NO Quarter (6 page)

For the record, I’ve got nothing against naked women, but even if I had never been married, I still wouldn’t make a habit of visiting strip clubs. It’s not prudishness on my part, not lingering Catholic school behavioral inhibitions. Neither do I go out of my way to object to the objectifying of women. One doesn’t need to shimmy naked and publicly to feel cheap and exploited and a whore for tips. Ask any waiter.

As gentleman’s clubs go, Big Daddy’s wasn’t at all seedy. New Orleans’ romantically sleazy Storyville past is just that—past. Advertised as Bourbon Street’s only ‘topless, bottomless club,’ Big D’s was more like Disneyland—for adults. A pair of high-heeled mechanical legs, complete with stockings, swung back and forth out the front window, drawing the attention of Bourbon Street crowds, much like balloons might draw a child’s attention at the fair. Inside, all was virtually antiseptic. Crisp lighting, air-conditioning cold enough to nearly freeze my summer-sweaty T-shirt to me, a bouncer’s alert/disinterested eyes robotically watching, all combined to make the climate feel—what? Fake? Contrived? You mean those beautiful buxom babes aren’t dancing up there strictly for my enjoyment? They
...
they just work here? You mean this isn’t real?

Pornography is as pornography does.

The patrons crowded the seats nearest the one occupied stage—frat-boy cretins that could be the same ones who’d hassled Nicki at the restaurant earlier, and maybe were, along with middle-aged and much, much older men. Their voices slavered and cheered above the soulless, bass-heavy music pounding the air. I didn’t know the girl twirling around the pole on the stage, and didn’t study her long enough to figure out if her bare, gravity-defying breasts were real.

Hardly a turn-on.
I didn’t join in the ogling, didn’t want to be mistaken for one of the simps down front. Stayed instead back by the bar, ordered a shockingly expensive rummincoke from the tall female bartender, and tipped good anyway. That’s ingrained. I’ve had quite a few years now in this industry, having no other marketable talents, and very quickly tipping becomes sacred. (If you’ve got no education and no prospects, go wait tables.) It works both ways, as do most things in the Quarter. When I wait on bartenders and fellow wait-folk at the restaurant, I can expect generous gratuities.

I watched the spike-haired waitress work the customers by the stage, noting and recognizing her naturally sensual movements. She came up beside me to set her tray on the bartop and place her order with the bartender.

“Bone,” she acknowledged me. I saw raw eyes in her heavily made-up face.

“Chanel.” I’d served her at the restaurant often enough that we knew each other’s names.

“If you’re looking for a job, we don’t hire male dancers.”

It was standard smartass banter. But her voice sounded scraped and quivery. She was just barely holding herself together; so was I. And we both were wearing our tough fronts.

I wasn’t about to make it a contest. “I came to ask about Sunshine.”

I said it quietly, under the music, so the bartender didn’t hear as she set glasses and beers onto Chanel’s tray. Chanel heard, and her painted features went still.

Finally she said, “What ... do you want to know, Bone? We only heard a little while ago. I only know she’s dead.
Stabbed
.” A shrill note of anger, one I recognized, punctuated her last word. Her bare eyes drilled me.

“That’s all I know too. Chanel
...
please
. Sunshine was
...
she was special to me. We go back. I just want to know
...
” And here my breath was suddenly gone. I locked gazes with her; and perhaps there was something to be read in my eyes.

“Who did it,” she finished for me.

“Yeah, who did it.” My lungs restarted. My heart beat slow and hard.

“I don’t know that.” Chanel took up her tray.

I nodded. “But I want to find out. I want to know who killed Sunshine.” I realized the club’s management might be watching, and I didn’t want Chanel getting any flak for loitering to talk to me.

She stood there a moment. “Look, I’m out of here in fifteen. Okay?” And without waiting for me to say anything, headed back toward the stage where the grandly-endowed girl was mock-humping the face of a man who looked old enough to have stormed the beaches at Normandy.

I drank off my drink, too fast, feeling it in the bones around my eyes. I hadn’t eaten dinner tonight—didn’t like eating on-shift—and tried to remember a meal before that. Nothing came.

The dancer finished her set, and a new one appeared on the second stage, causing the college kids and old men to migrate over. While I don’t knock the stripping profession, per se, I don’t know if it attracts self-damaging individuals
or creates them. I’ve known two dancers in my life who have overdosed, and one who is serving a ten-year manslaughter stretch for putting a 9-millimeter to her sleeping boyfriend’s forehead and pulling the trigger. That the boyfriend used to pound her like a gong hadn’t seemed to impress the cops much, but the jury took it carefully into account.

When I stepped outside, the steamy air was almost welcome after the club’s deep freeze. I picked a patch of wall, leaned, and waited. Sunshine had been waiting tables at Big Daddy’s, not peeling, I reminded myself needlessly. But ... hadn’t she already been on a self-destructive trajectory? And, if I was going to be brutally honest, she had been since we’d moved here. For that matter, even before we got together. Bad relationship choices—so bad and so consistent, in fact, they had to be deliberate on some level. Her high-strung personality had been volatile, but not panicky. Actually she was a good one to have around in a crisis. Still, she had that penchant for strong emotions, and her flirtation with drugs had been more serious than I’d let myself think. And what of our relationship? Was I the only decent man she’d ever been with, or was I just fooling myself? That scene at Molly’s between us, when she’d showed up wrecked and we’d ended up screaming at each other
...
Christ
. It still made me wince.

I want to know who killed Sunshine.

