Ken Bruen - Bust

The host, a Mafia-looking guy with slicked-back hair, was on stage introducing the girls one by one, holding their hands and kissing them on the lips or cheek after he said their names. Max sometimes wondered whether all the girls screwed around with the host, but he was positive that the ones who kissed him on the lips had. Max was a known regular at the club so he and Jack got the VIP seats, right in front of the stage. Immediately, Max bought Jack a rum and Coke and a table dance with the girl of his choice. Jack picked a Puerto Rican with a big smile and a nice set of 38 or 40 triple-Ds. Perfectomundo. That was the way to get ’em in the mood.

Max was watching Jack enjoy himself when he heard someone call out his name. It was Felicia, a black stripper with 46 triple-Ds whom Max had bought dances from many times before. She was on the stage, leaning forward so that her implants hung down off her bone-thin dancer’s body.

“How are you?” Max said.

“Wait up, baby,” Felicia said. “Let me come down there and talk to you personally.”

She climbed down off the stage and sat on Max’s lap. Max knew that she was just being nice to him because he had tipped her a lot of money in the past, but he couldn’t help but let the special treatment go to his head. He felt like Hugh Hefner, sitting there with a gorgeous girl on his lap. He wondered if Hef listened to Mozart. Guy spent his life in silk pajamas, smoked a pipe, he must listen to real music.

“That’s better,” Felicia said, wiggling her ass as she settled in on his lap. “So how you been?”

“All right,” Max said.

“Yeah? I ain’t seen you around here too much lately.”

“I’ve been busy. You know how it is.”

Max remembered once telling Felicia about his business and how this had impressed her.

“That’s right,” Felicia said, “you got some kind of company – computers or something, right?”

“That’s right,” Max said.

“That’s cool, baby. Hey, anybody ever tell you how cute you are?” That lifted him in every sense. Who needed Viagra?

“Nobody who looked like you,” Max said.

Felicia kissed him on the forehead and Max felt her hard implants pressing against his chest.

“I got an idea,” Felicia said. “Take down my number. You can give me a call some time when I’m not working. We’ll go out and have a good time. Or I can just come over to your place and we’ll party there.”

Max scribbled Felicia’s number on the back of one of his business cards, then leaned back as she gave a nice, slow table dance. First she crouched backwards with her butt high in the air. Then she turned and danced with her breasts in Max’s face. The bags were so big they were stretching the skin around them, and her nipples were sticking out like pencil erasers. In the middle of the dance, Max looked at his watch and saw it was 6:08. If all had gone according to plan, Deirdre had been murdered eight minutes ago. Felicia saw him looking at his watch and said, “You got a date tonight, baby?”

“No, I’m just checking the time. It’s a little after six,” he added so she would remember if anyone asked.

“A little after sex?”

“ Six,” Max said.

“Oh. I musta heard you wrong, baby.”

“Right side,” Max said to Asir Aswad as the cab turned onto East Eightieth Street. In the middle of the block, Max said, “Right here,” and the cab came to a stop.

The meter read $9.70. Max gave Asir a twenty and took back the entire ten dollars and thirty cents change. He never tipped cab drivers and wasn’t going to start now. He didn’t want the police to think he had been acting in any way unusual minutes before discovering his wife’s body.

It was 10:27. Max had dropped Jack off at Penn Station twenty minutes ago. Jack had seen Max writing down Felicia’s phone number and it had impressed him a great deal.

“You gonna call her?” Jack asked.

“When I get around to it,” Max said.

“If I were you I wouldn’t wait on that,” Jack said. “I’m getting a little tired of that Russian coffee cake. I might be in the mood for some chocolate pudding one of these nights. If you don’t use that number, why don’t you hold onto it for me?”

Jack was drunk, but not so drunk that he wouldn’t remember that Max was with him all night while Deirdre was being murdered.

Of course Max had no intention of calling Felicia. Seeing those big gazongas in his face had definitely got him thinking, but before he had sex with a cheap stripper he’d need to see some blood work. He was just egging Jack on, trying to maintain his swinger image since Jack seemed to like it. It was part of the sales technique that he had perfected – never show the client that you are in any way above him. In other words, if the client sleeps with cheap hookers, then you have to come off as a guy who sleeps with cheap hookers. Besides, Max had Angela and he’d probably be spending the rest of his life with her. Although, he had to admit, it would be nice if Angela had knockers as big as Felicia’s.

Max headed up the stoop to his townhouse. Through the lace curtains in the front windows he could see that there were no lights on inside. As he put his key in the first lock, he remembered what Popeye had said to him when they’d met in the pizza place, about how he might kill Max, too, if Max came home while he was still in the house. Max looked at his watch – 10:29. Popeye must have left more than four hours ago. There was no way in hell he could be inside there now.

After Angela’s mother died, her father suddenly started telling Angela she had to find her Greek roots so last summer, partly just to shut her father up, she figured, Why not? and found a package on the Internet and went for a visit.

Bad idea. Real bad.

She thought she’d chill on the beach, work on her tan, but it turned into the trip from hell. All everyone kept asking her was when she was going to get married. She was twenty-eight, for god’s sake, she didn’t even have a serious boyfriend. One of her aunts made her promise that when she got back to New York, she would call Spiros, the cousin of someone on the island who was supposed to be a very nice guy. Just to get her aunt and everyone else off her back, she took Spiros’s number and promised to call him. Jeez, a Greek got on your case, you were going to agree to anything.

A few months later, when she was back in New York and had just broken up with the latest dick she’d met out clubbing, she found the piece of paper with the phone number in the bottom of her suitcase and figured, What the hell?

Spiros was weird on the phone. He asked all kinds of questions – who was she, why was she calling, why did she wait so long to call. Angela was about to hang up when he suggested that they go to dinner Friday night. It wasn’t like her social diary was overflowing so Angela went to meet him after work, figuring she’d go for the free meal.

Spiros was short with bad skin, a crooked nose, and a bushy black mustache. He looked sort of like Saddam Hussein. Angela wanted to ditch him right then, but they were at a very expensive Greek restaurant in midtown so she figured he must be loaded. During dinner, he was very polite and kept telling her how pretty her smile was and how her eyes were the color of the Aegean Sea, but Angela was more interested when he started talking about his money. He said he was in “the restaurant business,” but he wouldn’t tell her the name of the restaurant or where it was located.