Strip Search (9 page)

I was desperate to call Darcy. He was the math savant, after all. He stood a far greater chance of deciphering that message than anyone on Granger’s detective squad. But I had promised O’Bannon I’d keep him out of it, and I certainly didn’t want to give anyone an easy excuse to grant Granger’s fondest wish and can my ass. I’d have to think of something else.

The second file was even stranger than the first. The body had been discovered early this morning by a homeless man in an alley between two department stores on the north side, more than twenty miles from the restaurant where the murder took place.

What the hell sense did that make? Why not just leave the corpse where it was instead of dragging it twenty miles across town? There didn’t appear to be anything special about this alley. It wasn’t even a good hiding place; the body was bound to be found. And it was just off a busy street that had nightclubs and bars and other places with heavy nighttime traffic. Somebody took a hell of a risk depositing the body there.

Why? Why go to all that trouble and incur so much danger just to leave the body…nowhere special?

I hadn’t a clue. I stared at the photo of the victim, then closed my eyes and let my mind wander, but nothing came. It just didn’t make any sense.

But it must’ve made sense to the killer. He must’ve had a reason. And my instincts told me that if I could figure out that reason—then I could figure out the killer. And if I could figure out what made this guy tick, maybe I could catch him.

But so far, I was at square one. Maybe not even there.

LIKE SEVERAL OTHER YOUNG WOMEN in Vegas, Danielle Dunn made porn films; in fact, she’d been doing it for twelve years. But she wasn’t the usual statistic, the pathetic drug-addicted nitwit who gave the camera one humiliating pose after another just to get a little chump change from the man. She was the man.

It hadn’t always been that way, she reflected, as she sat in her private office in the studio she owned, sipping tea from bone china. She’d left home when she was sixteen, pregnant, a social pariah. Her own parents would have nothing to do with her. Those had been tough times, and some of the things she did back then still haunted her. But she had survived. She was too young for most of the legitimate work on the Strip—cocktail waitressing, dealing cards. She was young and skinny and more than once some pervert tourist had suggested ways she could make a little money. And she’d thought about it. But fortunately, she was able to resist, although some might think her next job—stripping at a downtown club—wasn’t much better. That led to working as a nude model, which in a short time led to an encounter with one of the top direct-to-video porn producers late one night at the Sahara. In less than two years, she’d gone from high school cheerleader to porn queen. But those porn movies saved her from prostitution. And a host of other evils even worse.

She knew that, in some people’s minds, there wasn’t much difference. Taking money for sex was taking money for sex. But to Danielle, there was a Grand Canyon of a difference. She might be having sex (although most of the time penetration was simulated), but it was no squalid twenty-dollar back alley transaction. She was on a set, playing a part, following a script. She was acting. And when she did get paid, the money didn’t come from the man with whom she’d had sex. It came from the producer, who was compensating her in a legal and legitimate way because she had performed a valuable service.

She was good at it. Not just at being naked—the whole job. She learned lines quickly and rarely stumbled, and that meant a lot to a producer working on a limited budget. What’s more—she could actually act. The flat delivery that characterized so many porn actresses (either because they were high or barely able to read, or both) was light-years from Danielle’s performances. She not only could deliver a line, she could assume a character. As a result, the producers started investing more time in the plot, costumes, music, spending an extra penny here and there to make it better. If they had a real actress, why not make a real movie? With a sex scene every eight minutes, of course.

That’s when her career began to really take off. She became a name-recognized asset, something rarely accomplished in this industry where too often the women seemed interchangeable (and disposable). Her name appeared above the title. She got offers to make live appearances. She made decent money. But she still didn’t like the way they treated her: “Just lie on your back and kick up the high heels. Okay, bring the camera in closer between her legs.” And she noticed that, at the end of the day, it was those cigar-chomping producers, the talentless money men who you might pay to put their clothes back on, who were driving the Caddys and playing high stakes poker at the Sands.

So she decided to do something about that, too.

