This topless shit was close to hooking, she guessed, but the most any of the girls ever did by way of outright sex was a hand job every now and then, for which the going price was ten dollars. The girls were pissed off at Cindy just now—
“Cindy’s the teddy-bear girl, and only sixteen, but don’t tell Angus I said that, or it’s my ass...”
— because she was giving hand jobs away practically free, seven dollars a shot, which brought the price down for the other girls. The girls did the hand jobs sitting at the tables, usually a table pretty far away from the stage, which was where the brightest lights were, and sometimes they brought guys off by sitting on their laps and squirming there, but that was dangerous if a cop happened to stroll by. There wasn’t supposed to be any physical contact, you see.
“But sitting right here at the table, for example, I could give both of you hand jobs at the same time without anyone being the wiser, and earn myself twenty bucks for ten minutes’ work.”
Not that she was suggesting anything of the sort; she knew they were both cops.
She met Tracy in the alley out back where the girls went for a smoke break, get away from all the clutching hands in here, though you couldn’t make any money outside smoking. Some of the girls — well, she shouldn’t be telling them this, but who gave a fuck? — some of the girls used a pickup truck out back to do a little more than they were allowed to inside the club. Angus was very strict about anything but hand jobs. But outside in the pickup truck, you could earn a few extra bucks on a ten-minute break. A blow job cost twenty bucks. Anybody wanted to actually get in your pants, it cost him thirty, but hardly anybody who came here could afford that. The trade they got here mostly was young kids who thought a hand job was the end of the world. Either that or old geezers couldn’t get it up for a month till some young girl started playing with it. Sylvia herself never did any of that stuff, of course — “I’m here ’cause I like to dance,” she said. “I just dance for the guys ’cause I enjoy it, and if they stick a couple of bucks in my G-string, that’s enough for me.”
Tracy was out there smoking in the alley when Sylvia came out that night. She’d been onstage for fifteen minutes — what they did was alternate every fifteen minutes, the girls on the night shift. During the day there were fewer girls working, because there wasn’t much of a crowd, you see, and so they stayed onstage a half hour. But at night the girls danced onstage for only fifteen minutes. There were usually twelve girls working the night shift — from eight o’clock to two in the morning — which meant you had to go onstage maybe twice a night unless one of the girls was out sick, a lot of them didn’t like to work when they had the curse. The money was in working the tables, getting the guys to buy you drinks so Angus could realize his profit—
“He serves ginger ale for champagne, you know, well, all these joints do...”
— and also dancing for them so you could get those bills tucked away, which was how the girls made their money. One of the girls told her — she wouldn’t know about this personally — that Angus also took a cut on the hand-job trade, split the ten bucks fifty-fifty with the girls, because he said he was taking a risk allowing such things to happen in his fine little establishment.
Anyway, she’d come off the stage that night sweating like a truck driver, and had gone out to the alley to catch a smoke and whatever breeze there might be. Tracy was standing there leaning against the wall, puffing on a cigarette. Sylvia didn’t know if the detectives had any notion of what Tracy had looked like when she was alive, but the girl was a real beauty. Blonde hair down to here, big blue eyes, gorgeous nose, full mouth, hand-tooled tits, legs that wouldn’t quit, a real racehorse. Sylvia had been surprised to find her working in a place like Up Front, in fact, because, “Let’s face it, the girls here, myself included, wouldn’t win any Miss Universe contests.” The prettier girls first tried to find work at Club Alyce, which got a better clientele and where you could expect to make more money, but there was a waiting list a mile long for any girl wanted to work there, and what Angus got here were the leftovers, usually. As a matter of fact, one of the first things Sylvia had said to Tracy was, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a joint like this?” — which got a laugh from her because it was an old line, you know, “The line guys use in whorehouses when They’re trying to get to know you a little better, understand your personality, while all the girl wants is to get this over with as fast as possible so she can turn the next trick — not that I would know personally.”
Tracy told her, in the ten minutes while they smoked and talked together outside, that she’d been working until a week ago at a pizza place downtown, but that she’d figured there was no future in that, what she wanted to be was a movie star. What she figured was that this would be good practice for her, working in a place like this in front of an audience and half naked — a lot of movie stars did nude scenes nowadays, she explained — and anyway, she was earning more here than when she was pushing pizzas across the counter. Besides, who knew when some big movie producer might walk in looking for a location for a picture or something — she’d heard that Twentieth Century Fox was opening a studio in Calusa — and spot her dancing and figure she had the right stuff? Sylvia remembered thinking that in a week’s time she’d be doing hand jobs, and in a month she’d be out back in the pickup, sucking some guy’s dick. But she hadn’t said anything to her at the time because she hardly knew the girl. In fact, as it turned out, she was dead wrong about Tracy’s inexperience and innocence, because that very night she saw her sitting with a black soldier, and her hand seemed to be very busy under the table.
It was surprising that the other girls liked Tracy so much, her being so beautiful and all, and her attracting a lot of customers, and therefore a lot of bucks that might have been tucked into the bands of G-strings around other bellies. But there was something about her — she was like a mother hen, always worrying if a girl came down with the sniffles, always giving little tips on how to do your eyes or your nails or your hair, showing the girls how to walk, even how to smile — it was almost as if she was a movie star already and could afford to give advice to girls who weren’t as lucky as she was. It was really strange. In a month’s time, she was — well, the star here. With everybody. Not only with the guys who used to crowd that stage whenever she stepped on it, and who would practically be lined up waiting for her to dance for them privately or sit with them and, you know, do whatever it was they wanted from her, she had gorgeous hands. But also with the girls, the girls absolutely adored her, it was Tracy this and Tracy that, how do you make your nipples pucker before you go on, should I wear only one earring instead of two, how do you turn down some guy who’s a really hairy beast and still get him to tuck that buck in your G-string... Tracy, Tracy, Tracy, all night long.