Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) Page 20

  Some goddess or other had taken pity on Anna, and the cramped space was relatively free of smoke. Probably because Delilah wasn't there to add her nightly pack of Marlboro Lights to the dope smoke.

  "You guys got a minute?" Anna asked. Star collapsed into the unpadded metal folding chair that she'd occupied the previous night.

  "Geez, woman, how many minutes you need? Didn't you get your fill of bullshit last night? Whatever you're after, we're fresh out," Star said wearily. Shoving aside a blue towel that was probably older than her co-worker Candy, Star opened the lid of a plastic cooler and pulled out a beer. "You want one?" she asked.

  Because breaking bread--or, in this case, yeast--with another was good for developing trust, Anna accepted. Being a woman of manners, Star unscrewed the cap and wiped the mouth of the bottle off on the old towel before handing it to her uninvited guest.

  Candy, slumped in the other chair, US magazine open in her lap, her tummy looking bigger than it had the night before and her face rounder and younger, said, "Can I have one?"

  "How many've you already had?" Star asked, eyes narrowed like a faro dealer peering through smoke.

  "Just one. Honest," Candy said and crossed her heart with her fingers.

  "Okay, but you go slow. You've got the rest of the night to get through, and the boss doesn't like it when you get too silly onstage." Star pulled out a third beer, twisted off the cap, wiped the mouth of the bottle, and handed it to the pregnant teen. She shot Anna a look that said as clearly as if she'd shouted it, "I dare you to say one thing, one fucking thing."

  Anna didn't dare.

  "I got somebody I want you to meet," Anna said.

  Star groaned. "Everybody's got somebody they want us to 'meet.' We don't hook. Not even for 'sisters.' Got that? Didn't we go through all that last night? What part of 'fuck off' don't you understand?"

  "Yeah, what part?" Candy echoed without malice.

  "No," Anna said, feeling a fool for not knowing this was how her innocuous statement would be taken in the ladies' room of Dick's. "Not sex stuff. Serious stuff. You wait here." Not trusting herself not to screw things up with more unintended insults, Anna set her beer down on the board near Candy's makeup and let herself out of the bathroom. One elbow on the black plywood, she waited beside the bar, enduring the bumping of inebriated men making their unsteady ways back to the john in the rear.

  Tanya was reworking a high school wet dream for the audience, the one where the pretty girl doesn't snub the ugly fat boys. Finally Jordan delivered the last tiny bottle of booze on his tray and returned to the bar.

  "Ready?" Anna asked.

  "It's pretty busy," Jordan replied with a fretful look at the patrons growing ever more hot-eyed and thirsty as Tanya's micro-mini pleated skirt rode up her brown thighs to expose the threadiest of thong panties.

  "And you care about that why?" Anna asked.

  Jordan's lips curled into a sneer, and Anna braced herself for the onslaught of the four-letter words he was so fond of. Before the lips parted, she saw Clare come home. Pressed to describe it, Anna would have had a hard time. Anna's back was to the stage, and the slow strobe of pink lights Tanya used for her act was in Jordan's face, dying his skin the shade of a living person's, and taking the bloodshot veins from the whites of his eyes. In this glow of artificial health Anna saw the irises change as Jordan left and Clare returned. The pupils grew slightly bigger, the hazel less brown and more gold. Eyelids relaxed infinitesimally, and brows lowered. The sense was of an evil spirit departing and the body's original owner returning to look out through the eyes.

  "I'm scared is all," Clare said. She untied the black apron from over her black pants and laid it neatly across the black bar, leaving Anna to wonder what had really been accomplished.

  "Afraid a teensy-weensy little thing like believing you are a child molester will make them not like you?" Anna asked with what she'd meant to be an encouraging smile.

  "No," Clare said. "Scared to death they won't know anything, won't help, won't be able to help. Scared . . ." She let the word trail off and stared into the darkness at the rear of the club. "Let's go," she said and began walking ahead of Anna toward the ladies' room.

  Watching Clare square Jordan's slouching shoulders, Anna guessed she wasn't scared they would know nothing of her lost children but was terrified they would know something. They would know the girls were dead.