“All right,” Gina said, breaking her out of her reverie. She had a coat over her arm and purse in hand. “The captain’s bed set is ready to shoot. Everyone’s been told to be ready to do 42B at nine o’clock sharp.”

“Excellent. And Gina?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to have any more problems with John’s…. mmm, problem. Time is money. Let’s have a stunt double ready, okay?”

Gina arched an eyebrow. “A stunt member?”

“Exactly. We haven’t cast Longsword’s mate yet. Get someone who can perform both functions; we won’t have to pay him any more than scale, no matter how many parts we give him.”

“I think I know someone who’ll do it. I can send him over tonight if—”

“I’ll be here. Still got mounds of paperwork, and I want to check the set. Don’t want any eleventh hour mistakes tripping us up. If we stick to our schedule, we could be filming the money shot by Friday.” The money shot was industry slang for the climactic on-camera ejaculation, the scene most viewers seemed to live for.

“Shaving a week off the shooting schedule. That’ll make your investors happy.”

“That’s how you keep investors. Make the call, then give yourself a rest. You’ve earned it.”

“Will do. See you in the morning, boss.”

Boss. Now that was a word she liked to hear. As long as it was in reference to herself.

When she formed her own production company—the first porn actress ever to do so—the hooting and hollering could be heard all the way to the Hoover Dam. But she knew she could do it. If those slimy silk-shirt stogie-chomping slobs she’d been working under for years could do it, why couldn’t she? She was smarter than all of them combined, and she’d managed to bankroll enough savings to make it happen. Well, to make one film happen. Like a high roller at the Flamingo, she put all her chips on one number on the roulette wheel.

She gave it a lot of thought before she spent a penny, which again put her heads and tails above most of the porn producers out there, who thought if you just got some guy with a prodigious member and a woman who’d invested heavily in silicone, put them in a room together with a shoddy video camera, then packaged it with a title parodying the latest Hollywood hit, or playing on some cliché male fantasy (sorority girls, cheerleaders, nurses, women behind bars…the banal list was endless) and shipped it off to the usual distributor, that was good enough. And in truth, it was good enough, apparently, to make some bucks and keep the boys in business. But she wanted to do better than that. She wanted to make real movies. She wanted to be the Louis B. Mayer of skin flicks. To bring that off, she needed…something different. Some gimmick. A fresh approach. A new…something. But what? She spent months contemplating—until she finally figured it out. She knew she couldn’t eliminate porn movies—and she didn’t really want to. What she wanted to do was to make them her own.

The traditional view of porn movies was that they were made by men, for men, that they existed solely for the purpose of male gratification. Frat houses, bachelor parties, lonely guys in hotel rooms. According to statistical studies, the average pay-per-view hotel porn movie is watched for twelve minutes. Yes, that’s how long it took viewers to get what they wanted out of the film. That’s why the flicks almost always started with close-up oral sex—before you even knew who the characters were or what the story, if there was one, was about. These films usually put the female characters in demeaning roles that suggested that they lived solely for the purpose of gratifying the always dominant male. What if just once, Danielle thought, someone made a porn movie for women? A movie that showed a woman in the dominant role, taking her carnal pleasures whenever and however she wanted them? A porn movie made by the women, of the women, and for the women. That idea appealed to her.

The question was: Would it appeal to anyone else?

Every investor she approached thought it was far-fetched. Impossible. She didn’t give up. She’d talked to women who worked in adult gift shops and they told her that increasingly it was couples, not grimy unshaven brutes, but
couples,
who were coming in to rent porn flicks. The mail order people told her the same thing: more and more, watching porn was a couples activity. Almost fifty percent of all erotic films were rented by women or couples.

That knowledge gave Danielle power.

