Immoral (34 page)

“Uh-huh,” Cordy said.

“We’ll probably find Jerky Bob decomposing in the trailer in a few months,” Serena said. “Did he call it in?”

Cordy shook his head. “He found the body and freaked. Started running naked down the road. A motorist spotted him from the highway and reported it. When the unis got to him, he was babbling about a corpse that was alive.”

“Does he know the girl?”

Cordy shook his head. “Nan, he says he’s never seen her before. Just saw the body when he came outside to take a piss. Surprise.”

“How about timing? He have any idea when our little package may have been dropped off? Did he hear or see anything?”

“Man, he didn’t hear nothing.
Nada
. Guy’s been blacked out at least two days, maybe three. So it could have been anytime.”

Serena sighed. “Great.”

“So we don’t got a lot to go on here, is what I’m thinking.”

“I assume you scoped out the trailer for blood,” she said.

“Uh-huh. His feet were bleeding from his run, but not enough to account for bashing in someone’s head. And believe me, the place has not been cleaned up. Unless she was asphyxiated by the smell, the deceased was not inside. You should check out the jerky, though. He gave me a piece. Cajun turkey, I think it was. Good stuff, if you can stand the smell.”

“If you have to pull off the road and take a dump in the desert on the way back to the city, you’ll wish you hadn’t tried it”

“I’m Mexican. Stomach of iron. Chiles, mama.” Cordy thumped his chest.

Serena shook her head. “Salmonella, sweetie. It’s not just for gringos.”

“You forget. I wanted to see if he was hiding anything in his refrigerator, and I had no warrant. So now, one piece of jerky later, I know there is nothing in those shoe boxes but dried meat”

“Now you impress me, sweetie. You really do.”

Serena took another look at the body, wishing she could cover it up and give the girl a little dignity. Las Vegas had its share of bizarre crimes, and she was long past surprise at anything they found in the city. She had been involved in the strip search of a female suspect, only to discover, after baring her impressive breasts, that the girl was actually a she-male with oversized equipment She had investigated the murder of a midget who had been put on a homemade rack by two thrill-seeking teenagers and stretched to death. She had arrested a man for walking downtown, naked, with two goats in tow. Weird, sick, stupid, she had been there, done that. Once in a great long while, though, she came across a case where her instincts told her she had stumbled into something deep, interesting, and dark. Which was exactly what her sixth sense was telling her now.

There was more, too. She felt a special pain when she worked on a case involving the murder of a young woman. It was too easy to remember her own teenage years in Phoenix and to realize that, if one turn or another had gone a different way, she could have been the body lying naked in the desert.

“What’s your name, honey?” Serena murmured under her breath, staring at the girl’s body.

“Looks like the cavalry is here,” Cordy said. He pointed at the road, where a stream of police and medical vehicles had begun to arrive. “Tell me we’re not going to stay out here and roast for five hours while they poke around the rocks.”

Serena shook her head. “We’ll get the scene sealed and transfer control to Neuss. An afternoon in the sun will do him good. We’ll talk to the ME and see if he notices anything about the body that I missed. Then you and I are going to see if we can identify this girl.”

“You want to tell me how you plan on identifying a body that no one’s going to recognize?”

“Well, first you’re going to have the department fax us local reports of missing persons, white, female, thirteen to thirty, in the last two weeks.”

“Uh-huh. You want that bound or on CD-ROM?”

“I said two weeks, Cordy, not two years. I’ll be surprised if we find her in there, anyway.”

“Why?”

“I suspect she ran in circles where going missing isn’t a big deal,” Serena said.

“Uh-huh. So then what do we do?”

“Then we visit some strip clubs.”

Cordy howled. “My kind of day, mama. You think the chick was a stripper? I hope she looked better than that. See that thing stripping off, and you’d be back home with the wife forever, you know?”

“Shut up, Cordy.”

“Okay, so what am I missing? You find a stripper’s union card or something? Why are you so sure she did the occasional lap dance?”

Serena shrugged. “She’s got breast implants. That’s why they didn’t cave. Her pubic area is neatly shaved so that only a vertical strip of hair remains. There’s remnants of sparkle on her breasts and thighs. She has a small tattoo of a heart on her left breast. Put it all together, and I say the girl’s been twirling around a brass pole.”

