He noticed now that there were small tables around the perimeter of the room. The place was not very crowded. He suspected the rain was keeping customers away. But at one of the tables, a blond girl danced — if one could call it that — for the exclusive pleasure of a man who sat there alone, nursing a beer. There were four men sitting at the bar, two on each side of it, three of them white, one of them black. Carella took a seat midway down the bar. One of the bartenders — a young redheaded girl wearing a black leotard and black net stockings — walked to where he was sitting, her high-heeled pumps clicking on the hard wooden floor.
“Something to drink, sir?” she said.
“Have you got anything soft?” Carella asked.
“Oh, yes indeed,” she said, and rolled her eyes and took in a deep breath, at once imparting sexual innuendo to his innocuous question. He looked at her. She figured she’d somehow made a mistake and immediately said, “Pepsi, Coke, Seven-Up, or ginger ale. It’ll cost you same as the whiskey, though.”
“How much is that?”
“Three-fifty. But that includes the lunch bar.”
“Coke or Pepsi, either one’s fine,” Carella said. “Has Chloe Chadderton come in yet?”
“She’s taking her break just now,” the redhead said, and then casually asked, “You a cop?”
“Yes,” Carella said, “I’m a cop.”
“Figures. Guy comes in here wanting an ice-cream soda, he’s got to be a cop on duty. What do you want with Chloe?”
“That’s between her and me, isn’t it?”
“This is a clean place, mister.”
“Nobody said it wasn’t.”
“Chloe dances same as the other girls. You won’t see nothing here you can’t see in any one of the legitimate theaters downtown. They got big stage shows downtown with nude dancers in them, same as here.”
“Mm-huh,” Carella said.
The redhead turned away, uncapped his soft drink, and poured it into a glass. “Nobody is allowed to touch the girls here. They just dance, period. Same as downtown. If it isn’t against the law in a legitimate theater, then it isn’t against the law here, either.”
“Relax,” Carella said. “I’m not looking for a bust.”
The girl rolled her eyes again. For a moment, he didn’t quite understand her reaction. And then he realized she was deliberately equating the police expression for “arrest” — a term he was certain she’d heard a hundred times before — with what was bursting exuberantly in the black leotard top. He looked at her again. She shrugged elaborately, turned away, and walked to the cash register at the end of the bar. One of the dancers was squatting before the solitary black customer now, her legs widespread, tossing aside the fringe of the G-string to reveal herself completely. The man stared at her exposed genitals. The girl smiled at him. She licked her lips. The man was wearing eyeglasses. The girl took the glasses from his eyes, and wiped them slowly over her opening, a mock expression of shocked propriety on her face. She returned the glasses to the man’s head, and then arched herself over backward, supporting herself with her arms, thrusting her open crotch toward his face, and pumping at him while he continued staring. Just like the legitimate theaters downtown, Carella thought.
The state’s obscenity laws were defined in Article 235, Section 2 of the Criminal Law, wherein “producing, presenting or directing an obscene performance or participating in a portion thereof which is obscene and contributes to its obscenity” was considered a Class-A misdemeanor. A related provision — PL 235.00, Subdivision 1 — stated: “Any material or performance is ‘obscene if (a) considered as a whole, its predominant appeal is to prurient, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, excretion, sadism, or masochism, AND (b) it goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in describing or representing such matters, AND (c) it is utterly without redeeming social value.”
There was no question in Carella’s mind but that the girl down the bar, her back arched, her own hand now toying with her vulva for the obvious pleasure of the man seated before her, was performing an act the predominant appeal of which was to a prurient interest in nudity and sex. But as the redheaded bartender had pointed out to him a moment ago, there wasn’t anything you could see here that you couldn’t see in some of the legitimate theaters downtown, provided you had a first-row seat. Make the bust, and you found yourself in endless courtroom squabbles about the difference between art and pornography, a thin line Carella himself — and even the Supreme Court of the United States — was quite unready to define.
When you thought about it — and he thought about it often — what the hell was so terrible about pornography, anyway? He had seen motion pictures rated “R” (no one under seventeen admitted unless in the company of an adult) or even “PG” (parental guidance advised) that he had found to be dirtier than any of the “X”-rated porn flicks running in the sleazy theaters along The Stem. The language in these socially acceptable films was identical to what he heard in the squadroom and on the streets every single waking day of his life — and he was a man whose job placed him in constant contact with the lowest elements of society. The sex in these approved films was equally candid, sparing an audience only the explicit intercourse, fellatio, and cunnilingus common in “X”-rated films. So where did you draw the line? If it was okay for a big-name male star to make simulated love to a totally naked woman in a multimillion-dollar epic (provided he kept his pants on), then why was it wrong to depict the actual sex act in a low-budget film starring unknowns? Put a serious actress up there on the screen, show her simulating the sex act (but, God forbid, never actually performing it), and somehow this became high cinema art while Deep Throat remained cheap porn. He guessed it was all in the camera angles. He guessed he was a cop who shouldn’t be wondering so often about the laws he was being paid to enforce.
But what if he walked down the length of the bar right this minute and busted the dancer there for “participating in an obscene performance” (screwing a man’s eyeglasses was certainly obscene, wasn’t it?) and then busted the owner of the joint for “producing, presenting or directing an obscene performance” — what then? The offense was a Class-A misdemeanor, punishable by not more than a year in jail or more than a thousand-dollar fine. Get your conviction (which was unlikely), and they’d be out on the street again in three months time. Meanwhile, there were killers, rapists, burglars, muggers, armed robbers, child molesters, and pushers roaming the city and victimizing the populace. So what was an honest cop to do? An honest cop sipped at his Pepsi or his Coca-Cola, whichever the redhead with the inventive pornographic mind had served him, and listened to the blaring rock, and watched the naked backside of the blond dancer across the bar as she leaned over to bring her enormous breasts to within an inch of a customer’s lips.