Murder On The Menu: The 1st Nikki Hunter Mystery (Nikki Hunter Mysteries) (5 page)

“Of course,” she said.

“I noticed Laura didn’t have a computer in her room.”

Kate smiled wistfully. “No. She refused Derrick’s offers to buy her one. I guess she was old-fashioned in some ways.”

Laura might have been old-fashioned in some ways, but I didn’t think that was why she’d refused Derrick’s offer of a computer.

I told Kate I’d be in touch. She walked me to the door and thanked me for coming. She sounded sincerely grateful, and I searched her face before stepping outside. I had expected to see grief in her eyes, but what I saw there looked more like guilt. She felt responsible for her daughter’s death, whether directly or indirectly. I’d have to dig into that eventually, if I took the case.

I started up my little 2002, and drove to the bad part of town.

Chapter 5

I
had driven past the
Fanny Pack
often enough to know where it was, but I was surprised to find the parking lot crowded at 12:30 on a weekday. Maybe they served a lunch buffet. I locked the 2002 and approached the front door, stepping around bits of broken glass and gummy patches on the pavement.

The club was housed in a two-story, box-style building that was painted slate blue. There was a brass plaque on the front door that read
Twenty-one Years and Older Only - No Minors Allowed - Open for Business 11:00 AM - 2:00 AM

When I opened the door I was struck by the smell of cigar and cigarette smoke mixed with the odors of beer and human sweat. Apparently the patrons of this establishment chose to ignore the
No Smoking
signs and management was disinclined to enforce the ordinance. The music was almost painfully loud and I could feel the bass vibrate in my bones.

I surveyed the room and felt the urge to flee. This took me back to high school when the girls’ and boys’ gym classes happened to pass each other on the way to or from the locker rooms. I spend a fair amount of time in bars as part of my work, but I had never been in a strip club before. It felt different from a regular bar. Probably the pheromones.

The doorman seated on a stool to the left of the entry reminded me of Jim Belushi. He was dressed in khaki slacks, a Hawaiian shirt, and a baseball cap worn backwards. He smiled when I glanced his way. It was a nice smile.

A number of people had turned when I entered and were now staring at me, probably because I was holding the door open and letting the daylight in. Not surprisingly, there were few women present, apart from the one on stage. The dancer was a redhead with milky-white skin. She was slender and she wore nothing but a pink G-string and pink high-heels. She looked about sixteen. I felt my stomach clench, and I was momentarily overwhelmed with concern about the young woman’s welfare. There are some things I’m not open-minded about.

The red-haired teenager was dancing on an elevated platform equipped with a pair of fire-station-type poles that extended floor to ceiling. As she danced, she watched herself in the mirrored walls. She seemed self-conscious, maybe even embarrassed, but who wouldn’t be under the circumstances?

The female spectators looked like working girls and they sized me up with what I interpreted as professional curiosity. The men were sizing me up too, probably wondering how much I charged. I controlled my discomfort by telling myself that if I was inclined to charge for sex, no one in this crowd could possibly afford me.

I let the door close and moved toward the bar, taking everything in. The soles of my shoes made sucking sounds, sticking to the floor as I walked. I tried not to think about what the sticky substance might be. The walls were lined with pinball machines and video games, and a pool table was positioned in a corner to the left of the door. There was a flat panel television above the bar, tuned to a sports channel, but all eyes were either on the dancer, or on me.

The men who populated this establishment could have been a cross section of Americana. Some wore white shirts and dress slacks and looked like businessmen or possibly car salesmen. There were guys in jeans and tee shirts, and there were a couple of leather-clad bikers. The age range went from early twenties to mid sixties.

I noticed two cocktail waitresses dressed in pastel string bikinis standing in the back of the club; a pretty blonde and a zaftig brunette. I wondered if they were cold. The air conditioning was on high, and it was chilly. They were both smoking cigarettes and each held a large round serving tray.

The bartender on duty looked young. He was close to six feet tall, a little chunky, and wore a goatee. He placed a cocktail napkin on the bar in front of me, briefly made eye contact, and gave me a shadow of a smile. I asked for coffee, raising my voice to compete with the music. I paid for my coffee and then placed a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and took Laura’s picture from my purse. As soon as he saw the photo his expression hardened.

“Were you close?” I asked.

“You a cop?”

“No.” I leaned across the bar so I wouldn’t have to shout. “I’m a PI. Laura’s mother hired me. My name is Nikki.” I held out my hand.

He hesitated for an instant, and then shook my hand. His was massive, soft, cool, and a little damp. “Frank Waters,” he said, his eyes still suspicious.

“How well did you know her, Frank?”

“Pretty well. We used to see each other, you know, outside the club.” His voice cracked and his eyes filled with tears. “Excuse me.” He turned away, picked up a handful of cocktail napkins from the back-bar, and wiped his face.