“Uh-huh. That only narrows it down to about four hundred joints. Not to mention all the on-call services.”

“I said stripper, not hooker. Hookers don’t bother with sparkle, sweetie. Or implants. Them’s for show. We’ll start with the big-name places and hope the girl was good enough at the bump and grind to break in there.”

Cordy smiled. “You’re the boss. If I have to spend my day talking to women who like to get naked in clubs, so be it.”

Serena’s eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness inside the club. The air was smoky and vaguely perfumed. Rock music blared from hidden speakers, with a thumping beat they could feel vibrating under the floor. The walls of the cramped foyer were covered with a dark wood paneling. A red upholstered door separated them from the interior of the club, and beside the door was a podium, with an erotic Chinese painting hung on the wall behind it. As they entered, a hulking man in a gray business suit slipped through the red door and confronted them with a smile. He had curly blonde hair and a bushy mustache.

He glanced at Cordy without interest, then his eyes lingered on Serena, drinking her in from head to toe.

“It’s free for you, sweetheart. For Dudley Moore here, it’s $24.95 cover.”

The gorilla grinned at Cordy, and Serena thought she could see actual smoke coming out of her partner’s ears.

“We’re not customers,” Serena said, flashing her shield. “We’re from Metro. We’re investigating a murder.”

The smile vanished, replaced by cool indifference. “Whose?” the man asked, shrugging his broad shoulders.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. It’s a Jane Doe, found in the desert, back of her head bashed in. We think she may have worked one of the clubs.”

Cordy slid a Polaroid from inside his jacket and presented it to Superman. “Recognize this girl?”

Serena watched the man’s reaction, noticing his skin grow a shade paler and an involuntary grimace tighten his face.

“When was she in the business, 1940?”

“If you lie out in the desert for a few days, be sure to use sunblock,” Serena said. “Do you recognize her?”

“No.”

“Any of your girls gone missing in the last few days?”

The man laughed. It came out as a booming guffaw. “Are you kidding? Girls come and go every week, every day. This ain’t exactly career work, you know?”

“We’re just talking about the last few days,” Serena said. She hated guys like this. Users. They gobbled up young flesh and then spit it back in the street when its value was gone.

“The answer is no.”

“How about tattoos? You got a girl with a heart tattoo on her left breast?”

“Tattoos? We got dragons, kittens, boyfriends, barbed wire, sunflowers, and Dwight Yoakam. No hearts.”

“You’re sure?” Serena asked.

The man grinned. “I’ve seen them all.”

“I’m sure you won’t mind if we talk to the girls ourselves,” Cordy said.

“You got a warrant?”

“We don’t need a warrant to talk,” Serena said. “On the other hand, if you want us to get a warrant, and we happen to find any drugs around here, well, that’s going to take a bite out of business, isn’t it?”

“Make it quick,” the man replied, scowling. “And hey, some of the girls may look young, but they’re all over eighteen, all right? I checked their IDs.”

“Sure,” Serena said. Her fake ID at sixteen had gotten her into clubs easily enough. Back in the bad days.

They pushed through the red door and entered the club. It looked and sounded identical to the seven others they had already visited today. The music, loud enough in the foyer, was deafening inside. A large, elevated runway, interrupted by shiny brass poles that reached to the ceiling, jutted out into the center of the club. Narrow schoolroom tables surrounded the runway, with squat stools squeezed side by side along the tables. Most of the action was on the runway, but there were also three low stages, with circular benches fitted around them, scattered across the club floor. Velvet-lined booths hugged the walls. The rest of the place was crammed with dinner tables and cocktail tables.

The club reeked of beer and pheromones. A hazy cloud clung near the ceiling, where the smoke from the cigarettes gathered.

Serena counted about thirty men, ranging from horny college kids in T-shirts to old men in suits, with a mixture of freaks and drunks thrown in. Some of them got into it, hooting and hollering, trying to get as close to groping the girls as they could without getting bounced. Others sat in awe, then-jaws hanging open, silly grins on their faces. Others sat and sipped their drinks and watched through slitted eyes. Those were the scary ones, who didn’t show any emotion at all.

