Thomas Perry

by Pursuit

  Hobart clamped his lips together and nodded sagely, as though it had been obvious. “You were right to ask me first. That’s sensible, and I appreciate it. We do have a rule against fraternizing. You start having that kind of thing going on, and the authorities get on you. As it is, every time there’s a city council election, everybody in the entertainment business has got to fear for his livelihood. But the truth is, I wouldn’t have that rule if the girls didn’t want it. This way they can say no, and it isn’t their fault. The guy who’s been a big tipper doesn’t get hurt feelings and go away.”

  Prescott shrugged. “Okay. I can understand that. No hurt feelings. I’ll forget the idea.”

  Hobart said, “I didn’t say that. This is a little different. You’re a good customer, and you’re not a kid. You seem like a serious man, and the fact that you asked me means you’re sensitive to other people’s problems.” He let a mysterious little smile play about his mouth and disappear. “Jean happened to ask me about you a week or two ago. She’s not married at the moment, so it could mean she’s interested. Of course, it could mean nothing, too.”

  “So you think it might be okay if I had a talk with her?”

  “I’ll tell you what. I have a couple of conditions. You talk to her in private, where the other customers don’t get the idea this is a regular thing here. And if she wants to go out, pick her up at her place, not mine, and stay the hell away from here.”

  “That’s not much to ask,” said Prescott.

  Hobart leaned closer. “There’s only one more unpleasant thing to say, and I apologize in advance for having to say it. Jean is a grown woman, and she’s free to decide. But if you should happen to be one of those guys who’s carrying around some weird fantasy in his head that he’s planning on working out on Jeanie, then it had better be one that she likes.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” Prescott began, looking surprised.

  But Hobart continued. “Because if you were to harm her, you would find that this place works kind of like a family. There are some relatives—distant cousins, you might say—that you haven’t met, and that you don’t ever want to meet.”

  “I understand,” said Prescott. “I know you’ve got to be able to protect your workers.”

  Hobart stared at him in silence for a second, his eyes never blinking. “I’ve got to say this clearly so we both know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s not just getting a couple of ribs kicked in, and losing some teeth. The cops wouldn’t find anything as big as the sole of your boot.”

  “I’m not some kind of pervert, Dick,” said Prescott comfortably. “So neither of us has got anything to worry about.”

  “I was pretty sure that was true,” said Hobart. “And I don’t mean to insult you. She came in a while ago because she goes on at one. I’ll take you back, and you can ask her yourself.”

  Prescott followed Hobart through the door where he had seen him go with the two couriers a few times. The door led into a hallway of bare cinder blocks and a concrete floor with drains in it, lit by hanging bulbs with green metal shades. The only decorations were fire extinguishers at ten-foot intervals, and a four-foot-high, too expert drawing of a penis with Hobart’s face at the top and the words “Dick Hobart, Capitalist Tool” written across the testicles.

  Along the outer wall were several doors. One was an office, two were staff rest rooms with posters on them giving dire warnings about washing hands before returning to work. There was one on the right that Prescott could tell led to the kitchen area, and then a short stretch of hallway that ended in a door with a star on it. Hobart didn’t knock. He said, “Wait here,” then opened the door and entered.

  After a few seconds, he came out again, repeated, “Wait here,” and went back the way he had come. Prescott called, “Thanks, Dick,” before he had gone too far, and heard Hobart say, “Happy to help.”

  A moment later, the door opened and Jean came out wearing an old, soft chenille bathrobe. She looked at him shyly. “Hi.”

  “Hello, Jeanie,” said Prescott. “My name is Bob Greene, with an e at the end.”

  She nodded, and her shy look tentatively grew into a small smile. “Nolan told me.” Then she said, “I noticed you watching me sometimes, and wondered who you were.”

  Prescott said, “Now you know. I wanted to ask you if you might be willing to go out to dinner with me sometime.”

  She put her head down, but her eyes were on him from beneath the glittering eye shadow. “You might be disappointed. When I’m not on stage, I’m really a pretty ordinary person.”

  He grinned. “That’s what I was hoping. Ordinary people like to eat regular dinners in nice places, and don’t expect the rest of us to be too scintillating.”

  She let his grin shift to her face. “I think I’d like to. When would it be?”