While his back was turned I reached into my purse and switched on my tape recorder. California law requires that all parties consent to the recording of a conversation, but I was the only one who would ever listen to it. I set my purse on the bar between us. It would be hard to pick anything up because of the volume of the music, but it was worth a shot.

Frank took a few deep breaths and came back to me. “Sorry,” he said. “What do you need to know?”

I like men who cry, so Frank had scored points in my book and I didn’t want to upset him any more than I had to.

“I need to know what kind of person Laura was,” I said. “How she felt about life. What she did for fun. Who her friends were.”

He looked down at the picture, considering, then brushed at his nose with a napkin.

“Laura was a good person,” he said, “but she wasn’t happy and I don’t think she had many friends. We dated for a while. She was pretty and smart, and a great dancer.” He looked away and stopped talking.

“But?” I prodded.

“It’s hard to talk about.” He was tearing up again.

“Is there any place we can speak privately?” I asked.

Frank looked around the club and spotted the cocktail waitresses. He walked over to them, leaned close to the brunette, and said something to her that caused her to glance in my direction. She nodded and went behind the bar.

Frank motioned for me to follow him. He led me down a hallway to a small office that smelled of stale cigar smoke and housed a wall of blank video monitors.

“We can talk in here,” he said. “But I can’t be away from the bar too long.”

“Okay,” I said. “I know this is painful for you, but the more time that goes by the more likely it is Laura’s killer will get away with it. Anything
you can tell me will help, but whatever you don’t want to tell me will probably help the most.”

With a little prodding and encouragement some subjects will spill everything they know during a spur of the moment interview. If you come back to the same person a week later they’ll clam up. Others will tell you nothing during the first encounter, and after their conscience works on them for a while they’ll answer all your questions. I had a feeling Frank fell into the first category.

He took in what I had said, blushed, and averted his eyes. I waited. Eventually he spoke.

“She didn’t like sex. That was a problem for me. I tried to talk to her about it. Don’t tell her mom this stuff, okay?”

“Okay. What did she say?”

“She said it just didn’t do anything for her. She liked to be held though, you know, to cuddle. Anyway, we dated for about three months and then decided to just be friends. And we were, good friends. We’d go out to breakfast sometimes after closing, or go to a movie. Things like that.”

“What made you think she was unhappy?”

“Little things, mostly. She didn’t smile much, except when she was dancing. She really got off on dancing.”

“You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, Frank, but I’ll find out anyway. Was Laura into drugs?”

He looked around the office and fidgeted a little before saying, “She liked crank.”

“Did she do a lot?”

“No. Just once in a while when she was feeling down.”

“Did she ever talk about her family? How things were at home?”

“Only once, when we first got together. She got pretty drunk one night and started crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said she had no family. I asked her what she meant, ’cause I knew she lived with her folks, but she just wanted me to hold her. So I held her, and she fell asleep. I didn’t bring it up again.”

“Can you think of anyone who would want to hurt Laura? Anyone who had a grudge against her or who was angry with her?”

“Oh jeez, I gotta work here you know?” He popped his head out into the hall and looked both ways. “You didn’t hear this from me,” he whispered. I nodded. “There’s this other dancer. Candy. I don’t know her real name. Candy was the big draw here before all the regulars started saving their tips for Laura. That cut seriously into Candy’s take-home. One of the other girls told me Candy threatened to scratch Laura’s eyes out.”

“Was Laura afraid of her?”

“I don’t think so. But Laura liked to take risks.”

My ears perked up. “Excuse me?”

Frank leaned out the office door again, apparently checking on the bar, and then returned his attention to me. “When we first started going out, sometimes she would drive,” he said. “She was a crazy person behind the wheel, almost like she had a death wish or something. After a while I started driving everywhere we went together. I just couldn’t handle it.”

“Was she dating anyone recently?”

He looked surprised at the question. “I don’t know.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’ve been a big help, Frank. Thank you.”

I gave him my card with the usual request that he call if anything else occurred to him and asked where I could find Candy. He said she didn’t come in until 8:00 p.m. I asked if the owner was in and Frank said I should check back around 6:00 or 7:00. He said the owner’s name was Alfred Miner. He was about five-foot-three and heavy set. The office we’d been using was his.

When I stepped outside into the daylight, I put on my sunglasses and compulsively filled my lungs with smoggy air. What a relief. I switched off my tape recorder and drove to the marina.

Chapter 6

B
ack in my office I unloaded my purse, placing the tape recorder, the camera, the skydiving video, and Laura’s bank statements on my desk. I listened to the tape of my conversation with Frank while I booted up the computer and made a pot of Kona coffee. I lit a cigarette, and typed up some of Frank’s comments about Laura; she was unhappy, she felt she didn’t have a family, she wasn’t into sex, but she was into risk.

