“He knew about Brown,” said Lucas, leaning back and planting his feet on the desktop.
“Yeah. Looks like.”
“So where’d he go?”
The vice cop shrugged. “We’re asking around. He’s got a couple of other women. We’ve heard they’re working a sauna out on Lake Street. Used to work at a place called the Iron Butterfly, but that’s closed now. So we’re looking.”
“Relatives?”
“Don’t know.”
“When did we last have him in?” Lucas asked.
“ ‘Bout a year ago, I guess. Gross misdemeanor, soliciting for prostitution.”
“He do time?”
“Three months in the workhouse.”
“File upstairs?”
“Yeah. I could get it.”
“Never mind,” Lucas said. “I’m not doing anything. I’ll walk over and take a look.”
“We’ll keep looking for him,” the vice cop said. “Daniel’s all over our backs.”
Lucas flipped the lock on his office door and was pulling it closed when the phone rang. He stepped back inside and picked it up.
“Lucas? This is Jennifer. Are we going out tonight?”
“Sure. Seven o’clock?” An image of Carla flashed into his mind, her back arched, her breasts flattened, her mouth half-open.
Carla Ruiz.
Jennifer Carey, pregnant. “Yeah, that’d be fine. Pick me up here?”
“See you at seven.”
The maddog was waiting for files in the clerk’s office when Lucas walked in. The maddog recognized him immediately and forced himself to look back at the file he was holding. Lucas paid no attention to him. He walked through the swinging gate, behind the service counter, and across the room to the supervisor’s cubicle. He stuck his head in the door and said something the maddog couldn’t quite make out. The supervisor looked up from her desk and laughed and Lucas went in and perched on the edge of her desk.
The detective had an easy way about him. The maddog recognized and envied it. The files supervisor was an iron-girdled courthouse veteran who had seen one of everything, and Davenport had her fluttering like a teenage girl. As he watched, Lucas suddenly turned and looked at him and their eyes touched briefly. The maddog recovered and looked down at the file again.
“Who’s the dude at the counter?” Lucas asked.
The supervisor looked around him at the maddog, who dropped the file in the return basket and headed for the door. “Attorney. Can’t remember the firm, but he’s been around a lot lately. He had that Barin kid, you know, that rich kid who drove into the crowd . . .”
“Yeah.” The maddog disappeared through the door and Lucas dismissed him. “Jefferson Sparks. Bad guy. Pimp. I need the latest on him.”
“I’ll get it. You can use Lori’s desk. She’s out sick,” the supervisor said, pointing at an empty desk behind the business counter.
Sparks had three recent files, each with a slender sheaf of flimsies. Lucas read through them and found a half-dozen references to the Silk Hat Health Club. He picked up the phone, called vice, and asked for the detective he had talked to that morning.
“Is the Silk Hat still run by Shirley Jensen?” he asked when the detective came on the line.
“Yup.”
“I find the name in a couple of places in Sparky’s file. Could that be where his women are working?”
“Could be. Come to think of it, Shirley used to do the books on the Butterfly.”
“Thanks. I’ll run out there.”
“Stay in touch.”
Lucas hung up, tossed the files in the return basket, and glanced at his watch. Just after noon. Shirley should be working.
The Silk Hat was a black-painted storefront squeezed between a used-clothing store and a furniture-rental agency. The neon sign in the window said “Si k Hat t ealth Club” and the glass in both the window and door had been painted as black as the siding. There was a small wrought-iron door light over the door and a wise guy had spray-painted it red. Or maybe not a wise guy, Lucas thought. Maybe the owner.
Lucas pushed through the door into a small waiting room. Two plastic chairs sat on a red shag carpet behind a coffee table. A fish tank full of guppies perched on the sill of the blacked-out window. There were a half-dozen well-thumbed copies of Penthouse magazine on the coffee table. The chairs were facing a six-foot-long business counter that looked like it might have been stolen from a doctor’s office. A door beside the counter led into the back of the store.
As Lucas stepped into the waiting room, he heard a buzzer sound in the back, and a few seconds later a young woman in a low-cut black dress stepped up behind the counter. She was chewing gum, and a june-bug tattoo was just visible on the swell of her left breast. She looked like Betty Boop but smelled like Juicy Fruit.
“Yah?”
“I want to talk to Shirley,” Lucas said.
“I don’t know if she’s here.”
“Tell her Lucas Davenport is waiting and if she doesn’t get her fat ass out here, I’m going to fuck the place up.”
The woman looked at him for a second, working her jaw until the gum snapped. She was not impressed. “Pretty tough,” she said laconically. “I got a guy here you might want to talk to. Before you fuck the place up.”
“Who?”
She looked him over and decided he might recognize the name. “Bald Peterson.”
“Bald? Yeah. Tell him to get his ass out here too,” Lucas said enthusiastically. He reached under his jacket and took out the P7 and the woman’s eyes widened and she put up her hands as though to fend off a bullet. Lucas grinned at her and kicked the front panel of the counter and it splintered and he kicked it again and the woman turned and started running toward the back.
“Bald, you cocksucker, come out here,” Lucas shouted into the back. He reached across the counter, grabbed the bottom side of the top sheet and pulled and it came up with a groan and he let it go and he kicked the front panel again and a piece of board broke off. “Bald, you motherfucker . . .”
Bald Peterson was six and a half feet tall and weighed two hundred and seventy pounds. He had had a minor career as a boxer, a slightly bigger one on the pro wrestling tour. Some people on Lake Street were sure he was psychotic. Lucas was sure he was not. Bald had attacked Lucas once, years before, when Lucas was still on patrol. It happened in a parking lot outside a nightclub, one-on-one. Bald used his fists. Lucas used a nine-inch lead-weighted sap wrapped in bull leather. Bald went down in six seconds of the first round. And after he went down, Lucas used his feet and a heavy steel flashlight and broke several of the bones in Bald’s arms, most of the bones in his hands, the lower bones in both legs, the bones in the arches of his feet, his jaw, his nose, and several ribs. He also kicked him in the balls a half-dozen times.
While they were waiting for the ambulance, Bald woke up and Lucas gripped him by the shirt and told him that if he ever had any more trouble with him, he would cut off his nose, his tongue, and his dick. Lucas was suspended for investigation of possible use of excessive force. Bald was in the hospital for four months and a wheelchair for another six.
If Bald had been psychotic, Lucas thought, he would have come after Lucas with a gun, a knife, or, if he was really crazy, with his fists, as soon as he could walk. He didn’t. He never looked at Lucas again, and walked wide around him.
“Bald, you dickhead . . .” Lucas shouted. He kicked the front panel of the desk and it caved in. There was a clattering on a back stairs and he stopped kicking and Shirley Jensen hurried up the hallway toward the counter. Lucas put the P7 away.
“You asshole,” Jensen yelled.
“Shut up, Shirley,” Lucas said. “Where’s Bald?”
“He’s not here.”
“The other cunt said he was.”
“He’s not, Davenport, I mean, Jesus Christ on a crutch, look at this mess . . .” Jensen was in her late forties, her face lined from years of sunlamps, bourbon, cigarettes, and potatoes. She was a hundred pounds overweight. The fat bobbled under her chin, on her shoulders and upper arms, and quivered like jelly beneath her gold lamé belt. Her face crinkled and Lucas thought she might cry.