Strip Search (4 page)

“Did Shelly have any boyfriends?”

“No. She was married.”

“Did her husband ever come here? To check up on her, maybe?”

“I never met him if he did. But I don’t think he’d be the jealous type.”

“Why’s that?”

“She worked here a long time. Anybody who was jealous wouldn’t let their wife work here that long, even for the money. Besides, there’s Berg.”

“What about Berg?”

Clarissa hesitated a moment, her dark eyes expressionless beneath the pale yellow of her hair. “Berg gets first ride. That’s part of the ‘hiring interview.’”

“He what?”

“You know what I mean. That’s all he wants—it’s a macho thing with him. After that, he leaves you alone.”

“Mr. Sheldon knew this?”

Clarissa shrugged. “It’s no secret. Call it show biz. I’ve heard of people doing a lot worse for a lot less money. And it doesn’t mean a thing—except to Berg. It’s his own ego he pumps, not you.”

Wager and Axton worked through the dozen or so girls as they came into the dressing room while the club emptied out. But the information did not vary: Shelly received grudging respect because of her earnings and because she knew something about dancing. Some of the girls liked her, some didn’t, but no one knew her very well because she seldom talked to anyone except about club business. In fact, few of the girls knew each other very well, and most seemed to want it that way. Axton finished before Wager did and motioned that he’d wait outside; a few minutes later, Wager joined him in the tiny hallway. Axton sniffed at the lapel of his jacket. “I smell like a French whorehouse—I hope I can air out before I get home.”

They watched the tight designer jeans on one of the girls as she walked on spiked heels toward the bar.

“Just tell Polly the truth: you were interviewing nude dancers.”

“Right—thanks. What’d you get?”

Three of his interviewees had started this week, after Annette Sheldon had disappeared, and could tell him nothing. Two others who had worked last Saturday night had since quit, but the other responses indicated they hadn’t been special friends of the murdered woman. “A lot of zilch.”

“Me, too. Annette was a good dancer. She made good money. She apparently had no boyfriends. And she stuck strictly to business.”

“That’s my picture, too,” said Wager. “Let’s talk to the people up front.”

In the now-empty club room, a busboy quickly dumped litter from the tables and stacked the chairs in front of another busboy, who pushed a broom in urgent thrusts across the floor. A colorless glare fell from the ceiling where a rheostat had turned up the lights, and the Vietnamese bartender, gray in the pale glow, stood at the cash register carefully entering totals into a ledger.

“You’re Nguyen?” Wager asked.

“Yes, sir.” He closed his account books over his thumb. “You want to know about Miss Shelly?”

His English still had that oriental singsong that held so many echoes for Wager, and he half-wondered if, in some dusty, pungent village, he had marched past this man. “Did you see her leave last Saturday?”

“No, sir. She checked her accounts. Table accounts. Then she went to dressing room. After that I was very busy. I didn’t see her leave.”

“You didn’t see anyone follow her? No customer paying special attention to her?”

“Special? No, sir.” He smiled, showing a row of gold-streaked teeth. “All the girls have regulars, yes? But not special like you mean, no.”

“Did you see any of her regulars? Or anybody spending a lot of time with her in the last couple weeks?” asked Axton. “Maybe spending a lot of money on her?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you ever meet her husband?” asked Wager.

“No, sir. He never come here. Mr. Berg, he don’t like husbands coming here.”

“Anybody give her a specially big tip that night?” asked Max.

“Not that she tells me. Maybe Ed knows.”

“Who’s Ed?”

“Disc jockey.” The bartender’s slender hand gestured toward the booth above and behind the runway where a light shone dimly through the ceiling glow. In the shade beneath the booth, a busboy whistled shrilly between his teeth and called to someone in the kitchen, “Let’s go, Carlos—andale, man!”

Wager started toward the dance ramp.

“Please, sir!” The bartender waved a nervous hand. “No shoes on stage, sir! You please walk around, yes?”

Wager did, following the curve of the waist-high platform into a shadow where a narrow stairway led up to the booth. Behind him, Axton asked the bartender more of the now-familiar questions.

At the top of the straight stairs, a door hung open, spilling light and stale, sweaty air into the club room. The disc jockey, in his mid-twenties, with a drooping mustache and blow-dried hair, looked up from a pile of tapes and records and shook his head. “Not up here, man. Off limits.”

