“Tell you what,” Morales said. “You tell us and we’ll decide whether it’s worth an additional payment.”
He pressed his lips together, clearly annoyed. “So, Basil used to work for the O’s, right? Seeing how he’s Aphrodite’s nephew, he got special insight into the sex potion business. Apparently, Krystal decided to use that.”
“But you said Krystal’s Votary. Why would she want a cut of the sex magic trade?”
“Who knows? Bottom line is I heard she and Basil made some deal with some Chinese motherfuckers to distribute their shit.”
“The Fangshi?” I said.
“Never thought I’d see the day the Chinese would be selling on Babylon’s streets.” Little Man shook his head sadly, but his tone betrayed anticipation instead of disappointment.
“I’m thinking Aphrodite won’t be too happy with that development,” Morales said, shooting me a look.
“They did mention something about young wizes,” I said.
Little Man leaned forward, suddenly very interested. “Hold up, you went to Aphrodite before you came to see me? The shemale working for y’all or what?”
“Relax, LM,” I said. “Aphrodite would no sooner work for the MEA than give you a blow job.”
He leered. “Please, that he-bitch would pay me for a taste of my prime beef.”
I threw up a little in my mouth, considering the beef in question was currently encased in a full diaper.
“Anyway, that actually is pretty helpful, LM.” I pulled an extra ten from my wallet and handed it to him. “So, thanks.”
He handed the bill to Mary and laid his hands across his bare belly. “So…you two fucking, huh?”
The change in topic was so fast, I got vertigo. “Whoa.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Morales said.
“Please. You got the look of a lady who been getting it on the regular, and he’s strutting around like he’s dipping his wick in a special candle.”
It was nice to hear that he thought of me as a “special candle,” but there was no way in hell I was going to discuss my private life with a horny homunculus. As much as I’d relied on Little Man’s intel to help solve cases, I was under no illusion that he was on our side. He was a businessman who sold information. If word got out on the street that Morales and I were romantically involved, it could eventually be used against us by any number of lowlifes.
“You need to cut back on whatever you’ve been smoking.” I shot Morales a grossed-out look. “I know better than to shit where I eat.”
Morales’s brow shot up, but he played along. “Yeah, gross.”
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.” LM tipped his chin to shoot me a frank look. “Hey, no judgments. I get it. Y’all working long hours together. Things are bound to get horizontal. Just sayin’, though, shit’s gonna get messy.”
“We don’t pay you for relationship advice, Little Man,” Morales said.
He smirked at us. “Nah, I do that for free.”
Mary, who until that point had been sort of staring off into the middle distance, perked up. “Macho and Lady sitting in a tree,” she sing-songed.
Little Man cackled like a loon. “F-u-c-k-i-n-g.”
I shook my head and waved away their perverted nursery rhyme. “You two ain’t right in the head.” I plucked at Morales’s shirt. “Let’s go.”
As we walked away, the sound of Little Man’s laughter followed us. But then he yelled, “Don’t arrest Krystal today.”
I stopped and turned. “Why not?”
He made a jerk-off motion in the air. “I got an appointment tomorrow morning!”
* * *
Once we got to the car, I called my friend Joyce at the county clerk’s office. According to the records on file, Krystal LeMay had gotten permits to open a massage parlor five weeks earlier.
After I hung up with Joyce and told Morales what I learned, he said, “Timing is interesting.”
Krystal’s ex-boyfriend Puck had been arrested a week before she got her permit. Sometime between choosing not to corroborate her boyfriend’s alibi and opening the salon, she’d come into enough money to open a business.
“Something to ask about when we chat with her,” I said.
“Do you really buy LM’s claim she’s running the Votaries now?”
“On one hand, he’s rarely wrong. But on the other, she didn’t strike me as the type.”
He shot me a look.
“What?”
“You met her for what? Ten minutes in that bar that one time. And you two didn’t even talk.”
“Morales, I grew up in that coven, remember? You learn how to size people up quickly.”
“Well, she had Puck fooled, so maybe she’s a good actress.”
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “You want to talk about the fact that it’s looking more and more likely that the Fangshi have infiltrated Babylon?”
A muscle in his jaw clenched. “Not especially.”
Several years earlier, Morales had been undercover in the Fangshi. While he was there, the coven killed a dirty cop and Morales had helped them cover up the murder. It had been a secret he’d carried by himself for a long time, but the previous fall, a psycho wizard dosed us both with a truth serum and the truth had come out. Later, we discovered that Mayor Volos also knew his dirty secret and even had a written account of the crime signed by a member of the coven named Gan Ji, who’d been there when it happened.
“You know once Gardner finds out, she’s going to start asking questions and your past in that coven is going to come up.”
He shifted in his seat and veered the SUV into traffic. “Kate, there is no way that the wizards I dealt with in Los Angeles are in Babylon now. From the sound of it, it’s a low-level guy wanting to earn some quick cash.”
“But Gardner—”
He cut me off. “If L.A. comes up, I’ll tell her everything I know about the inner workings of the Chinese coven so far as it pertains to closing the case. There’s no reason for the incident to come up.”
By that time, we’d pulled onto the street where the massage parlor sat. It was not the nicest area of the Cauldron, but it wasn’t the worst, either. The block held a couple of dive bars, a check cashing joint, and had a bus stop on the corner. We parked across the street.
The massage place was in the center of the block with a pink neon sign in the window that read, Happy Ending Massage Parlor.
“Well,” Morales said, “that answers that question.”
I shot him a look and reached for the door. “Behave,” I warned him. “And don’t touch anything.”
The air inside smelled like coconut oil and stale semen. The combination was less pleasant than it sounds.
Behind the front desk, a woman with orange skin was talking on the phone. The hue was the result of a fake-tanning potion. The clean magic version of the potion was expensive and gave a convincing sun glow to the skin. The dirty version was cheap and left one looking like they’d rolled in cheese-puff dust. This chick clearly had gone for the discount version.
As she talked on the phone, she smacked her gum and filed her nails into daggerlike points. “So I tells him, you gotta warn a girl before you put it there—”
“Excuse me,” I said.
She held up one of her fingers. “And he said, ‘It slipped.’ Can you believe it?”
“Hey, it happens,” Morales said to me, straight-faced.
“It better not,” I said to him, darkly. To the lady behind the desk, I said, “Ma’am.” I held up my badge. “You need to hang up now.”
She paused mid-smack and squinted at the badge. “I’m gonna have to call you back.” She dropped the phone into the cradle. “We don’t do couples massages.”
“You have a lot of cops come in asking for massages?” I asked.
“You’d be surprised who we get in here.” She shrugged. “What do you want?”
“We need to see the boss lady,” Morales said.
“You got an appointment?” Smack, smack, smack.
I looked up at the video camera behind the desk and waved. “Come out now or I’ll have my friends come raid your back rooms.”
The phone on the desk rang. The Smacker answered. “Yeah…Uh-huh. Yep.” She hung up. “You can go on back. Third door on the right. The right, you hear? You do not want to go left.”