Skin Deep

21

At one thirty Steve lay in the dark, still trying to compose his mind to sleep. The pills had done nothing, yet part of him was grateful. At least he didn’t have to risk another Terry Farina nightmare fest.

He got up and went into the kitchen to do some work. His first impulse was to pour himself a double scotch. Instead he had a glass of warm milk and went to his laptop at the kitchen table. If and when he felt sleepy he’d give the bed another try.

He opened the Farina file and flipped through her photographs from the Mermaid. In some earlier shots she was a cropped brunette, in others a full and flaming redhead. In all she was naked or nearly so, sometimes gaping big-eyed like a schoolgirl startled by the cameraman, sometimes panting in false heat. He wondered if she’d gotten any pleasure from making canned love to fifty guys sucking Bud Lights. He had heard that strippers just zoned out, clicked into autopilot, and ran through the mechanics—the self-fondling, the groans, the humpy-bumpies—as if a programmed toy. He didn’t think any real harm was being done. But it seemed a cheesy way to earn tuition.

“Did you ever kill anyone?

“What was it like?”

Terry Farina had performed for guys who paid to watch her nurse fantasies—some dark, some dangerous, some even deadly. The working theory was that she had befriended a Mermaid customer—

(Not you, never been there. Uh-uh, just ask Mickey DeLuca.)

—some sexual psycho that girls made fun of in high school, who stayed home on prom night. They got close, maybe went out a few times. Then last Saturday night he showed up, and because of whatever lunatic logic that fired his synapses, he killed her.

After having accepted her death as murder, Neil speculated that she might have been turning tricks, using the Mermaid as a place to recruit johns. If that were the case, she must have made house calls, because Mrs. Sabo said she had never heard anyone coming over to visit her. Her bank statements gave no indication that she was making deposits out of line with her earnings as a trainer and dancer. Thus far, the investigation produced no evidence that Terry Farina was turning tricks. But for Neil French, stripping was just a gutter away from prostitution.

As for Steve, he had no working theory. Only a pea under the mattress, now the size of a baseball.

But he wasn’t going to deal with that because he couldn’t reach it, only squirm. Meanwhile, he would dutifully pursue the working theory.

More than one hundred names made up the list of subscribers that DeLuca had given him. Another two hundred and seventy had paid by credit card over the last month.

He scanned both lists into his computer and reduced the overlap to seven: Tyler Mosley; Luis Castillo; Richard Maldonado; Walter Priest; Earl Pendergast; Thomas O’Sullivan; and Angus Q. Schmentzel. Seven regulars who had paid by credit cards over the last month. Of course, cash-paying customers would have slipped through, but this was a start.

He did a Google check on each, restricting the search to Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Two of the names yielded no hits. The others yielded several, especially Walter Priest at ninety-four because the name was not uncommon. For two hours he scanned the sites for any clue that cross-checked with strip clubs, sexual fetishes, sex offenses, or anything that directly or indirectly connected to Terry Farina.

At about two fifteen, he began to grow sleepy in the middle of his scan of Earl Pendergast. The guy was an English professor at Hawthorne State College in Hawthorne, Massachusetts, and an active scholar who had written articles on English Romantic poetry. Steve’s eyes were crossing as he went down the list of publications, including a book on John Keats and several articles with long tortured titles. One that caught his eye was called “Femme Fatales Disrobed: Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ v. Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci.’” His home page listed in Google had expired. The online syllabus for his Romantic lit course was two years old. But what set off a small charge in Steve’s veins was an entry from the Hawthorne Student News from last year: PROFESSOR SUSPENDED FOR SEXUAL HARASSMENT CHARGE. “Professor Earl Pendergast…”

Steve was instantly awake. But when he clicked on the article, that posting had also expired. With his password, he got into the NCIC database, but Pendergast had no criminal record. The same with ViCAP. Apparently the harassment charge stayed with the college.

It was nearly three A.M. when he finally logged off and headed for bed, buoyed by his discovery, and making a mental note that most college newspapers have archives.

“Femme Fatales Disrobed.”

The phrase lulled him into a deep dreamless sleep. His first in days.