Snow White and Rose Red

7

It was not until Monday, April 22, that Bloom and Rawles finally got their first real lead in the Jane Doe case. The trouble was that there were too many damn restaurants and fast-food joints in the downtown area near Albert Barish’s dry-cleaning establishment; a city that doubles as a winter resort had better have a lot of restaurants, or the people will go somewhere else for their fun and frolic. They had talked to Albert Barish on Tuesday, April 16, and had begun looking for the supposed waitress in the brown uniform the very next day. By Saturday they had come up with nothing. Since most restaurants in Calusa were closed on Sunday, they took the day off — even God rested at the end of the week. On Monday morning they hit pay dirt.

There were still a half-dozen restaurants they hadn’t yet hit, all of them catering either to kids who wanted to eat fast and run, or to older people who couldn’t afford fancier food and who lingered over a meal as if it were their last one on earth. The first of these was a Mexican joint, and the waitresses there were wearing black skirts, white peasant blouses, and sandals. One of the waitresses had a rose pinned to her coal-black hair. None of the waitresses wore name tags. The second place was a hamburger joint, and the girls behind the counter were wearing yellow uniforms and barking orders into microphones. The detectives got lucky in the third place, a pizza joint. The girls dishing out hot pizzas were all wearing brown uniforms. A little black plastic tag with a name stamped on it in white was fastened over the left breast of each uniform. The pizza smelled good. Bloom’s mouth began watering — but it was only ten-thirty in the morning.

The manager was dressed in brown, too, just like the girls behind the counter. His name tag read BUD, and beneath that MANAGER. He was eating a slice of pizza when he came out of the kitchen to where Bloom and Rawles were waiting for him. He was perhaps twenty years old, a thin, lanky kid growing a sparse mustache. In Florida, and maybe everywhere in the United States, all the fast-food joints are run by kids. You never see an employee over the age of twenty in a fast-food joint. Kids take the orders, kids wipe off the tables, kids do the cooking, kids do the supervising. If the kids of America ever decided to go on strike, half the population would starve to death.

“Can I help you?” Bud asked. He had finished the pizza and was now licking his fingers.

“Police,” Rawles said, and flashed his badge. “Anyplace we can sit down and talk?”

“Sure, plenty of empty tables,” Bud said. He gestured toward a table near the window. “Any trouble here, officers?”

“No, we just wondered if you could help us with something,” Bloom said.

“Sure, happy to be of assistance,” Bud said.

They went over to the table and sat. They had no pictures to show Bud. They had no names they could throw at him. They had only Barish’s vague description of the two girls who had come to his shop on foot — and the red dress one of them had been wearing when she died. Rawles took the dress out of the evidence envelope.

“Ever see this dress before?” he asked.

Bud looked at it.

“No, Officer, I have not,” Bud said. He looked suddenly nervous.

“Anybody wearing this dress ever come in here?” Bloom said.

“No, sir, not as I can recall.”

“Blonde girl, nineteen, twenty years old.”

“Well, sir, we get a lot of young people in here,” Bud said.

“This girl might have been friendly with one of your employees,” Bloom said.

Bud actually blanched. He did not yet know that the police were here to inquire into a homicide, but he had just been informed that one of his employees might be involved in whatever this was.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Which employee would that be, sir?”

“Girl with a good build,” Bloom said.

“Big tits,” Rawles said, less delicately.

“Well, we have lots of good-looking girls here,” Bud said. “Would you happen to know her name, officers? Because that would be of great assistance in locating the specific girl you have in mind.”

“No, we don’t have her name,” Rawles said.

“But she would have been friendly with the blonde girl who wore this dress,” Bloom said.

“Is this dress important in some way, officers?” Bud asked. “Has there been a crime committed in which this dress—?”

“Ink spot on it right here,” Rawles said. “See the ink spot?”

“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t recall such a spot,” Bud said.

“Want to round up all the girls so we can talk to them?” Bloom said.

“Sir?”

“Bring them all in the kitchen,” Rawles said. “We want to talk to them privately.”

“Well, officers, we have pizzas to sell here,” Bud said.

“Won’t take a minute,” Bloom said.

“Bring them in the kitchen,” Rawles said.

“Sir, only employees are allowed in the kitchen. That’s a Board of Health regulation, officers. I’m sorry, but—”

“Then bring ’em out here,” Rawles said impatiently.

“Sir, that wouldn’t look right, my girls talking to police officers. Customers might think there was something wrong here.”

“Then let’s go in the goddamn kitchen,” Rawles said.

“I already told you, sir—”

“We’ll square it with the Board of Health,” Bloom said.

“Let’s get this fucking show moving,” Rawles said.

“Yes, sir,” Bud said. “I’ll ask the girls to come back, sir.”

