“How long were they married?”
“Five months.” He leaned back in his chair, and his brow furrowed. “My son was a screw-up, Mr. Asch.”
“The only thing he ever showed any interest in was fast cars and faster women. A lot if it was my fault, probably. I wasn’t the best father in the world. My wife — Chip’s mother — died when he was only nine and I was too busy trying to keep the business going to give him the supervision he needed. When he was a teenager, I had to get him out of one scrape after another. I always thought he would straighten up, even after he quit college and drifted from one job to another. I offered him a position with my company, but he said he had to ‘find himself,’ whatever that means. But when he came to me and said he intended to marry that tramp, that was the last straw.”
He paused, but he wasn’t through yet. He came forward and rested his forearm on the desk.
“I’ve worked my butt off my whole life, Mr. Asch. I came up from nothing and struggled to put something together. Too damned hard to sit back and watch it squandered on some fortune-hunting hooker. I told Chip if he wanted to marry the girl, fine, but he could support her on his own, because he wouldn’t get one more dime from me, before or after I died. We both said things we shouldn’t have. That was the last time I saw him.” Coldness in the blue eyes softened; guilt tugged at his features.
“You called the woman a hooker,” I said. “Did you mean that literally?” He gave a look of distaste. “They all hook in places like that.”
“Places like what?”
“The Paradise,” he said, folding his hands on the desk top. “It’s a topless bar on Beverly Boulevard. She was dancing there when Chip met her.”
I wrote it down. “What’s her first name?”
“Rhonda,” he said, as if he did not like the sound of the word.
“Where is she living now?”
“In Chip’s apartment.” He recited the address, then looked at me appraisingly as if I were a pork belly for which he was trying to guess tomorrow’s market value. “Harry says you’re good.”
Never one to deal well with flattery, I said nothing.
“That bitch took away my only son,” he said through pursed lips. “I don’t care how much money it takes, I want her nailed for it.”
It sounded as if he had lost his son years ago and wanted me to help him pin his guilt on the woman. For two hundred a day plus expenses, I was willing to at least try.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.
Chip and Rhonda Anixter had gotten married in September, in Westwood, and I obtained a copy of the marriage license from the Hall of Records downtown. Her maiden name was Rhonda Jo Banks, and she was twenty-eight, two years older than Chip. She had been born in Arizona, had completed high school, and listed her occupation as “dancer.” I figured that was as good a place to start as any.
The Paradise was on Beverly Boulevard, on the edge of the Silver Lake district, in the middle of a fatigued city block of laundromats and seedy-looking Mexican and Vietnamese restaurants. From the outside, it looked like a dirty plywood and plaster box, covered with cartoon paintings of leggy, scantily-clad girls. Inside, it was a dirty plywood and plaster box with real girls instead of cartoons. The cartoons looked better.
The place was built like a dog pit, with tables set around the perimeters of the sunken dance floor, where an anemic-looking redhead in nothing but a G-string was gyrating listlessly to a Michael Jackson tune. “Flashdance” it wasn’t.
Afternoon trade was sparse and I had no trouble securing a table. Passing myself off as an old acquaintance of Rhonda’s, it took one hour, five beers and twenty-eight dollars in “tips” spread between the bartender and a bovine brunette named Noreen to find out Rhonda had not been around much since she’d gotten married. Noreen was particularly talkative, especially after I picked up some latent hostility from her and assumed the role of one of Rhonda’s jilted exboyfriends.
“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” she said in a snide tone, the hostility becoming less latent as she talked. “You’re in some good company. She was going out with the owner of the club, Arnie Phalen, when she met that rich kid. The minute she found the kid had bucks, she dumped Arnie on his ass. Strutted around here bragging how she was going to set herself up for life with that score. I guess the joke was on her.”
“Why is that?”
The corners of her mouth turned up in a selfsatisfied leer. “She came back in a few months ago, crying to Arnie about how the kid was broke. The kid’s old man was the one with the money and he’d cut them off on account of her I guess. He had about as much use for her as a case of herpes.”
“She been back in since then?” I asked, sipping my beer.
“Naw,” she said, waving a hand disparagingly. “She’s too good for this place. All she did when she worked here was bitch her whole shift about what a dive this place was and how she was gonna make a score and get out She must have thought she was Grace Fucking Kelly or something, the way she acted.”
“Arnie around now?” I asked casually.
She shook her dark, ratted hair. “He doesn’t come in till around seven.” She looked down at the blond dancing in the pit and said, “I’m up.” I took out my wallet. “Thanks for the conversation, Noreen,” I said, and left her an extra five as a tip, just for public relations in case I needed to talk to her again.
Her changebox snapped up the bill and she smiled warmly. She had a live one now. “My shift is over at six,” she said. “Stop back then and maybe we can have a drink or something.”
“Maybe I’ll do that.”
When I left, she was moving her big body to Bob Seger’s “Fire Down Below,” and she threw me a few hip-pumps and breast-flops as I went out the door.
The Anixter’s ex-connubial love nest was in a new, two-story, vanilla-colored apartment building on a tree-lined street of apartments scissored out of the same nondescript mold. After making sure that the red Porsche Carrera John Anixter had bought his son for his twenty-first birthday was in its slot in the garage, I went back around front, and through the glass doors. At the edge of the swimming-pool courtyard, I stopped.
A lone woman was sunning herself in one of the deck chairs by the pool, and I knew instinctively it was Rhonda. She had on a tiny string bikini, and her tanned body glistened with oil. She had a hard, flat stomach and long, slim legs, and maybe a little too much in the chest department, but being the magnanimous person that I was, I figured I could live with that. Her face, although not as spectacular as her body, was a solid 8, framed by a mane of ash blond hair. She shifted languorously onto her stomach and I wiped a hand across my chin and checked for drool. I could see why Chip had ignored his father’s advice.
Figuring that if she intended to go out anywhere it wouldn’t be for a while, I went back to the car and drove to Carl’s Jr., where I grabbed a quick infusion of cholesterol with cheese, and was back in place across the street within half an hour. I found a jazz station and settled back with my styrofoam cup of coffee. Shadows lengthened, cars went by, cars pulled in and out of the driveway to the apartment building, but she was not in any of them. It was almost dark when a black Corvette cruised by slowly, and parked in a space a few cars up.
There was something about the man who got out of the Vette that attracted my attention. Maybe part of it was the shades he was still wearing, despite the thickening dusk; the sun is always shining when you’re cool. He was short and weaselly-looking, with a thin, olive-complected face and oily black hair slicked straight back from his high forehead. To go with the shades, he wore a gray sports jacket over a black shirt, jeans and white tennis shoes. He didn’t notice me watching him across the street; he was a man on a mission.