Beautiful, Naked and Dead mm-1 Read online

  It was ten o’clock and the club was starting to fill up with men from all walks of life. All searching for something, most shallow enough to think they could find it here. Jane let out a small laugh when she saw me at the bar. “I see you dumped the skirt,” she said setting down a gimlet.

  “Yeah, she was cramping my style. Did Crystal show up?”

  “Hell must be freezing over, she’s in the back room giving some drunk a lap ride. So I guess you’re stuck with me, at least for a couple of songs.”

  “Lucky me.” The gin felt warm in my belly. It took the edge off the pressure building inside me and that was good, so good I ordered another.

  “I’m not a tramp you know,” she said “I don’t throw myself at every hunk of man stuff that walks through that door. But there is something about you… ummm. Something different. This town is full of millionaire stock option babies, or at least it used to be, but real men are hard to find.”

  “You want the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not going to happen between us.”

  “And yet here you are, without the skirt.”

  “It isn’t going to happen with her either, if it did you’d both realize I’m nothing special. Just one more brother swimming for shore,” I said. She shook her head with a slight smile. I was drinking my third gimlet, starting to feel the comfortable buzz when Jane pointed out Crystal. She was a statuesque blonde in an emerald green evening gown. Her hair was piled up on her head, with tendrils framing her face. She was walking a grinning sailor out of the back room, he left her side and ran over to his buddies at the rail, slapping them five.

  “Hi, handsome,” she said in a raspy sultry voice as I walked up to her, “Do you want a private dance?”

  “I just need some information,” I said, her smile dropped instantly.

  “And I need to make a living.” Her eyes roamed the room. I snapped a fifty in front of my face. The sound got her attention. In a flash the fifty disappeared into her hand. She led me to a booth, sliding in next to me. “You have my undivided attention.”

  “Tell me about Gino.”

  “Who?” she said, with a blank expression.

  “Torelli. Let’s not dance around it. You did some cyber work for him. Ringing any bells?”

  “Oh that Gino, sure I did a gig for him, down in South City, he had a studio set up, he and some tech geek. It was a scam, they had me pose in different positions, strip, touch myself. Later they rigged it so guys thought they were talking to a live girl. They had some kind of program that would play the sections that linked to what the guy was typing. Isn’t technology grand?”

  “You have an address for this studio?”

  “Gino drove, sorry.”

  “Could you find it again, if the price was right?”

  “Much as I’d love to take your cash, I’m afraid it would waste both our time. Zanax and champagne you know? It’s all a happy blur.” She looked away from me, scanning the room again.

  “One last thing, do you have any idea where I could find Gino?”

  “Only thing I ever saw was his big comfortable BMW.” At the bar she noticed a lone man in an expensive looking suit. Without even a goodbye she stood up and headed for the man. She was like a graceful shark who had just smelled blood in the water. I hung around the club watching the cash driven mating rituals. I don’t know what I expected to find out, maybe I hoped Gino would walk through the door, sit down and tell me what the hell happened. He didn’t so I kept drinking gimlets and watching.

  “You met Crystal, mission accomplished. And there you sit, your fine ass still on my bar stool. What is a gal to make of that?” Jane said giving me a sideways over the shoulder smile that could melt the polar caps and drown Malibu. The DJ was spinning Robert Cray’s “Back Door Man”, and I don’t know who I figured I was cheating on but the song seemed to fit my mood just right.

  “Don’t make nothing of it little girl, just a fool having a drink in a bar,” I said.

  “There is nothing little about me,” she said, stopping to look into my eyes. “And I haven’t been a girl since I started to bleed. But you got one thing right. You are a fool, if you walk out that door without making a date to take me out later.”

  “Have you ever been at a moment in your life when it’s all falling in, a tumbling shit storm and you can’t see up or down? Just struggling to keep moving forward and not step on a land mine. You ever feel like that?”

