Richard Aleas - Little Girl Lost

“No, thanks. Just a coke.”

He filled a glass and set it down on a napkin, dropped in a straw. “Saw you were talking to the girls last night. They’re a good bunch,” he said. “Don’t have an easy lot in life.”

“No,” I said.

“They come in here for some peace and quiet, and I’m glad to give it to them. They need a place to let off steam, feel safe. I wouldn’t keep the place open so late nights, only where would they go if I didn’t?”

I nodded.

“Time to time,” he said, “people see them here, figure out who they are, and start dropping by. Think maybe they can make friends, or pick up some company for the night, have a little fun. They don’t encourage it, and neither do I.”

He shot some more coke into my glass now that the foam had settled.

“You seem like a nice fellow, clean cut, well dressed, that’s why I’m talking to you like this. There’s some you talk to and some it’s not worth the breath, you’ve got to find other ways to get through to those.”

“I hear you,” I said. “The girls won’t have any trouble from me.”

“Ah, that’s good,” he said. “We’ve got to look out for one another in this world, don’t we?”

So where were you, I wanted to ask, when Miranda needed someone to look out for her? But all I said was, “That we do.”

I saw Rachel come through the door then, look around the room, and spot me at the bar. She was wearing jeans and a cardigan, with a hat pulled down over her ears. She took the hat off and shook out her hair as she walked over.

“Don’t break my kneecaps,” I said. “She asked me to meet her here.”

We sat in the back, at the table farthest from the door. Even so, Rachel kept darting glances over her shoulder.

“Thanks for meeting me. I wasn’t even sure you got my message.”

“I’m sorry I missed your call. I was on the subway.”

“That’s okay.”

We were both silent for a bit. She had something to say, and I figured she’d say it when she was ready. In the meantime, I didn’t want to open my mouth and maybe scare her off by saying the wrong thing.

“The reason I asked you to meet me is, Randy talked to me the night before she was shot,” she finally said. “She was terrified. She told me she was afraid someone was going to kill her.”

“Did she say who?”

“Yes,” Rachel said. “Murco Khachadurian.”

Her hands were shaking. I fought the urge to reach across the table and cover them with my own.

“It’s not like we knew each other,” she said. “We didn’t. I’d just come from three weeks at a club in Jersey called Carson’s. Right on the other side of the bridge?”

I nodded.

“So who am I to her? Just the new girl, right?” She swallowed some of her drink, stirred the rest with the little red straw. “We’d never talked before. Not one word. But we were changing after the last set, it was just the two of us in the dressing room, and I guess she just needed to talk to someone. God. I wish I’d said something to someone, but I didn’t think she was serious. No, that’s not it – she was serious. I just didn’t believe it was true.”

“What did she say?”

Rachel closed her eyes tight. I’ve noticed that some people do that when they’re trying hard to remember, though for others it seems to be a matter of not wanting to look you in the eyes while they tell a whopper. “She said, ‘There are bad things going on at this club,’ and I said something like, ‘You’re saying it’s a high-mileage place?’ and she said no, that it was much worse.”

“High mileage?”

“You know, lots of touching.” She looked at me, and I got the feeling that she was suddenly noticing how young I looked – nice and clean-cut, as my friend at the bar had said – and maybe wondering how much I knew about the ways of the world. “Some clubs, there’s a strict hands-off policy, look but don’t touch – that’s no mileage. Some places, the dancers are expected to grind a little during a lap dance, but the guys have to keep their pants on and their hands to themselves. That’s low mileage. Then there are places where the whole point is to make the guy come. Basically they can touch you anywhere except inside your g-string, and you can do anything to get them off short of actually having sex with them.”

“And that’s high mileage.”

She nodded. “Only thing higher’s full service. Most girls won’t work for a high-mileage club, but sometimes you don’t know going in, because the high-mileage stuff is going on in the champagne rooms, not out front. So girls will warn each other, especially when you’re new to a club, and I figured that’s what Randy was doing.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“No. She said, ‘Believe me, you’ll be glad when someone comes in and all he wants is a hand job.’ And I said, ‘What? What is it? Is it S amp;M?’ Because some of these places, that’s the big secret, they’ve got a dungeon in the basement and guys come in to get whipped. I’ve never understood that stuff myself, but it doesn’t bother me – I’d rather smack someone with a riding crop than jerk him off. But she said, ‘No, it isn’t sex. It’s drugs.’ “

“Drugs?”

“That’s what she said. She had this whole story about how the guy who owns the club is a dealer and is using the girls to move his merchandise, and if you don’t go along with it or you talk to anyone about it, you wind up in a ditch in Jersey City.”

“But here she was talking to you about it.”

“Right, exactly,” Rachel said, “and I was thinking, this girl’s watched one too many re-runs of The Sopranos. Because that’s the vibe she was giving off. Real drama queen. The people you meet in this business are not exactly the most stable-” A look of embarrassment washed over her face. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“But you used to date her.”

“It was a long time ago,” I said.

We didn’t say anything for a bit. Rachel brushed her hair out of her eyes, and for a moment I was reminded of Miranda. They didn’t look anything alike, but something about the gesture brought her to mind – that and the fact that I’d seen this woman dancing naked on a stage the night before, and here she was now, looking completely normal, completely ordinary. It was like a photographic negative of my experience with Miranda.

I also found myself noticing how, without the stage makeup and the gel in her hair and all the other trappings of her trade, Rachel was a very beautiful woman. Maybe this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did. Dancing on stage she’d been just another pin-up, another pair of high heels and long legs and bare breasts, and I’d found nothing very erotic about the sight. But across a table in a pub at twilight, dressed in faded jeans and a sweater the color of ginger ale, she was an ordinary woman, and infinitely more appealing.

“What did Miranda say she was afraid of?”

“She told me she’d found out about the drugs and somehow had gotten on the wrong side of the owner, this Khachadurian, and now she was sure he was going to kill her. She really sounded scared. But you know, lots of girls talk themselves into getting scared or angry or ashamed over all sorts of things, and maybe one tenth of it is real. So I just tried to make her feel better. I remember saying, ‘I’m sure it’s not that bad. You haven’t told anyone, right? So what reason would he have to do anything to you?’ And then a day later, she’s dead.”

“It may not be related,” I said. But even as I said it, I knew how foolish it sounded.

“The terrible thing,” Rachel said, “is when I heard what had happened, the first thing I thought about wasn’t her, it was, ‘She told me, and now they’re going to come after me, too.’ “