Wager showed his badge. “I’m investigating a homicide. A girl named Shelly. I’d like to ask you some questions.”

“Homicide? Shelly? Does that mean murder, man?”

He nodded. “Can I have your name, please?”

“Man!” The brown eyes widened and stared at Wager. “Shelly…!” Absently, he reached for a cigarette and lit it, drawing deeply and hissing out a thin stream of smoke. “Man!”

“You were working Saturday night, right?”

“Huh? Oh—yeah. Every night.”

“Can I have your name, please?”

His name was Edward Gollmer and he had been the regular disc jockey since Berg bought the place. “That’s quite awhile in this business. People burn out. It’s really a lot harder than people think.”

Wager nodded. “Did you see her Saturday night, Ed?”

Gollmer had. She danced her three sets of three dances each and worked the floor as well. One of the better dancers, she was scheduled late in each round of sets. “That’s when the tipping gets heavy. And Shelly always did pretty good when she danced.”

“How do you know?”

“I get ten percent. That’s part of the deal—minimum wage from Berg and ten percent of the girls’ take. It’s not like I don’t earn it, man—it’s my job to establish the mood for the sets. I cool things down and then build them up a little bit, give a girl her introduction. Then I run their music the way they want it and handle the volume. That’s an art—you have to run the volume up a little at a time through the set, you know? It’s no easy job.”

“Did you do the music for Shelly that night?”

“Sure. She was real particular about it. A real artist, you know? She talked once about going to dance in Las Vegas or maybe she’d been there—I’m not sure. But she was good.”

“Did she ever talk about any friends of hers? Or her husband’s?”

“No. She was strictly business. She told me what she wanted and I did it, and that was it.”

“Did she give you her ten percent last Saturday?”

“Sure. A girl doesn’t give it over, I have a word with Mr. B. She either feeds the kitty or she’s out on her sweet ass. Unless I screw up—then no ten percent.” He shrugged. “It happens once in a while. We’re all human, man, and some of the music the girls want. …” He shook his head and fingered the gold chain around his neck. “A monkey couldn’t hop to some of the music they drag in.”

Wager asked, “Does the bartender get ten percent, too?”

“Sure. He’s got the same arrangement I do. That’s where the real money is in this racket. It sure ain’t in the salary.”

“Any of the girls ever skim?”

“It happens once in awhile, sure. But you can usually tell—you have a pretty good idea what each night brings. Things have been dropping off lately, though. The depression, right? But it’s overall, if you know what I mean. A girl skims, she stands out.”

“Shelly?”

“No. Never. What for? Shit, she could pick up two, three hundred. And a few nights she even made half a grand.”

“In one night? Five hundred dollars in one night?”

“Right. You get a Saturday-night house pretty well oiled, they can put a lot of bucks on the table. It’s amazing what some guys will pay just to look up a girl’s snatch.” He shrugged. “Like I say, minimum wage, that’s for the IRS, you know?” A thought struck him. “Ah—you guys don’t talk to them, do you?”

“Only about my own taxes, Ed.”

Gollmer smiled with relief. “Right. What the IRS don’t know won’t hurt us.”

“So Shelly paid you Saturday. Was that before or after she changed clothes?”

“After. They go in and count the tips and then settle up on their way out.”

“You saw her go out?”

“Right. I was sitting at the bar and having my drink, like always. She says, ‘Here you go, Ed,’ and hands me my money, and then out she goes.”

“Alone?”

“Yeah—right.”

“You saw her go out the front door alone?”

“No. The back door. Over there.” He pointed off across the vacant ramp whose waxed surface threw back the ceiling’s cold glow like a strip of ice. “There’s an employees’ lot out back where we park.”

“Can you think of anyone who might have wanted her dead?”

Gollmer shook his head.

“Nobody in the audience who showed special interest in her? Gave her a big tip? Asked her out after the show?”

“No more than usual. You know, ‘Can I give you a ride home?,’ that kind of crap. The out-of-towners do that, not the regulars. She got her share of it—she was a good-looking girl. Really a good figure.” He shook his head again. “Murdered … What, was she raped and killed?”

“It looks that way.”

“Well, I guess I’m not all that surprised.”