It had startled me when I caught myself saying that. It was suggestive, telling. I hadn’t yet stopped to think about what I was doing—stepping out of the Calf, coming here to Sunshine’s old workplace to make inquiries, to find out. She’d been killed. Stabbed. Possibly as part of some sick, twisted ritual thing. I would handle the grief of that on my own. But I needed my question answered. Who did it?

Why, though, did I want to know? It seemed if I was asking, then I meant to do something about it. Was that what was happening? I didn’t know.

Was I thinking of revenge?

I absentmindedly lit up a smoke, and immediately a rancid gutter punk sprang up out of the dark and grime, looking to mooch. Beer-stained T-shirt, facial blemishes, gross ingratiating grin. It was tough to give a shit, and I didn’t try, waving him off.

Bourbon, which closes nightly to auto traffic, was supporting just a few handfuls of revelers, those walking around with “specialty” drinks (puked up, they make distinctively colored puddles on the sidewalks) and oversized beers in plastic go-cups. Somebody shouted out,
“Newwwor-LEEENZ!”
at football rally volume, just in case anybody sleeping in a one block radius had forgotten where they were, and mispronounced our city’s name to boot.

I love the Quarter. I truly do. But it can be a test.

When Chanel came down the front steps, I’d been waiting more like twenty minutes. The tight outfit had been replaced by dowdy civilian clothes, her spiked bottle-red hair hidden under a cap. Frankly, I thought she looked prettier this way, less mannequin-like. She fished a pack of cigarettes out of her shapeless, baggy jeans, and I lit her smoke for her.

“Okay, Bone.” Her makeup too was gone. She looked tired. “Ask me.”

“You want to go someplace?”

“No. I don’t. I want to go home. Ask me here.”

It felt, oddly, for that second there like I was at some line of demarcation, that to cross it I need only ask my first question about Sunshine—that I was at the start of something I could stop now, simply by not going forward.

I stepped off into the void. “Do you know if Sunshine was dating anybody lately?”

“Dating?” Chanel blew smoke through grimly smirking lips. “What, like going to the malt shop, wearing some guy’s school pin?”

I wasn’t doing banter tonight. “Like seeing somebody steady.”

“Couldn’t say. I had the feeling she was screwing someone on a regular basis, but who
...
” She shrugged. “We weren’t tight, y’know, her and me. Girls go through here, and it’s usually a while ‘fore I get to know
...
” She didn’t need to add that now it was too late to make friends with Sunshine.

“How about customers?” I asked. “Anybody showing up to see her?”

“Sure. But that goes for everybody. Not just the dancers. I get guys asking for me all the time.” She said this with some professional pride.

I was hoping for something easy, I realized—one of Sunshine’s standard disastrous boyfriends, maybe a customer at the club stalking her. Something—some
one
—obvious.

Chanel was already looking impatient. Who could blame her? A dead co-worker, and now my questions. Better ask while the asking was good.

“Was Sunshine showing up for her shifts on time?”

She shrugged, a bit petulantly this time. “I guess. Most of the time. She wasn’t, like, a total flake.”

“How about money? Was she short on cash lately?”

“I didn’t make a habit of going through her purse.”

I grimaced. “Right. But was she strapped, did she borrow from you, from the other girls? Did she gripe about money a lot?”

“Not to me. Borrowing? I never heard of her doing it. Look, Bone
...
”

“I know.” I took a last puff off my cigarette and ground it out under my heel. I did have something I had to ask, had teased around it with my last few questions. It was delicate, and I was using up the last of Chanel’s good will. I didn’t want to, but—I had to ask.

I drew a breath.

“Chanel, was Sunshine turning tricks?”

Those raw, tired eyes lit with a spark. She stiffened. If this was a hard-boiled gumshoe movie, I would be able to divine her body language instantly. Fact was, I didn’t know if I’d bumped against the truth or just provided a point of focus for her free-floating anger over Sunshine’s murder.

With studied icy dignity she pulled herself tall. “You ought to speak a little better of the dead, Bone.” With a sharp flick she shot her cigarette butt inches past my left ear, and that was it. She turned and strode off, down Bourbon toward Canal, a straight crisp line.

Leaving me staring after her, alone on the sidewalk with the street’s fumes and very little accomplished. Alone
...
until I realized someone was standing behind me, very near.

* * *

Excerpt from Bone’s Movie Diary:

A good way for an actor to grab the Oscar is of course to play a character with an affliction. Dustin Hoffman’s 2
nd
Oscar for
Rain Man
(autistic); Daniel Day-Lewis for
My Left Foot
(cerebral palsy); Tom Hanks’ double whammy of
Philadelphia
(AIDS sufferer) &
Forrest Gump
(mentally challenged); Pacino’s
Scent of a Woman
(blind); etc. Not always the actor’s best work, is it? Actresses fare well for awards & nods playing prostitutes & women of questionable morals. Elisabeth Shue got a nomination for
Leaving Las Vegas
, as did Annette Bening for
The Grifters
, Jodie Foster for
Taxi Driver
; & the Oscar went home with Jane Fonda for
Klute
, Mira Sorvino for
Mighty Aphrodite
, Kim Basinger for
L.A. Confidential
, Anne Baxter for 1946’s
The Razor’s Edge
, Liz Taylor for
Butterfield 8
, & so forth. There are good performances among those, with some glaring exceptions. Yet even the cautionary tales, the gritty & seamy ones ... they seem to subversively & perversely glamorize the lifestyle. We can safely observe and tsk-tsk the proceedings & most of these films encourage us—overtly or otherwise—to do so, but secretly we’re titillated by these “fallen women.” We are meant to thrill as they plunge headlong toward annihilation.