I wanted to collect my thoughts before showering and going back to the
Fanny Pack
.
Ugh.
I started with a log of my time and expenses, then entered my hypotheses about Laura. Her parents had apparently offered her every advantage, but she had chosen to take a huge symbolic dump in the faces of her benefactors by working as a stripper. Why? Did she feel her parents had somehow neglected her? And if she hated her parents, why had she continued living at home? Maybe she loved her parents but resented the lack of attention she received from them, so she stayed at home to be near them, but chose a career she knew would embarrass them if they found out about it. Even negative attention is better than no attention at all.

I had no idea what kind of money exotic dancers made, but I felt certain Laura’s parents would have been happy to supplement her income so she could afford a place of her own. It had to be a conscious decision on her part, to live at home with Mom and Dad while stripping five nights a week.

Laura was turned off to sex according to Frank, but a lot of women don’t reach their sexual peak until they’re over thirty. Besides, Frank seemed like a nice, sensitive guy, and that could be a real turn-off for a woman who was attracted to danger. Maybe she’d found a more exciting partner. I thought about the skydiving video, and wondered who the man was. I saved my notes, turned off the computer, and walked down to my boat.

I love living at the marina. It’s a community in the truest sense of the word. The day I moved aboard I received visits from several of my new neighbors who introduced themselves and pointed out their boats so I’d know where to find them if I needed anything. A woman who lived on a trawler across the dock from me said, “If you need to use a phone before yours is hooked up, feel free to come aboard anytime. I never lock the door.” In all my years of renting apartments, houses, and duplexes in the Bay Area, I had never once had such an invitation.

Most of my neighbors who own sailboats live for the day they can take a break from work and go cruising. I just like knowing that if I decide this isn’t the place for me anymore, I can untie my home and move on. It gives me a sense of freedom.

Although it seemed pointless to shower before going back to the
Fanny Pack
, I needed a psychological cleansing. The shower on board my boat doesn’t have much water pressure, but it’s convenient. When I was clean and dry, I dressed in jeans and a tee shirt and threw on a windbreaker to conceal the holster at the small of my back. I grabbed a fresh pack of cigarettes and made sure there was enough cash in my wallet to pay for information.

On the way to the parking lot I stopped in at my office and drew the Ruger out of its resting place under my desk. It slid smoothly into the Galco holster.

I arrived at the
Fanny Pack
at 7:37 p.m. There were no empty spaces in the lot, so I parked around the corner and walked back, holding my canister of pepper spray at the ready.

The whole strip club scene was different at night. There were more tables set up and they were closer together. Two women were dancing between tables, another was on the stage, and one was gyrating on a customer’s lap. The dancer on stage looked barely old enough to drive. I reminded myself that the young women who worked in this establishment did so by choice. Unemployment was high, but they could probably have found office or retail jobs.

I planned to speak with Alfred Miner first, and then catch Candy before she went on at 8:00. Frank wasn’t on duty, so I approached the bartender – female, Asian, five-five, long blonde hair, wearing a hot pink spandex bodysuit – and asked if Alfred was in. She silently pointed to the hallway with a two-inch French tipped talon.

I found Alfred Minor in his office. The door was open and the video monitors displayed several views of the club and one of a poorly lit hallway somewhere else in the building. Cigar smoke permeated the air. Normally I like the smell of cigars, but Alfred’s was cheep and the tobacco odor was rank. I stood in the doorway unnoticed for a moment before knocking.

Alfred looked up at me with dark beady eyes, grinned, and said, “You look good, honey, but aren’t you a little old for this kind of work?”

Fuck you
, I thought, and smiled back at him.

“My name is Nicoli Hunter,” I said. “I’m a private investigator looking into the death of one of your employees. Laura Howard?”

Alfred stopped smiling. “You’re not with the police?” I shook my head. “What do you want to know?” he asked, rolling the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.

“Whatever you can tell me about her. Who she was friendly with. Which customers she spent time with. Anyone you can think of who might have wanted her dead?”

He considered me for a moment, and then said, “I don’t know who her friends were. The broads are always yakkin’ in the dressin’ room, but I rarely go in there. They take it off for the stiffs out front, but they get pissed if you walk in when they’re naked.

“All the customers liked Laura, but she preferred the older gents. Maybe ’cause they got more money. I don’t know anyone who wanted her dead. Certainly not me. She was a good draw. Now if that’s all, I got a business to run.”

“I need to talk to the dancers,” I said. “Any objection?”

“Not if it don’t interfere with their work. Come on. I’ll take you to the dressing room.” He winked and I shuddered.

Alfred walked me down the hall to the first door on the left. He knocked twice and yanked it open, revealing four women in various stages of undress, all of whom started yelling at once.

“Shut up a minute,” he bellowed. “This here’s a private dick.” He grinned at his own joke. “She needs to talk to you about Laura, so be nice, but nobody misses a cue.” With that he withdrew, leaving me standing in the open doorway.