“Why’s that?”

“You do get your share of sickies coming in here. Some of them…well, Cal has a tough job, you know?”

“That’s the bouncer?”

“Right. Mr. B. keeps the place clean; nothing rough, nothing dirty. It’s not like some of the other skin houses. Still,” he added, lighting another cigarette, “we do get our ration of sickies.”

Wager went through the rest of the questions, asking the same thing a couple of different ways, but getting the same answers. Shelly left for the parking lot a little after two. She had been alone. No one seemed especially interested in her. Gollmer knew of no trouble between her and her husband. He knew of no one who might want her dead. And he could think of no sickie that stood out in the audience Saturday night.

When Wager came back down the stairs, Axton was waiting for him.

“Anything?”

“It looks like the disc jockey was the last one to see her leave.”

“Alone.” It wasn’t a question now.

“Yeah. Let’s go out this way—it’s the employees’ parking lot.”

It was a dirt square tucked between the windowless brick walls of the adjoining buildings and open at the back to an alley that glittered with crushed glass. Across the pavement, a high wooden fence with a board broken here and there guarded someone’s backyard, and beyond that a darkness of thick trees protected an old neighborhood from the noise and gleam of Colfax. High on the club’s wall above them, spotlights flooded the parking area with light. A black Mercedes sat in the slot closest to the door. Its license plate read M
R
. B. and on the wall in front of it was stenciled
Reserved for Numero Uno
. Other slots were numbered in older paint half-hidden under sprayed graffiti. Only four cars were left in the lot by now. They were all late models and one other had vanity plates reading D.J.-1.

“Not much hope for any witnesses,” said Axton.

He was right. It was, despite the openness and light, a secluded spot. Wager glanced again at the solid brick walls boxing in the lot. A girl could step through that door and, crossing suddenly into another world, simply disappear. “Looks like another wait-and-see killing,” he said. Wait-and-see if anything would turn up, because there sure as hell wasn’t much to help them right now.

A
NNETTE
S
HELDON WAS
autopsied the next day. Parts were taken out, weighed and measured, sampled and tested, then tossed back into the body cavity, which was tacked together for burial. Golding and Munn, on the day shift, interviewed Mr. Sheldon again to see if he could remember anything else after a night’s sleep. They handed their report on to Ross and Devereaux on the four-to-midnight, but those two were called to a shooting on the west side. A Chicano gang had squared off against a Vietnamese gang over the question of who was getting a bigger share of the welfare cut. So Ross and Devereaux had no time to follow up on Sheldon. When Wager and Axton came on at midnight for their eight hours, Sheldon’s second interview lay unread in the case file and the thick autopsy report was still in its brown routing envelope. Axton picked them both up when he gathered the day’s mail.

The pages of procedural steps and blanks were filled in by the medical examiner’s findings. It was, as usual, a detailed and comprehensive job. Doc Laban had been at it for over thirty years, and though some people outside Homicide might wonder at Doc’s continued fascination with the mangled and the mutilated, the division had a lot of respect for him. When he retired, it was going to be hard to find somebody as good.

“Gabe, Doc says there’re no sperm traces.”

Wager looked up from pouring his first cup of coffee. “She wasn’t raped?”

“No medical evidence of it. No bruises, abrasions, or sperm in the vaginal, anal, or oral areas. No sperm traces on thighs or buttocks.”

He thought about it for a moment. “We still don’t have all her clothes.” Sometimes a rapist got his kicks before he could go all the way. But not usually. More often, the rapist needed to feel a woman’s writhing terror and pain, even her hatred, as part of his pleasure.

“We probably never will have them,” said Axton, and added, “still—”

Wager agreed. “Like I said, why would somebody want to make it look like a rape?”

“You and your twisty mind.” Axton turned to the section on internal organs and read through the findings. “Approximate time of death, four to six days before the autopsy.” He counted back. “That could fit early Sunday morning—she got off work and got killed the same night.” His finger skipped down to the next paragraph. “He located a cocaine trace in her body fluids. The organs are normal, though. No evidence of long-term abuse.”

“Recreational chipping?” Wager wasn’t surprised. It was fairly common for a customer to offer a toot instead of a tip to a nightclub waitress. She either used it herself or sold it later.