Swan Dive - Jeremiah Healy Page 13

  Nino slid off the barstool. The women both looked about thirty. Given their working hours, they could have been anywhere from seventeen to forty. The blonde was tall, even sitting down, and heavily made up. The other slumped in her chair and wore no cosmetics at all. As I reached the table, the blonde smiled at me in a practiced way, the other paid no attention.

  Nino said, "John Cuddy, I have the pleasure of giving you Maylene and Salomé."

  The blonde said, "I’m Maylene, honey." She had a south of Kansas twang in her voice. "I show it, I shake it, and I share it."

  Salome, out of the corner of her mouth, said, "Jesus."

  Nino said, "You and me sit here and here, John. You know, boy, girl, boy, girl?"

  I sat down, Maylene to my left, Salomé to my right.

  "Has Nino told you why I wanted to talk with you?"

  Maylene said, "Yeah. It’s about the Angel." She laid her hand over mine and gripped tight.

  "God, I was terrified when I heard."

  Salomé seemed awfully bored. Her attitude reminded me of the bare tolerance an experienced cop shows when paired with a rookie. I put Salome nearer forty, Maylene nearer seventeen.

  Nino said, "Hey, John, you making some impression here. I think Maylene want to swallow you pride."

  Maylene took her hand off mine and gently slapped Nino on the shoulder in that limp-wristed way some women use to show tenderness. Nino took it playfully. Salome broke off another piece of bread from the shallow basket in front of her and sopped some gravy

  from her dish.

  "Nino, I’d really like to talk with the women alone, okay?"

  He shook his head, but he stood up. "You really think they tell you something they don’t tell me after you leave?"

  "Who can say?"

  Nino picked up his drink and said, "I order you the arroz con pollo and some white wine. The chicken and rice the spec-i-al-ity of the house." He looked from Salome to Maylene and back again. "You ladies tell this man anything he want to know."

  Maylene said, "Yes, Nino." Salome finished her hunk of bread while Maylene struggled to lift her handbag onto the table. Made from natural cowhide, it had outlandish fringes, the kind of present Dale Evans might have bought Buttermilk for Mother’s Day.

  Waiting till Nino resumed his seat at the bar, I decided to start with Maylene. I figured Salome would know more that would help me, but I doubted she’d talk until she’d become fed up with Maylene.

  "How close were you to Teri Angel?"

  Maylene frowned, as though that wasn’t the question for which she’d prepared an answer. "I wouldn’t say close. The Angel didn’t want anybody to be close, I don’t think."

  "Why was that?"

  Maylene took a pack of cigarettes from her bag. Her hands were big and rough, almost manly. "I don’t know. She really wouldn’t let any of the girls get to know her. Not like Salome and me."

  Salome avoided laughing by taking a swig of wine.

  "You ever meet anybody with her?"

  "You mean like a date or something?"

  "Yeah."

  "No. Really, we don’t . . . didn’t see her that much. Just here and other places for lunch once in a while."

  "Why is that?"

  "Well, Nino sets us up through these hotel people he knows, so we’re mainly on with convention types in the afternoons and maybe some traveling executives like at night. We just do one-ons."

  "One-ons?"

  Salomé groaned and said, "She means one-on-ones. No parties or group gigs."

  "Oh."

  Maylene said, "That’s why we wouldn’t see her except at lunch here sometimes. We just weren’t together when we were working. We weren’t . . .aren’t even supposed to say hi to each other if we see a girl in the hotels or anything?

  "Because of their security people?"

  "Right."

  The fat man came toward us, carrying my chicken dish and a half-carafe of wine. Given the timing, I was pretty sure La Flor didn’t exactly cook to order. I tried it. Not bad.

  "Did you know any of her free-lance clients?"

  Salome laughed. "You don’t know a hell of a lot about the life, do you?"

  "No."

  "Well, I got a client expecting my Dance of the Seven Veils in about an hour, and I gotta get painted and changed by then, so let me save you some time, okay?"

  "Okay." I took more chicken.

  "You’re in the life for a while, you got two choices. Get out, or get your own."

