The club was busier than Archie remembered it, and louder. He tried to stand up straight, to not favor the side where Gretchen’s Taser bruise still burned. Cigarette smoke choked the air. Portland was going to ban smoking in bars in the New Year, and it seemed like everyone was trying to suck down as much nicotine as possible while they still could.
Archie moved like a hunchback, but no one noticed. There were a dozen men collected around the first stage, where a half-dressed woman was working on disassembling the rest of her nurse’s ensemble. Behind the stage was the club’s trademark sign, a dancing bear, crossed out, above a drawing of a naked woman, reclined, legs extended in front of her. Beside that sign was another sign that read
GIRLS, UP CLOSE, with an arrow pointing right.
Archie followed it down a hall where there were four doors, all quilted with brown fake-leather fabric held in place in a harlequin pattern with brass furniture tacks. Archie went to the door marked “3” and knocked. “It’s me,” he said. If Leo was in there, Archie wasn’t sure he could hear him over the club’s main speakers.
He tried the door.
It wasn’t locked.
He opened the door a tiny crack and peered in.
The room was mirrored. Mirrored walls, mirrored ceiling. If they could have figured out a way to make the floor mirrored, they would have. A cherry-red vinyl sofa went around the perimeter.
Leo looked up and waved Archie in. He was sitting back on the red sofa, knees apart, arms resting on his thighs. Gray suit pants, white shirt unbuttoned midway down his chest. There was a glass of something dark on the sofa next to him.
A blond well-toned stripper with a star tattoo danced around a pole in the middle of the room.
The stripper looked up as Archie entered. She had one long leg wrapped around the pole and the other in a stiletto pump on the floor, and she was bending back, breasts high in the air, so that her hair piled on the floor in a shiny blond heap. “Hi,” she said.
“That’s Star,” Leo said.
“Hi, Star,” Archie said.
There was music in here, too. Archie didn’t know what it was. Something electronic and moody.
Archie took a seat next to Leo on the sofa. It was a relief to sit down.
“We haven’t done this in a while,” Leo said.
Leo had been twenty-one when Archie had met him after his sister’s murder, already older than his years, and already his father’s son. He had all of Jack’s best attributes: his looks, his physical confidence,
his smarts. He was being groomed to take over the family business, but he wanted out.
So Archie had introduced him to Raul Sanchez, his contact at the FBI. Archie hadn’t anticipated that the Feds would convince him to do exactly what his father wanted him to. In the end, it had worked out better for Jack than it had for Leo. Unbeknownst to him, it was the reason he was allowed to continue doing business. Leo had access to drug operations all over the world. And as long as the FBI and DEA knew the ins and outs of Jack Reynolds’s operation, they were fine with it.
People were going to get their heroin somewhere.
It was one of the reasons that Archie had kept in such close touch with the Reynolds family. Leo had access to all sorts of criminal contacts that Archie had accessed more than once during his tenure as leader of the Beauty Killer Task Force.
Star hooked a knee around the pole and spun. It was a small room and Archie could smell her, the sweat on her body, the gel in her hair.
Leo lifted his drink to his lips and took a sip. “Sorry about my brother,” he said. His eyes were bloodshot, the pupils large.
“How long have you been here?” Archie asked.
“A few hours,” he said.
More like all afternoon. “You’re wasted,” Archie said.
“Yes.”
The stripper sashayed back and forth in front of them, fluttering her fingers over the tops of her breasts.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Leo said.
“She’s very fit,” Archie said.
Leo laughed. “You don’t like her?”
“She looks like Gretchen,” Archie said.
Leo clapped his hand on Archie’s knee. “Sometimes a blonde is just a blonde.”
Archie tried to get a read on Leo. “Did you know?” he said.
“Give us a minute, Star,” Leo said. The stripper stopped sashaying, picked up a silk robe that lay in a puddle on the floor, put it on, and left without a word.
Leo frowned. “The triangles bothered me,” he said. He took another swallow of his drink, holding it in his mouth for a moment. “Jeremy was always jealous of Isabel. He thought Jack loved her more. When Jack named the Isabel after her, Jeremy lost it—tried to wreck the boat, tore the sail, cut the lines.” Leo warmed his drink in his hands. “I always wondered if that’s what the triangles carved into Isabel were—boats.”
Maybe Jeremy had convinced himself that Gretchen had actually killed his sister. Or maybe he had just been lying all along.
“When did you know for sure?” Archie asked.
“He had this fascination with eyes as a kid. Used to pop them out of Isabel’s dolls and carry them around in his pocket.” Leo looked in his glass. “The eyes. That’s when I knew for sure.”
“Gretchen came to see me tonight,” Archie said.
Leo looked up from his glass.