The black girl who had almost gotten into the Eldorado was sitting next to the white girl and she, like the bartender, looked Harold over carefully and became satisfied that he could not possibly be The Man.
Then she smiled and said, “Why don’t you sit over here?” And she moved to the right and gave Harold the bar stool between the two of them.
“Why not? It’s invenereal to me where I sit,” said Harold, using a Bloomguardism they didn’t seem to understand or appreciate.
“What’ll you have, chief?” asked the bartender, a graying black man with a bass voice that could drown out Tina Turner any old day.
“A Bombay martini straight up, very dry, with a twist, please.”
The bartender just leaned on the bar and stared at Harold while the two girls edged closer. Then the bartender said, “I been workin hard all night, chief. Can’t you make it easy on me?”
“Give him what the fuck he wants,” said the black girl, who was taller than Harold and outweighed him but who was solidly proportioned, buxom and attractive.
“Look, I ain’t trickin with him,” the bartender said. “Besides, I ain’t got no more Bombay.”
“J amp;B and water?” offered Harold Bloomguard, rightly assuming from the number of black bandits who asked for J amp;B Scotch before sticking up a liquor store that the bartender would have no problem filling that order.
“Comin up,” the bartender said. “You buyin for the ladies?”
“Indeed,” said Harold Bloomguard, and he immediately thought of Roscoe Rules who disapproved of Harold’s saying “indeed” because it made him sound like a fag.
After the three of them had their drink, the blonde with the eight month pregnancy put her hand on Harold’s thigh and said, “Got a match?”
Harold picked up the match pack from the bar and found that he couldn’t get it working. He was crestfallen when the blonde took the pack from his hand and lit her own cigarette. The choirboy feared that his nerves might give him away, but it had the opposite effect in that most inexperienced tricks were every bit as frightened as Harold Bloomguard.
“My name’s Sabrina,” said the big black girl who had a sensual glistening mouth.
“My name’s Tammy” the pregnant blonde said. She had terrible teeth she was going to have pulled as soon as she dropped her frog and adopted it out and could hustle enough money to see a dentist, which she was having trouble doing what with her grotesque shape.
“My name’s Harold Leekly I’m a certified public accountant.”
“Nobody asked you what you did,” said Sabrina. “Why’d you say that? Maybe you’re a cop.”
“A cop!” cried Harold. “Ha ha! A cop!”
The bartender put the three drinks in front of them and said, “If this sucker’s a cop, I’m a astronaut.”
Then the blonde put her hand on Harold’s thigh again and moved it up his leg. The leg began to tremble as Harold realized that Sabrina had her hand around his waist and both girls were smiling and making incoherent small talk and patting him down caressingly, expertly just to reassure themselves. Then Sabrina put her hand on his right leg, the quiet one. It began to shake worse than the other.
“You shakin like a paint mixer,” Sabrina said. “But we get-tin outta here in a minute. We goin somewheres to quiet you down.”
“Where we going?” Harold asked, thinking that if he swallowed the Scotch it might help relax him.
“Maybe to our pad, baby,” Tammy smiled, showing her decaying fangs.
“That’ll be eight dollars, chief,” the bartender said as the girls gathered up their cigarettes and purses.
“For three little drinks?” Harold said. The bartender straightened up and glared down at him and Harold added, “Oh yes indeed, very good drinks, too, I must say!”
Harold tipped the bartender fifty cents which drew a sneer and a grumble and he followed the girls outside, remembering that Scuz had warned him that under no circumstance was he to go into a room with a whore because of the danger involved. He was hoping the girls would have given the offer before now and since they hadn’t he decided to push it.
“By the way what am I gonna get when we get where we’re going?”
“Don’t be in such a hurry, you cute little blue eyed jitterbug,” Sabrina smiled as she fished the Cadillac keys out of a red leather handbag.
“Am I going with you?” Harold asked, thinking frantically for an excuse not to.
Sabrina answered, “No, you follow us in your car.”
“Okay,” Harold said, much relieved. “But I wanna know what’s gonna happen. How do I know I’m gonna like it?”
“Oh, you gonna like it,” Sabrina said, and she stepped over to him, there on the corner of Pico and Western, under the streetlights in full view of passing cars, and gave his genitals a squeeze.
“Woooo,” said Harold Bloomguard, pulling back in embarrassment. “Woooo.”
“I was just gonna tell you what you’re getting,” Sabrina said, as Harold stood off a few steps and blushed and swung his arms around, wondering if anyone had seen that.
He knew that he had just been “honked,” as the vice cops called it, in a public place and that Scuz had said something about honking being a misdemeanor. But he couldn’t remember if it applied only to fruit cases or whores as well. And he couldn’t remember if the honking precluded the need for a money offer.
And as he stood there considering the next move, Tammy bounced over to him, grabbed his arm and said, “Let’s go, cutie,” and she gave him two more toots with a thumb and forefinger.
“Wooooo,” said Harold Bloomguard, honked again.
“Gud-damn, man!” Sabrina said testily. “We ain’t got time to stand around here all night and listen to you woo woo. Follow us down the street there where it’s dark. We gonna talk about money.”
“Money,” said Harold Bloomguard, grateful to Sabrina for solving his problem.
He ran across Pico to his car, made a U-turn in a gas station and pulled back onto Pico facing east, following the slow moving Cadillac which turned right onto Oxford where it was residential. And very dark. The Cadillac pulled into the first available parking space on the right. Harold pushed his borrowed glasses up on his nose like his partner Sam Niles and found a parking space fifty feet farther south.
Then Harold carefully reached down, found his two inch off-duty gun, which he had decided to carry working undercover, and his badge and handcuffs. He shoved the gun and cuffs inside his belt in the back, put the badge in his back pocket and affected a jauntiness he did not feel as he quickly walked back to the Cadillac, to the whores waiting in the darkness.
Harold stepped up on the sidewalk, leaned in the passenger window, looked at Tammy’s pathetic teeth and said, “Well, girls, let’s bring this pimple to a head. Get down to business. How…”
“Git in,” said Sabrina.
“Well before…”
“Get in,” Tammy said, pushing the Cadillac’s door open.
“Shouldn’t we …”
“We gonna talk business after you inside,” Sabrina said. Then she purred, “We want you here between us where we can feel your hot little body so maybe we kin git you to give us another dollar or two for our work.”
“Slide over me, honey,” Tammy said as Sabrina pushed the electric switches which took the white leather seats back and down.
As he was gingerly lifting himself across Tammy’s enormous belly, he worried that she might feel the gun, but she didn’t. And he thought how sad it was that a pregnant girl should be doing this kind of work, and while he was feeling sad she reached up between his legs and squeezed, making him say, “Woo woo,” and sit down on her hand.
“Ouch!” she cried, pulling her hand out. “You fucking near broke my wrist!”
“Sorry,” said Harold.
Then he began to wonder if he was doing the right thing by getting in the car. But he knew he was very close to bringing in a two-banger and he just couldn’t stop now.