“Don’ believe me?” she demanded truculently.
She pulled up her negligee and straddled him, put her arms around his neck, started to French-kiss him as her naked crotch worked against him. Nothing happened to him. He wanted to get stiff. He wanted to feel something — excitement, lust, even anger. Nothing. Goddammit, wasn’t five years long enough to mourn? Marie was never coming back to him.
Marie’s mouth was strained impossibly wide, her eyes were wild, her hair an underwater slow-motion swirl, the black hole between her breasts blossoming red
Jeri suddenly stopped, drew back to look shyly into his eyes. “I’m going to be sick now,” she announced.
Dain got her off him and into the bathroom in time, held her head while she threw up.” As he wiped her mouth with a wet washcloth, she passed out. In the bedroom he put her to bed, and after pulling up the sheet and a light blanket found himself kissing her on the forehead as if she were a little girl.
Dain walked all the way back to his hotel, half-hoping some half-wit would try to mug him, but the Chicago streets on that night were safe as a cathedral. He was empty as a pocket with a hole in it, was nothing, had nothing, except a lust for revenge and a cat who wouldn’t purr.
11
“Great turnaround time,” said Dain to Jeri when he found her behind her desk at Maxton’s office at 8:30 the next morning. Her eyes were clear, her hair was brushed and shiny. She wore a wide-shouldered pinstripe suit and slacks, the suit jacket almost to her knees when she stood up. She looked terrific.
“Good genes. Dain, listen, I... I think I remember—”
“You passed out, I put you to bed. That’s all.”
In his private office Maxton was grunting into the phone. Rain-washed Chicago sparkled outside the windows. He covered the receiver, said sarcastically, “How nice of you to drop in. It’s been over a week. My bitch wife is getting...” He uncovered the receiver, said, “Yeah, I’m listening,” and covered it again.
“Who do you know drives a red Porsche?” asked Dain.
“Nobody.”
“Who did Zimmer know drives a red Porsche?”
“I told you before — Zimmer was a fucking law clerk. We didn’t have any social life in common.”
“You’d be surprised,” said Dain.
“What the fuck does that mean?” He said into the phone, “Then go into court and get a continuance, fuckhead.”
“Platinum blonde,” said Dain. “Mid-twenties at a guess, too much makeup, cool face, maybe beautiful, maybe just this side of beautiful. She was waiting for him when they grabbed the bonds. She’s the one who planned the steal. Too bad you don’t know her, I could have cut across, saved some time.”
Maxton barked into the phone, “Yeah, yeah, you stupid fuck, I’m listening,” then said to Dain, “A fucking broad? No way. Zimmer planned it.”
Dain shrugged and was on his feet, his usual leather-covered book in hand. He looked down at Maxton, said, “Why does every male in Chicago think he’s got to be Mike Ditka?”
In the outer office, Jeri Pearson, who had been listening on the intercom, bounded to her feet and kissed him on the mouth.
“Nobody’s ever told him off before! They’re all too scared of him.” She stepped back, suddenly shy. “Listen, I remember you holding my head when I was sick last night and—”
“It never happened,” said Dain.
Jeri said, “The dancers were from the Cherry Bomb.”
The Cherry Bomb was in Rush Street’s strip-club district, two blocks west of and parallel to Michigan Avenue. A huge barn that stank of stale beer and stale sweat and cheap perfume and disinfectant and testosterone. There was dim lighting for the tables, indirect lighting for the bar, spot lighting for the stage with revolving red, yellow, blue and green gels for the three women in G-strings and pasties who writhed, danced, and gyrated to canned music.
At the empty end of the bar furthest from the action, Dain waited with a $50 bill, folded lengthwise, nipped between his extended fingers. It quickly brought the bartender to him.
Over the music, Dain yelled, “Dancer. Real pretty. Great breasts. Black hair to her butt.”
The bartender eyed the fifty and made a fly-away gesture.
Mercifully, the music ended, the women left to scattered applause and rebel yells. A manic aging emcee bounded onto the stage. He rolled eyes like stones and flicked his tongue after the departing strippers in their G-strings and pasties.
“Put a dollar bill on their heads,” he yelled into his cordless mike, “and you got all you can eat for under a buck!”
“Any friends?” asked Dain.
Another trio of strippers was taking the place of the first. The bartender jerked his head toward a long lithe black woman. “The tall one. Cindy.”
Dain dropped his fifty on the bar, crossed to the stage as the emcee’s overamped voice yelled, “Anyway, welcome to the Cherry Bum — I mean Bomb, the only place in town where the girls wear underpants to keep their ankles warm!”
The music suddenly blared, the black woman started to dry-fuck one of the fire poles set up onstage.
Dain yelled over the music, “Cindy!“
She turned her head and he held up two fanned $100 bills, then stuffed them down the back of her G-string.
Dain was leaning against the brick wall of the alley when Cindy emerged from the stage door at 4:07 in the morning. She wore running shoes and tight jeans and a long-sleeve red T-shirt with DANCE THEATRE OF HARLEM stretched across her breasts.
She stopped dead at the sight of him, sighed, and nodded as if winning a bet with herself.
“Don’t ever anything come free in this world of ours,” she said. “Now, mister, I know you laid a double-century on me, and I know you spect something for it, but—”
“Just a walk and a talk,” he said. “I don’t want to know where you live, I don’t want a free sample.”
She looked deep into his eyes for a moment, asked, “You weird?” then answered herself before he could, “Wouldn’t tell me if you was, would you, Mr. Sad Man?”
They started walking together; she was tall enough so they made a striking couple. In the street at this hour there was only silence, contrasting with the tumult of the Cherry Bomb. Their meandering unsynched footsteps were the only thing breaking the immediate silence around them, though the slow breathing of the city formed a background curtain of sound.
Cindy gave a deep laugh. “You don’t want nothing, Mr. Sad Man, you must be that Good Samaritan the preacher talk about on Sunday, layin’ a pair of C-notes on me like that.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want anything,” said Dain.
“Oh yeah, right, right. Walkin’ an’ talkin’. Y’want me t’talk dirty? ‘Bout what I’d like you to do to me, or what I’d like to do to you? Or maybe cry a little an’ tell you all about what a nice girl like me be doin’ in a place like—”
“I want to talk about you and your friend with the long black hair entertaining at Teddy Maxton’s Christmas party.”
Cindy dumbed down her face and put a whine in her voice.
“Was just a gig, man. Dude paid us a century each to do the same show we do at the club—”
“The long-haired one who took off with Jimmy Zimmer.”
“Look, man, I don’t know nothing about it. Even if I did know something about it I wouldn’t know nothing about it.”
Dain said, conversationally, “If they catch them, Cindy, they’ll snuff her. Right along with him.”
“Snuff?” she cried in alarm, her black eyes shocked in her strong-boned brown face. “What you talk snuff? Vangie—”
“If I get to them first, I can give her a break.”