  “Baby, I’m tending bar in a strip club, what do you think? This is not the career choice one makes when life is all peaches and cream,” she said ignoring a drunk pounding his beer mug at the other end of the bar. “But you have to learn to roll with it or it rolls over you.”

  “This one’s bigger than that.”

  “Bigger than what?”

  “Bigger than whatever you were imagining,” I said. She looked at me, wide eyed. Rising up on straight arms she looked over the bar and down at my lap.

  “Really, um, I was imagining pretty big,” she said with a smile that got me grinning. “First smile I’ve seen big guy, I like it.” With a wink she went down the bar to service the waiting drunks. While her back was turned I got up to go. I left a fifty for a tip. I was going through the dead greaseball’s cash like it was stolen, which it was. Maybe I thought when the cash was gone I would forget their decomposing bodies and their pals that were sure to come hunting us. Or maybe it was like the song says, you should spend it like you got it, drive like it’s stolen and love like they’ll love you back. Sometimes even country music has wisdom if you listen.

  Cass was sleeping when I got back to the room. I sat up for another hour looking down at neon, blinking through the fog. I was running down a blind alley chasing a ghost who was always just out of my reach. I searched the phone book, but found no listing for Gino Torelli. His being Italian was one more nail in my coffin. I had found a way to piss off the mob. Once they caught wind of me, there would be no place safe to hide. No place in the world they couldn’t reach out and swat me. And here I was trying to find them. Maybe Gino wasn’t connected, maybe the boys in the desert being Italian was a coincidence. Maybe, but I doubted it.

  CHAPTER 10

  “It’s simple, hit search, type in stripper and bingo,” Cass said, we were in a cyber coffee shop called Java Enabler down in the Haight district. It was once the epicenter of the flower power explosion, full of hippies and junkies and free love. Now it was just another quaint gentrified neighborhood. Gone are the runaways whose lives were forever changed by that long cool summer. Gone, the valiant peaceniks who faced the riot police with flowers against batons and mace only to see their dreams crushed under the wheels of the coming corporate dream of a Coca-cola USA forever world. Gone, the hippies who tuned in and dropped out then discovered heroin and died… all reduced to a footnote in the cable-car-tour-bus ride, come see where it all happened, come see it from the comfort of your air-conditioned Trail-ways seat.

  The kid behind the counter at Java Enabler told me that before the bottom dropped out of the dot com stocks, this place used to be packed twenty-four seven. A flick of the eyes and I saw the small shop was near empty. Along one wall, it had a row of iMacs with overstuffed chairs in front of them. While Cass started to bang away in a blur of meaningless clicks and clacks on the keyboard, I ordered her a latte and a black house coffee for me, say what you will about yuppie scum they have improved the quality of coffee for all of us and for that I bless them. Cass found 157,263 sites listing the key word “Stripper”. I had her add the word “Live” and that got us down to 42,637. She started clicking on addresses and a flurry of porn sites flashed on. I was flooded with embarrassment to be looking at these pictures in broad daylight with Cass at my side. It wasn’t like this was anything we hadn’t seen before. Hell, I reminded myself, her last place of employment was a brothel. Still it felt odd. After an hour of mind-numbing bad porn I had her add the word “Crystal” to the search. The top web site listed was called Hot
-horny-strippers.com. When she clicked on the address I nearly spit out my coffee. There on the welcome page was a picture of Kelly. She was naked, on her hands and knees, ass to the camera. Her face stared back at me over her shoulder, it was animated so she winked at me. On her left butt cheek I noticed a tattoo of Tinkerbell or some other fairy who’s name I didn’t know. Fact is, all fairies look alike to me. It had never occurred to me that Kelly would have a tattoo, not that she should or shouldn’t have had one. It was just that I didn’t know she did. It was one more in the growing list of things I hadn’t known about Kelly. And there she was kneeling on the screen forming her crude, “come fuck me” wink.

  “That bastard,” Cass said more to herself than me. We both stared at the picture for a long moment, as if we could make her real if we watched long enough. “Give me a credit card number.”

