The exterior stairs were cluttered with kiddie toys. Shirley lurched up with him, clinging to him, just a sick, scared girl, that's all.
"Got a key?"
Her false nails scrabbled through the baby-doll purse. "l can't find it."
Max took the small box and probed its tight mirror pocket.
"One key."
"Oh, how'd you do that?'
"Magic." He opened the apartment door, assaulted by the odor of must and cheap face powder and baby formula.
"Maybe I would visit the bathroom now," she suggested, delicately.
He let her go, watched her stumble over the furniture and clutter to a hallway. Then he checked the window. Mini-blinds, some metal slats askew. He straightened the crooked and closed them tight. The kitchen reeked of open cans not thrown out. He found a bottle of hardened instant coffee crystals in a cupboard and a mug to heat up in the spaghetti-sauce-spattered microwave oven.
She finally came out, clinging to the hall wall, the ridiculous shoulder-hung purse swinging at her hip.
"That doesn't work," she told him as he pulled the coffee mug from the microwave. "Coffee, I mean."
"The effect is psychological."
"It's supposed to make me think I'm sobering up?"
"No, it's supposed to make me think l can help you sober up."
She laughed at that, and reached into the tiny purse. "Here's your money. I never lost it. I may have lost my lunch, but I never lost the money."
"Better you had lost the money and kept your lunch. Sit down."
She gazed at the cheap stools pulled up to the room-divider lunch bar between kitchen and living room. "l guess l can still do stool dances."
"Not with me you can't."
"You don't like me?"
"I do like you, so you can forget that crap."
"What do you want? I don't get it."
"I want you to drink this really foul coffee so I can think I'm doing you some good, then l want you to go to bed--"
"Oho!"
"Oho. Oh no. l want to you go to bed and sleep it off, and we'll talk in the morning."
"Talk?"
"Talk."
She rolled her eyes and sipped the brew, rearing back because its heat seared even her numb lips. "Raf is gonna kill me."
"Not if you never go back."
"But l gotta go back!"
"No one's 'gotta' do anything. Ever. Remember that. Here.
Take your cup with you."
He guided her to a bedroom--he wasn't sure if it was hers, but that didn't seem to matter around here from the haphazard arrangement of the place.
When she was settled, sitting on the edge of a lumpy unmade bed with her knees together and the purse at her hip and both hands on the coffee mug like it was a very fragile teacup, Max went back into the living room and threw himself down on the couch, also lumpy and way too short for him.
He hadn't learned a darm thing, except that Raf Nadir was an angry man and he would be formidable if not caught by surprise.
Chapter 45
Hair Apparent
"You did the dishes."
Max looked up from wiping Rorschach pattems of spaghetti sauce from the microwave interior.
She stood in the archway between hall and kitchen, barefoot. Wearing worn jeans and a knit top (no bra, and the better for it). He hadn't heard the shower. but she had washed her face (no makeup, and the better for it). She looked like somebody's sister.
"I chipped out some more instant coffee. Want some ?"
"Oooh. I guess. If I can find something to go with it. Toast, maybe. Sorry the place is such a mess. with three of us coming and going. . ."
She edged onto one of the stools, content to let him forage.
Which he did. The bread was moldy, but he found a couple of frozen waffles and a crumb-crusted toaster.
"What's your working name?" he asked when he put the plate of waffles and a steaming mug of black coffee in front of her. The milk in the refrigerator was rancid.
She giggled. "I feel like l'm at a lunch counter. l use 'Mandy.' "
Mandy. From the upbeat seventies song by Barry Manilow? Mandy, who gave without taking? Elevator music now, wordlessly familiar, if you were old enough to remember.
"You were right last night, Mandy. You can't go back."
"No." She pushed her hair behind one ear. "I'm a bad girl.
Broke the rules and got caught leaving with a customer. They don't want us hooking.
"And you know why? Not on moral grounds. They just don't want you making money for yourself on the side.
"Listen. The girls are a great group. They've been so nice to me. Strippers aren'r hookers, honest."
"Usually not, but they're not winners, either."
"Hey, the money is better than hooking."
"Yeah, you can make some money, but pretty soon it's gone on booze, or some biker boyfriend with a habit, and then there's that baby that just happened, or the two kids left over from that marriage right out of high school, and the money goes and there's nothing to show for it but this." He lifted his own coffee mug to roast the jumbled apartment. "And then, if it isn't drugs, it's drink."
She hung her head, hid behind the tangled hair. "I was shy when I started."
"You're still shy. And You're still not a drunk, or you wouldn't get so blown on those watered-down drinks. You could get out."
"And do what? At least at Secrets I'm somebody. l'm a dancer, in the spotlight. We all have our fans. We do!"
"At Secrets, you're somebody else. Some body. Mandy, who six months from now may be...
Delilah at the place six blocks down the street. You want to wear high heels and look good and meet men? Get a job cruising the casinos with free drinks for players. It doesn't pay like stripping, but you wouldn't have to get bombed to do it. And you wouldn't be under the thumb of some ugly customer like Raf Nadir."
She had picked up one of the warmed waffles, but bit her lip instead. "Why are you interested in him!"
She eyed his chest and Max suddenly remembered what he looked like: gold chain nestling in the requisite macho chest hair, velour top, bad hair.
"I'm not. Someone l know is. You know if he worked Tuesday night?"
"He works every night. He likes what he does."
"What hours?"
"I come in at nine, and he's there. He's there when I leave, usually one or so." She nibbled some waffle, then frowned. "He wasn't there one night, though. Was it Wednesday! Are you an undercover cop or something?"
"No."
"I know! A P.l."
He Let her think what she wanted to.
"What'd Raf do?"
"Something bad, maybe. Who'd be able to swear he was gone Wednesday night?"
"Gosh, we all come and go. Larry the manager, I guess."
"What about Nadir? Was he gone that night?"
"No! That I remember. This NCO from Nellis got drunk and started pushing some girls around. Raf was in there like a tiger shark. How come you decked him?"
"I'm stronger than I look."
The phrase hit her in the morning-after mood. "I wish I could say that."
"You can. But it won't be easy, or pay well, or give you the false encouragement of sawbucks in your G-string. You'd have to quit the stripclub circuit--and the alcohol, find a straight job, think about going to junior college maybe, find out what you're good at besides taking off your clothes, and develop that."
"l'm not very good at taking off my clothes, not like some of the other girls. Some of them are real pros."
"I know. Dancers. Then why don't they get a job in a casino show? Chorus girls don't wear much more than strippers and they're stars."
"Maybe my friends weren't good enough."
"Good enough dancers, or good enough to themselves? Mandy, l knew a guy who made a living photographing performers, including strippers. He said he never met one who hadn't been abused as a child."