“Yes. Has something happened to her?”
“You’re sure this is her dress?”
“Positive.”
“Were you with her when she took it to Albert Cleaners last year sometime? May sometime. Or June.”
“I don’t remember when it was exactly — but yes, I was with her. The dress had an ink spot on it. On the front someplace. She was upset about it because it was one of her favorite dresses.”
Bloom and Rawles both sighed at exactly the same moment.
“Okay,” Bloom said. “Tell us everything you know about her.”
Bloom wasn’t upset that Up Front was the second topless joint to have surfaced in Calusa. Before he’d moved to Florida, he’d been a working cop in Nassau County, and there were more topless joints there per square mile than perhaps in the entire state of Florida. Back then, Bloom frequently went into New York City (my partner Frank’s “hometown,” so to speak), and there were more topless joints there than there were subway stations. To Bloom, topless joints were less harmful than heroin or cocaine. The second-largest industry in the state of Florida was dope. The second-largest topless joint in Calusa was Up Front — so what? The biggest joint was called Club Alyce; Bloom distrusted all fanciful spellings of ladies’ names.
Up Front was on the Tamiami Trail, still in Calusa County, but pressing close to the border of the county just south. Up Front had once been a pinewood shack dedicated to distributing Christian Science literature. A discreet sign out front now announced that this was Up Front, and then — in smaller lettering — read TOPLESS — 2:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M. According to the Calusa PD records on the place, it was just this side of being a whorehouse, but then again, so was Club Alyce. This meant that girls came to your table wearing sequined bras and bikini panties and “danced” for you. This further meant that they straddled your knee (left or right) and pumped away at it while poking their breasts in your eye. So far, there had been no drug busts and no murders committed at Up Front. Bloom didn’t care how many girls straddled how many horny guys’ legs, so long as nobody got hurt. It was his job, he figured, to make sure nobody got hurt, and to throw away the key on anybody who hurt anybody else. Cooper Rawles felt the same way. They went to Up Front because it seemed that a girl who’d once worked there had got herself hurt — badly. Someone had pumped a bullet into Tracy Kilbourne’s throat and then cut out her tongue.
A scantily clad girl at the entrance door told them they could find Mr. McCafferty “inside someplace.” She told them he would be smoking a cigar. Cooper Rawles had once worked in Houston, Texas, and he’d told Bloom that the topless-joints-cum-whorehouses in that city were the seediest to be found anywhere in America. Bloom doubted that anyplace in America could be seedier than Up Front.
The dimly lighted inner room was hung with faded crepe paper from a long-ago New Year’s Eve party. There were only four men and seven girls in the place at three o’clock that afternoon. One of the girls was dancing on a makeshift stage in the center of the room. She was wearing nothing but a G-string with a rosette on it. On a rear-projection movie screen set up behind the girl, a black girl was vigorously blowing a white man. The girl dancing before the screen seemed oblivious to the grunting and groaning on the screen behind her. She seemed, in fact, to be enjoying the dance she was performing. Rawles suggested that maybe she thought she was Makarova. Or Navratilova. He always mixed up ballet artists with tennis stars.
Three of the other girls were dancing privately for three men sitting at tables in dark corners. They had opened their bra tops and were cautioning the men to look but not touch. The remaining three girls were sitting at a table in a relatively bright corner of the room. One of them was clutching an oversize teddy bear to her oversize breasts. Another was wrapping a belt around her waist. The belt glowed orange in the dark. The third was sipping a Coors beer from a can.
Fat, cigar-smoking Angus McCafferty was sitting close to the stage. In Bloom’s experience, all owners of topless joints smoked cigars and were fat. He wondered why this was true. Did fat, cigar-smoking men automatically open topless joints? Or did any man opening a topless joint eventually grow fat and start smoking cigars? McCafferty was dividing his attention between the porn flick and the oblivious girl dancing on the stage. Bloom figured the girl was on dope. He didn’t care what she was on, so long as nobody was selling it at Up Front.
“Detective Bloom,” he said to McCafferty, startling him out of his reverie.
“Yeah, hello, sit down,” McCafferty said. “Make yourselves at home. You guys like a beer or something?”
The detectives sat down.
“A girl named Tracy Kilbourne,” Bloom said without preamble. “What do you know about her?”
“You want to know about the name Tracy?” McCafferty said, puffing philosophically on his cigar. “I’ll tell you about the name Tracy. There are more girls named Tracy in the world today than there are girls named Mary. There are also more girls named Tracy than there are girls named Kim. Especially in topless joints. In topless joints, Tracy and Kim are very popular names. I must have three Tracys and two Kims on the premises right this minute,” he said. “So what else is new?”
“What else is new,” Rawles said, “is that Tracy Kilbourne is dead.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” McCafferty said. “You sure you don’t want a beer, you guys? Kim!” he shouted across the room. “Let’s have a little service here.”
A blonde girl wearing net stockings, black patent-leather high-heeled pumps, a black miniskirt with a lacy white apron over it, and nothing else sidled over to the table.
“Help you gentlemen?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Bloom said.
“The same,” Rawles said.
“I’ll have a sour-mash bourbon on the rocks,” McCafferty said. “And hurry it up.” As she walked away from the table, he said, “She swivels her ass nice.”
It surprised Bloom that McCafferty wasn’t at all nervous about the presence of policemen on the premises. He figured at once that the place was extraordinarily clean except for the girls grinding away at the tables in the dark. But a girl who’d performed the same service not too long ago had been shot in the throat and had her tongue taken from her mouth.
“Tracy Kilbourne,” he said.
“Her straight handle?” McCafferty asked.
“As far as we know.”
“When?”
“When what?” Rawles asked. “When did she work here? Or when did she catch it?”
“However you want it,” McCafferty said. “This is your show.”
“She’s supposed to have worked here last year sometime. May to July, something like that.”
“Tracy Kilbourne,” McCafferty said.
Kim was back with his drink. She put it on the table, leaning over the men — the way McCafferty had taught her — so that her breasts nudged Bloom’s shoulders.
“Anything else?” she asked archly.
“This is the law here,” McCafferty told her.
“Oooo, pardon me,” Kim said, rolling her eyes. “The law don’t appreciate naked tits?”
“Buzz off,” McCafferty said. He lifted his drink. “Very fresh, the young girls you get today,” he said. “No respect for anything. Tracy Kilbourne, huh? Sorry, it don’t ring a bell.”
“Last May sometime,” Bloom said. “Worked until July or thereabouts.”
“What’d she look like?”
“About nineteen. Long blonde hair. Full of piss and vinegar,” Rawles said.