“Is that what you give your customers?”
“In part. We’re about fantasy fulfillment.”
Darcy probably only understood a tenth of what was being said, but he was still red in the face, and I knew it was only going to get worse. “Darce, why don’t you take a stroll around the premises while we talk? See if you can spot anything the detectives missed.”
I could tell he didn’t want to leave me, but he did as I asked. If only my previous partners had been so compliant.
This chick was way over the top, but by Vegas standards, she was a perfectly average, ordinary working girl. After all, Vegas was the one city where a girl with no training, no education, and not incredibly bright could still make a good living, own a house, raise kids. Thanks to the Culinary Union, even nongaming cocktail waitresses got nine bucks an hour, plus tips, which was where the real action was. Gaming waitresses got fourteen. Where else could a cocktail waitress afford a mortgage and car payments? Where else could a high school dropout park cars and make enough to send his kids to college? Call girls-even run-of-the-mill ones-took home anywhere from five hundred to three thousand bucks a night, depending upon what exactly they were willing to do. Anywhere else in the world, this woman would be sleeping under a bridge in a cardboard box. In Vegas, she was the mistress of pain.
Hey, it wasn’t called Sin City because of Wayne Newton.
“What can you tell me about Lenore Johnson?”
“Nice girl,” she answered. “Did whatever she was asked. I like that in an employee.”
“How long had she been here?”
“About three months.”
“Know anything about her background?”
“She came from Kansas, poor girl. Father was a police officer. She didn’t do drugs-something of a rarity in this field. She was well mannered, respectful. Didn’t have the attitude a lot of my girls get. She was trusting.”
Which was probably what killed her. “Did she do outcalls? For sex?”
“Not to my knowledge. That would be illegal, you know.”
“Yeah, but did she do them?”
“I don’t think so. She was a good girl.”
“But she was working here. The night she disappeared.”
“Yes, and two of my girls saw her leave with a customer. One of them actually referred her to him. She blames herself.”
“She shouldn’t. He picked his victim based on her name and her appearance, not any referral.”
“Really?” For the first time, her mistress-of-pain façade cracked a bit. “I’ll tell her that. I hope she takes some comfort from it.”
“I’ll want to talk to all the, um, employees who saw this guy.”
“I’ll assemble them. But you won’t get much. They can’t describe his face.”
“Surely if they saw him right here-”
“But my girls are trained never to look a customer in the eyes. The entire face is to be avoided, as much as possible. We don’t want attachments forming. It clouds the judgment. In this line of work, it’s important to retain a certain professional detachment.”
Just my damn luck. My only eyewitnesses are sex merchants who’ve been trained not to look at people’s faces. “I’ll still want to talk to them just as soon-”
I was cut off by a piercing scream from down the corridor. I raced past the mistress, fumbling for my weapon, remembering that I wasn’t allowed to have one anymore. Damn!
Another cry, this one even more terrified than the first. I tracked it to a closed door, grabbed the knob, flung it open.
There were two women in the bed, both stark naked. The one on top, the one with the surgically enhanced knockers who was holding a huge dildo in her right hand, appeared to be the trained professional. The skinny girl who had pulled the covers up to her neck was undoubtedly the customer.
Darcy was on the floor at the side of the bed, hunched over in a fetal position, rocking back and forth. He was making strange nonsense noises, babbling, whimpering.
The mistress came in behind me. “What happened, Kimberly?”
The silicone princess dropped her equipment. “We were just-”
The mistress shot her a harsh warning look.
“-having a conversation,” she continued. “And this simp comes rushing into the room.”
Darcy looked as if he were having a total meltdown. I’d never seen him like this. He began pounding his head against the floor. I ran to his side and wrapped my arms around him. “Darcy-what happened?”
He flapped his hands, rubbed the sides of his head. “Did you think that one was in trouble? Because I thought she was in trouble.”
“But why-”
He couldn’t stop rocking. “She was screaming. Screaming real loud. I thought the big one was hurting her.”
I closed my eyes. “So you rushed in to help?”
“And I saw she wasn’t wearing any clothes, and I remember the bad man took all the girls’ clothes away, and I tried to help, and she hit me with-with-that thing.” He was hand-flapping with a frenzy. His voice was never well modulated, but now it sounded as if he was shouting. “Why did she do that? Why did she hurt me? I don’t think people should hurt each other!”
I took his wrists and tried to get him under control. “It was a misunderstanding, Darcy. She wasn’t hurting the other woman. She was just-”
Okay, where did I go from there? Even if O’Bannon had had that little talk with his son, would it have covered activities such as the one he’d just stumbled upon?
“Let’s go back to the car, Darcy,” I said. “We’ll get a custard or something.”
“Why would she scream if she wasn’t hurting? I screamed last night when I stubbed my toe because it hurt and she was screaming and she didn’t have any clothes on and-”
“Come on,” I said firmly. “We’re leaving.”
I made a few excuses to the mistress and got him the hell out of there. Damn it all. I should have seen that coming. Maybe Granger had been right. Maybe I didn’t have any business dragging Darcy to these horrible places. All kinds of traumatic things might be going on inside his head that I knew nothing about. I had enough problems without playing with fire of this magnitude. O’Bannon’s autistic son. Christ, what was I thinking?
Those are bad girls and I know they are and they were doing bad things. Bad people go to hell and I don’t want to go to hell. Mr. Strickland said that we have to behave ourselves and if we didn’t we’d go to hell and he took me by the hand away from the others and told me he knew what I was thinking that I had these ideas and all the boys like me did and we couldn’t control them but I had to or I would be a dirty boy and I would go to hell. Bad girls! And the smell was so yucky on the big girl with the mole under her right knee and the holes all up her arm. Like the smell of Mommy’s dishwashing gloves when Mommy was still alive.
I hope Susan doesn’t stop taking me places even though I had a fit and Dad told me to control myself but I couldn’t help it and I wanted to rip my hair out but I didn’t and I hope Susan doesn’t stop taking me because I was bad but I’m afraid she will because she has been smelling really funny bad and it isn’t funny and Dad wouldn’t let me read the D. H. Lawrence books because he said they would be bad for me and I think this is all scary and I wish people wouldn’t do those things to other people. Bad girls! Bad girls!
Midnight. Most of the operatives had gone home, but Dr. Spencer and several others were still in the hotel ballroom. The phone rang incessantly. He had an hour to go before his shift ended.
“This is really something, isn’t it?” Harv said with his usual conversational panache.
“Did you have a specific this in mind,” he replied, “or just a general this?”