Chapter Four
Thirty minutes later, I was on the dance floor in the arms of Murray Donovan, a reporter who Tom happened to know had hassled some of the girls at Destiny and pissed off all the knights. Considering everything that Kevin had told me, that made Murray either a very brave man or an idiot for coming tonight.
Idiot though he might be, he was perfect for my purposes.
He was actually the second guy I’d sought out from Tom’s list of potentials, the first being a real estate broker named Reggie from whom I’d disentangled myself after only five minutes. He held me too tight on the dance floor and, frankly, it was a toss-up which was more annoying—the way the beer on his breath mixed with the prime rib and asparagus he’d obviously enjoyed from the buffet, or the manner in which he pinched my ass.
Murray, at least, wasn’t a pincher. But even that small blessing soon faded under the weight of his inane and ill-advised comments about women in general. And the girls at Destiny in particular.
“I’m just saying it made no sense to me,” he said, referring to the way the girls had not only refused his repeated hounding for interviews, but had gotten the knights involved to end the harassment.
“Maybe the girls weren’t interested in being featured in a magazine article.”
“That’s bullshit. The article would have gotten them some attention. Gotten them out of that shit-hole of a life, maybe. And what woman wouldn’t want to be featured in a national magazine?”
“I wouldn’t,” I said, my back already up at the “shit-hole” comment. My first year as a detective, I’d put away a rapist who was targeting exotic dancers. That’s when I’d met Candy. She wasn’t a vic, but she’d been dancing the nights of two of the attacks, and she had a good eye, a solid memory for faces, and a habit of eavesdropping on the clientele.
Like several of the other dancers at the club, she was a single mom, high school dropout. She was raising a kid, studying to take the GED, and doing her damnedest to make a good life for herself.
The job was solid—paid the bills and gave her time to study and be with her little boy. In the past three years, she’d earned the diploma, then started taking business classes at the community college. She’d moved from the dance floor to management, and gotten herself engaged to the bartender she’d been eyeing since his first day on the job, not to mention very happily knocked up with kid number two. She’d carved out a life for herself—a good one—and it all centered on that job.
Sure, there were some clubs that treated the girls like shit, the customers worse, and ran a few profitable-yet-illegal side operations out of the back. But that wasn’t where Candy worked, and it wasn’t what she wanted. She was a dancer with dreams of owning her own club, and never in a million years would she have agreed to be the focus of a magazine article that suggested that either the club was sleazy, or that she was struggling through a life of slime. She was just a woman doing her best for herself and her kid, and I respected the hell out of her for it. Murray Donovan, I could tell, didn’t.
“I wouldn’t have anything to do with an article like that,” I repeated, just to emphasize the point.
“Hell no, you wouldn’t. I can tell just by looking at you. You’ve got too much class,” he added, ruffling my feathers even more. “What do you do, baby?”
“I make it a habit of breaking the nose of assholes who call me baby.”
He snorted. “That’s what I mean. You’ve got too much spunk—too much drive—to whore yourself out like that.”
Honestly, that nose-breaking thing was looking better and better.
“Come on, seriously. What do you do?”
“I work in a government office.”