Serena felt the same claustrophobic sensation she had felt in all the other clubs. Involuntarily, she looked down, expecting to see her own body exposed, wondering what it would feel like to trade places with the girls up there. She was the only woman in the club, except for a couple of cocktail waitresses, who was wearing more than panties. Not surprisingly, she didn’t attract much attention, except from a few men who didn’t expect to see any women here at all who weren’t naked. Those that looked at her gave her the same appraising glance they gave the girls onstage. Serena felt sick.

She studied the faces of the girls parading down the runway, looking past the plastic smiles. You could see their age in their faces. The more makeup they wore, the more they were trying to cover up. In the smoky, dark environs of the club, it usually worked, because most of the men didn’t bother looking at faces. Serena could tell, though. She could look in their eyes and see their secrets. This was a higher-paying joint, where the girls were younger, not yet ravaged by alcohol or drug abuse. A girl here could still fool herself that she would wind up rich, like another Jenna Jameson. But Serena had seen too many wasted faces over the years, perched atop taut bodies. Eventually their bodies sagged, too, and the downward spiral began.

She remembered arriving in town at sixteen, just her and a girlfriend, both of them escaping from their lives in Phoenix. Serena got a job at one of the casinos. Her girlfriend wound up here, at one of the clubs, doing lap dances. She tried to talk Serena into doing it, too. The money was better. It was tempting, but Serena had already seen enough of men that she couldn’t imagine parading herself in front of them. Lucky for her. Her friend moved up to a nicer apartment, did some low-budget porn films, and eventually wound up with AIDS. She died a hideous death at age twenty-two.

The girl in the desert was dead. Her friend was dead. Sometimes Serena felt guilty that she had survived.

A cheer arose from one of the satellite stages. Serena and Cordy edged closer, watching a hole appear in the center of the small stage. Slowly, rising out of the well, they saw two black arms, sensually twisting to the music. The girl emerged inch by inch as the elevator platform rose from beneath the floor. Her long arms went on forever, and then Serena saw dark hair and a sculpted ebony face. This girl was perfect, barely eighteen and stunning. A newcomer—Serena could see it in her eyes. The girl was still aroused by the hypnotic spell she could cast and the throaty bellows of the men. She was enjoying herself, and the men knew it. There was nothing more exciting than a girl who was truly trying to turn them on and not playing a weary game. The men knew the difference, and this girl was it.

Someone shouted, “Lavender!”

The girl turned to the man who had called her name and gave him a thick-lipped smile and a wink. All the while, she kept dancing, as more of her body rose into view. She wore a spaghetti-strap teddy that was ruby red against her coal skin. Her breasts were ready to burst out of the lace. The flaps of the fabric left her taut stomach bare, and below, she wore a thong parity. Her legs, trim and smooth, stretched down to blood-red pumps with three-inch heels.

“Put your tongue back in your mouth,” Serena told Cordy.

“It’s hard, mama, it’s hard,” he whispered.

“Is that a weather report from down south?” Serena asked, grinning.

Cordy didn’t reply. He was transfixed, watching Lavender pop the buttons one by one, letting her cleavage spill out.

“What gives, Cordy? I thought you liked your girls short. and blonde.”

“A good salsa is made up of many chiles,” Cordy said.

“What is that, a Mexican proverb?”

“Nah, it’s my new philosophy of life.”

Serena watched as Lavender finally revealed her giant nipples, as hard as bullets. The girl cupped her full breasts in her hands as the crowd screamed.

“Come on, Don Juan, let’s go backstage.”

Serena dragged Cordy, craning his neck to keep an eye on Lavender, to the back of the club, where another upholstered door was labeled
PERFORMERS ONLY
. It was manned by a beefy black guard who wore a don’t-fuck-with-me scowl. Serena explained that they needed to talk to the girls, and he scrutinized their shields before grudgingly standing aside.

Cordy smiled sweetly as he passed the guard. “Will the girls be self-conscious with a man down there?”

Serena laughed. The guard didn’t.

They went down a flight of stairs, then entered the dressing room, which was a beehive of activity, filled with at least ten girls in different stages of nudity. Some were adjusting their breasts inside skimpy costumes, ready to go onstage. Others patiently sat before lighted mirrors and applied their makeup. Three girls who had completed their shifts were changing into their street clothes. They paid little attention to Cordy and Serena, although a couple of the girls gave Cordy an inviting smile. He smiled back.