“Meaning, Best might have told her something that he didn’t tell you or any of the other girls.”
Bunny seemed openly annoyed now. “This is a business like any other—employees get days off, and this is hers. She’s probably at the Vincalla Motel. Goes there and sits around the pool all day, when she’s not working. At night she reads or watches TV. Quiet girl.”
“Is there a boyfriend in the picture?”
Now Bunny seemed strangely amused. “Gaita, why don’t you break it to him?”
Gaita made a resigned gesture with her shoulders. “Tango, she is a lovely woman. One of the loveliest and most in demand here at the Mandor. But she does not like the men.”
“Funny game to go into, then. So, she’s a lesbian?”
“No. She is...how you say...frigid.”
Bunny said, “Tango says the act of sex is no more exciting, or meaningful, to her than brushing her teeth or using the john.”
I frowned. “What, so she puts on an act for her clients?”
“No. She takes great pleasure in having them work hard to please her while she remains bored. It’s her way of feeding her hatred for men.”
“Why is she popular, then?”
Gaita took that one: “Because she is very beautiful, señor.”
Yeah, and what man doesn’t think he’s just the right guy to melt an ice queen?
I asked, “Yet she went out on...what, dates with this Best character?”
“Him she did not mind,” Gaita said. “He was more the father to her. My guess is, they never did the act of sex together.”
Bunny cut in: “To what degree she can put up with men, Tango prefers older ones, like Best. Younger men, closer to her own age, she has a supreme contempt, even hatred, for.”
“Why in hell?”
Again, it was Gaita who responded: “It is because of her older brother, Señor Morgan. He is dead now. Because he raped her. And she killed him.”
“Okay, I’m starting to get the picture.”
“This is why she left Cuba, señor. To flee the police for this crime, but it was really self-defense.”
I nodded. “How old is she now?”
“She is twenty.”
“Brother,” I whispered under my breath. “How long has she been at the Mandor?”
Bunny took that one: “Four years,” she said, too casually.
“That’s rape, too, you know,” I told the madam pointedly. “Statutory rape.”
“She had papers saying she was twenty-one when she came here,” Bunny said. “I take my girls at their word.”
“Even when you know they’re lying.”
“Excuse me if I don’t take morality lessons from Morgan the Raider.”
I raised a hand to quell any argument.
Then I crawled off the other side of the bed, got to my feet and tried to shake the tiredness out of my body.
“Okay,” I told them, “I’m going to speak to Tango, then I’m coming back here. In the meantime, Bunny, you rack that memory of yours for anybody else who might have been involved with Parvain and your hubby in that Possibilities company. Come up with somebody we can track down.”
Her eyes flared. “Morgan, damn it, that was years ago.”
“Phone operators are the best tracers of missing persons in the world. Let your fingers do the walking—just don’t bust a nail.”
Bunny came over and touched my arm. Suddenly the good-looking old broad had what seemed to be a genuine look of concern. “Going to that motel—aren’t you taking a big chance?”
“Who isn’t?”
“Morgan...”
The tone of Bunny’s voice made me meet her eyes. “What, kiddo?”
She whispered, though surely Gaita could hear. “Tell me ...please...what did you do with that...that person who was killed at my building?”
“I left him in Domino Park behind some bushes.”
She had the expression of a startled deer. “There was nothing about it in the papers.”
“Yeah, I know. Kind of curious, isn’t it?”
Her mouth was a tight line now. “Morgan...sometimes you frighten me.”
“Just sometimes?”
Then I got a closer glimpse of myself in the dressing table mirror.
“No wonder,” I said. “You think maybe I could scare up a shower and a shave around here someplace?”
Bunny didn’t answer me—maybe this simple indignity was the last straw.
But Gaita came over, took my arm and gave me one of her funny, sexy grins. “Why, of course, señor—we attend to all of a man’s needs here at the Mandor Club.”
She was good as her word.
I was halfway through the shower, the spray like hot little friendly needles that were bringing me to life even as the steam soothed me and uncoiled muscles that were tight with stress and too little sleep. I was washing my hair with a bath bar, eyes tight shut as soapy water trailed down my face, when I heard the shower stall open.
Gaita slipped inside and she was naked, with her hair pony-tailed back, and her makeup already washed off, a fresh, youthful girl but no kid, not with breasts so full and high, their dark nipples taut, not with that supple belly where a little whisper of dark hair worked its way from her navel down to gradually expand into the lush dark tangle of the delta between her legs, the rest of her a coppery smoothness that the water seemed to love, to caress, to turn her into a gleaming goddess, pearled with moisture, her parted lips dripping water down like nectar flowing from a goblet.
She began to soap my front, lathering up my chest hair, then lathered lower and had she spent any more time down there, we’d have been finished before we started; but then her arms slipped behind me as she soaped my back while the front of her was pressed to me, the breasts splayed against me.
“Gaita...no...I’m....”
She covered my mouth with hers, lips with a full plumpness that seemed to consume mine, and over the hammering of the shower and the splash at our feet and the gurgle of the drain, she drew away from me and said, “You are not married. Did you not tell me so yourself? You have not consummated the act. You do not betray her. You do not.”
This time I kissed her.
We moved away from the spray of the showerhead, to the rear of the stall where she pushed me against the wall like a suspect, but she did not interrogate me, she went down on her knees, she went down on me, and for a moment I thought of Kim, but just a moment, because then the Cuban kitten was rising and turning and leaning against the wall with her hands flat against the tile, glancing back at me with sultry insistent invitation, offering the rounded cheeks of the most perfect posterior that fool Castro ever banished from his country.
And not doing something about it would have been goddamn insulting, so I entered her and she said, “Si!” with every stroke, grinding back at me in a rhythmic sexual samba that required no music but our heavy breathing and the percussive insistence of the shower.
We wound up on the floor of the bathroom on a fluffy little rug, first with her riding me, her eyes shut dreamily, her mouth beaming with bliss, rocking, grinding, rocking, then with me on top, stabbing her sweetly, and when she came, she cried out in a language neither Spanish nor American, but I understood it perfectly.
Finally I was sitting, out of breath, on the lid of the can, feeling like I was the one who’d been ravished. She had already disposed of the rubber she’d so stealthily slipped onto me, practiced doxy that she was.
Now she stood and toweled herself off, shamelessly at ease with her body, and then in the mirror carefully applied her lipstick, put on a touch of eye makeup, and undid the ponytail and shook all that hair like the lioness mane it was, looking at herself, pleased with what she saw.