Richard Aleas - Little Girl Lost

“Thanks for the tip,” I said.

“What they pay me for,” he said. “Preventing trouble.”

The place was packed. Maybe it was all thrillseekers and newshounds, people who had come to soak up the club’s sudden notoriety, but somehow that wasn’t the feeling I got. The guys at the bar had the comfortable, broken-in posture of old regulars, and at the stage it was clearly Eros, not Thanatos, that was on everyone’s mind.

It wasn’t hard to recognize the headliners from their photos on the door. Mandy was the shorter one, and a little older than she looked in her picture, but no less well endowed. She was working the crowd, kneeling at the edge of the stage and pressing the face of one patron after another between her breasts. Her garter had a few bills in it and a few had fallen to the stage. I think one of them might have been a twenty, dropped by some high roller, but I couldn’t swear to it.

Meanwhile, Rachel Firestone was back by the pole, leaning against it, doing a sort of sinuous Salome thing with her arms over her head that was completely lost on the audience. The ones who weren’t slobbering on Mandy’s breasts were woofing and cheering when she leaned back and bucked her hips in time to the beat.

Throughout the song she’d been playing with the bowtie knots at either hip, and now that she’d worked the crowd into a lather, she gave each knot a practiced tug and whipped off the spangled g-string entirely. This was a no-no for a club with a liquor license, but there were apparently no cops in the room, or at least none that disapproved, since she went right on bucking and twisting under the spotlight.

The song reached its climax and faded, and then it was Rachel’s turn. She stepped forward as the next song started. Mandy snatched up the fallen bills, threw a few kisses to the crowd, and exited through a door at the rear of the stage. Presumably to the too-cold dressing room, where the next girl waited to take Rachel’s place at the pole.

I looked around the room. The mirrored walls made it hard to get your bearings, especially since some of them turned out to be doors, like the one behind the stage. One swung open, disgorging a man wiping his hands on a twist of beige paper. Another opened to reveal a woman in heels and a clingy gown, leading a happy patron by the hand. Some sort of VIP room, presumably, which would be where the girls made their real money, extorting extra bucks for “champagne” and a private lap dance. How far things went in rooms like that depended on the club and how badly they wanted to stay on the right side of the law. Of course, I’d just gotten a hint of how law-abiding this place was. Behind closed doors, it was probably every girl for herself.

I couldn’t imagine Miranda selling back room sex any more than I could imagine her dancing naked in a room like this. But then I couldn’t imagine her dead of two bullets to the back of the head, either.

I felt a hand at my elbow, then a soft pressure against my arm as a woman came around from behind me. She was about my height, Chinese, in a green dress cut down the front and up the side to show a bit of this and a bit of that. The smile she gave me didn’t look any more unnatural than, say, a shoe salesman’s. “Hi, handsome. Want to buy me a drink?”

“I’m looking for Lenz,” I said.

She dropped the smile and nodded. “He’s around here, I just saw him.” She looked over my shoulder, scanned the bar. “I don’t know, he’s probably in back. He’ll be out in a minute.” She patted my arm. “Back to work.” And up went the smile again.

I elbowed my way to the bar, ordered my club soda, and parted with a twenty when it arrived. The woman working the tap was not the same one who’d been there earlier, but she was the same general type. If you bothered to look closely you’d see that this one had curlier hair and darker skin, that her breasts didn’t fill the bustier quite so close to overflowing – but who was bothering to look? All heads in the room were turned to the stage, except for the people who were engaged in conversation with one of the women working the floor. I wasn’t watching the bartender, myself – I was watching the room reflected in the mirror behind her.

But I wasn’t watching closely enough, and I jumped a little when another hand landed on my elbow from behind. This one had a firm grip and didn’t sweeten the pot with the soft pressure of a breast against my arm.

“I hear you’re looking for me.”

I turned around, then climbed down off my stool to even things out a little, but it wasn’t enough. Even in boots with two-inch heels, Lenz only came up to my chin. He had unruly sideburns and something in his hair that made it shine under the room’s lights. His head was tilted back and cocked at an angle and there was a stare etched onto his face that dared me to say something smart.

“Jasmine said you’re looking for me. I don’t think we’ve met. Do we have business together?”

“We might,” I said. “I was Miranda Sugarman’s boyfriend.”

He stiffened visibly. After all he’d had to deal with, that had to be low on the list of things he wanted to hear. Still, Leo’d taught me to try the direct approach first.

“This was a long time ago, in high school,” I said. “I read in the paper about what happened, and I figured maybe I could come here, talk to someone who’d known her more recently.” He was doing a slow burn, which told me my chances weren’t good. “I’d like to talk to you about her. Do you have a minute?”

His head twitched to the side. “Do I have a minute. No, I don’t have a fucking minute. Two days, the fucking cops have been crawling up my ass, asking me questions. Your girlfriend worked here, what, four months? Gets herself killed on my premises, puts my club in the fucking paper-”

“Doesn’t look like it’s hurting your business any.”

“The fuck do you know about my business? Jesus Christ, now I’ve got to talk to the fucking boyfriend from high school? What the hell are you anyway, sixteen years old? Fucking Roy’ll let anyone in. Get out of here!”

Now some of the heads had turned our way. Even Rachel Firestone was watching from the stage, though she kept shimmying while she did it.

He tried to grab my arm, but I held my hands up out of his reach.

“I just want a few minutes of your time,” I said.

“No, that’s not what you want,” Lenz said. “You want to break my balls. Well, tonight’s your lucky night, since all I’m gonna do is kick you out.” He marched me to the door and pushed me through, giving me a violent shove toward the curb. He turned to the bouncer, shook his index finger in the man’s face. “You let him in again, you’re fired. Understand?” The door slammed shut.

“Told you not to call him that,” Roy said.

So much for the direct approach.

I straightened myself up and took my wounded pride down the block, past the deli I’d stood in earlier, past a shuttered FedEx office, past a Radio Shack that was brightly lit but closed, to a pub that was dark but open. The sandwich board on the sidewalk outside listed dinner specials written in chalk – shepherd’s pie, bangers and mash, liver and onions – along with a couple of specialty drinks and the name of the trio that played Mondays through Thursdays from nine to midnight. It was Monday, but after midnight, and both the piano and the microphone stand stood silent.

Behind the bar, a gray-haired man with rolled-up shirtsleeves and ancient blue tattoos on both forearms was wiping down the bar with a rag. He kept wiping after I sat down and only stopped when I ordered a drink. He looked at me for a second longer than he’d have looked at most people, but in the end he didn’t ask to see an ID.