  "Your own prostitutes?"

  "No. Oh, that too, yeah. If you can stand dealing with pompom girls."

  Maylene said, "Sal! You promised never to tell any--"

  "So let’s say you don’t want to be Nino the Second. You gotta get your own book of clients. Free-lance, okay?"

  "Got it," I said around my chewing.

  "Now, you get the right book of clients, you can be pretty well set. Lots of these guys are just looking for somebody reliable, you know?" Salome cranked up her tempo, an enthusiastic broker describing a property with potential. "Somebody who’ll do the things for them that the wives won’t without gagging and bitching about it. They find a girl they like, they’re loyal like fucking football fans about it. They stick with the same girl for years. God, I know a girl has the same three lawyers for fifteen years. Fifteen fucking years. They all know each other, but nobody knows they’re all doing her except her. She covers all her overhead on those three guys alone, and that’s just twice a month each."

  “So?"

  Salome slowed down. "So, a girl gets a good freelance, she ain’t about to spread that information around to her competitors, follow?"

  "I thought you said the free-lance clients were loyal?"

  "Yeah, but they ain’t perfect. If they were, they wouldn’t be clients to start with."

  "So you never saw her book?"

  "What book?"

  "Her book of free-lancers."

  "Jesus. I didn’t mean she had a book. That’d be stupid."

  "Because they call her, not the other way around. Besides, if you did have a book, you couldn’t carry it with you, because the cops’d grab it, and you couldn’t leave it at your place, because your pimp would read it."

  I looked over at Nino. Maylene said quickly, "Oh, Nino wouldn’t do something like that."

  Sal said, "Maylene, grow up or shut up."

  I said, "Nino doesn’t mind you all branching out?"

  "No." This time Salome glanced over at him and couldn’t quite hide a crinkle of genuine affection. "No, Nino’s good that way. Steers us the business, takes his cut but lets us keep the lion’s share. And, he doesn’t muscle in with the free-lancers. He understands how it is."

  "Any of Teri’s clients go in for rough stuff?"

  "No way. First of all, Teri had the looks, way too good to need the rough boys. Plus, you don’t keep that kind of action as a free-lance. You need your man around to keep them in line sometimes."

  "So Teri didn’t talk with you about her free-lancers."

  Maylene seemed eager to contribute. "Well, she did, sort of."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Well, she talked about her sources."

  "Her sources?"

  "Yeah, where she got the free-lances from. Like sometimes one client refers another to her. And then she had this lawyer who did a lot of divorce stuff, the lawyer would send the husbands to Teri for, well, kind of like that Masters and Jones stuff?"

  Salome said, "Masters and Johnson."

  Maylene said, "Yeah, them."

  "Teri ever mention the lawyer’s name?"

  "No, just that it was a girl. A woman lawyer, I mean. Teri never mentioned names or anything, but she’d talk about some of them like that."

  "Like what?"

  "Like give them made-up names, you know?"

  "Like street names?"

  "No, no. More like . . ."

  Salome said, "Labels. Like ‘the Senator,' ‘the Wizard’—"

  "He was like a computer
genius, the Wizard—"

  "—‘the Producer,' and like that."

  I thought about sister Sandra mentioning Teri’s interest in the movies. "What did she mean by ‘the Producer’?"

  Salome said, "Not the real thing. Not Hollywood, I mean. She just had some guy liked to look at himself getting done. He took movies of it."

  "Movies of him and Teri together?"

  "That’s what she said."

  "Videocamera?"

  Salome took a cigarette from Maylene’s pack and lit up. "How else you gonna make them?"

  "Did Teri ever mention anything else about this Producer?"

  Salome blew a cone of smoke sideways from her mouth and away from me. "No."

  Maylene said, "But Sal—"

  "She didn’t say anything else, Maylene."

  "She did, though." Maylene turned to me and elaborately away from Salome’s glare. "The Producer was her candy man."

  "Drugs."

  "Right. As much as she wanted, although she never used a lot."

  "She ever describe him?"

