I ignored her and went to the closet again. Tango’s shoes were neatly aligned in a rack with a matching handbag above each. Out of curiosity, I took the handbags down one by one and looked in them. Each one had some odd toiletry items along with a few coins. One had a letter from an old friend sent to her home address, four months ago, full of chatter about the other girl’s marriage and children in a more normal life than Tango had managed so far. I noted the street number of Tango’s house, and put the letter back.
But the blue bag held the kicker.
In the side pocket was a worn-edged picture that I held out for Bunny to see.
Softly, she said, “My God...it’s Jaimie Halaquez.”
“I thought Tango didn’t take to men. Especially younger men.”
Bunny frowned and handed the picture back. “That photo doesn’t mean she flipped over him or anything.”
“Hell, Bunny, it’s the only photo she has.”
“So?”
“You ever notice them together? Was Halaquez a client of hers?”
“Morgan, in this business, it’s a business to be together. You know already that he was a client here. Sure, he knew her, but he liked variety too much to single any girl out. Understand, this Halaquez was a real self-styled stud.”
“And an S & M freak. Don’t leave that out.”
“Yes, and not all of the girls were willing to go down that road. So that does narrow it for you. Within reason, if the money was right? Tango was willing.”
“In other words, two to tango.”
“Very funny.”
“Maybe,” I said, thinking out loud, “she had the same kind of yen and you didn’t know about it. Some women who were abused as young girls develop their own weird kinks.”
The madam didn’t argue that point—she knew all too well how many weird sexual byways there were for human beings to go down.
“Maybe,” Bunny said, “Tango had a thing for Halaquez, at least enough to hang onto his picture.”
“Do you know if she ever saw Halaquez outside of the club?”
“I don’t,” she admitted.
“But we do know she sometimes dated her clients outside the Mandor’s doors. Dick Best a case in point.”
Bunny nodded, but then contradicted it with a head shake. “If Tango did date Halaquez, she never mentioned it. Nobody asks too many questions around here. And Dick Best is the only one I know of that she dated away from the club.”
I stuck the photo in my pocket and put the handbag back on the shelf. “Think I can beat Gaita out of her room tonight? She can stay here in Tango’s room instead.”
“I’m not crazy about you staying around, Morgan. You’re trouble.”
“You’re telling me? That’s why I want that handy back exit out of her room. Look, I can’t risk a hotel and the cops might spot me on a park bench.”
She sighed, a world-weary one, but then she gave me a little smile that said all was forgiven. Or most, anyway. “All right, Morg, I’ll arrange it.”
“Thanks.”
“Although Gaita may prefer sharing her room with you, to giving it up.”
“She and I can negotiate that. Just make sure she knows I’m coming.”
“Somehow,” Bunny said archly, “I think she’ll know when you’re coming. Morgan...what about Tango? How much heat is this liable to raise here at the Mandor?”
“And here I thought you were concerned about Tango as a friend.”
She whapped me on the arm—sort of a friendly whap, but a whap. “Bastard,” she said.
I grinned at her, shrugged. “My bet is that the cops will call it an attack by a sadist that was interrupted by someone who heard her yell. What happened is obvious enough—somebody tortured her. Whether to get information out of her, or just for the jollies, that’s in the eye of the beholder. It’ll be easy enough to understand why her rescuer would call the cops but get the hell out.”
But I was wrong. The cops didn’t call it anything at all. The next morning there would be no mention of it in the papers, nor any of the guy who had fallen on his knife in the lobby of Bunny’s apartment house.
Right now, of course, I didn’t know that. We went to Bunny’s office to wait for the doctor. We sat on her handsome leather couch, plumped up with big plush pillows, over which loomed that paisley wall hanging.
Her half-lidded eyes regarded me. “You think I’m a cold-hearted bitch, don’t you?”
“Not really,” I said. “I think you’re a decent enough dame. I understand why you don’t want to risk what you’ve got going here. I know you care about your girls.”
Her expression softened. There was real warmth in those dark blue eyes.
When she kissed me, it came as a surprise. Not a bad one, either, but a surprise.
“You know,” she said, “I don’t mind that you’re married. Not at all. A lot of married men do business here.”
“Yeah, you do know I make a policy of not paying?”
“I didn’t say anything about charging you, Morg. Anyway, I kind of owe you one...I did try to have you killed, once or twice.”
I kissed her and it was starting to get somewhere when a knock came at her door, and a muffled voice said, “It’s Doc Wilson, Bunny! You in there?”
I took my tongue out of her mouth and my hand off her right breast and said, “Maybe I should get my busted rib taped up before we take this any farther....”
A thundering rain had driven everybody indoors and was beginning to turn the streets into sluiceways. The cabbie who had picked me up reluctantly let me out a block from where I asked to be dropped, clearly wondering what kind of nut would want to wade through a night like this one in a ramshackle neighborhood slated for rebuilding when the city got tired of looking at it.
Tango may have possessed an exotic queenly beauty, perfect for her to play Cleopatra in the movies, but she sure hadn’t been raised in pretentious surroundings. The house she grew up in was a relic of those days when the boom hit Miami, then collapsed to leave the memory of inflated money behind by way of unpainted siding and sagging verandas. The wind had blown two aged wicker rockers onto their backs on the porch, and kept the torn screen door slamming on its hinges, like the face of the house kept getting slapped. The noise didn’t seem bother anybody, though.
I stepped across the litter of soggy newspaper and leaves plastered to the porch floor, rapped on the door, and waited. I did it again without getting an answer, said the hell with it, and tried the knob. The door swung in limply, half-loose from the frame, and—when I closed it again—sighed with creaking release.
The smell was like a foul fog in the air. Rotted garbage was the base, somewhere a dirty toilet added its bouquet while whiskey and beer fumes gave it that certain tang. The only occupant downstairs was an unshaven, dead-to-the-world guy in his middle fifties who was sprawled out on the couch, like Lizzie Borden’s papa waiting to get the axe.
The sleeper reeked of booze, two empty bottles on the floor beside him, his half-naked belly poking through a split shirt and his pants held together by an old army belt with the zipper wide open. A half-dozen pension check stubs were on the table at one end of the couch—the name typed on them: George L. Prosser.
Tango’s old man.
No great surprise there. Scratch a whore, find a no-good father.
I tried shaking him awake, but it was no good. He didn’t even make sounds of protest or even of reflexive awareness. The bum would be out a pretty long time yet.
I went through the downstairs rooms, kicking my way through the mess, then upstairs to what used to be the bedroom level.
Two rooms were totally empty.