She asked, “So what brings you here tonight? Looking for some fun? Or some good fun? Or some really good fun?”
The current song blasting from the speakers came to an end with her question, leaving him to sit there with the silence and dimness and an agitated crotch. Before he could formulate his reply, another song erupted, this one a hard-driving country song. “If it don’t come easy,” sang Tanya Tucker, “you better let it go…”
“I came to watch you dance,” he said.
“We don’t start dancing for another hour, sweetie. What are we going to do in the meantime?”
“I guess I don’t know,” he said. “How about I buy you a drink and we discuss the possibilities?”
Ariel lifted a hand in the air and waggled her fingers. DeMarco followed her gaze to a woman behind a short bar near the stage entrance. The woman soon approached his table. She set a split of champagne and a fluted glass in front of Ariel. “And you, sir?”
He thought he had seen something in her eyes when she looked at him, a shadow of disapproval. She appeared to be in her late thirties, with a long-legged body and ample breasts slowly succumbing to gravity, a face still fighting entropy.
“Double Jack,” he told her. “Straight up.”
The bartender turned and walked away.
Ariel laid a hand on his cheek and turned his face toward hers again. “We could do a couple private dances,” she told him. “That would pass some time.”
“I’m afraid I’m not a very good dancer.”
She giggled softly. “It’s twenty dollars a song for a room dance,” she said. “But for fifty dollars you can have a twenty-minute couch dance.” She spoke with her mouth against his ear again. “And there’s a curtain across the door in the couch room.”
He nodded.
“Sound good?”
“Sounds very good.” He poured some champagne into her glass. She lifted the glass and took a sip. Then she placed her lips against his and forced a trickle of mouth-warmed champagne over his tongue. He tasted its wetness and the sweetness of her lips, and when the dizziness passed, he thought, That’s a good way to get hepatitis.
The bartender returned then and set his glass in front of him. “Thank you,” he said. She smiled tightly. As she walked away, she gave Ariel’s shoulder a quick tap.
Ariel’s eyes widened at the touch. She cut a glance at DeMarco’s face, then quickly looked away. “I’ll be right back,” she told him. She reached for her glass and the small bottle of champagne, slid off DeMarco’s lap, and walked away briskly. The fur trim on her white coat tried to cover her backside but fell short. He watched her go and knew that she would not be coming back. He wished he had stroked that fur when he’d had the chance.
DeMarco sipped his drink for a while. Finally he stood, glass in hand, and crossed to the bar. He smiled at the bartender, whose eyes held a dull sheen of resignation. “We know each other?” he asked.
“Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” she said.
“You made me for a cop. I saw you tap her shoulder.”
“I guess you look the type,” she said.
“My guess is we’ve met before.”
She shrugged. “In a previous lifetime maybe.”
“When I was working vice, no doubt.”
“No doubt,” she said.
He sipped his drink. She brought out a bottle from behind the bar and poured another inch into his glass.
“I’m not here to make trouble,” he told her.
“Neither am I.”
“I’m just looking for some answers.”
She stared at him hard for a few seconds. Then looked away. Then looked at him again. “If it’s about that professor, there’s not much I can tell you.”
“Good guess,” he told her.
She shrugged. “He’s the only one of our customers been in the papers lately.”
“And?”
“He was a customer. That’s the grand total of what I know about him.”
“Except that he’s a professor.”
She shrugged. “Some of the customers don’t know enough to lie about who they are.”
“What else didn’t he lie about?”
“To me? I never even spoke to the man except to take his drink order.”
DeMarco nodded and sipped his whiskey. He was feeling more comfortable now, playing a more familiar role. Ariel’s scent and warmth and touch had unnerved him for a few minutes, took him to a place of uncertainty he had not visited in a very long time. It had reminded him of how easily a man could succumb to such an invitation, how quickly he could find himself lost in that beguiling place.
But, he asked himself, a man like Thomas Huston? Huston had been married to a beautiful woman and, by all accounts, blissfully so. On the other hand, thirteen years of married life can make a man restless. Curious. Wistful for the unknown, the only imagined. Maybe even fearful of the slow slide into old age and all the loss it portends.
And what was it Bill Clinton had said when asked, Why would a man in your position, Mr. President, a man who has achieved everything he could ever want, ever stray?
Because I can, Slick Willie had said. He had done his best to look remorseful, repentant, self-chastising, but had been unable to banish a sly and arrogant smile from his lips.