Louie drained his beer in one gulp. "I was going to tell you, I was just waiting for the right time. A friend of mine saw Vandy, sometime last week.
She was walking out of this outcall service place on the Strip, you know, by the All-American Burger. He said at first he didn't recognize her with all this makeup on, but then he was sure. I'm sorry, man."
Rice stood up. Louie saw the look in his eyes and said, "Maybe it don't mean that."
"It means I have to find her," Rice said. "Go get me my car."***
Duane Rice drove his "new" '69 Pontiac to the east end of the Sunset
Strip, hugging the right-hand lane in order to check out the hookers clustered by bus benches, searching for Vandy's aristocratic features wasted by makeup and dope. Every face he saw burned itself into his brain, where it was superimposed against a reflex image of Gordon Meyers and preppy
Anne Atwater Vanderlinden. But none of the faces was her, and when he saw three solid blocks of massage parlors, fuck pads and outcall services looming in front of him, he gnawed his lips until he tasted blood. Rice parked in the All-American Burger lot and walked slowly west on the south side of Sunset. All the streetwalkers now were black, so he kept his eyes glued to the shabby storefronts and their flashing neon signs. He passed
Wet Teenagers Outcall and Soul Sisters Mud Wrestling; New Yokohama
Oriental Massage and the 4-H Club-"Hot, Handsome, Horny and Hung."
After a block, the obscenities blurred together so that he couldn't read individual names, and he stared at front doors waiting for her to come out. When he saw that guilty-looking men were the only ones entering and leaving, he started to see red and walked to a curbside bus bench and braced his hands against it in an isometric press. With his eyes closed, he forced himself to think. Finally he remembered the snapshot of Vandy he'd carried through jail. He reached for his wallet and pulled it from its plastic holder, then turned around and again confronted the flashing beacons.
Nuclear Nookie Outcall; Wet and Woolly Massage; Satan's House of Sin.
This time the words didn't blur. He pulled out a handful of Louie
Calderon's twenties and walked through the nearest door. A bored black man behind a desk looked up as he entered and said, "Yeah?" Rice held the photo of Vandy and a double saw under the man's nose.
"Have you seen this woman?"
The man put down his copy of the Watchtower, grabbed the twenty and looked at the snapshot. "No, too good-lookin' for this jive place. If you want to pork this kinda chick, I can fix you up with a cut-rate version who gives mean head."
Rice breathed out slowly; the red trapdoor behind his eyes eased shut.
"No thanks, I want her. Got any ideas?"
The man stuck the twenty in his shirt pocket. "I don't know what places got what quality pussy, but I know this jive place ain't got nothin' but woof-woofs.
You just keep walkin' and whippin' out that green, maybe you find her." Rice took the man's advice and walked east. He showed the snapshot to every doorman and bouncer at every sex joint on the row, handing out over three hundred dollars, getting nothing but negative head shakes and a consensus that Vandy was too foxy to be doing either Strip outcall or street hooking. After four straight hours of breathing nothing but sleaze, he got coffee at the All-American Burger and sat down at an outside table to think. He came up with facts that he trusted. Louie and his friends were solid; if one of them saw Vandy out here in whore makeup, it was probably true- without him to look after her she was a stone self-destructor. None of the assage and outcall slimebags he'd talked to had I.D.'d her-and it was to their financial advantage to do so. Louie's friend had seen her sometime last week, probably right after she visited him and cleaned out the pad. It all felt right.
Rice looked at his watch: 3:30, the whores thinning out as the traffic on
Sunset dwindled. The only hookers still working were black, and unlikely to have info on Vandy-she avoided all jigs like the plague. Draining his coffee, he stood up and started for the car. Then he saw an incredible redhead walk over to the curb and stick out her thumb.
Rice moved fast, running to his car and pulling up in front of the girl, cutting off a slow-trawling Mercedes. The redhead looked in the passenger window distastefully, then back at the status car. Rice yelled, "A C-note for ten minutes," and the girl hesitated, then opened the door and got in. Rice handed her a wad of twenties as the driver of the Mercedes accelerated and flipped them the bird.
The redhead stuffed the money into her purse and poked a finger at the tufts of foam sticking out of the seat. "This car sucks. Can we go to a motel or something?"
Rice turned around the corner, then pulled over to the curb and flicked on the dashboard light. "I don't want to get laid, I just had a feeling you could help me find this woman." He handed her the photo of Vandy and watched as she examined it, then shook her head.
"No, never. Your chick?"
"That's right."
"She a working girl?"
Rice swallowed a wave of anger. "Yeah. I've heard she's been doing outcall around here, but nobody recognizes her, and I believe them." The redhead scrutinized the snapshot, then said, "She's real cute. Too classy for most of the places around here."
"What do you mean, 'most'?"
"Well, there's this high-line place a couple of blocks from here, off the
Strip. They run only really foxy chicks, to these movies and rock big shots.
I worked out of there for a week or so, then I quit. Too much of a drug scene.
I'm into health food."
Rice felt his skin prickle. "What's the name of the place?" "Silver Foxes. No 'outcall,' just 'Silver Foxes.' "
"What's the address?"
"Gardner, just off the Strip. Lavender building, you can't miss it. But they only send chicks out on referrals, you know, it's real exclusive." "Phone number?"
The girl hesitated. Rice dug in his pocket for more money, then handed it to her. "Tell me, goddammit."
She grabbed the door handle. "You won't tell where you got it?" "No."
"658-4371." The girl darted out of the car. Rice watched her counting her money as she walked back to the Strip.
It took him less than ten minutes to find the lavender apartment building. It stood just south of Sunset in the glow of a streetlamp, a plain Spanish-style four-flat with no lights burning.
Rice parked and walked across the lawn to the cement porch. Four doors were recessed in the entranceway, illuminated only by mailbox lights. He squinted and saw that three of the apartments belonged to individuals, while the last box was embossed with a raised metal insignia of a fox in a mink coat winking seductively. There was a buzzer beneath the words "Silver Foxes." Rice pressed it three times and heard its echo. No lights went on and no sounds of movement answered the buzzing. He reached into the mailbox and found it empty, then stood back on the lawn so he could eyeball the whole building. Still nothing but darkness and silence. Rice drove to a pay hone and dialed 658-4371. A recorded woman's voice answered: "Hi, this is Silver Foxes, foxes of every persuasion for every occasion. If you're already registered with us, leave your code number and let us know what you want; we'll get back to you soon. If you're a new friend, let us know who you know, and give us their code numbers and your phone number. We'll get in touch soon."
There was an interval of soft disco music, then a beep. Rice slammed down the receiver and drove back to outcall row.
Only the dregs of the hookers were still out, garishly made-up junkies who stepped into the street and lifted their skirts as cars passed by. Rice sat at a table inside the All-American Burger and drank coffee while he scanned women on both sides of Sunset. Every face he glimpsed looked ravaged; every body bloated or emaciated. Toward dawn, the neon lights on the outcall offices and massage parlors started going off. When streetsweeping machines pushed the few remaining hookers back onto the sidewalk, he took it as his cue to leave and check out business.