  Odds were against any of that happening. At best, Candy would remember something that was useful or Star would know someone who might know someone who might know something useful.

  That was if, in fact, Dana and Vee had gone missing and not been burned in their beds by Mom.

  The worst that might happen was that, eager to please or to seem important, Candy would make up information that would delay them with wild goose chases. The girls had been gone nearly two weeks. If they were not dead already it would be a miracle. Any trail leading to them or, more likely, their corpses would have cooled.

  Much longer and it would be cold beyond the abilities of a park ranger and an actor to detect.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  "Wait," Anna said as Clare reached the bathroom. "Let me go first."

  Clare backed into the shadows so Anna could open the door.

  The smoke was back. Star had lit up. Candy was planting kisses on the mirror in hot pink lipstick, then trying to match her mouth's reflection to the greasy lips on the glass.

  Anna took her usual place in the space between the toilet stall and the sink. "This isn't Jordan," she said by way of introduction as the skinny black-clad woman pushed in behind her.

  "The fuck it isn't," Star snapped. "Get your bony ass out of here." She started up from her chair, a hairbrush held like a billy club.

  "Easy, Star," Anna said. She was about to lay a calming hand on the other woman's arm but decided she would probably get a black eye out of the deal. Star looked like she'd taken her self-defense classes on the streets and in the alleys of New Orleans. "It's not Jordan. Jordan is a woman. Her name is Faye," Anna said. They hadn't discussed a pseudonym, but the less the dancers knew about Clare, the less trouble they could get into for helping her. "Faye disguised herself as Jordan because she's trying to find her daughter. The little girl got snatched, and Faye was able to follow her as far as New Orleans. She thought if she got a job in the business she might hear something, and she couldn't strip--"

  "That's for sure," Star said unkindly.

  "And she thought men might talk more easily in front of another man. So she went for bartending," Anna finished in a rush, trying to get it all in before Star bodily threw Jordan into the hall and her after him.

  At the end of Anna's impromptu speech there was silence. The pulse of Tanya's dance music came through the thin walls as faint and all pervasive as if it were the building's heartbeat.

  Star stared at Jordan, then Anna, her eyes hard as she looked for the trick, the hoax, the hook that was hidden behind the words.

  "Bullshit," she said finally. "You want to play games, do it in the men's room." Stubbing out her cigarette, she turned to face the mirror and began touching up her eyebrows, Anna and Jordan as dead to her as the sink or the bowl.

  Clare unbuttoned the black shirt.

  "None of that shit," Star said without turning. "I can whip both your butts and will."

  Clare undid the last button and pulled open the shirtfront to expose the Ace bandage wrapped around her breasts to flatten her chest. "My little girls--" she began, then stopped herself. If she told them too much, if there were two missing daughters in her story, they might realize she was the woman on the run for a quadruple homicide and stop listening in their rush to dial 911. "My little girl," she amended, "is seven years old," she said softly, letting the shirt fall to the floor. "She loves animals and is a good swimmer. She beat the third graders at the last meet. Her hair is brown and soft as a kitten's fur. On windy days it looks as if it has a life of its own."

  As she spoke in the quiet clear voice
, she removed the butterfly closure and began to unwrap the bandage from her chest. "She calls me Momsy and loves me to French-braid her hair and recite e. e. cummings to her in funny accents." The bandage was off. She started unbuckling her belt.

  "Her father is dead, and the police won't help me. They think I'm insane, and more and more I do, too."

  Leaning her fanny against the door to the hall, Clare pulled off one shoe, then the other, dropping them to the floor with a thud. "The night she was kidnapped I heard a man say he was taking her to 'the Bourbon Street Nursery.' He had a Cajun accent. There was an awful boy with him, no more than twenty, but so sick he should be put down like a rabid dog." One leg was free of the trousers, and, balanced on one foot, she was easing off the other.

  "I've seen the boy here in the Quarter. I chased him, but he pulled a knife and got away. I think they've got my little girl. I think they are going to sell her into sexual slavery or use her for a while, then kill her."

