Not my scene.
But I made the rounds anyway, moving from one tableau to another, until I fell in with a guy in a conservative brown suit who had a kind of State Fair demeanor. He was about forty, with a graying crew cut, and looked vaguely like Ozzie Nelson. He noticed me and I smiled, nodded, held up a hand for him to stop. He did.
“I got here late,” I said, having to work to get heard over the blare of raunchy jazz. “What’s the drill?”
“Your number’s on the back of your invitation,” he said.
“It is?”
“Yeah. When you hear it, just go over to the doors.”
“And?”
His face burst into a goofball grin. “That’s when you get your private party.”
So this ballroom was just one big waiting room. A warmup for the real deal. But just as I was thinking that I hadn’t heard any numbers read, a sultry, throaty female voice cut in over the jazz on the loudspeakers: “Number twelve. Number twelve.”
My pal turned to me and his eyes went wide and he was beaming like Christmas. That’s me! his stupid expression said.
And here I was without a number. Hell, without an invitation. What was my next move?
In making the rounds, I had already checked to see if Jaimie Halaquez was among the men waiting at this S & M Baskin Robbins. And there was no sign of him.
Maybe he was off in his private session. Or maybe he’d had it already and gone home, happily humiliated. Worse still, maybe he hadn’t shown up at all, and wouldn’t show, and I’d gone to all this trouble just to crash the kind of sex party that did nothing for me.
There were modest wet bars hugging opposite walls. I was about to order from the pretty little Latin bartender, who was in a black leather bikini outlined in silver studs, when I squinted through the smoky semi-darkness and realized who she was.
“Hiya, Gaita,” I said to her. “What’s a nice girl like you...? Skip it.”
“I have been watching you.” Her lush mouth was painted blood red, a moist glowing thing that surrounded her amused smile. “You do not stay long to look at the women as they play their games.”
“Not my thing,” I said. “I was worried about you, kid. I thought maybe Halaquez or his people had grabbed you.”
She shook her head. She got me a beer without my asking for it, waited on another guest, and when we were alone again said, “No, this is just a job I took.”
That was vague, but I didn’t push it. “Gaita, is he here? Have you spotted him? Is Jaimie Halaquez here?”
But she was looking past me at something else.
Someone else.
“There she is, señor,” she said. “The legend. The living legend.”
I turned and at once I saw her...
...moving through the ballroom with regal grace, floating like a ghost, and yet commanding attention and respect and even subservience, a dominatrix of stunning beauty and power, entirely in black, tall (but then those tightly-laced knee-high gladiator boots with the impossibly high heels contributed to the effect), in a latex gown, floor length but snapped open at the top of her sheer-dark-stockinged thighs, long black latex gloves almost to her bare shoulders, her face concealed by a mask that revealed little more than red lips and chin, with little devil horns, blonde hair spilling out onto her shoulders from under the mask.
The Consummata.
“Christ,” I said admiringly. “She looks like the Catwoman in the old Batman funny books.”
Gaita arched an eyebrow. “They say she has been around forever, señor. But does she look it? No. She is timeless. She is ageless.”
Was Gaita making fun of me? There was something mocking in her tone. Or was there? With that ever-pounding, blaring grindhouse jazz, I couldn’t tell.
My eyes were on the Consummata, who was moving slowly around her kingdom, legs flashing out of the floor-length gown, as she nodded to those subjects who dared to acknowledge her with a glance.
“Never mind her,” I said, and turned my head halfway so Gaita could hear me. “Is he here, doll? Is Halaquez here?”
“He is,” she said. Now her tone was cold. “Not long before you came in, his number came up.”
“His number is up all right,” I said. “Do you know which private room he’s in?”
“No. Only the Consummata does. You will have to deal with her.”
I shrugged. “You know what they say. You want something done, see the top man.”
So I waited till our masked hostess had made her circuit and came near where I stood at the bar, and I stepped behind her. There was enough fog and smoke to conceal the fact that I was holding the point of a very sharp knife to the base of her back.
Because of her heels, we were on the same level when I leaned in to whisper: “Pain as fantasy is one thing, Connie. But you won’t dig the real thing. Take me to Jaimie Halaquez...now.”
The hooded head nodded.
I couldn’t walk behind her like that and not attract attention, so I fell in at her side. She knew I had the knife, which I palmed, and her sideways glance and the resulting up-tilt of her chin made me think she could sense I was truly dangerous.
So together we exited the ballroom, right past a security guy, and were in that hallway off of which the private sessions were conducted behind closed doors. None of the security staff spoke to her, but they all watched her close—she was clearly the boss.
Only the guy guarding the last door on the other end of the hall said anything, when the masked woman reached for the doorknob.
“Mistress,” he said, and it sounded silly because he was another of the burr-headed Marine types, “you do know there is a session in progress.”
She merely nodded, and went on in, and I followed her.
What we saw was the best tableau yet, and the only one that I found really entertaining.
In a fairly small room otherwise stripped bare, Jaimie Halaquez was on his knees on the carpeted floor, wearing only black latex skivvies, and his hands were cuffed behind him and a ball-gag was in his mouth. His back was red and bleeding here and there, laced with maybe a dozen slashes thanks to a thin-lashed metal-tipped whip in the hands of a black-corseted young woman with very short dark hair. She had spike heels and sheer dark stockings and the familiar trappings of the Consummata’s craft. But like Gaita, she was a Latin girl.
Apparently Jaimie preferred to be beaten by his own kind.
He looked over his shoulder at us as the Consummata came in first, and swiveled around to gaze up at her like a praying man seeing a vision of the Madonna. He seemed delighted, seeing her, perhaps thinking he’d get special attention now from that fabled dominatrix.
He was half-right.
Then he saw me, and his eyes reflected a level of fear to which those play-acting girls in the ballroom could only aspire.
In her low, throaty tone, the Consummata said to her helper, “You may go,” and the little Latin chick rolled up her whip and vamoosed.
I grabbed Halaquez by the arm and hauled him to his bare feet.
“I’m taking this clown with me,” I said to my reluctant hostess. “It can be messy, or you can walk us out, and nobody gets hurt who didn’t pay to be.”
Halaquez, that big bad man, was shaking like he was freezing. Suddenly being in handcuffs and ankle chains wasn’t a good time.