The kitchen was hot. Three seventeen-year-old kids kept opening and closing the doors on the big ovens, peering in at the pizzas, moving them around on long wooden paddles, taking them out to place them either in white cardboard boxes or on metal platters, depending on whether the pizza was to be taken home or eaten here. A half-dozen girls filed into the kitchen, puzzled looks on their faces. None of them looked older than eighteen. Rawles immediately discounted two of them as titless wonders. The other four seemed substantially endowed. Bloom reflected later that this was the first time he’d run a lineup predicated on the size of a girl’s brassiere. Rawles sent the two luckless girls back outside to the counter. The name tags on the other four identified them as Margie, Peg, Corrie, and Mary Lou.

“Just relax, girls,” Bloom said, “nothing to worry about here.”

Once again, Rawles took the red dress out of the evidence envelope.

“Anybody recognize this dress?” he asked.

Bloom was watching the girls. One of the four widened her eyes in surprise.

“Anybody?” Rawles said.

“How about you, miss?” Bloom said.

The girl looked even more surprised. “Me?” she said, and one hand came up unconsciously to touch the plastic name tag pinned to her chest. The tag read CORRIE. The chest was as Barish had described it.

“The rest of you can go back to work,” Bloom said. “We want to talk to Corrie alone.”

“Me? What’d I do?” the girl said. Her voice was high and twangy, tinged with a faint southern accent.

“Nothing, miss,” Bloom said. “We just want to talk to you privately.”

Rawles, who hadn’t seen the girl’s expression when he’d held up the dress, knew that Bloom was onto something; he went along with it. “Let’s go, girls,” he said, “back to work now, no problems here, let’s all get back to work.”

“Are you accusing this girl of something?” Bud asked.

“Go manage the restaurant,” Rawles told him.

Corrie was not an attractive girl, and fear now made her seem even less attractive. She was perhaps five feet four inches tall and grossly overweight — which accounted for the “nice chest” Barish had described — her doughy face blighted with acne, her eyes a pale, watery blue, her hair a straight, mousy brown. A little brown cap sat crookedly on top of her head. The three teenage pizza bakers had turned their full attention on her and the detectives now, certain she was a hatchet murderess or something.

“Go check your pizzas,” Rawles said. “Come on back here, miss.”

They led her to where a small table stood against the wall under a hanging telephone. Sunlight streamed through a window over the table. Corrie was biting her lip now.

“You’re not in any trouble, Corrie,” Bloom told her at once. “We just want you to tell us everything you know about this dress.”

“Is she dead or something?” Corrie asked.

“Who?” Rawles said.

“Tracy. Is she dead?”

“Tracy who?” Bloom said.

“Kilbourne. Is she?”

“Is this her dress?”

“Yes. Has something happened to her?”

“You’re sure this is her dress?”

“Positive.”

“Were you with her when she took it to Albert Cleaners last year sometime? May sometime. Or June.”

“I don’t remember when it was exactly — but yes, I was with her. The dress had an ink spot on it. On the front someplace. She was upset about it because it was one of her favorite dresses.”

Bloom and Rawles both sighed at exactly the same moment.

“Okay,” Bloom said. “Tell us everything you know about her.”

Bloom wasn’t upset that Up Front was the second topless joint to have surfaced in Calusa. Before he’d moved to Florida, he’d been a working cop in Nassau County, and there were more topless joints there per square mile than perhaps in the entire state of Florida. Back then, Bloom frequently went into New York City (my partner Frank’s “hometown,” so to speak), and there were more topless joints there than there were subway stations. To Bloom, topless joints were less harmful than heroin or cocaine. The second-largest industry in the state of Florida was dope. The second-largest topless joint in Calusa was Up Front — so what? The biggest joint was called Club Alyce; Bloom distrusted all fanciful spellings of ladies’ names.

Up Front was on the Tamiami Trail, still in Calusa County, but pressing close to the border of the county just south. Up Front had once been a pinewood shack dedicated to distributing Christian Science literature. A discreet sign out front now announced that this was Up Front, and then — in smaller lettering — read TOPLESS — 2:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M. According to the Calusa PD records on the place, it was just this side of being a whorehouse, but then again, so was Club Alyce. This meant that girls came to your table wearing sequined bras and bikini panties and “danced” for you. This further meant that they straddled your knee (left or right) and pumped away at it while poking their breasts in your eye. So far, there had been no drug busts and no murders committed at Up Front. Bloom didn’t care how many girls straddled how many horny guys’ legs, so long as nobody got hurt. It was his job, he figured, to make sure nobody got hurt, and to throw away the key on anybody who hurt anybody else. Cooper Rawles felt the same way. They went to Up Front because it seemed that a girl who’d once worked there had got herself hurt — badly. Someone had pumped a bullet into Tracy Kilbourne’s throat and then cut out her tongue.

