He struck out in the first three places; staff turnover being what it was, he couldn’t find anyone who had been in the job for more than six months. In the fourth place, he found a waitress who said she’d worked there for two years and thought she recognized his description of Mitch.
After twenty dollars had disappeared down the front of her lacy black panties, which was all she was wearing, he realized he’d been conned. He declined the blow-job, offered for only another twenty, and moved on. He supposed he should have been flattered by the price; he’d heard that the older you are, the more they charge, seeing as it takes you longer to get it up.
At the sixth place, thirsty from walking and talking and breathing so much secondhand smoke, he ordered a beer. What came from the tap would probably have failed any rigorous scientific test, but at least it was fizzy and cold. The bartender knew nothing of Mitch but suggested he ask Martha, the club’s manager. As she happened to be talking to one of the waitresses only a few feet away, Arvo asked her if she would join him.
Martha was a squat, barrel-shaped woman in her early fifties. Her intelligent green eyes gave the impression that what she hadn’t seen wasn’t worth seeing. She had a dark mole beside her nose, with three hairs growing out of it, and a square chin under an almost lipless mouth, as thin and red as a razor slash. Her hair, which was cut short and layered, seemed a natural, healthy chestnut color, though Arvo had been fooled before by the magical properties of chemicals. She wore a light-green cotton blouse tucked into the waist of a brown skirt that fell well below the modesty level.
Martha hoicked her hard, square butt onto a stool and looked ready to listen to yet another hard-luck story she didn’t want to hear. On the stage, a flat-chested, anemic dancer stumbled through the motions with her eyes half closed. Arvo thought he could see needle-marks on the insides of her thighs, but they might have been tiny moles, or a rash of some kind. Diaper rash, maybe, judging by how young she looked.
“Cop,” said Martha. A statement rather than a question.
Arvo nodded and pulled out his badge.
She scrutinized it. “LAPD.”
“That’s right.”
“Long way out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you, sonny? I’ll bet you don’t even have any power up here.”
Arvo smiled. “No more than any other citizen, ma’m.”
Martha looked him up and down. “You’ve got the tan,” she said, “and the look, but you still don’t seem one hundred per cent purebred La-La-Land asshole to me.”
“Maybe that’s because I’m from Michigan.”
“That right?”
“Yeah. Detroit. Well, Birmingham, really. It’s a sub—”
“I know where Birmingham is. Know what it is, too. Other side of the tracks.” She pointed to her formidable chest. “Hamtramck. My daddy was a drunk and my mother was a saint. What do you want to know, Mr. Arvo Hughes?”
Arvo smiled and shook the strong, dry hand she held out, then he told her what he knew about Mitch. “Can you help?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said. “I know Mitch. Mitchell Cameron. Haven’t seen him for a while, but I know him sure enough. One of the meanest sons of bitches I ever had the misfortune to employ.”
Arvo took out his notebook. “When was this?”
“About eighteen months ago. Sometime last summer, anyway.”
“What did he do?”
Martha paused for a moment and asked the bartender for a glass of milk. When she got it, she took a sip, made a sweeping gesture around the club and said, “I don’t know if you’re familiar with this business at all, son, but the last thing you want is trouble. Sure, sometimes you get a customer cuts up a bit rough. When men get all excited they have a way of thinking with their dicks. And believe me, none of them are big enough to hold enough gray matter to understand a simple ‘No.’ So you need a bit of muscle around.” She laughed. “Helps if they’re eunuchs, of course, but hell, most of ’em have taken so many steroids they might as well be.”
Arvo laughed. “How did Mitch fit in?”
“Well, Mitch was different. For a start, he wasn’t so much muscular and threatening physically as he was mentally intimidating. He had killer’s eyes and a scary presence. To put it simply, he scared the shit out of most people and never even had to lift a finger. Not that he couldn’t if he wanted. That was the trouble.”
“He hurt someone?”
“Real bad. Damn nearly killed a guy. Not that it would’ve been any great loss, but like I said, the last thing we want in this business is the place swarming with cops.”
“What happened?”
Martha tossed back the last of her milk, saw Arvo looking puzzled and grinned. “Stomach,” she said, patting her corseted midsection. “Never has been quite what it should be. I blame it on too much borscht when I was a kid. Anyway, why drink the profits? What happened? The usual. Some drunken asshole gets a bit too fond of one of the dancers, and all of a sudden he’s in love. A case of the spirit being willing but the flesh being weak, if you get my point.” She winked. “Anyway, he’s grabbed the girl and he’s pulling her toward his lap when Mitch goes over. Instead of being Mr. Diplomacy like he should and ushering the guy out with apologies and promises of good times to come, what does Mitch do? He breaks the guy’s arm, is what. Just like that. Where the guy has his arm stretched out, dragging the girl, who’s crying and pulling back, Mitch just puts the arm over his knee like it was a stick of firewood and snaps it. You could hear it crack over the music.”
Arvo shook his head in sympathy.
“And that was just for starters,” Martha went on. “As if that wasn’t enough he hits the guy flush in the face and breaks his nose. Blood all over the place. Then he starts banging the guy’s head on the table.”
“What did you do?”
“Do? Well, luckily for us the guy was playing away from home — some asshole at a weedkiller convention or something — and he didn’t want his wife and kids to know he’d been sniffing around strange pussy. So we got him to the hospital, told them he’d been mugged, and got him taken care of. It wasn’t too hard to dissuade him from bringing the cops in. I got rid of Mitch.”
The music stopped and the dancer took a bow, almost falling off the stage as she did so. Martha pulled a face of disgust at the girl but said nothing. Arvo guessed the poor anemic dancer didn’t have much longer in this job.
Martha laughed.
“What?” Arvo asked.
“Just remembering. The girl, the dancer the asshole was grabbing. I think she and Mitch had a thing going. She kind of liked the attention, anyway. I think it excited her. Mitch was her hero for the night.”
So the girl had been impressed by Mitch’s use of violence. Enough, Arvo wondered, to make him think, as his mind became more unbalanced, that the way to a woman’s heart was to kill for her? “Do you remember her name?” he asked.
“Candi, I think. With an ‘i.’”
Arvo made a note of it. Hadn’t Carl Buxton mentioned a Candi, too? “Would you happen to have her address anywhere?”
Martha shook her head. “Sorry, honey. Candi’s ancient history. She was only with us a couple of weeks, as I remember, and we never did get around to the paperwork.”
“How did Mitch react to being fired?” Arvo asked.
“Pretty well. Admitted he got out of line. Begged for another chance, of course. Who doesn’t? When he saw he wasn’t going to get it, he said he’d got a better job lined up anyway and then he up and left.”