Private Dancer

For Leslie Knowles, who must be a wonderful teacher. Thank you for the vivid insights and the gentle advice.

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

A Biography of Suzanne Forster

“R
AY
B
ANS, A FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOW
, and a black leather jacket.” Bev Brewster whispered the words into the silk flower pinned to her lapel, her eyes riveted on the man who’d just entered The Tearoom Pavilion. Then she glanced around the elegant restaurant to see if anyone had noticed her covert action. Luckily, with all the commotion at the reservations desk, nobody was paying any attention to a rather ordinary-looking brunette, even if she was talking into a flower.

The entire restaurant seemed to share Bev’s fascination with the customer the maître d’ was discreetly trying to waylay. The man looked as if he’d wandered off a remake of
Rebel Without a Cause.
A poolhall roughneck, Bev thought. What was he doing in a place like this?

“I’m sorry, sir, but our dress code requires a jacket.” The maître d’s agitated voice carried through the hushed room.

“Then we have no problem, do we?” The roughneck indicated his leather jacket with a flip of the lapel, brushed past the maître d’, and entered the room. He hesitated long enough to case the place with one quick sweep of his eyes.

Bev found herself taking in every detail of the man’s appearance, from his shoulder-length dark hair and unshaven profile to his street-brawler’s build. He was at least six four and an undeniably tough customer. She didn’t envy the maître d’s predicament.

The roughneck strolled across the room without a backward glance. He had the long, rangy stride of an urban cowboy and a way of carrying himself that said “proceed at your own risk.” He also had the kind of dark, smoldering good looks that women left their husbands for. As he walked, his eyes flicked around the restaurant in a quick appraisal that sized up the trendy crowd with barely concealed insolence.

Bev feigned sudden interest in her menu.

It wasn’t just that she wanted to avoid being seen, it was the surprising tightness in her neck muscles. She didn’t trust herself not to wrinkle her nose, or to do something even more adolescent, if he looked her way. There was something about the man’s go-to-hell attitude that rankled.

Or maybe it was his seeming command of a tense situation, she admitted, taking a quick sip of her oolong tea. Given her present state of insecurity, a show of confidence from anyone, including her pet goldfish, felt threatening. Frankly she didn’t feel equal to this assignment, or to any assignment. She wasn’t a bonafide private eye, and if she hadn’t insisted on helping out at her father’s detective agency after he’d had his heart attack a month earlier, she wouldn’t be here now. She’d still be designing and selling mail-order stationery from her small house in the San Fernando Valley.

“Mind if I sit down?”

The harsh whiskey rasp of a male voice sent shivers down Bev’s spine. Her jaw went slack and her head snapped up. “I beg your pardon,” she said, staring into empty air. An embarrassing second flashed by before she realized the man hadn’t been talking to her. He was two tables down, talking to—

Bev snapped to attention. He was talking to Elayne Greenaway, the woman she’d had under surveillance for the past week. Bev barely had time to be grateful that neither of them had heard her before she registered the oddness of the situation. She wasn’t surprised that Mrs. Greenaway was meeting a man. She’d been hired because
Mr
. Greenaway thought his wife was having an affair. What surprised Bev was her subject’s choice of man. What could a sophisticated woman like Elayne Greenaway possibly want with a hoodlum like him?

Unless it was the obvious, Bev thought, experiencing a tiny, involuntary shudder. Reckless thrills. Some women went in for that sort of thing, especially bored housewives with money to burn.

No, it had to be a mistake, she decided, expecting to see security guards burst into the room at any moment and drag the intruder away. Instead, she watched him pull back a chair and sit down at Mrs. Greenaway’s table as though he’d been invited. A moment later he slouched back negligently, a booted foot propped on his knee.

Bev lowered her menu, fascinated. This was going to be interesting, she decided. The fashionable Mrs. Greenaway hadn’t uttered a word of protest. In fact, she was smiling one of those dippy smiles that women often produce when they come flat up against a wall of male sensuality. And he had it to spare, Bev admitted. A six-feet-four-inch wall of it.

A waiter approached hesitantly and the roughneck ordered a beer. The waiter reappeared almost instantly, apparently eager not to offend, but when he tried to pour the beer into a chilled glass, the man stopped him.

He drinks from the bottle
, Bev thought, watching him rip off the screw top and take a long swallow. Why didn’t that surprise her? He probably chewed on toothpicks and kept a pack of Camels in his rolled-up T-shirt sleeve. He probably didn’t even shut the bathroom door!