A scantily clad girl at the entrance door told them they could find Mr. McCafferty “inside someplace.” She told them he would be smoking a cigar. Cooper Rawles had once worked in Houston, Texas, and he’d told Bloom that the topless-joints-cum-whorehouses in that city were the seediest to be found anywhere in America. Bloom doubted that anyplace in America could be seedier than Up Front.

The dimly lighted inner room was hung with faded crepe paper from a long-ago New Year’s Eve party. There were only four men and seven girls in the place at three o’clock that afternoon. One of the girls was dancing on a makeshift stage in the center of the room. She was wearing nothing but a G-string with a rosette on it. On a rear-projection movie screen set up behind the girl, a black girl was vigorously blowing a white man. The girl dancing before the screen seemed oblivious to the grunting and groaning on the screen behind her. She seemed, in fact, to be enjoying the dance she was performing. Rawles suggested that maybe she thought she was Makarova. Or Navratilova. He always mixed up ballet artists with tennis stars.

Three of the other girls were dancing privately for three men sitting at tables in dark corners. They had opened their bra tops and were cautioning the men to look but not touch. The remaining three girls were sitting at a table in a relatively bright corner of the room. One of them was clutching an oversize teddy bear to her oversize breasts. Another was wrapping a belt around her waist. The belt glowed orange in the dark. The third was sipping a Coors beer from a can.

Fat, cigar-smoking Angus McCafferty was sitting close to the stage. In Bloom’s experience, all owners of topless joints smoked cigars and were fat. He wondered why this was true. Did fat, cigar-smoking men automatically open topless joints? Or did any man opening a topless joint eventually grow fat and start smoking cigars? McCafferty was dividing his attention between the porn flick and the oblivious girl dancing on the stage. Bloom figured the girl was on dope. He didn’t care what she was on, so long as nobody was selling it at Up Front.

“Detective Bloom,” he said to McCafferty, startling him out of his reverie.

“Yeah, hello, sit down,” McCafferty said. “Make yourselves at home. You guys like a beer or something?”

The detectives sat down.

“A girl named Tracy Kilbourne,” Bloom said without preamble. “What do you know about her?”

“You want to know about the name Tracy?” McCafferty said, puffing philosophically on his cigar. “I’ll tell you about the name Tracy. There are more girls named Tracy in the world today than there are girls named Mary. There are also more girls named Tracy than there are girls named Kim. Especially in topless joints. In topless joints, Tracy and Kim are very popular names. I must have three Tracys and two Kims on the premises right this minute,” he said. “So what else is new?”

“What else is new,” Rawles said, “is that Tracy Kilbourne is dead.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” McCafferty said. “You sure you don’t want a beer, you guys? Kim!” he shouted across the room. “Let’s have a little service here.”

A blonde girl wearing net stockings, black patent-leather high-heeled pumps, a black miniskirt with a lacy white apron over it, and nothing else sidled over to the table.

“Help you gentlemen?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Bloom said.

“The same,” Rawles said.

“I’ll have a sour-mash bourbon on the rocks,” McCafferty said. “And hurry it up.” As she walked away from the table, he said, “She swivels her ass nice.”

It surprised Bloom that McCafferty wasn’t at all nervous about the presence of policemen on the premises. He figured at once that the place was extraordinarily clean except for the girls grinding away at the tables in the dark. But a girl who’d performed the same service not too long ago had been shot in the throat and had her tongue taken from her mouth.

“Tracy Kilbourne,” he said.

“Her straight handle?” McCafferty asked.

“As far as we know.”

“When?”

“When what?” Rawles asked. “When did she work here? Or when did she catch it?”

“However you want it,” McCafferty said. “This is your show.”

“She’s supposed to have worked here last year sometime. May to July, something like that.”

“Tracy Kilbourne,” McCafferty said.

Kim was back with his drink. She put it on the table, leaning over the men — the way McCafferty had taught her — so that her breasts nudged Bloom’s shoulders.

“Anything else?” she asked archly.

“This is the law here,” McCafferty told her.

“Oooo, pardon me,” Kim said, rolling her eyes. “The law don’t appreciate naked tits?”

“Buzz off,” McCafferty said. He lifted his drink. “Very fresh, the young girls you get today,” he said. “No respect for anything. Tracy Kilbourne, huh? Sorry, it don’t ring a bell.”

“Last May sometime,” Bloom said. “Worked until July or thereabouts.”

“What’d she look like?”

“About nineteen. Long blonde hair. Full of piss and vinegar,” Rawles said.