  The panties were off, and, naked but for a pair of men's black socks, Clare stood before the strippers. "Could you help me?" she asked, and she spread her hands in the universal gesture of supplication.

  Star's mouth was pursed and tight, as if she were on the upslope of a roller coaster and they'd just crested for the fall. Tears were in her eyes. Before she had a chance to speak, Candy burst out sobbing.

  "You're a girl, and I'm not a lesbian. I hate you! Fuck you! I hate you! You said you liked me!" She wailed like the child she was, makeup running down in the tears and the snot.

  "I do like you," Clare said, dropping on one knee, her nakedness forgotten, her arms going around Candy. "I like you a lot, a whole, whole lot." Candy kept wailing. "I like you better than me cutlass," Clare said in a perfect pirate's voice. "Better than high tea," she said in tones Maggie Smith would have to work for. "Better than a leprechaun." This in a brogue.

  Candy stopped crying to snuffle at her. Amazement had taken the place of betrayal on her face. "You're like everybody rolled up," she said with wonder.

  "And every one of us likes you more than anything. Forgive me for not being a boy?" Clare smiled, and Anna realized it was the first time she'd seen a smile on either her or Jordan's face. It changed everything. Without the smile, Anna had believed in her innocence. With it, she was sure. Almost sure.

  Candy looked at Clare for a moment longer, then turned back to the mirror, saying, "But you're not a boy." Candy's interests were limited, it would seem.

  "I can do tricks, though. Magic. Want to see?"

  "Beer!" came a roar from beyond the door. Then, louder, as more voices joined what was becoming a chorus, "Beer! Beer! Beer!" The chant was accompanied by rhythmic banging of bottles on plywood.

  "Put your clothes on," Star ordered. "We'll stay after. Without booze and bare breasts those monkeys'll tear the place apart."

  Clare jammed herself back into her black clothes. The Ace bandage she left on the floor.

  As she left, Star laughed. "Half those jackasses are going to see those boobs under the shirt, get hot, and think they've started batting for the other team."

  At twenty after four in the morning, Dick's was finally closed for the night. Customarily, Jordan would clean the men's room, empty and wash the ashtrays, stack the chairs, and sweep and mop the floor. Tonight, he didn't bother. Neither Jordan nor Clare was coming back to Dick's Den any time soon.

  Clare had taken six beers from the refrigerator, paid for them, and set them on one of the cubes. Delilah, come to carry Star home, had joined them. Wondering what was going on, Tanya stayed. She sat on the edge of the makeshift stage near their table, her feet in canvas high-tops, her body hidden under an ankle-length gypsy skirt and a long white linen tunic belted with a print scarf. The rest were in plastic chairs crowded around two cubes Clare had shoved together. Star and Delilah were smoking. Candy was yawning and playing with the fringe along the edge of Tanya's scarf.

  Beers served, Clare waited till everyone's attention was focused on her. Anna wondered if it was a trick she'd learned in acting school.

  When everyone was looking at her, Clare said, "I'm not Jordan--"

  "Yeah," Delilah said. "Star filled us in. You lost a kid, followed the snatcher to New Orleans. Pick it up there. Danny's going to be up in two hours, and I'm gonna be there to make him breakfast."

  "Tanya?" Clare asked. She had morphed into the very heart and soul of sanity, warmth, and the smell of baking cookies and talcum powder. The woman was good. Who wouldn't want to help her find her little girl? If Anna, who'd had a lifetime of looking behind people's facades, couldn't see through her, what chance did the dancers have? The question had barely formed in her mind when she realized they'd undoubtedly had more experience in that quarter than she. Many of her clients were animals in the best sense of the word. These women saw animals in the worst sense most nights of their lives.

  The stage set, Clare introduced what characters she had: the young freak in the canary yellow leather sport coat, the Cajun with the thick black hair and hard-muscled shoulders, a little girl named Aisha with long dark hair and the eyes of a doe. Careful not to give away so much detail they'd guess who she was, she told them that her husband had a factory business, used undocumented workers, and, she believed, took the children they brought with them and delivered them to someone in New Orleans.