  “Do I look like the kind of guy they give credit cards to?” Fact was I had one hidden in my car, but it was clean in John Stahl’s name and needed it to stay that way. It was my get out of jail, I’ll be in Paris ‘cause there are too many dead bodies in this room to cover up, security card.

  “We need one to see more,” she said.

  “I don’t need to see more, I need to see where this is coming from.” Looking around, the shop was now empty. The clerk was sitting at one of the iMacs tapping away on the keys. I decided to take a wild shot in the dark. I caught Cass’ attention and then looked over at the clerk. She smiled, this was her area of expertise. In the few steps it took for her to reach him she completely transformed herself. She stood up a hardened woman but by the time she reached him she was the girl next door. Meryl Streep had nothing on this girl.

  She slid into a chair next to him and flashed the kind of smile that made you forget your troubles, your wife, even your car keys. Caught in her crosshairs he never had a chance.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “How’s it going,” he mumbled, unable to keep eye contact he looked down, then found himself staring at her breasts. He gulped and quickly looked up, a slight rosy tint forming on his cheeks. “You need something?”

  “You’re good with computers, I can tell by the way you whip around the keyboard.” She let her fingertips brush against his hand resting on the keys.

  “I know a thing or two,” he said with false modesty, still glowing from her briefest of touches. Yeah, she was that good.

  “My uncle and I were trying to trace a web site.” She nodded at me. “It was pictures, bad pictures of his daughter, he wants to know how to find the server it’s on. I love computers but I’m in way over my head on this one. Could you, no I don’t want to bother you.”

  “It’s no big deal, piece of cake really.” The clerk smiled, this was his turf, his moment to shine.

  “Really?” She looked like she was in awe of his prowess.

  “If you have the IP address, I can find out where the data is hosted.”

  “IP address?” Unconsciously she ran her thumb over her lower lip acting confused.

  “Sorry, do you know the site’s name?”

  “This is embarrassing.” She said pursing her lips into a heart shape and looking down. In her flower print day dress she looked like an innocent college student. “I don’t know how Betty got into this, she was always a bit wild but after her mom died she just went crazy. It’s tearing Uncle Travis up.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I just want to help him. The site is called, um,” she stammered, ashamed to say it out loud, she whispered, “Hot-horny-strippers.com.”

  The clerk looked down at the keyboard and typed in the address. He paused for a moment, embarrassed by the picture in front of him. Cass studied the floor. “Damn, she could be your twin, except the hair, yours is, you know…”

  “Blonde,” Cass said eyes still downcast. “Please turn it off.”

  “Sorry, I, um, just, you know, need the address.” He tore his eyes from the naked picture and quickly wrote down a series of numbers, then clicked out of the site. “Every IP address has five numbers, they give the country, region, municipality, city block and real world address.” He was relieved to be back on a subject he was strong in. Cass rewarded his returning confidence with another brilliant smile. “The phone company keeps records of all the addresses. Their firewalls are some of the weakest on the net, I wrote a program to hack them.”

  “You’re amazing. Where did you learn all this?” Cass said with admiration.

  “I’ve been messing with computers since before I could walk,” he said proudly. He slipped in a disk and typed in several commands. Numbers and letters flashed across the screen in rapid succession. “This is going to take a couple of minutes, you want another latte?”

  “That would be nice.” As they moved to the counter, Cass moved close beside him, giving him a comfortable sense of familiarity. He was a small boy, I don’t think he was ever chosen first for stick ball, but next to Cass’ petite body, he looked almost full size. Looking down at her, he beamed with pride. I’m sure at that moment he wished someone he knew would come in and see just how cool he was.

  I couldn’t hear what they said but they seemed to chat happily. Watching them was like seeing an alternate path Cass could have taken. A nice girl on a date with a nice boy her own age. He could walk her home to a house where a good mother and father waited. Maybe he’d take her to the movies and get up the courage to slip an arm onto her shoulder. I knew it was all an act, but if I was her Uncle Travis, it’s the life I would want for her.