“I get blonde nineteen-year-old girls in here like they’re going out of style,” McCafferty said. “All of them full of piss and vinegar. So what else is new?”

“What’s new is I already told you,” Rawles said. “She’s dead.”

“And I already told you I’m sorry,” McCafferty said. “You want me to do an elegy?”

“Eulogy,” Bloom corrected.

“Whatever,” McCafferty said. “I don’t remember her. End of story.”

“Beginning of story,” Rawles said. “Who’s been working here since last May?”

“Now that’s another story,” McCafferty said. “They don’t last too long here. Most of them — I’m sure I don’t have to tell you gentlemen — they graduate into hundred-dollar call girls working in Miami.” McCafferty paused. “Or San Juan. San Juan, they get more than a hundred.”

“Anybody here working since last May?” Rawles asked again.

“I’ll have to ask. I can hardly keep track of them.”

“Ask,” Bloom said.

“Be back in a minute,” McCafferty said. “Don’t let nobody touch my bourbon, huh?”

The detectives sat watching the porn flick. On the stage, the girl kept grinding away to the guitar beat of a heavy-metal band. The girl was smiling.

“Likes her work,” Rawles said.

“Six to five we strike out here,” Bloom said.

“I shouldn’ta mentioned she was dead, huh?” Rawles said.

“No, no, that’s okay.”

“Make them all run for the hills.”

“Better to lay it out from go sometimes,” Bloom said. “That way everybody knows You’re not kidding around.”

“Still, I think I made a mistake.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Bloom said.

He liked Rawles. Rawles was one of the two or three cops on the Calusa PD to whom Bloom would have entrusted his life — and had, in fact, on more than one occasion. Rawles took a lot of crap from the other detectives in the division. In Calusa it was rare for a black cop to attain the rank of detective; Rawles was an oddity, and oddities attracted comment. The redneck detectives down here all told themselves how tolerant they were and made it sound like a joke when they called Rawles “boy.” Hey, boy, you crack any good murders lately? You all duded up today, boy, you goan to a party or sump’in? Rawles let them clown their way through. He knew he could lay any one of them on his ass in a minute, and he knew none of them was foolish enough to invite a real hassle. Sometimes he put on a watermelon dialect for them and flashed a big nigger grin — Yassuh, boss, I’se typed up de report in t’ipiclate, boss, same like you tole me. The bottom line was that any of those jiving rednecks would have preferred being partnered with Rawles than with anyone else in the division. Rawles had been cited for bravery three times. On the last occasion he had single-handedly taken a cleaver out of the hands of a butcher who’d gone berserk after chopping his wife into little pieces. In an odd way, whenever they “jokingly” called Rawles “boy,” they were acknowledging the fact that he was more man than any of them. He was watching the dancer now.

“She looks familiar,” he said.

“She looks hypnotized, is what she looks,” Bloom said.

“Mighta run across her in Houston,” Rawles said. “These girls, they get started on the topless circuit, it’s the only thing they know. They drift to another town, first thing they do is look for a topless joint. Bread on the table, man.”

“Talking up a storm there,” Bloom said, indicating the corner of the room where McCafferty was sitting at the table with the three idle dancers. The one holding the oversize teddy bear was leaning over the table, listening avidly. The one with the orange luminescent belt had taken it from her waist and was idly twirling it in the air.

“We strike out here ’cause of my big mouth,” Rawles said, “I’ll go shoot myself.”

“You handled it right,” Bloom said. “Relax.”

McCafferty got up from the table, rested his hand on the shoulder of the girl sipping beer, nodded, laughed, and then came back to where the detectives were waiting.

“No luck,” he said.

“How about the other girls?” Bloom said.

“They’re earning a buck,” McCafferty said. “I don’t want to interrupt them.”

“Interrupt them,” Rawles said.

“Have a heart, They’re working hard.”

“Ain’t we all?” Rawles said. “This is a homicide here.”

“This dead girl,” McCafferty said, “she’s in a hurry to go someplace?”

“Talk to the others, okay?” Bloom said gently, but McCafferty caught the undertone of warning in his words. All of a sudden, visions of a hundred citations for violations swam through his head. Faulty plumbing, frayed electrical wiring, maybe even a big padlock on the door for employing a couple of girls who were underage. Like Cindy with the teddy bear, who he knew was only sixteen.

“Sure,” he said, “be happy to help you.”

He left the table. The detectives watched as he talked to each girl in turn. None of the girls skipped a beat. Kept grinding away as they listened to him. Their customers listened, too, glassy-eyed. From across the room, Bloom and Rawles saw nothing but a lot of rotating hips and buttocks and a lot of shaking heads. McCafferty came back to the table.

“Negative,” he said. “None of them remembers anybody named Tracy Kilbourne. Most of these girls, They’re new. You’re talking last May, none of them would remember.”