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to limit it to tonight, tomorrow night, or any other night in the future,” he said. “Last night is out.”

  “How about tonight, then?” she asked. “I’m only working until three, and I could be ready around seven-thirty.”

  “Wonderful,” said Prescott. “Terrific. I’ll get a reservation for Cavender’s.”

  “Cavender’s?” she repeated, her expression apologetic and maybe a bit regretful. “I’m flattered. I really am. But you’ll never get a reservation for Cavender’s at noon the same day.”

  He looked down at his feet, then back at her and shrugged. “I already have the reservation,” he admitted. “I made it just in case you said yes.”

  Her sad look disappeared, and a look came over her that was partly gratification that he would make a reservation at a famous restaurant just in case, partly pleasure that she was going to get to go, and partly an amused sympathy that he’d had to admit to being so eager. The sympathy made her response excessive, as though to protect him. “I’m so glad. I’d love to go there. What time is your reservation?”

  “Eight-thirty, but I could try to change—”

  “Perfect.”

  “Where can I pick you up?”

  She frowned. “My apartment, I guess. I’ll write down the address.” She disappeared behind the door, then came back with an address written on a Nolan’s Paddock Club napkin. She held it in her hand, but she didn’t hold it out to him.

  He detected a tension in her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  “This is embarrassing,” she said. “But I hope you’ll understand. Can I see your driver’s license?”

  He reached for his wallet and retrieved the Robert E. Greene license he had brought from home. “It’s a California license, but it’s got my picture on it.”

  She glanced at it, pushed her napkin into his hand, and closed his fingers over it. “I’m sorry. It’s just something you have to do if you’re—”

  “No problem,” he said, making his smile return. “If I were you, I’d do the same.” He glanced at the address, and saw that there was a telephone number too. “I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty, then.”

  But he could see there was still something on her mind. He waited. “Would you do me one more favor?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Would you mind . . . I go on at one. Would you mind not watching me work today? You can watch the other girls, I don’t mind. And it’s just for today. It would be kind of . . . distracting for me, and—”

  “Say no more,” he said. “I’m on my way.” He gave her a warm smile and started down the hallway.

  She called, “I heard the lunch is better down the street anyway.”

  “I’ll let you know,” he said. On his way out, he passed the bar, smiled at Hobart, and gave a quick thumbs-up sign. Hobart nodded gravely, then looked down to spray soda into a customer’s scotch and slide the glass across the bar on a cocktail napkin.

  As Prescott walked out into the sunlight, he assessed his progress and felt pleased. He was halfway in now, and the resistance was beginning to soften. The next part had to be done carefully.

  26


  The apartment complex looked like an island fortress surrounded by a lake of asphalt. There were low ramparts along the sides that held captive plants, but there were no trees. Prescott pulled up to the west end, parked the Corvette, and got out to look for the right staircase. Almost instantly he heard the click of high heels, turned, and saw Jeanie hurrying toward him.

  She was wearing a simple black dress and small diamond studs in her ears, and carrying a tiny handbag. Her shining dark brown hair was pulled back in a tight coil that Prescott noticed was more than merely reminiscent of the style she had worn when she was taking off the business suit in Nolan’s. He felt a pang of sympathy for her: maybe it was her uniform to signal she was on her best behavior.

  He stepped toward her, his expression anxious. “You didn’t have to wait outside for me.”

  She paused about five feet from him, as though she were wondering how to get by him without touching him. “I didn’t want to make us late.”

  He said, “You look terrific.” It wasn’t a lie. She had a pretty little face with large brown eyes that looked much better without the sparkling blue smears of eye shadow on the lids and the heavily rouged cheeks. Her figure was what she used to make a living, her one reliable asset, and the cut of the dress showed that she was confident about it, relying on it to make everything all right.

  She disguised her need to stay five feet from him by using the distance to appraise him critically, looking at his suit, shoes, and tie. “So do you.” Then she made a sudden, evasive step to the passenger door of the Corvette. Prescott held it open for her, then went around the back of the car and got in. She seemed to have a list of questions she had decided to ask him, and she started as he drove. “I see you hanging out at Nolan’s during the day. What do you do for a living?”