She set up her studio, DannyDunn, on the south end of the Strip, outside the City of Las Vegas limits, because the nebulous anti-prostitution laws in the city raised the possibility of legal trouble if some court ruled that the actors were really prostitutes because they took money for having sex. Sort of. The first film from DannyDunn Inc. was set in the wilds of the Congo. It was a Tarzan riff—she played a Jungle Girl, a latter-day Nyoka who was raised by wild animals after her explorer-parents were killed. Tom Matheny, one of the hottest new hunks on the circuit, played a shipwrecked archeologist, washed onshore near the Jungle Girl’s home and thrust into a series of dangerous and sexy adventures, culminating in his capture by Tra, the Queen of the Lion People, who tried to force him to become her mate, the sire of a new generation of stout-hearted men to rule her lost kingdom.

Role reversal? Yes. But at the same time, Danny was careful not to put the hunk in demeaning roles. She didn’t want to trade one half of the potential audience for the other; she wanted everyone. The male lead might be the one getting rescued, but he wasn’t portrayed as stupid, weak, or subservient. And when sex happened, it was gloriously passionate. Maybe
Congo Conquest
was still a low budget skin flick, but it was a low budget skin flick with a story and characters. For the target audience, it was an ideal fantasy.

And it was fantastically successful.

Now, six years later, Danny had produced twelve films running the gamut of fantasy themes—Sinbad, WWII spies, science fiction—and now, the pirate movie. She had captured a dependable secondary market via two of the top cable channels, where the sexual content was slightly abridged and the films found an even greater audience. She didn’t always star in the pictures these days, but whether she did or she didn’t—her name was always above the title. She was well-known in Vegas, often offered opportunities to speak to the more liberal-minded groups or to serve as a resident celeb at poker tourneys and such. Not bad for a girl who’d been desperate, almost suicidal, at sixteen.

Which was more than ten years, and about four million dollars, ago.

Enough reminiscing. She had a set to inspect. She pushed out of her chair and—

Did she imagine that she heard something? A squeaking? She listened hard, but didn’t hear anything more. That actor Gina was sending, or any other visitor, would’ve rung the bell, especially this late at night. Must be her imagination.

Wasn’t it? She froze, listened again.

Of course it was. She didn’t have time for this foolishness. She had a set to inspect. She walked onto the soundstage and gave it a once-over. This would not be the major sex scene between the protagonists of the picture; the pirates would return too early and passion would be exquisitely delayed for another twenty minutes or so of screen time. But she still wanted it to be an arousing scene. Something to work the emotions of the viewers into such a fevered pitch that they could barely restrain themselves from hitting the fast forward button when the dastardly pirates returned. Happily, everything seemed to be in order. Now all she had to do was deal with that paperwork and she could—

“Excuse me? Are you Ms. Dunn?”

Danielle was startled by the sudden voice out of nowhere. Standing on the set, still lit by the bright overhead lights, it was impossible to see anything beyond the perimeter.

“Who’s there? Are you the actor Gina called?”

After a moment’s pause, the man replied, “Yeah. That’s me.”

Danielle walked off the set, shielding her eyes. Slowly, the male figure took shape before her.

Gina called this guy to be in the movie? Had she totally lost her grip? He was a big man, strong, but much too short. Burly, rather than the thin-hipped lean look women seemed to favor today. Not to be cruel, but he was not remotely attractive: a big pug nose that looked as if it had been broken at least once, pocked skin, short black hair that draped his head like a mop. Mean eyes. Why on earth would Gina pick him unless…

Two possibilities occurred. Gina might be going for a change-of-pace look, something to differentiate him from the rest of the male cast. He was probably a more realistic incarnation of what a pirate’s mate would look like than the rest of the pretty boys in the cast, not that this film had anything to do with reality. Or it was possible Gina had some…inside information. And her choice of this lug had focused more on the need for an impressive stunt member.

“There will…I’m sure you understand…” She was stumbling for words, and she didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been through this a hundred times before. Something about him…

Suddenly she was wishing Gina was still around. “Anyway, you’re going to have to audition for the part. For…both parts. If you know what I mean.”

Even though she didn’t really want to, she took a step closer, hand extended. “I don’t think we’ve worked together before, have we? I’m Danielle. And you’re…”