“How about Smiley up there?” Rawles asked.

McCafferty glanced at the stage.

“Yeah, she’s been here awhile.”

“Then talk to her.”

McCafferty looked at his watch.

“She’ll be off in three minutes flat,” he said, “you can talk to her yourself. I got some girls to interview in the office. Nice seeing you,” he said, “I wish you luck,” and walked off.

For one brief, shining moment, there were two girls on the stage. The smiling girl had been joined by the girl who’d been holding the teddy bear and now both of them were facing each other and rotating their hips and jiggling their breasts, both of them smiling as the first girl segued toward the steps at the side of the stage, and then turned gracefully and started down the steps, leaving the teddy-bear girl gyrating all by herself. On the movie screen behind her, a tall and very pretty blonde was unzipping a man’s fly.

The girl came down the steps, picked up a glass of water from a table near the wall, drank it, and then looked around the place. The only unoccupied men she saw were Bloom and Rawles. She started for their table at once, swinging her hips in the exaggerated style of a hooker. A blue klieg light bathed her blonde hair in glare ice as she passed under it, freezing the smile on her face. She hitched the G-string a bit higher on her hips. An amber light caught her. There were sequins sprinkled on her breasts and nipples. She was still smiling when she reached the table.

“Hello, boys,” she said. “Want me to dance privately for you?”

“We’d like to ask you a few questions, miss,” Bloom said, and showed her his shield. “Detective Bloom, my partner, Detective Rawles.”

“Uh-oh,” the girl said. “Was I obscene or something?”

“No, you were fine,” Bloom said. “Sit down, won’t you?”

The girl sat, crossing her arms over her breasts. “I feel naked, talking to cops,” she explained.

“What’s your name, miss?” Rawles asked.

“Did I do something wrong?” she asked. “I wasn’t flashing, I know that for sure. If the G-string moved, it wasn’t me made it move.”

“No, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Bloom said.

“Then why do you want to know my name?”

“We told you our names, didn’t we?”

“Big deal,” the girl said. “You weren’t up there dancing with maybe your G-string slipping a little so you couldn’t notice it.”

The detectives looked at her. Neither of them said a word.

“Tiffany Carter,” she said. “Okay?”

“What’s your real name?” Bloom asked.

“Sylvia.”

“Sylvia what?”

“Sylvia Kazenski.”

“Is that Polish?” Bloom asked.

“Why? What’s wrong with Polish?”

“Nothing. My grandfather came from Poland.”

“So shake hands,” Sylvia said.

“How long have you been working here, Sylvia?” Rawles asked.

“Almost a year now, it must be. Why?”

“Were you working here last May?”

“I told you almost a year, didn’t I? This is April. If I’ve been working here almost a year—”

“Would you remember a girl named Tracy Kilbourne?”

“Why?”

“Do you remember her?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Rawles looked at Bloom. Bloom nodded.

“She’s dead,” Rawles said.

“Wow,” Sylvia said.

“Did you know her?”

“Yeah. Dead, wow. What happened?”

“How well did you know her?” Rawles asked, avoiding the question.

He was taking out his pad and pencil. Sylvia watched him. He looked up expectantly.

“You going to write this down?” she asked.

“If you don’t mind.”

“I just don’t want to get in any trouble. I’ve been clean since I came to Calusa, I don’t want no trouble.”

“Where’d you come from?” Bloom asked.

“Jacksonville.”

“What kind of trouble were you in up there?”

“Who said I was in trouble?”

“You said you’ve been clean—”

“That don’t mean I had trouble before.”

“What was it?” Rawles asked. “Dope?”

“A little bit,” Sylvia said, and shrugged.

“Were you busted?”

“Almost. Which is why I left Jacksonville, to get away from the crowd I was running with.”

“You still doing dope?” Bloom asked.

“No, no.” She held out both her arms. “You see any tracks?” she asked, and pulled back her arms, folding them across her breasts again. “The point is,” she said, “my name gets in the police files down here, I’m right back where I started. I like it here. I don’t want to have to move on again.”

“What was the charge in Jacksonville?” Bloom asked.

“There wasn’t any charge,” she said. “I was just running with a crowd that got in trouble.”

“Then how’d your name get in the police files up there?” Rawles asked.

“Because I was with them when it happened. But I didn’t know what was going on, I really didn’t, so the cops let me go.”

“Without charging you with anything?”

“That’s right. Because they realized I had no idea what was happening.”

“What was happening?”

“These guys were junkies,” Sylvia said.

“But you weren’t.”

“I was shooting maybe a dime bag a day, but I didn’t have anything like a habit.”

“So what did these guys do? These junkies?”

