself. You always checked out the new girl, comparing yourself and sizing up the competition.

  I put my boots on. They were my pièce de résistance, thigh high with a platform and spike heel and made out of shiny black latex. Men went crazy for them, turned into slobbering idiots. They’d cost a mint, but had paid for themselves many times over.

  A tall girl with straight, shoulder-length blond hair and violet eyes approached me. She wore a figure-hugging long white dress cut to the hip on both sides.

  The white bikini underneath barely contained her impressive assets. I wondered if they were real.

  ‘Hi, Vivien,’ she said. ‘I’m Aurora. I love your boots.’

  ‘Thanks, Kitty’s Fetish Wear, four hundred bucks.’

  I finished zipping them and straightened up, shaking her hand. ‘I love your tits.’ It just slipped out.

  ‘Doctor Eng Pen Tan. Twelve thousand.’ Aurora laughed. ‘I’ll introduce you to the girls. This is Betty—’

  Betty managed a small wave. She was close to the mirror applying liquid eyeliner. She was small and pale with black hair and a turned under fringe and looked like her namesake, the famous fifties pin-up Bettie Page.

  ‘And this is Dakota, Montana, Carolina and Anais.’

  I tried not to smirk. Every second stripper you met was named after an American state. Anais slid a Cleopatra wig over her buzz cut. ‘If you had a fringe,’ she told me, ‘you’d look exactly like Xena, warrior princess. Do you have a garter?’

  ‘Oh shit, I didn’t think of that.’

  ‘Here, borrow one of mine.’ She threw me a black garter with a small red rose.

  ‘Thanks.’ I slipped it over my boot and onto my thigh.

  ‘I’ll give you a tip,’ Anais said as she stuck on long false eyelashes. ‘At the start of the night put a couple of twenties of your own money in the garter so you don’t look desperate.’

  ‘And don’t forget to put rubber bands around the cash so it doesn’t slip out.’ Betty zipped herself into a leopard-skin skirt with black tassels on the hem.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Would you like the grand tour?’ Aurora asked.

  ‘Sure.’ I quickly stuffed my things into the locker and pinned the key to the inside lining of my shorts. Aurora disappeared around the corner to the left and I trotted along behind her.

  ‘This is backstage,’ she said. ‘The stage and podiums are up those steps and this door leads to the private rooms. If you do a private you can wear a fantasy outfit.

  They’re in those boxes.’ She nodded to a shelf with boxes marked ‘schoolgirl’, ‘cheerleader’, ‘nurse’ and the like. She took me up the steps and we stood in the wings.

  The main stage had catwalks connecting to three of the podiums.

  ‘Podiums one, two and three,’ she pointed. ‘Four and five are over there. A roster in the girls’ room tells you which one you’re on. It’s twenty minutes every hour and a half.’ We walked the narrow catwalk to the middle podium. The first customer, a guy drinking alone, looked over. I tested the pole; it went all the way up to the ceiling and seemed sturdy.

  ‘So how does it work when you’re up here?’ I asked.

  ‘You haven’t done tabletop before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’ve stripped?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ll give you a crash course,’ Aurora said. ‘You come out and start dancing. Guys’ll come and sit in the seats down there. Don’t take anything off until they tip you.

  Ten bucks for your top, twenty for the bottoms. And dance for the guy who tipped you. Everyone else will try to get a look, cheap bastards, so go up real close. Watch how the other girls do it.’

  I nodded and she continued, ‘You dance for the guy who tipped you for a couple of minutes, then you put your bikini back on, thank them
and give them a bit of a kiss on the cheek. Of course if they keep tipping you stay there as long as the money comes in.’

  ‘What if two guys tip you at the same time?’

  ‘Go to one, then the other. Back and forth. It’s easier to do than explain. It’ll all come together when you’re up there, after a couple of drinks. Speaking of which, you want one?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Aurora sat down on the edge of the podium, then slid off to the floor. I followed suit and we headed for the bar.

  ‘First drink of the night’s free,’ she explained. ‘After that you have to pay.’ We both ordered champagne.

  ‘What’s the difference between a lap dance and a private dance?’ I asked.

  ‘A lap dance is twenty dollars and you take the guy to a couch and dance for two songs max. They have to sit on their hands. If they don’t one of the bouncers’ll come over and tell you off. You can get up real close, rub your boobs on their face, but you can’t actually sit on their laps. No crotch to crotch contact, even if you’re fully clothed.’

  ‘Sort of takes the lap out of lap dance, doesn’t it?’

  ‘You’re not wrong. They changed the laws in ninety-nine and ever since it’s been illegal to sit on someone’s lap for money. Now it’s prostitution.’

  ‘That’s like the peeps,’ I said. ‘You can get busted for hooking if a cop comes into the booth and sees you playing with yourself. How can that be prostitution if the customer isn’t even in the same room as you?’

  ‘It’s a fucking joke,’ said Aurora. ‘You want to see where we do the privates?’

  The private area consisted of six rooms, two rows of three facing each other with gauzy red curtains instead of doors. Each had a fake animal print rug, a couple of chairs, a side table for drinks and a stereo on a small shelf. The walls were mirrored and the lighting was low.

  A black light made Aurora’s dress luminous. I suddenly realised why everyone wore those fluorescent bikinis.

  ‘It’s fifty for ten minutes. You give the money to Emma at the bar and she gives you a tape. A bouncer will wander up and down the corridor. If you get the timing right you can do a bit of lap sitting, let the guy touch your boobs. Or not, it’s up to you.’