  He turned to her and saw that she was nervous, her head quiver-ing slightly as she waited. He looked at the road. “I guess you’d have to say I’m a bum at the moment,” he said happily. “I owned a couple of car-wash places in Los Angeles, but I sold them a few months ago, and came east. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do when I grow up.”

  “If you didn’t have a plan, why did you sell them?” she asked.

  “It seemed like the right time.”

  “The right time?”

  “Yeah,” said Prescott. “I was doing okay—not getting real rich, but okay. People in California care about cars. I picked the places up when the price of land was way down, and anything that happened to be on it was down lower. So I bought the corner and got the first car wash almost for free. I hadn’t planned to be in that business, but there I was, so I kept it going. A little later the second one was available, so I bought it. Then, about three or four years ago, land prices shot up again.”

  “And you couldn’t resist.”

  “I did resist,” he protested. “I waited for a long time. But I kept asking myself, ‘Am I in this because I like the smell of carnauba wax, or am I in it for the money? If I’m in it for the money, I have to sell at the time when there are a lot of people who want to buy, not wait through a boom.’ So I sold. One of the car washes is probably a shopping mall by now. The other is going to be a parking lot for the Bank of America.” He looked at her again. “How about you? Do you always have a plan?”

  She shook her head. “Nope.” Then she changed her mind. “Yes, I guess I do, but none of them works so hot.”

  “Do you have a plan now?”

  She looked at him in anticipation of an approaching disappointment. “I’m going to college at night, picking up a degree. That’s why I work the lunch hour now.”

  “That’s a lot better than my plans usually are,” he said. “What are you studying?”

  She said, “Let’s talk about you.”

  He looked at her, puzzled. “What’s wrong?”

  She sighed, and glared at him with a mixture of frustration and sadness. “I don’t like talking about me. You’re curious about how I arrived at making a living in a dark saloon taking my clothes off so a bunch of sad, lonely men can stare at my tits. You’re too polite to ask straight out, so you work up to it gradually. Only there’s no way you can broach the topic without my sitting here cringing and waiting for that part of it to arrive. I can see it coming from a long way off. It’s a conversation I’ve had too many times.”

  Prescott drove in silence for a few seconds. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. How about if I promise not to ask you about that, and you just tell me what your major is in college?”

  She stared at him with hard hostility, then seemed to see herself. A laugh escaped from her lips. “Accounting. I’m in a CPA program.”

  “That sounds great,” said Prescott. “I admire and approve of it. And I hope you’ll notice that it hardly hurt at all.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and put her hand on his arm, then seemed to think better of it and pulled it back into her lap. “I just get so tired of it.” She sat quietly for a few blocks, but no other topic seemed to fill the void. It weighed on her. “How about if I just tell you quickly, and then we forget about it?”

  “No,” said Prescott. “I don’t think so.”

  She was very surprised. “Why not?”

  “You think I have some eagerness to hear all the intimate details, so I was weaseling my way up to that. Actually, I wasn’t. You don’t find out much about people by looking into all that. It’s mostly decisions they don’t feel like defending, and luck. I learn more about people by hearing what they want than by hearing what they have. So if it’s a sad story, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “It’s a pretty good story,” she teased. “And it’s not sad.”

  “You sure?” he said skeptically.

  “Yes. I was from a small town west of here, eighteen, and couldn’t afford college. I—”

  “You said this wasn’t going to be sad,” he reminded her.

  “I know,” she said. “That part’s over. I came to the big city and waited tables in a restaurant. I was very good at math, so I did a little of the bookkeeping, too: cashing out at the end of the day, and helping with the records. A girl in my apartment building was working at a strip place, and one day while we were doing our laundry, we compared notes.”

  “Did she work at Nolan’s?”

  “No, she worked at a different place, called the Harem,” she said. “But here’s the comparison. I worked at my restaurant five to eleven every night, doing setup, waiting for dinner from five-thirty until ten on my feet, then cleanup after. I made five dollars an hour plus tips, which all added up to about a hundred a night, because it was a nice restaurant and I was really sweet and eager and looked young and pretty. My friend spent two hours at work, which amounted to forty-five minutes of getting made up and in costume, two fifteen-minute dance shows on stage a half hour apart, and fifteen minutes getting the makeup off and changing to street clothes. She got two hundred for the two dance numbers, and her tips came to about three hundred a night. She was making five times what I was making, and working a third of the hours—meaning that she was getting fifteen times what I got on an hourly basis, and was actually doing what I call work for only a quarter of that time.”