“They tried to stick up a liquor store. I was riding with them in the car, one of them says, ‘I’ll go buy us some juice,’ he goes in the store with a thirty-two, sticks it in the owner’s face. His bad luck, there was an off-duty cop in the store buying a jug. His worse luck, he tries shooting it out with the cop. Guy driving the car, he hears guns going off, he hits the gas pedal, rides the car up on the sidewalk, and knocks over a fire hydrant. Next thing you know, there’s more cops than I knew existed in the whole state of Florida.” She shrugged. “But they let me go. Because I had no idea anybody was planning a stickup. I was just along for the ride.”

“Who let you go?”

“The detectives. After they questioned me for three, four hours. Also, the two guys I was with said I was clean.”

“We can check this, you know,” Rawles said.

“Sure, check it. Would I be telling it to you if it wasn’t the truth? One thing I learned about cops, you better tell it the way it is, or You’re asking for more trouble than you already got.”

“How old are you, Sylvia?” Bloom asked.

“Twenty-one. I look older, I know. It’s the lousy job this dope did on my hair last week. Makes it look like straw.”

One hand went up to her bleached blonde hair. She tried to fluff it, gave up the attempt, and folded her arms across her chest again.

“Tell us about Tracy Kilbourne,” Rawles said, his pencil poised over the pad.

“So here I go in the files again, right?” she said, and sighed.

“As a witness,” Rawles said.

“I was a witness last time, too. How’s this any different? Shit, I hardly knew the girl. So now I’m a fucking witness in a homicide case.”

“Who said it was a homicide?” Bloom asked at once.

“Please don’t shit me, okay, mister?” Sylvia said. “You ain’t here ’cause Tracy died in her sleep.”

“That’s right,” Bloom said. “She was shot in the throat, and her tongue was cut out, and she was dropped in the river. Would you like to see some pictures of what she looked like when we fished her out?”

“Wow,” Sylvia said.

Behind her, rock-and-roll music blared into the small room. Lights flashed blue and red and amber. The teddy-bear girl shook her hips and her breasts at empty tables, unconcerned that she had no audience. In the dim corners of the room, the other dancers plied their trade. On the movie screen, a white girl was sandwiched between two black men.

“What do you want to know?” Sylvia asked. “Anything you can tell us,” Rawles said.

Sylvia first met Tracy Kilbourne—

“That’s her real name, you know. I mean, a lot of girls working the topless joints, they take exotic, sexy names... well, Tiffany Carter, for example... but that was the name Tracy was born with.”

— met her for the first time on a sultry night last May, the temperature hovering in the high eighties, the promise of a thunderstorm in the air. June usually marked the beginning of Calusa’s summer-long heat wave, but sometimes the last part of May could turn oppressive, and this was one of those nights. The girls, Sylvia remembered, would have been willing to dance naked that night, if the law had allowed it, that’s how hot and sticky it was. You came off that stage dripping sweat, and then you were supposed to find some guy’s face to grind into when all you really wanted to do was take a cold shower.

Most guys touched you, even though there were signs all over the place warning that the dancers were not to be touched, all according to law, you know, but they did it anyway, and the girls let them do it because that’s what added up all those dollar bills tucked into the band of the G-string, five-dollar bills sometimes if you let one of them slide his hand up a little higher than it was supposed to go, or maybe cop a quick kiss on the nipple. All in the dark, all hidden from the eyes of the law; if a blue uniform popped into the doorway over there, everybody was suddenly very prim and proper — well, the cops knew that, Sylvia was sure they knew it, and besides, they were probably being paid off to look the other way, no offense.

Tracy had been working there for a week by then, but Sylvia didn’t meet her until that night because she herself had taken two weeks off to go visit her mother in Louisiana, whose old man had just left her and who was feeling rotten. Her mother worked in a massage parlor in New Orleans. She was still pretty good looking at thirty-eight years old, and pretty much in demand up there. Sylvia herself would never take work in a massage parlor — “Let’s face it, that’s plain and simple hooking, my mother’s a hooker, that’s all there is to it.” A massage parlor was a whorehouse, period. So were all these escort services you saw advertised. All legalized prostitution was what it amounted to. A lot of girls dancing topless, they later drifted into massage parlors or escort services, what they did was become hookers.

This topless shit was close to hooking, she guessed, but the most any of the girls ever did by way of outright sex was a hand job every now and then, for which the going price was ten dollars. The girls were pissed off at Cindy just now—

“Cindy’s the teddy-bear girl, and only sixteen, but don’t tell Angus I said that, or it’s my ass...”

— because she was giving hand jobs away practically free, seven dollars a shot, which brought the price down for the other girls. The girls did the hand jobs sitting at the tables, usually a table pretty far away from the stage, which was where the brightest lights were, and sometimes they brought guys off by sitting on their laps and squirming there, but that was dangerous if a cop happened to stroll by. There wasn’t supposed to be any physical contact, you see.

