William Bernhardt - Dark Eye

“Do they make you wear that?” he continued. “Are you being punished because you misbehaved?”

“No, dear.”

“I’ve never seen a shirt that had to be tied up in the front like that. Do you like to be all tied up like that?”

She turned her withering expression my way. “One of your crack detectives?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I have a few questions for you.”

“I’ve already spoken to several-”

“You haven’t spoken to me. I have some additional queries.”

“Well, I have a business to run.”

“I can change that.”

She jammed that crop under my chin, forcing it up. “You like to play rough. Is that what you’re into?”

“You don’t have any idea what I’m into.”

“I’ve been at this a long time. I can tell what a client wants in about thirty seconds.”

We were practically nose to nose. “I’m not a client, and if you don’t cooperate, I’ll send Vice over to shut you down for good.”

“Bitch.”

“Lady, you don’t know what bitch is till I get started. So are you going to talk to me, or what?”

“Well…” She glanced beyond the red curtain, down a corridor. “These are business hours.”

“And what business would that be? Nothing illegal, I hope.”

“Of course not.”

“I would certainly hate to find out there was”-I made a little gasp-“prostitution on the premises, because that’s still not legal in Vegas.”

“Contact dancing is permitted. At least for now.”

She was right. Despite Vegas’s rep as Sin City, prostitution had never been legal here. Customers had to leave town and go to joints like the famed Chicken Ranch for that. For it to be legal, anyway. In reality, prostitution was not uncommon. A lot of it passed under the guise of “outcalls” or “room dancing.” Escort services with girls who met you at your hotel room fronted a lot of it, too. After a 2002 law change, lap dancing became technically legal in Clark County, but dancers were not permitted to touch or sit on the customer’s genital area, which some would have said was the definition of a lap dance. What many people didn’t realize was that the Las Vegas Strip-and most of the clubs on it, including this one-were outside the city limits. Municipal officials had no jurisdiction.

“Is that what you give your customers?”

“In part. We’re about fantasy fulfillment.”

Darcy probably only understood a tenth of what was being said, but he was still red in the face, and I knew it was only going to get worse. “Darce, why don’t you take a stroll around the premises while we talk? See if you can spot anything the detectives missed.”

I could tell he didn’t want to leave me, but he did as I asked. If only my previous partners had been so compliant.

This chick was way over the top, but by Vegas standards, she was a perfectly average, ordinary working girl. After all, Vegas was the one city where a girl with no training, no education, and not incredibly bright could still make a good living, own a house, raise kids. Thanks to the Culinary Union, even nongaming cocktail waitresses got nine bucks an hour, plus tips, which was where the real action was. Gaming waitresses got fourteen. Where else could a cocktail waitress afford a mortgage and car payments? Where else could a high school dropout park cars and make enough to send his kids to college? Call girls-even run-of-the-mill ones-took home anywhere from five hundred to three thousand bucks a night, depending upon what exactly they were willing to do. Anywhere else in the world, this woman would be sleeping under a bridge in a cardboard box. In Vegas, she was the mistress of pain.

Hey, it wasn’t called Sin City because of Wayne Newton.

“What can you tell me about Lenore Johnson?”

“Nice girl,” she answered. “Did whatever she was asked. I like that in an employee.”

“How long had she been here?”

“About three months.”

“Know anything about her background?”

“She came from Kansas, poor girl. Father was a police officer. She didn’t do drugs-something of a rarity in this field. She was well mannered, respectful. Didn’t have the attitude a lot of my girls get. She was trusting.”

Which was probably what killed her. “Did she do outcalls? For sex?”

“Not to my knowledge. That would be illegal, you know.”

“Yeah, but did she do them?”

“I don’t think so. She was a good girl.”

“But she was working here. The night she disappeared.”

“Yes, and two of my girls saw her leave with a customer. One of them actually referred her to him. She blames herself.”

“She shouldn’t. He picked his victim based on her name and her appearance, not any referral.”

“Really?” For the first time, her mistress-of-pain façade cracked a bit. “I’ll tell her that. I hope she takes some comfort from it.”

“I’ll want to talk to all the, um, employees who saw this guy.”

“I’ll assemble them. But you won’t get much. They can’t describe his face.”

“Surely if they saw him right here-”

“But my girls are trained never to look a customer in the eyes. The entire face is to be avoided, as much as possible. We don’t want attachments forming. It clouds the judgment. In this line of work, it’s important to retain a certain professional detachment.”

Just my damn luck. My only eyewitnesses are sex merchants who’ve been trained not to look at people’s faces. “I’ll still want to talk to them just as soon-”

I was cut off by a piercing scream from down the corridor. I raced past the mistress, fumbling for my weapon, remembering that I wasn’t allowed to have one anymore. Damn!

Another cry, this one even more terrified than the first. I tracked it to a closed door, grabbed the knob, flung it open.

There were two women in the bed, both stark naked. The one on top, the one with the surgically enhanced knockers who was holding a huge dildo in her right hand, appeared to be the trained professional. The skinny girl who had pulled the covers up to her neck was undoubtedly the customer.

Darcy was on the floor at the side of the bed, hunched over in a fetal position, rocking back and forth. He was making strange nonsense noises, babbling, whimpering.

The mistress came in behind me. “What happened, Kimberly?”

The silicone princess dropped her equipment. “We were just-”

The mistress shot her a harsh warning look.

“-having a conversation,” she continued. “And this simp comes rushing into the room.”

Darcy looked as if he were having a total meltdown. I’d never seen him like this. He began pounding his head against the floor. I ran to his side and wrapped my arms around him. “Darcy-what happened?”

He flapped his hands, rubbed the sides of his head. “Did you think that one was in trouble? Because I thought she was in trouble.”

“But why-”

He couldn’t stop rocking. “She was screaming. Screaming real loud. I thought the big one was hurting her.”

I closed my eyes. “So you rushed in to help?”

“And I saw she wasn’t wearing any clothes, and I remember the bad man took all the girls’ clothes away, and I tried to help, and she hit me with-with-that thing.” He was hand-flapping with a frenzy. His voice was never well modulated, but now it sounded as if he was shouting. “Why did she do that? Why did she hurt me? I don’t think people should hurt each other!”

I took his wrists and tried to get him under control. “It was a misunderstanding, Darcy. She wasn’t hurting the other woman. She was just-”

Okay, where did I go from there? Even if O’Bannon had had that little talk with his son, would it have covered activities such as the one he’d just stumbled upon?