  "Like what he looked like and all?"

  "Yeah."

  "No—yeah, wait, she did! She said he had these tattoos. Like of a tank or something."

  No question we were talking about Marsh now. "Did she see this guy on a regular basis?"

  "Yeah, sure."

  "Same time and place each week?"

  "Oh, I don’t know about that. She did say . . . Sal, when did we have lunch with her that last time?"

  “I don’t remember."

  "Sure you do. It was . . . no, no, it wasn’t here. It was down at the Market."

  "Quincy Market?"

  "Yeah, yeah. Right down by the water. And she said . . . no, no, it wasn’t lunch, it was brunch. Remember, Sal, we couldn’t get served our drinks cause it wasn’t twelve noon yet?"

  "I don’t remember."

  "Sure you do. We wanted Bloody Marys, and the waiter said we had to wait, and Teri joked about taking care of him if he’d take care of us, but you could see he was a fag so he didn’t think she was funny."

  "What did she tell you?"

  "About the Producer?"

  "Yes."

  "Just that she was going to do a screen test."

  "Screen test?"

  "Yeah, you know, like an audition, only for the movies. She thought the way she could get into the movies was to be in one of those porno things, and the Producer told her he knew somebody who did them. He was the candy man, so maybe he did, I don’t know."

  "And he was going to introduce her to this real movie guy?"

  "Yeah. Well, no. No, I think what she said was that the real movie guy would want a sample of what she could do." Maylene put her hand to her mouth and giggled. "I don’t mean that way, in person. I mean on him. How she’d look doing it."

  "With one of the guys she free-lanced?"

  "Yeah. Or one of the girls."

  "One of you?"

  "No, no. I mean one of her girl clients. Some of the lezzies, they really go for somebody as beautiful as the Angel. And even the straight ones, they like to try some new things, if you get me."

  "So the Producer was going to arrange some kind of screen test for Teri."

  "Right."

  "When?"

  Maylene frowned again, straining to remember. "I don’t think she said, but I think it was supposed to be real soon."

  "Soon?"

  "After we were talking. She said she’d seen the Producer like the night before."

  "And when was that?"

  “At the brunch, like I said."

  "Yes, but when was the brunch?"

  “When?" She looked at Salomé, then back to me. "On Sunday. When else do you have brunch?"

  "You mean this past Sunday?"

  "Yeah, yeah."

  The day before she was killed.

  * * *

  After I was finished with Maylene and Salome, the fat man bowed to me graciously and said he hoped I’d enjoyed my meal. On my way to the door, Nino told me he’d meet me outside Teri Angel’s apartment house at 8:00. He gave me the address, a building down by the waterfront.

  I climbed into the Fiat, drove across the MassPike interchange and into Back Bay. Heading downtown, I wended my way through the construction on Boylston Street and then quartered over past the New England School of Law and Tufts Medical and Dental complexes. The Barry Hotel stood a bit farther toward the Fort Point Channel and near South Station, railroads being the principal mode of transportation back when the Barry was Queen of the Hub.

  * * *

  "Hope there’re no hard feelings about yesterday?"

  The little guy in the bellboy outfit had a sincere look I in his remaining eye, the patch on the other one tied on jauntily with black, woven cords. The man with the pop-bottle glasses was dozing behind the registration desk across the lobby.

  "No hard feelings," I said, resting my elbow on the top of the wooden captain’s stand. "Thanks for not I identifying me as the bad guy."

  "Hah," he said, unnecessarily shuffling some blank forms on the writing area in front of him. "You ain’t exactly the sort we cater to nowadays."

  He moved his head around, sweeping quickly over the tattered carpet, worn upholstery, and sallow wallpaper. He made a clucking sound with his tongue against his teeth. "You also ain’t old enough to remember her in her glory, but this dowdy bitch was a hell of a hotel once."

  I stuck out my hand. "John Cuddy."

  "Name on my discharge papers is Norbert, Olin C. But everybody calls me Patch. Bet ya can’t guess why."

  I laughed politely and let him go on.