  "The Cajun said 'Bourbon Street Nursery.' Maybe where the kids were taken. The man he was on the phone with, he called the Magician. The yellow-coated freak was called Dougie. The Cajun was called Blackie."

  "Like half the Cajuns in the bayous," Delilah said. "It's the coon-ass version of Slim or Tex." She stubbed out her cigarette, then shook another from the pack lying on the cube. As if it were a signal to rally 'round a dying cause, Star and Clare dug out their own packs and lit up. Candy held out a hand for one.

  "You can smoke or you can touch my scarf," Tanya said, "but you can't do both. This thing is silk and cost me two nights' tips."

  Candy drew her hand back and returned to letting the slinky silk fringes tell through her fingers.

  "So, big announcement: no dick, no daughter. What do you want us to do about it?" Delilah asked. There was no malice in her tone, only a desire to move the meeting forward.

  "If any of you know who might be trafficking in children, or anybody who spawns rumors of that kind of activity, it would give us somewhere to start," Anna said.

  Waiting for the public life of Dick's to bump and grind to a close, she'd gotten so tired she could barely yawn. Now that there was a chance at information, she was wide-awake. "Has anybody heard of a Dougie or a Blackie or even the Magician in the context of illegal trafficking in minors?"

  "They give traffic reports on the radio all the time. Why don't you just listen," Candy said helpfully.

  "Not car traffic, baby. Kid whores, you know, like you were before you started here."

  "I use to know a bunch of working kids," Candy said, proud to be the center of attention. "They're probably dead or gone off." She seemed indifferent to both fates.

  "I've got something special that only you can do," Clare said to Candy. "If you would help me, I'd sure appreciate it." She used her warm apple pie voice and added the sugar of a smile to it.

  "How much will you give me?" Candy asked.

  "How about twenty dollars?"

  "Some nights I get more'n that for one dance. I had forty-three dollars stuffed in my string once."

  Candy might not have been blessed with all the brains in the world, but she counted money just fine.

  "Hmm, that's a lot," Clare said, pretending to consider. "How about a hundred?"

  Anna knew she'd give the girl a thousand if it came to that. She'd probably known intuitively that a number that big might have scared Candy. Too much for too little. Canniness had filled in for the baby stripper where intelligence should have been.

  "Okay," Candy said quickly. She didn't ask what the favor was. For a hundred bucks she would probably do anything that didn't hurt t
oo much.

  "Good girl," Clare said.

  "Wait a damn minute," Star said. "What are you going to have her do for her money?"

  "Be hypnotized," Clare answered. "I want to see if she can remember more about the fancy house she was in before she was put on the streets."

  Mollified, Star took another swig of beer.

  "The law busts a few hookers now and then to prove they're on the job--"

  "Or because they didn't get a free blow job," Star cut in.

  "That, too," Delilah agreed, "but mostly they leave them alone. But kids are different. You don't hear much about it unless you're in that groove, if you know what I mean. Too volatile with the politicians and the media. Gets the moms in from the suburbs with torches storming city hall."

  They sat with that thought for a moment.

  "Dougie and Blackie could be anybody. Might not even be their real names," Star said.

  "I might have heard of the Magician," Delilah said after more thought. "There's this woman, used to dance, then went to hooking because the money was better but quit and started reading tarot on the square after a john nearly killed her. Andi--you remember Andi," Delilah said to Tanya. "Did a pretty little Bo Peep deal, made more than anybody not hooking could with her private lap dances, got canned?"

  "Right," Tanya said. "Larry Flynt's. Got turned in by a john that didn't want to pay for the extras he'd got."

  "We talk sometimes," Delilah said. "Seems like I heard her mention a guy gets his reading done a lot. She could have called him the Magician. Then maybe it was the Musician. If I see her, I'll ask."

  The leads weren't exactly coming fast and fresh. The long night and the poisonous air were beginning to tell on Anna. What optimism she'd brought to the table was getting harder and harder to hang on to. Clare evidently felt the same way, but as she sank, Jordan rose. He came into her eyes like a fever, into her hands till the knuckles seemed to grow harder and the skin coarser.