“But sitting right here at the table, for example, I could give both of you hand jobs at the same time without anyone being the wiser, and earn myself twenty bucks for ten minutes’ work.”

Not that she was suggesting anything of the sort; she knew they were both cops.

She met Tracy in the alley out back where the girls went for a smoke break, get away from all the clutching hands in here, though you couldn’t make any money outside smoking. Some of the girls — well, she shouldn’t be telling them this, but who gave a fuck? — some of the girls used a pickup truck out back to do a little more than they were allowed to inside the club. Angus was very strict about anything but hand jobs. But outside in the pickup truck, you could earn a few extra bucks on a ten-minute break. A blow job cost twenty bucks. Anybody wanted to actually get in your pants, it cost him thirty, but hardly anybody who came here could afford that. The trade they got here mostly was young kids who thought a hand job was the end of the world. Either that or old geezers couldn’t get it up for a month till some young girl started playing with it. Sylvia herself never did any of that stuff, of course — “I’m here ’cause I like to dance,” she said. “I just dance for the guys ’cause I enjoy it, and if they stick a couple of bucks in my G-string, that’s enough for me.”

Tracy was out there smoking in the alley when Sylvia came out that night. She’d been onstage for fifteen minutes — what they did was alternate every fifteen minutes, the girls on the night shift. During the day there were fewer girls working, because there wasn’t much of a crowd, you see, and so they stayed onstage a half hour. But at night the girls danced onstage for only fifteen minutes. There were usually twelve girls working the night shift — from eight o’clock to two in the morning — which meant you had to go onstage maybe twice a night unless one of the girls was out sick, a lot of them didn’t like to work when they had the curse. The money was in working the tables, getting the guys to buy you drinks so Angus could realize his profit—

“He serves ginger ale for champagne, you know, well, all these joints do...”

— and also dancing for them so you could get those bills tucked away, which was how the girls made their money. One of the girls told her — she wouldn’t know about this personally — that Angus also took a cut on the hand-job trade, split the ten bucks fifty-fifty with the girls, because he said he was taking a risk allowing such things to happen in his fine little establishment.

Anyway, she’d come off the stage that night sweating like a truck driver, and had gone out to the alley to catch a smoke and whatever breeze there might be. Tracy was standing there leaning against the wall, puffing on a cigarette. Sylvia didn’t know if the detectives had any notion of what Tracy had looked like when she was alive, but the girl was a real beauty. Blonde hair down to here, big blue eyes, gorgeous nose, full mouth, hand-tooled tits, legs that wouldn’t quit, a real racehorse. Sylvia had been surprised to find her working in a place like Up Front, in fact, because, “Let’s face it, the girls here, myself included, wouldn’t win any Miss Universe contests.” The prettier girls first tried to find work at Club Alyce, which got a better clientele and where you could expect to make more money, but there was a waiting list a mile long for any girl wanted to work there, and what Angus got here were the leftovers, usually. As a matter of fact, one of the first things Sylvia had said to Tracy was, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a joint like this?” — which got a laugh from her because it was an old line, you know, “The line guys use in whorehouses when They’re trying to get to know you a little better, understand your personality, while all the girl wants is to get this over with as fast as possible so she can turn the next trick — not that I would know personally.”

Tracy told her, in the ten minutes while they smoked and talked together outside, that she’d been working until a week ago at a pizza place downtown, but that she’d figured there was no future in that, what she wanted to be was a movie star. What she figured was that this would be good practice for her, working in a place like this in front of an audience and half naked — a lot of movie stars did nude scenes nowadays, she explained — and anyway, she was earning more here than when she was pushing pizzas across the counter. Besides, who knew when some big movie producer might walk in looking for a location for a picture or something — she’d heard that Twentieth Century Fox was opening a studio in Calusa — and spot her dancing and figure she had the right stuff? Sylvia remembered thinking that in a week’s time she’d be doing hand jobs, and in a month she’d be out back in the pickup, sucking some guy’s dick. But she hadn’t said anything to her at the time because she hardly knew the girl. In fact, as it turned out, she was dead wrong about Tracy’s inexperience and innocence, because that very night she saw her sitting with a black soldier, and her hand seemed to be very busy under the table.

