Had Thomas Huston succumbed to a similar weakness?
“If you never spoke to him,” DeMarco asked, “how did you find out he’s a professor?”
“Girl talk,” she said. “Besides, just because I work in a place like this doesn’t mean I’m totally illiterate. I read the paper every once in a while.”
“That’s what puzzles me,” DeMarco said. “Why a man so well-known would jeopardize his public image by—”
“Fraternizing with us lowlifes?”
DeMarco considered her face. It was beginning to look familiar.
“Let me save you the trouble,” she said. “You took me in a couple times maybe ten, twelve years ago. Me and a couple of friends.”
“For keeping a disorderly house.”
“So they said. Personally, I consider myself a meticulous housekeeper.”
“Meticulous,” he repeated and smiled.
“Dust bunnies run at the mention of my name.”
“On Fourth Street,” he said. “Just up from the marina.”
She nodded. “There’s a gift shop there now. Some guy gives glass-blowing demonstrations in the basement.”
The way she said “glass-blowing” made him smile again.
“Guess who taught him his technique,” she said.
He grinned and shook his head. Another sip of whiskey. Then it came back to him. “Bonnie,” he said.
“Good for you. You remember the names of all your busts?”
“Just the ones who proposition me with sex.”
Again, she shrugged. “Use what the good Lord gave you, that’s what my mama always told me.”
“I imagine that’s a popular opinion around here.”
“More like gospel. The eleventh commandment.”
“You remember the other ten?”
She rattled them off without cracking a smile. “No spitting, no swearing, no touching the dancers, no fighting, no smoking, no cell phones, no cameras, no minors, no food near the stage, no drinks that weren’t purchased at the bar.”
“I bet you can name the seven dwarves too.”
“We have them booked for New Year’s Eve. You should come. They put on quite a show.”
DeMarco chuckled, then felt guilty when he realized how much he was enjoying himself. “Maybe we’d better get back to the subject.”
“Let’s refill that glass first.”
He considered it. He wasn’t officially on duty. In fact, if he were home right now, he would have a glass in hand and his eyelids would be drooping. “A small one,” he told her.
She poured his glass half-full.
“You call that a small one?”
“I don’t call any of them small. Just hurts a guy’s feelings.”
“Stop it,” he said.
“I would if I thought you really wanted me to.”
He turned his back to the bar so she would not see his unmanageable grin. From that position, he could peer into the stage area. Around a low stage built of plywood, its floor boxed in by low plywood walls, were several inexpensive chairs with black seat pads. Eight customers were already seated around the stage in anticipation of the first dancer. A mirrored ball hung above the stage and flickered shards of light throughout the room.
The rear and one sidewall of this room each had three openings cut into them. Two of the open doorways on the rear wall led to tiny rooms with nothing inside but another chair; in one of these rooms, a naked girl was straddling a fully-clothed man who sat with his head back, eyes closed, arms dangling limp at his sides while the girl writhed atop him, sluggishly bumping and grinding to Usher’s “Nice and Slow.” The third tiny room appeared empty, but DeMarco thought he could make out another door deeper inside. The dressing room, he told himself.
Each of the three doorways on the far wall had a dark, heavy curtain hanging over it. Couch dances, he thought. Fifty dollars for twenty minutes.
He turned back to Bonnie. “So what was Thomas Huston’s preference? I’m guessing the couch dances.”
“Couch dance. Singular. One per night.”
“That was it? Twenty minutes and then he’d leave?”
“He’d watch the dancers for a while first, have a couple of drinks. Then the couch dance. Then good night.”
“Always with the same girl? In the room, I mean?”
Bonnie looked away for a moment. She gazed at the mirrored ball. When she returned her gaze to DeMarco, she smiled. “It’s not my job to notice things, you know? Just the opposite.”
“It’s not your job, but you notice them all the same. You’re too clever not to.”
“All I know is that he doesn’t come here anymore, and because of that, I’ve lost a regular source of not much income.”
DeMarco nodded. “You own this place, Bonnie?”
“More or less.”
“So tell me about the girls who work here.”
“What’s there to tell? If you’re pretty, if you’re friendly, you can make a lot of money. All cash.”
“How much is a lot?”
“On a busy night? Five, six hundred. Sometimes more.”
“Is this a busy night?”
“Around eleven o’clock it will be. That’s when the really pretty girls come on.”
“The ones here now aren’t pretty?”
“You’ve looked at them all. You tell me.”
“I think Ariel’s a beautiful young woman.”