Four voices simultaneously shouted,
“Shut the door!”

I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Nicoli Hunter.”

Group interviews are awkward under the best of circumstances, and with eight breasts of various shapes and sizes pointed at you it’s difficult to concentrate. I’m also shy in the locker-room at the gym. I think this has something to do with my mother, the former nun, and modesty training. After I’d introduced myself, I asked each woman her name. I took out my notebook and jotted down a brief description of each dancer.

Bambi – Caucasian, early 20s, 5’ 3”, black hair, brown eyes, double D implants.

Clarise – Caucasian, late teens, 5’ 6”, red hair, green contact lenses.

Amanda – Mulatto, early 20s, 5’10”, brown hair, blue eyes.

Buffy – Caucasian, mid 20s, 5’ 7”, blonde with dark roots, blue eyes.

I was relieved that at least three of the four didn’t look as young up close as the women I’d seen dancing earlier.

They all claimed to have no knowledge of Laura’s personal life and, of course, none of them had anything against her. No one had been close to her and the consensus was that Laura kept pretty much to herself. I asked if they had any idea who might have wanted her out of the way. They looked at each other and stopped talking.

“I just need to know if any of the customers or any of the other dancers had issues with Laura. It’s a simple question.”

Sometimes being rude gets a better response than being polite does. I have a carefully cultivated bitch persona, which I enjoy taking out of the closet on occasions such as this.

Buffy opened her mouth to speak, but at that moment the dressing room door opened and in walked a woman who
had
to be Candy. She was at least five-nine, even without the spiked heels, an Asian and Caucasian hybrid in her mid-twenties, with black hair down to her waist and inch-long jungle-red fingernails. She was dressed in a leopard-skin spandex unitard. She took in the scene at a glance and asked the logical question.

“You a cop?”

The other women had hastily gone back to applying make-up, turning away from me.

“No,” I said. “I’m a PI investigating Laura’s death. And you are?”

“My name’s Candy,” she said. “Can I see some ID?”

Talk about a bitch persona. I produced my private investigator’s license and also handed her one of my cards. She set her black tote on a vacant dressing table and examined the license.

“Okay,” she said. “I guess you’re for real.”

This woman unearthed something dark in my lizard brain. I disliked her more than I could justify. It wasn’t because she was young, beautiful, and a sleazy bitch. It was because she was a young, beautiful, sleazy bitch, and she was talking
down
to me. I could only hope that if she looked like a middle-aged schoolteacher and talked down to me I’d have had an equally negative response. But this was no time for introspection. I unclenched my jaw and retrieved my license.

“I was asking if anyone knew who might have wanted Laura out of the way. Did you know her well?”

Candy sat down, crossed her legs, and lit a cigarette. I lit one too. Eventually she responded. “The only person in this joint who spent time with Laura is Frank. He’s a bartender. You should talk to him.”

“I’ll do that. So you don’t know of anyone with a grudge against Laura?”

“I didn’t say that.” She exhaled a smoke ring and glanced at the other women, who were pretending to ignore our conversation. “Everybody knows I threatened to scratch her eyes out if she didn’t stay away from my regulars.” She looked at me. “We all have our special customers, you know? Laura had no respect for that. She’d do a table dance for anyone, sometimes without being asked, even after I warned her to leave my guys alone. Tell you the truth, I’m glad she’s dead.”

I gave her points for honesty.

“What about the customers? Was there anyone who seemed hostile toward her?”

“Honey, the guys who come in here are horny, not hostile.” That got a few nervous giggles from the other women. “I gotta go on in fifteen minutes. Are we done?”

I gave each woman a business card, thanked them, and left the dressing room, quickly closing the door behind me.

I went back to the bar and ordered a draft beer. I wasn’t going to drink it, I just wanted to blend in. I asked the bartender the same questions and, after I gave her a twenty, got the same answers. She admitted there was a problem between Candy and Laura, but said she didn’t think Candy was likely to become violent.

“She might break a nail or something. You know how much porcelain nails cost?”

I turned away from the bar and watched the dancers perform for about a minute, then I started watching the customers. The person I was looking for might be intelligent, but would not be well adjusted. I squinted, trying to see facial expressions through the smoke in the dark room. I didn’t see anyone who looked like they could plan, much less execute, a crime that would baffle Bill Anderson and the RCPD forensics team. I set my beer on the bar and headed for the door.

Before stepping outside I took the pepper spray out of my purse. I walked cautiously to my car, watching every shadow. I made it to the car without incident and locked the doors once I was inside.

I decided to go back to the office and take a look at the pictures I’d taken of Anderson’s murder book. I drove to the marina, my mind a whir of visual impressions I’d absorbed at the
Fanny Pack.
I needed another shower.