  Back at the computer, she sipped a fresh latte while they watched the blinking screen. “And we are in,” the clerk said proudly. He typed in the IP address and then scribbled something down. “It’s down in Palo Alto, not one of the big servers, may even be a private home,” he said handing her the paper.

  “You are fantastic.” She kissed him on the cheek. We left him glowing, at least for a moment he was somebody cool. On the street, her happy smile dropped instantly and she transformed back into her twenty going on forty year old self.

  “Nice kid,” I said.

  “I guess, if you like nice.” She gave me a look that told me she didn’t, she liked bad men like me.

  “Come on, he seemed like a good kid.” We were walking down the steep street, leaning back for balance.

  “A real saint. Did you see the way he was drooling over Kelly’s picture? He was easy to play, I liked that about him.” We walked on in silence. At the bottom of the hill she turned to me, suddenly serious. “I did good right?”

  “Yeah you did swell.”

  “And you couldn’t have done it without me?”

  “Not without spilling some of that kid’s coffee and or blood. And I hate to waste good coffee. Who’s Uncle Travis? He the one?”

  “He’s from that movie, you know, the old time one about the guy who drives the taxi?” she said searching for the title.

  “Taxi Driver?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one, sometimes you remind me of him.” For her it was a compliment. And oddly enough that’s how I took it.

  “With or without the mohawk?” I said with a grin.

  “With, most definitely. You’re whacko, straight up crazy. But in a good way,” she said as we climbed into the Crown Vic. The address was down the bay in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley. We took the 101 out of the city, out of the fog and out past Candlestick Park, or at least that’s what it was called for forever until some corporate bandits bought the rights to name it after their crap. Everything is for sale in America, you just have to know the price. It was a forty minute drive, traffic was light, the sun was on the bay, seagulls circled in the air and everything was right with the world except for all the parts that were fucked up. Like mob assassins trying to whack you for no good reason, and little girls posing naked on their hands and knees when they should be going to junior college and dating Biff the track star. I wondered what else I would have to find out about Kelly. With every step I took, I knew her less and less. Or maybe
I knew her better. But she wasn’t the girl I had cared so deeply for. She had been an actress playing a part that should have been her life. That guileless country girl I shared Chinese food with, the girl who loved her puppy and went to the dog park, that’s who she should have been. Who she could have been if the world had kept its hands to itself and let her grow up.

  “Was it your father?” I asked Cass.

  “Was who my father?” she said, looking out the window.

  “Who put the scars on you two. Was it your father?”

  “Oh you think you have it all figured out, do you? You think you know me? Forget it,” she said, her voice turning cold. “Keep your mind on who killed Kelly, ok?”

  “What ever you say.” I let it lay. I didn’t really need the details, the names changed but the facts remained. Girls of the sex trade all came from the same mold, shaped by a world that sexualized them at a young age. They all yearned for the good daddy, but looked for him in bad men. They searched to master what they couldn’t control as children. I had spent my adult life in their world and only seen a handful make it out. The rest put scars on scar tissue and kept moving on, getting colder and colder. In the end cynicism replaced hope and they lived their lives in rigid resignation.

  We got off the freeway at University Avenue. It was a broad street canopied by deep-rooted trees. The homes were large yet still cozy, with eight mile long unfenced front lawns stretching to the curb. Palo Alto was a rich man’s small town USA. Kids played on lawns with a Frisbee, others rode bikes and skateboards. If Dennis the Menace ran out chased by Mr. Wilson, I wouldn’t have been surprised one bit. It was just that freaking quaint a town and it made my palms sweat just to be there.

  The address we had turned out to be a two-story Tudor on Hamilton Avenue, a quiet residential neighborhood that stunk of both old money and new dot com cash. It was early evening so I cruised past the house, in the driveway was a late model Volvo station wagon and a BMW sedan five series. With something like ninety plus grand in rolling stock, and a mil plus house, whoever lived there was doing ok, I kept going.