Bev understood that the first priority of good detective work was emotional distance, but she decided to indulge herself this once. She was already nurturing a dislike for Elayne Greenaway’s hoodlum boyfriend, just on principle. He was too cocky and self-assured for his own good—or so she told herself several times over the next few minutes. And then, when she saw him chugalug the first beer and order a second, she made up her mind that he drank too much and probably treated women abominably.

And yet, when Elayne Greenaway leaned across the table and touched his hand, Bev’s breath caught. It happened so suddenly she felt a wave of lightheadedness. Elayne’s crimson fingernails mesmerized Bev as they drifted lightly across the man’s forefinger. Even more bizarre was how Bev could almost imagine herself doing the same thing! For a split second, she envisioned herself in Elayne Greenaway’s place. Touching him.

The roughneck glanced down at Elayne’s hand, then raised his eyes to hers. It was a scene right out of a sizzling midnight movie, Bev realized, one with Bogart and Bacall. She didn’t dare blink for fear of missing something. Riveted in place, she watched as Elayne took a slender cigarette from a gold case and waited for him to light it. He dug a tattered book of matches from a zipper pocket of his jacket and leaned forward, staring into her eyes as he slowly struck the match.

Bev nearly slithered off the chair as he touched Elayne’s hand to steady it. It was over in an instant, just the lightest contact of his fingertips against Elayne Greenaway’s wrist, but to Bev it ranked sky-high on her list of ecstatic moments. In all her twenty-seven years, she’d never seen anything so sexy!

They began to talk then, in hushed, conspiratorial tones. Bev found herself leaning toward them instinctively, so engrossed that she nearly toppled out of the chair when the roughneck suddenly stood up. He nodded at Mrs. Greenaway. She smiled back at him, and then he turned and walked away.

Bev barely had her pulse rate under control before he’d disappeared from the room. She sat there, oddly shaken, and wondering what to do. Who was he to Mrs. Greenaway? And what had their brief meeting been all about? She’d been following the woman for days and this was the first indication that there might be something clandestine in her life.

Abruptly Bev’s instincts took over.
Check it out
, she told herself.
See where he’s going
!

She had no idea how much oolong tea cost, but she plunked down a ten-dollar bill and made tracks for the exit. The roughneck was getting into a vintage red Mustang convertible as Bev came out of the restaurant. He obviously hadn’t used the valet parking service either. He was parked down the street, just two cars away from her Buick Skylark.

He gunned the Mustang’s engine and pulled back, tires screeching, then wheeled out into traffic like a destruction derby veteran. Irresponsible, too, Bev thought, ringing up another character defect. She had quite a list by now.

As he sped down the street, Bev sprinted for her car. Her heart was pounding wildly. She was halfway across the street before she realized that she was actually going after him! She wasn’t sure when she’d made that decision, and she suspected her reasons weren’t entirely professional, but she simply had to find out who Mrs. Greenaway’s hoodlum boyfriend was.

Had she put the blackjack in her purse?

It was the foremost question in Bev’s mind as she followed the Mustang through neighborhoods that got progressively seedier. The graffiti grew more explicit by the mile, and the tattooed riffraff loitering on street corners looked as if they were planning their next convenience store heist. Parole violators at best, Bev decided.

Beyond that, Elayne Greenaway’s roughneck wasn’t an easy man to tail. He drove as if he’d been put on earth to test everyone else’s defensive driving skills, including Bev’s. She’d nearly lost him twice, and suddenly that didn’t seem like such a bad idea. She was just about to make an illegal U-turn and head back when he pulled the Mustang over.

He parked in front of a rundown beer joint called The Red Monkey. The bar was housed in a two-story building with a sign in the window that advertised rooms to rent upstairs. Bev pulled over half a block down the street and waited, sizing up the situation. It was possible this was where he and Elayne Greenaway met, although she couldn’t imagine the attorney’s wife stepping foot in such a place. Unless Mrs. Greenaway was a closet thrillseeker, she reminded herself, the sort who sought out danger to relieve the tedium of her privileged life.

Twenty minutes later, Bev had accepted the fact that, tedious life or not, Mrs. Greenaway wasn’t going to show up. Still burning with curiosity, she told herself she’d come too far not to follow through. She removed her blazer, taking care not to jostle the silk flower. Its petals concealed a tiny microphone attached to a miniature voice-activated tape recorder that Bev had hidden in the breast pocket of her jacket. It was her own brainchild, and she was quite proud of it.