  “That’s quite a difference.”

  “I was off on Sunday night because I worked the Sunday brunch, so I went to see her work. There were four girls on that night. None of them was especially good-looking. They all had lots of long, bleached hair and reasonably good shapes, but that was all you could say. They weren’t even very good dancers, except one. It turned out that my friend wasn’t exaggerating. They were all making more than she was. They had an amateur night just like Nolan’s does on Saturday night, so I signed up for it and called in sick at my job. It isn’t nuclear physics. If you can dance and you’ve seen four or five other people do it, you know about as much as you’ll ever know, and if you’re used to waiting tables in six-hour shifts, dancing for fifteen minutes isn’t exactly a triathlon, either.”

  “So you got
into it on the arithmetic.”

  She laughed. “Numbers were always my weakness. I was a little nervous about it the first time. I didn’t know what to expect. Even though I’d spent a night watching it from offstage, I wasn’t used to the men. I also didn’t know what to wear that first time, but then I realized I had the perfect thing hanging on the hook on the back of my closet door: my waitress uniform. I looked good in it. It was all starched and ready for Saturday dinner, and I had comfortable shoes that went with it. A lot of the girls try to dance in spike heels, and you can do it after a while, but at first it makes you clumsy and stiff. May Company was having a lingerie sale, so I went and bought some nice underthings—a slip and everything, because I figured I might need a lot to take off, just to kill time on stage. So what I took off was the waitress outfit I was supposed to wear to work that night. I won the contest, made fifteen hundred for fifteen minutes’ work, and got offered a job. I thought about it for a week, and realized it didn’t make any sense to do anything else.”

  “How long have you been doing it?” asked Prescott.

  “About twelve or thirteen years, on and off.”

  “On and off?”

  “Yeah. I got married once, and quit. I met him at the Harem. He was one of those young guys you see a lot, who go out on a tear on Friday night, drink too much, and celebrate something or other. He was with about five other guys from a car lot. He was a salesman, and they’d beaten their quota that month and set some record. I didn’t expect to see any of them again, but the next time I came on, there he was. A little while later, we were dating.”

  “What made you decide to go out with him?”

  “Did I say he wasn’t cute?” she retorted. “And he seemed to me to be the one I wanted. A few months later, he changed jobs so nobody at work would know me, and we got married in Las Vegas. It didn’t last.”

  “Why not?”

  “First he wanted me to quit stripping. I could understand that, so I quit. Things went on okay for about a year. We didn’t have a whole lot coming in, but I had saved a lot at the Harem. I went back to waiting tables. But then things started to fall apart. He bought a new car and put a down payment on a house with most of the money I had saved. Then one day, he came home and said he’d been laid off. He wanted me to go back to stripping, just for a little while, to make the mortgage payments and get ahead for good. I felt really sorry for him because I thought it must be killing him, knowing how he felt. But since he asked me, and I didn’t have any better ideas, I did it. By then, Hobart had bought Nolan’s and opened it as a strip club, so I got a job there. I figured I’d better make the most of it, so the time I was back at it would be as short as possible. I worked five nights, four shows a night, and five on weekends. Weekends are a rougher crowd, but the money is great. I was taking home at least a thousand a night, sometimes more, most of it in cash. After about two months, I noticed my husband wasn’t looking too hard for a job. I kept track of him for a week, and realized he wasn’t looking at all. I asked him about it, and he said he already was working. He was acting as my business manager. Investing my pay, making hair appointments for me, and all that was a full-time job. He said it was stupid for him to kill himself trying to sell cars when I could make much more just taking off my clothes. I put up with that for a while, not wanting to do anything too hasty while I was thinking things over. Then I took a look at the bank statements and the bills, and saw that there were no investments, no savings. He had been spending it all, a lot of it on other women. I filed for divorce. My lawyer did a search to see if I still had any money left, and he found no money, but a lot of things I didn’t know: that my husband hadn’t been laid off from the car lot at all. He had quit, and told them he’d inherited some money.”