Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

“In what?” I said, peeking out the window once more, but seeing only the flat, black darkness.

“I already told you in the car,” she said.

“The brain.”

“Psychology, to be exact,” she said.

“So you were an intellectually motivated student, slash, exotic dancer, is that it?”

“A very broke dancer, slash, correspondence student,” Cassandra said. “I had bills to pay, and dancing more than paid for them. I even had my own apartment on the West Side. Try supporting that on waitressing money.”

“Dancing was cost-effective,” I said.

“I guess that was the sensible side of it all,” she said. “But then there was the other side.”

“What do you mean?”

“I used what I was doing at work to come up with a topic for a term paper. ‘Striptease,’ I called it, ‘For Fun or Money?’ “

“What’d you get?” I said, now leaning against the windowsill.

“For what?”

“For a grade?”

“For a grade?” she said. “They didn’t even bother to grade it. The teacher wrote a little note saying that my topic had little to do with the intention of his course and that it might help if I turned myself in to the pornographic hot line or the rape crisis center or some shit like that.”

I wasn’t sure why, but part of me wanted to laugh.

“I guess they weren’t used to term papers written by strippers,” Cassandra admitted.

“Which was it for you, then?”

“Which was what?”

“Dancing,” I said, picking up a scrap of kindling from the floor and tossing it into the red-yellow flames. “Fun or money?”

“I’m not sure. But like I told you, it was a way to make the green. It wasn’t like I hated it either, you know.”

I sat down next to her again, sat the.45 in my lap, barrel pointed to the fireplace, and gently brushed away the hair on her shoulder exposing the heart-shaped tattoo.

“What about Vasquez?” I said. “What about this tattoo?”

“He saw me dancing one night and offered me a job in Tribeca that paid almost twice the cash, and suddenly I’ve got this career.”

“But what about the tattoo?”

“All his dancers had their mark. Their brand you might say.”

“And yours came in the shape of a heart.”

“You catch on quick, Mr. Marconi,” Cassandra said. “Do I call you Mr. Marconi or is it Warden Marconi or General Marconi?”

“Keeper,” I said, in the interest of killing off any formality. Besides, she knew by now what people called me. “What I don’t understand, though, is how a smart kid like you could be coaxed into being branded by Vasquez?”

“Lots of recreational drugs went with the job,” she explained, “which, by the way, kind of added to my term paper.”

“Research is research,” I said.

“I ended up doing a couple of films for him. Nothing heavy. Strictly cheesecake. But by then the drugs were becoming an everyday event and I was snorting a lot of junk and making more money in a single week than my father made in three months when I was growing up. All of this went into the paper. That and a lot of graphic description.” She smiled. “In terms of language, I left nothing to the imagination.”

“I’m beginning to understand your teacher’s concern,” I said, getting up from the floor once more, replacing the pistol in my belt, and going for another bottle of wine. “Suddenly the researcher becomes the subject.”

“I was making the green,” she said, “and getting off on the excitement. My father struggled for years selling wholesale toilet paper from the dining room table of our flat in Queens and then died a lonely, broke old man. I wasn’t going to let something like that happen to me.”

“What about your mother?”

“My mother?” she said, grabbing the fresh bottle of wine from my hand. “My mother died not long after my tenth birthday. And as for my father? They should have buried him alongside her.”

“After a while,” Cassandra went on, “I had no idea what I felt or what I was doing. It was like suddenly the mythical Cassandra-the babe who’s supposed to be able to tell the future-can’t make any sense out of her past or present. It wasn’t like I was worried about having a future. It was like I didn’t want a future at all.”

“Drugs, pornography, correspondence school,” I commented. “It all adds up.”

“I fell into this trance,” she said, taking another sip of wine from the bottle and passing it back to me. “Did you know there’s been studies done as to why women turn to hooking or stripping or both?”

“Women who normally wouldn’t turn to that sort of thing,” I said.

“Some shrinks think that these women work from some kind of…how do they put it…some kind of pathological base, but not identical pathological bases, if you get my drift.”

“Pathological, as in crazy?”

“Do I look crazy to you?”

“I hardly even know you. But here I am needing you.” The memory of her burying that hatchet flashed through my mind.

“Believe me,” she said, “the word pathological can even mean that some women are born into this kind of thing. Doesn’t matter if they’re rich or dirt-poor like I was, they’re attracted to the allure of it all, attracted to the trance. They don’t give a rat’s ass about doing anything else.”

“In other words,” I supposed, “it’s not just a way of making a quick buck, after all.”

“You’re not going to believe this,” Cassandra said, “but some prostitutes don’t need the money at all.”

“So much for mythology. But what about you? What snapped you out of the trance?”

She took a breath and another swallow of wine.

“One night, as Eddy and I were coming back from the club in his Mercedes, he ran a stop light. A cop tailed us and made us pull over, close to the sidewalk. When the cop came up to the car, Eddy opened the door and slammed it into him. It caught the cop by surprise and he fell back hard. I screamed at Eddy to stop it, but he just backhanded me, told me to shut up.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d seen him mad before, but not like this. He just went berserk, like the cop triggered something inside his brain. He shot out of the car and kicked the cop in the head and dragged him into an alley on the opposite end of the sidewalk. It was late night and dark, and you know how it is in the city when it’s hot and people just hang out at all hours of the night. Some people had gathered, a few black kids and a black woman I remembered whose eyes were as big as pools, even through the tinted windows of Eddy’s Mercedes. It took only a second or two, but then I saw the flash and heard the pistol go off.

“I got out of the car and screamed, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ But Eduard never answered. He just pulled the trigger again.”

Cassandra fixed her eyes on the fire now. Finally, she was opening up to me. At the same time, I knew she was trying to come to grips with a past gone horribly wrong.

“I started to run,” she said. “I ran as far as I could for as long as I could. And then I ran some more. The next morning I found myself outside the doors of Penn Station. I wanted to go straight to the police but I was afraid of what they’d do to me. So I went into Penn, went downstairs and called 911 from a pay phone, told them I knew who killed the police officer. I gave them Eddy’s address and by the time I got up the nerve to go back there, Eddy was under arrest. That black woman with the big eyes, she had given the police a description of Eddy, too. A description that must have matched mine.

“But here’s the strange thing. During the time Eddy was being questioned, he never let on that I was with him. Even though witnesses were sure there was a girl with him at the time. But then, he’s always held that over my head, along with the fact that I called the police. I mean, it’s one thing that I told him I turned him in. It’s another he didn’t kill me right away. It’s why I stayed with him, even after he went to jail. It’s why I did everything.”