“No, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Bloom said.
“Then why do you want to know my name?”
“We told you our names, didn’t we?”
“Big deal,” the girl said. “You weren’t up there dancing with maybe your G-string slipping a little so you couldn’t notice it.”
The detectives looked at her. Neither of them said a word.
“Tiffany Carter,” she said. “Okay?”
“What’s your real name?” Bloom asked.
“Sylvia.”
“Sylvia what?”
“Sylvia Kazenski.”
“Is that Polish?” Bloom asked.
“Why? What’s wrong with Polish?”
“Nothing. My grandfather came from Poland.”
“So shake hands,” Sylvia said.
“How long have you been working here, Sylvia?” Rawles asked.
“Almost a year now, it must be. Why?”
“Were you working here last May?”
“I told you almost a year, didn’t I? This is April. If I’ve been working here almost a year—”
“Would you remember a girl named Tracy Kilbourne?”
“Why?”
“Do you remember her?”
“Why do you want to know?”
Rawles looked at Bloom. Bloom nodded.
“She’s dead,” Rawles said.
“Wow,” Sylvia said.
“Did you know her?”
“Yeah. Dead, wow. What happened?”
“How well did you know her?” Rawles asked, avoiding the question.
He was taking out his pad and pencil. Sylvia watched him. He looked up expectantly.
“You going to write this down?” she asked.
“If you don’t mind.”
“I just don’t want to get in any trouble. I’ve been clean since I came to Calusa, I don’t want no trouble.”
“Where’d you come from?” Bloom asked.
“Jacksonville.”
“What kind of trouble were you in up there?”
“Who said I was in trouble?”
“You said you’ve been clean—”
“That don’t mean I had trouble before.”
“What was it?” Rawles asked. “Dope?”
“A little bit,” Sylvia said, and shrugged.
“Were you busted?”
“Almost. Which is why I left Jacksonville, to get away from the crowd I was running with.”
“You still doing dope?” Bloom asked.
“No, no.” She held out both her arms. “You see any tracks?” she asked, and pulled back her arms, folding them across her breasts again. “The point is,” she said, “my name gets in the police files down here, I’m right back where I started. I like it here. I don’t want to have to move on again.”
“What was the charge in Jacksonville?” Bloom asked.
“There wasn’t any charge,” she said. “I was just running with a crowd that got in trouble.”
“Then how’d your name get in the police files up there?” Rawles asked.
“Because I was with them when it happened. But I didn’t know what was going on, I really didn’t, so the cops let me go.”
“Without charging you with anything?”
“That’s right. Because they realized I had no idea what was happening.”
“What was happening?”
“These guys were junkies,” Sylvia said.
“But you weren’t.”
“I was shooting maybe a dime bag a day, but I didn’t have anything like a habit.”
“So what did these guys do? These junkies?”
“They tried to stick up a liquor store. I was riding with them in the car, one of them says, ‘I’ll go buy us some juice,’ he goes in the store with a thirty-two, sticks it in the owner’s face. His bad luck, there was an off-duty cop in the store buying a jug. His worse luck, he tries shooting it out with the cop. Guy driving the car, he hears guns going off, he hits the gas pedal, rides the car up on the sidewalk, and knocks over a fire hydrant. Next thing you know, there’s more cops than I knew existed in the whole state of Florida.” She shrugged. “But they let me go. Because I had no idea anybody was planning a stickup. I was just along for the ride.”
“Who let you go?”
“The detectives. After they questioned me for three, four hours. Also, the two guys I was with said I was clean.”
“We can check this, you know,” Rawles said.
“Sure, check it. Would I be telling it to you if it wasn’t the truth? One thing I learned about cops, you better tell it the way it is, or You’re asking for more trouble than you already got.”
“How old are you, Sylvia?” Bloom asked.
“Twenty-one. I look older, I know. It’s the lousy job this dope did on my hair last week. Makes it look like straw.”
One hand went up to her bleached blonde hair. She tried to fluff it, gave up the attempt, and folded her arms across her chest again.
“Tell us about Tracy Kilbourne,” Rawles said, his pencil poised over the pad.
“So here I go in the files again, right?” she said, and sighed.
“As a witness,” Rawles said.
“I was a witness last time, too. How’s this any different? Shit, I hardly knew the girl. So now I’m a fucking witness in a homicide case.”
“Who said it was a homicide?” Bloom asked at once.
“Please don’t shit me, okay, mister?” Sylvia said. “You ain’t here ’cause Tracy died in her sleep.”
“That’s right,” Bloom said. “She was shot in the throat, and her tongue was cut out, and she was dropped in the river. Would you like to see some pictures of what she looked like when we fished her out?”
“Wow,” Sylvia said.
Behind her, rock-and-roll music blared into the small room. Lights flashed blue and red and amber. The teddy-bear girl shook her hips and her breasts at empty tables, unconcerned that she had no audience. In the dim corners of the room, the other dancers plied their trade. On the movie screen, a white girl was sandwiched between two black men.
“What do you want to know?” Sylvia asked. “Anything you can tell us,” Rawles said.
Sylvia first met Tracy Kilbourne—
“That’s her real name, you know. I mean, a lot of girls working the topless joints, they take exotic, sexy names... well, Tiffany Carter, for example... but that was the name Tracy was born with.”
— met her for the first time on a sultry night last May, the temperature hovering in the high eighties, the promise of a thunderstorm in the air. June usually marked the beginning of Calusa’s summer-long heat wave, but sometimes the last part of May could turn oppressive, and this was one of those nights. The girls, Sylvia remembered, would have been willing to dance naked that night, if the law had allowed it, that’s how hot and sticky it was. You came off that stage dripping sweat, and then you were supposed to find some guy’s face to grind into when all you really wanted to do was take a cold shower.
Most guys touched you, even though there were signs all over the place warning that the dancers were not to be touched, all according to law, you know, but they did it anyway, and the girls let them do it because that’s what added up all those dollar bills tucked into the band of the G-string, five-dollar bills sometimes if you let one of them slide his hand up a little higher than it was supposed to go, or maybe cop a quick kiss on the nipple. All in the dark, all hidden from the eyes of the law; if a blue uniform popped into the doorway over there, everybody was suddenly very prim and proper — well, the cops knew that, Sylvia was sure they knew it, and besides, they were probably being paid off to look the other way, no offense.
Tracy had been working there for a week by then, but Sylvia didn’t meet her until that night because she herself had taken two weeks off to go visit her mother in Louisiana, whose old man had just left her and who was feeling rotten. Her mother worked in a massage parlor in New Orleans. She was still pretty good looking at thirty-eight years old, and pretty much in demand up there. Sylvia herself would never take work in a massage parlor — “Let’s face it, that’s plain and simple hooking, my mother’s a hooker, that’s all there is to it.” A massage parlor was a whorehouse, period. So were all these escort services you saw advertised. All legalized prostitution was what it amounted to. A lot of girls dancing topless, they later drifted into massage parlors or escort services, what they did was become hookers.