  "Lost the eye right near the end of things, when the Japs were trying to kill us and themselves with the kamikazes. Hit the ship, but we managed to save her. Didn’t have no medical attention for six hours, but the doc said six minutes wouldn’t have made any difference. Fire flash seared the lens part right off But I got no complaints, the VA takes care of me, and the disability pension plus this place pay me as much as I’ll ever need."

  "How’d you come to be here?"

  "The hotel, you mean?"

  "Yeah."

  "We was here on liberty once. Boston, I mean. First time I ever seen a real city, being from Indiana bottomland originally. Also, right here’s where I first got laid. Room seventeen-oh-four. Never will forget it. I thought about this place afterwards, while I was in the hospital. After I got out and all, I come here and they signed me on."

  "Since the cops had you in for the show-up, I’m guessing you were on when Teri Angel was killed."

  "Shit, son, I’m on pretty near every day."

  "You remember her that night?"

  "Nope. I knew which one she was, though. You ever see her?"

  "Just a photo." '

  "Well, she was a beauty, that one. Not just the body, she had the face, too. Didn’t look the same as the others somehow, like she didn’t have the same hardness to her or something."

  A black woman in a blond wig and purple hot pants plowed past us, towing a fiftyish guy scratching his forehead to keep us from seeing his face clearly. They didn’t bother stopping at the registration desk.

  Patch gave me a look that said, "See what I mean."

  "The police told me that somebody here recognized Roy Marsh as one of Teri’s regular customers."

  "That was me."

  “You know her other regulars, too?"

  "To be square with you, no, I can’t say for sure. You. see, I come on at three usually. I like my days off, go for walks, especially this time of year. So there could be a lot of guys—some women too, if you can believe it—who coulda been regulars and I’d never see ’em, or just see ’em coming or leaving and never with any particular girl."

  "See any other regulars that night?"

  "Of hers, you mean?"

  "Yes."

  "Nope."

  "But you knew Marsh was one of hers for sure."

  "Yeah. Well, I didn’t know his name till the cops told
me. It ain’t exactly the sort of thing we wanta keep track of, get me?"

  "You saw her with him?"

  “Once. And I’d see him sometimes on days I knew she was entertaining?

  "You the one who saw him with the suitcase?"

  "Right. Both times."

  "Both times?"

  "Yeah. I saw him with it maybe six, eight months ago, then again on Monday night."

  "Eight mouths ago?"

  "Give or take."

  That was way before any of the divorce stuff. "Any idea what was in the suitcase?"

  Patch smiled knowingly. "Nope. And around here, you don’t ask."

  "What are my chances of seeing the room?"

  Patch crossed his arms, doing a slow-motion dance with his feet. "No chance at all. The cops are pretty good about not bothering us here. So when something happens, we cooperate like goddamn boy scouts. They say nobody goes in the room, nobody gets in."

  "What does a room rent for here?"

  "Ten bucks."

  "An hour."

  "Uh-huh."

  "There another room like the one she died in?"

  "Sure. Any of the oh-twos."

  "The what?"

  "The oh-twos. Like nine-oh-two, ten-oh-two, get it? She was killed in twelve-oh-two, and all of them are like identical above and below."

  "How about I reserve eleven-oh-two upfront for a coupla hours, but use it only for about twenty minutes?"

  “Alone?"

  "No. You as my tour guide."

  He smiled and said, "Elevator on the right. Watch your step, please."

  * * *

  "Anything different?"

  Patch looked around 102. Swaybacked double bed, bureau that looked like the backstop at an archery range, a couple of faded prints on the wall, one in a frame with cracked glass. "Can’t swear about the prints, but the furniture is all like twelve-oh-two’s."

  "In the same relative position in the room?"

  “Yup."

  I walked to the window. The sill was old-fashioned, beginning just above my knee, the glass rising nearly six feet high. Patch said, "That’s where he went out. Up a floor, of course."

  The view was the South Station coupling yards, two locomotives desultorily warming up or cooling down. Must have been a damned impressive sight in the forties, though I doubted Marsh appreciated the historical perspective.