It was surprising that the other girls liked Tracy so much, her being so beautiful and all, and her attracting a lot of customers, and therefore a lot of bucks that might have been tucked into the bands of G-strings around other bellies. But there was something about her — she was like a mother hen, always worrying if a girl came down with the sniffles, always giving little tips on how to do your eyes or your nails or your hair, showing the girls how to walk, even how to smile — it was almost as if she was a movie star already and could afford to give advice to girls who weren’t as lucky as she was. It was really strange. In a month’s time, she was — well, the star here. With everybody. Not only with the guys who used to crowd that stage whenever she stepped on it, and who would practically be lined up waiting for her to dance for them privately or sit with them and, you know, do whatever it was they wanted from her, she had gorgeous hands. But also with the girls, the girls absolutely adored her, it was Tracy this and Tracy that, how do you make your nipples pucker before you go on, should I wear only one earring instead of two, how do you turn down some guy who’s a really hairy beast and still get him to tuck that buck in your G-string... Tracy, Tracy, Tracy, all night long.

The younger guys went for her, naturally — she was their dream girl next door, you know, all peaches and cream, that honey-blonde hair and those blue eyes flashing like lightning, sweet as a virgin and built like God you could die just seeing her move her pinkie. But she got an even bigger play from the older guys, the geezers who it took all night for them to get a hard-on. She played to these guys — “I think because they tipped heavier than the kids” — like she’d been waiting all night for them to walk through the door, strutted her stuff on that stage for them, made them feel like a million bucks when she went to their tables. That was where she made most of her tips. With the older guys. Man, they laid bucks on her like they were harvesting cash in the boonies off the Trail. She never went out in the pickup with anybody, not to Sylvia’s knowledge, anyway, but that was because she didn’t have to. There was gold to be mined right there inside the club, and even sharing some of it with Angus, she went home with a bundle every week.

Sylvia guessed she spent most of it on clothes. She was living in a furnished apartment all the while she worked at the club, “little shack kind of thing built up on stilts, out near Whisper Key, but on the mainland... that spit of land just before you cross the north bridge to Whisper, on the bay there, where there are a lot of mobile homes and shitty little dumps crowding the waterfront.” Sylvia had been there only once, and the place was as neat as a pin, but it was just this tiny little apartment and it was furnished with rattan stuff the owner had probably picked up at a fire sale. The closets were full of clothes; it was easy to see where all Tracy’s money went. Dresses and shoes and blouses and skirts and sweaters and one very expensive designer outfit she’d bought in a boutique on Lucy’s Circle, most of them brand-new and looking as if they’d never been worn.

“Except this one red dress,” Sylvia said.

The dress was a cheap little thing Tracy had worn when she first left Georgia to go to Hollywood. She’d worn it hitchhiking clear across the country, the red dress and red shoes, and she thought of that dress as a good-luck charm because it got her all the way to California, even though she didn’t get to be a movie star there. Also, the dress was what she called her first “grown-up” dress, which she’d bought for herself when she decided she was at last going to make the break and step out on her own. She never really wore the dress anymore, she told Sylvia, except when she came out of the shower, something to throw on while she did her nails or blow-dried her hair. That was because there was an ink spot on it, near the waist. But even though she wouldn’t be seen dead in it in public, she couldn’t bear to throw it out. There was just something... comforting about that dress. Putting that dress on — it just wrapped around, you know, no zippers or anything — she was reminded all over again of the decision she’d made when she was sixteen years old and ready to leave Georgia. The dress reminded her that one day she was going to be a movie star. Maybe that’s why she put it on whenever she got out of the shower, clean and naked, fresh and smelling of soap. The dress made her feel sixteen again. She’d told Sylvia she’d never throw that dress away — even when she got to be rich and famous, as she knew for sure she would someday.

And then, one day last July, she just didn’t show up at the club.

Nobody knew where she was.

One of the girls tried calling her at the apartment — they thought maybe she was sick or something — but nobody answered the phone. Sylvia herself had gone to the apartment the very next morning, looking for her, wanting to make sure she was all right. No one answered her knocking at the door. A next-door neighbor told her that if she was looking for the good-looking blonde gal, she was gone. A big, expensive car had picked her up the night before, and a colored chauffeur had helped her take all her clothes and things down to put in the trunk. The neighbor didn’t know where the car took her. It had driven out toward the bridge to Whisper Key.

“That’s the last I ever heard of her,” Sylvia said. She paused. “I missed her. We all did. This place wasn’t the same without her.” She paused again. “So now she’s dead.”

“This car,” Rawles said. “The neighbor didn’t happen to see the license plate number, did she?”

“It was a man,” Sylvia said. “The neighbor.”

“Did he catch the number?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.”

“What was his name, do you remember?”

“I didn’t ask him his name, either. He was just this guy popped out of a mobile home next door and told me Tracy was gone.”

“Can you give us the address of that apartment?” Bloom asked. “Where she was living.”

“I don’t remember the address. But I can tell you how to get there. You’ll know the house the minute you see it. It’s the only one up on stilts, right on the bay.”