It floated disembodied on the air. A black high-heeled pump pointed, wiggled, a calf muscle tightened, the knee bent, and then the toe pointed again. There was more of the leg visible now, the black nylon stocking shimmered in the glow of the lights, ribbed at the top where a vulnerable white thigh lay exposed, black garter biting into the flesh, fetishists all over the theater thrilled to the sight, not to mention a few detectives who weren’t fetishists at all. Freida Panzer undulated onto the stage bathed in the glow of the overhead purple leikos, wearing a long puple gown slit up each leg to the waist, the black stockings and taut black garters revealed each time she took another long-legged step across the stage.
“Look at them legs,” Calucci whispered.
“Yeah,” La Bresca said.
O’Brien sitting behind them, looked at the legs. They were extraordinary legs.
“I hate to cut anybody else in on this,” Calucci whispered.
“Me, neither,” La Bresca said, “but what else can we do? He’ll run screaming to the cops if we don’t play ball.”
“Is that what he said?”
“Not in so many words. He just hinted.”
“Yeah, the son of a bitch.”
“So what do you think?” La Bresca asked.
“Man, there’s big money involved here,” Calucci said.
“You think I don’t know?”
“Why cut him in after we done all the planning?”
“What else can we do?”
“We can wash him,” Calucci whispered.
The girl was taking off her clothes.
The four-piece ensemble in the orchestra pit rose to heights of musical expression, a heavy bass drum beat accentuating each solid bump as purple clothing fell like aster petals, a triple-tongued trumpet winding up with each pelvic grind, a saxophone wail climbing the girl’s flanks in accompaniment with her sliding hands, a steady piano beat banging out the rhythm of each long-legged stride, each tassel-twirling, fixed-grin, sexy-eyed, contrived, and calculated erotic move. “She’s got some tits,” Calucci whispered, and La Bresca whispered back, “Yeah.”
The men fell silent.
The music rose in earsplitting crescendo. The bass drum beat was more insistent now, the trumpet shrieked higher and higher, a C above high C reached for and missed, the saxophone trilled impatiently, the piano pounded in the upper register, a tinny insistent honkytonk rhythm, cymbals clashed, the trumpet reached for the screech note again, and again missed. The lights were swirling now, the stage was inundated in color and sound. There was the stink of perspiration and lust in the theater as the girl ground out her coded message in a cipher broken long ago on too many similar stages, pounded out her promises of ecstasy and sin. come and get it, baby, Come and get it, Come and come and come and come.
The stage went black.
In the darkness, Calucci whispered, “What do you think?”
One of the baggy pants comics came on again to do a bit in a doctor’s office accompanied by a pert little blonde with enormous breasts who explained that she thought she was stagnant because she hadn’t fenestrated in two months.
“I hate the idea of knocking somebody off,” La Bresca whispered.
“If it’s necessary, it’s necessary.”
“Still.”
“There’s lots of money involved here, don’t forget it.”
“Yeah, but at the same time, there’s enough to split three ways, ain’t there?” La Bresca said.
“Why should we split it three ways when we can split it down the middle?”
“Because Dom’ll spill the whole works if we don’t cut him in. Look, what’s the sense going over this a hundred times? We got to cut him in.”
“I want to think about it.”
“You ain’t got that much time to think about it. We’re set for the fifteenth. Dom wants to know right away.”
“Okay, so tell him he’s in. Then we’ll decide whether he’s in or out. And I mean really out, the little son of a bitch.”
“And now, ladies and gentlemen,” the loudspeaker voice said, “it gives us great pleasure to present the rage of San Francisco, a young lady who thrilled the residents of that city by the Golden Gate, a young lady whose exotic dancing caused the pious officials of Hong Kong to see Red … it is with bursting pride that we turn our stage over to Miss … Anna … May … Zong!”
The house lights dimmed. The band struck up a sinuous version of “Limehouse Blues.” A swish cymbal echoed on the air, and a sloe-eyed girl wearing mandarin garb came into the follow spot with mincing steps, hands together in an attitude of prayer, head bent.
“I dig these Chinks,” Calucci said.
“You guys want to stop talking?” a bald-headed man in the row ahead said. “I can’t see the girls with all that gabbing behind me.”
“Fuck off, Baldy,” La Bresca said.
But both men fell silent. O’Brien leaned forward in his seat. Parker bent sideways over the armrest. There was nothing further to hear. Kapek, across the aisle, could not have heard anything anyway, so he merely watched the Chinese girl as she took off her clothes.
At the end of the act, La Bresca and Calucci rose quietly from their seats and went out of the theater. They split up outside. Parker followed Calucci to his house, and Kapek followed La Bresca to his. O’Brien went back to the squadroom to type up a report.
The detectives did not get together again until eleven o’clock that night, by which time La Bresca and Calucci were both hopefully asleep. They met in a diner some five blocks from the squadroom. Over coffee and crullers, they all agreed that the only thing they’d learned from their eavesdropping was the date of the job La Bresca and Calucci were planning: March the fifteenth. They also agreed that Freida Panzer had much larger breasts than Anna May Zong.
In the living room of a luxurious apartment on Harborside Oval, overlooking the river, a good three miles from where Detectives O’Brien, Parker, and Kapek were speculating on the comparative dimensions of the two strippers, the deaf man sat on a sofa facing sliding glass doors, and happily sipped at a glass of scotch and soda.
The drapes were open, and the view of warm and glowing lights strung on the bridge’s cables, the distant muted reds and ambers blinking on the distant shore gave the night a deceptively springtime appearance; the thermometer on the terrace outside read ten degrees above zero.
Two bottles of expensive scotch, one already dead, were on the coffee table before the sofa upholstered in rich black leather. On the wall opposite the sofa, there hung an original Rouault, only a gouache to be sure, but nonetheless quite valuable. A grand piano turned its wide curve into the room, and a petite brunette, wearing a miniskirt and a white crocheted blouse, sat at the piano playing “Heart and Soul” over and over again.
The girl was perhaps twenty-three years old, with a nose that had been recently bobbed, large brown eyes, long black hair that fell to a point halfway between her waist and her shoulder blades. She was wearing false eyelashes. They fluttered whenever she hit a sour note, which was often. The deaf man seemed not to mind the discord that rose from the piano. Perhaps he really was deaf, or perhaps he had consumed enough scotch to have dimmed his perception. The two other men in the room didn’t seem to mind the cacophony either. One of them even tried singing along with the girl’s treacherous rendition–until she hit another sour note and began again from the top.
“I can’t seem to get it,” she said, pouting.
“You’ll get it, honey,” the deaf man said. “Just keep at it.”
One of the men was short and slender, with the dustcolored complexion of an Indian. He wore narrow black tapered trousers and a white shirt over which was an open black vest. He was sitting at a drop-leaf desk, typing. The other man was tall and burly, with blue eyes, red hair, and a red mustache. There were freckles spattered over his cheeks and his forehead, and his voice, as he began singing along with the girl again, was deep and resonant. He was wearing tight jeans and a blue turtleneck sweater.