“Oh, God,” I said. “Another anti-vice crusade. You know what’11 happen? The members of the city council and the legislature will denounce such goings-on in the fair capital of the state, and then trample each other to get to those joints to make sure they don’t have any credit card charge slips being held for payment.”
The waitress came to our so-called table. Liz ordered an ale and I took a beer.
“Listen,” I said. “I’ve got something your dad might be able to use.” I told her about the helicopter and Shiu’s plans to pilot it.
“Wow, that is strange stuff. And I saw something yesterday that may have something to do with it. Rick sent me over to the company garage to get the photographers car greased, and I noticed the circulation trucks were all parked on the street. The big fenced-in yard they have there is filled with huge boxes.”
“Boxes?”
“Well, containers. Big—maybe the size of truck bodies.”
I thought about that, and after we’d had a couple of beers, we left the Clark—got a couple of nice leers from some lobbyists I knew as we went through the lobby—picked up my car and drove to the building by the river where the paper serviced and parked its dozen or so delivery vans.
I drove up to the compound and looked inside. There were six metal containers about the size of beer truck boxes along the fence. They had small metal wheels—like the garbage dumpsters you see outside office buildings—and something Liz hadn’t mentioned, a good-sized tractor with a towing hitch on the back. Walking alongside the fence, I paced off the open space in the compound… at least 150 feet. There was room enough for Shiggy’s copter.
“I think you’re right. I bet those containers have something to do with the chopper. You better phone Frank tonight.”
Liz looked at me. “There’s a problem, Bob. I’m sharing a place with a girl I knew in school last year, and it really is too small for private phone conversations if she’s home.”
I swear my heart was pure when I suggested we’d have to make the call from my place. That’s where we went and made the call, and ordered pizza, and talked into the night, and went to bed.
Liz usually dressed in jeans and sweaters that were large enough to do very little for her figure, but I found her to be very much a full-grown woman. She also acted much more like one than the coeds I remembered from a few—well, maybe more than a few—years back on campus.
At some point I believe I said something about being old enough to be her father, which caused her to raise up on her elbow and declare, well, she liked her father, but inasmuch as she had never even been tempted to try incest, she was altogether more content with the present arrangement.
“Christ, I wonder what he’d do if he knew I took you home and bundled you into bed,” I said.
Liz laughed. “Seduced his innocent daughter? Bob, I was living off campus with a guy for more than a year. Daddy didn’t like him much, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he would be relieved if he knew I was with a man who didn’t think the Rolling Stones were the flower of civilization and that an evening without an hour on a bong was wasted forever.”
“What do you think?”
“I think you are a nice, funny, gentle man—a lot better in the sack than I would have guessed—a lot more interested in how it’s going for me than some I’ve known. Now I’m going to sleep unless you’re going to throw me out.”
“Oh, God no,” I said—and slept the sleep of the happily spent.
It was most of a week before Kirk Bright’s project developed. I had finished a long feature I was doing on the speaker and called Grace to ask when I should figure it would be run.
“Sure as shit not tomorrow, Bob. Swift is taking the front page and two inside for Bright’s whorehouse pieces. Claggett is reading them with Swift leaning over his shoulder, and every time he goes to cut something, Old Whiskers jumps on his ass. Drew told him a while ago that something in one of the pieces was too raw for our town’s readers, and you know what Swift said? ‘I’m not putting out this paper for this piss-ant town.’”
The next clay’s CR&P was a sight to behold. The front page had a big picture of the block with most of the town’s massage parlors and shots of the girls through the front windows and standing in the open doorways. I especially liked the one of the lady wearing a Girl Scout uniform with the blouse opened to the navel and the skirt ending closer to the crotch than the knees.
The headlines had Swift’s unerring touch:
SODOM IN CAPITOL’S SHADOW!
HOOKERS PLY WARES IN BOGUS HEALTH CLUBS
POLICE TURN BLIND EYE TO LOCAL DENS OF VICE
DO MASSAGE PARLORS FOSTER HERPES, VD, AND AIDS?
ARE TEEN GIRLS RECRUITED FOR LIVES OF SHAME?
The stories convinced me that Sanders probably was wrong about young Bright being an overseer for the mob at the paper. Maybe his papa was major motion in the Mafia, but Bright wrote about sex-for-sale like a country parson’s kid. The headlines were pure Granville Swift, but the text was more like Tom Swift.
At one point, Bright wrote of the customer (who but himself?) who went into a massage parlor and asked if he could receive treatment to ease the discomfort of a charley horse.
The scantily clad young woman, who could not have been much older than eighteen, laughed heartily at the request. “We play some horsey here, Charley, but that ain’t my specialty. Maybe you’d like a little leather workover?”
The customer asked what that would involve and the girl came over and wrapped her arms around him. “Pun, honey, fun. But if you don’t go that route, I can play it just as straight as the missionary called for. Now, are you going to be cash or credit card?”
It was obvious from this exchange that something more than conventional physical therapy was being dispensed at this establishment which, in fact, appeared to be too dimly lit and too gaudily decorated to be an authentic clinic.
The customer hesitated and the young woman said, “Look, if you would rather see one of the other girls, I’ll send one out. Why don’t I show you one of our rooms and have someone else talk to you?”
She took the customer by the hand and led him to a small room almost completely filled with a round bed. “This is our deluxe suite,” she said. “Sit down and relax and someone will be with you in a minute.”
The room was semidarkened, but after a few minutes the customer was able to see. There was one chair in a corner with several towels draped over the back. On a shelf was a bottle of baby oil and a can of talcum powder. The walls of the room were covered with a red, flocked wallpaper. Four or five unframed centerfold photographs of frontally nude women were tacked to the walls.
After about five minutes, a tall blonde woman wearing a negligee came into the room. Without a word, she let slip the shoulder strap on one side of the garment and exposed a large breaert. This she lifted in her hand and thrust toward the customer. “You want a sample?”
The customer hurriedly excused himself, saying he had left home without his wallet, and left. As the door closed behind him, he heard the blonde woman say to someone inside, “Hell, it wasn’t money that one didn’t nave in his pants.”
At the Next Door that night, the Bright stories were the talk of the place, and when the kid came in about 10 p.m. with the heavyweight type I had seen the previous week, he became the center of attention.
Shep Carley, I was sorry but not surprised to see, was in that sodden state that follows drunken liveliness and precedes “flat on his face.” Shep was no barroom bravo, but he got nasty after enough beer, and this night it was Kirk Bright who was the target.