“We’ll pick you up at your hotel,” went the pitch, “deliver you to the club, deliver you safely home. You can drink all you want, you don’t have to worry about a DUI, and if you happen to want some company on the way back-say, one of the girls, we can arrange for that, too, no extra charge. And if you want to write it off, no problem-we’ll give you a clean receipt. We can even give you a restaurant check, if you want it, to prove you were going to a business dinner.”
So seeing as how Frank was taking customers there all the time, and seeing as how he’d usually end up driving them home as well, he ended up hanging out there a lot.
The girls were pretty, he had to admit that.
Eddie Monaco knew how to find talent.
And he was generous with it.
“You want anything,” he’d tell Frank, “you don’t even have to ask. A sandwich, a drink, a blow job, it’s yours.”
Eddie liked having mobbed-up guys around. It kept things copacetic and gave the place a whiff of notoriety and danger, which brought customers through the door. What did he call it-“gangster chic”? And anyway, Mike and Frank were driving a lot of business up to those doors, so a meal, a little booze, a hummer in the back room, what was that?
Peanuts to Eddie Monaco.
Frank would accept the free food and the comped drinks, but he never took Eddie up on the BJs. There was something sad enough about the girls already, without them having feign enthusiasm on their knees in the office, and besides, with a toddler at home, he was trying to be faithful to his wife.
It wasn’t that hard to do. The strippers looked sexy at first-it was because of the lights, the pounding music, the atmosphere of undiluted eroticism-but the appeal wore off in a hurry. Especially when you hung out at the bar and got to know them, talked with them on their breaks. Then, sooner or later-usually sooner-the same tired, depressing stories came out of their mouths. The childhood sexual abuse, the cold, distant fathers, the alcoholic mothers, the teenage abortions, the drug addictions.
Especially the drugs.
These girls were so coked up, it was a wonder they could everstop dancing. Unless they hooked up with some sugar daddy, they were just caught in the spin cycle, until they were used-up coke freaks with more lines on their face than up their nose, and then they were out the door.
And a fresh crop came in.
There was never a shortage of girls.
There was never a shortage of anything, not in the world of Eddie Monaco.
Eddie had five vintage cars, including the Rolls he usually drove around in. He had women-lots of women, and not just the dancers, either-and the women had lots of jewelry that came from Eddie’s fingers. Eddie had a big house in Rancho Santa Fe and a condo in La Jolla.
Eddie had nice threads, Rolex watches, and wads of cash.
The other thing Eddie had a lot of was debts.
They went with his ambitions. Nothing was too good for Eddie, and nothing was too good for the Pinto Club. He spent millions remodeling the place-millions he didn’t have-but he wanted the Pinto to be the premier topless club in California, the base for a whole string of clubs. Eddie wanted to be king of the strip club world, and he didn’t mind spending money to get there.
Problem was, he was spending other people’s money.
Eddiewas the king of OPM. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of it, but it didn’t seem to bother him at all. He’d pay off his old debts in fresh OPM, and that way he just kept kiting the debt around. Somehow, people were always willing to give him money.
One of them was a loan shark named Billy Brooks.
Billy used to hang out at the Pinto, ogling the tits and ass and cruising for customers. His two goons were usually with him-Georgie Yoznezensky, known, for obvious reasons, simply as “Georgie Y,” and Angie Basso, who was actually Eddie Monaco’s favorite dry cleaner when he wasn’t breaking legs for Billy.
Angie was your typical goombah, but Georgie Y, Georgie Y was acase. A tall, gangly immigrant from Kiev with thick wrists and a thicker head, a guy so stupid and violent even the Russian mob up in the Fairfax district didn’t want him hanging around. Somehow he hooked up with Billy, and Billy gave him occasional work, even getting him a job as a bouncer at the Pinto.
Eddie gave him the job as a favor to Billy, and why not-Billy had loaned Eddie $100,000.
And Billy wanted to get paid back.
Eddie blew him off.
Billy would keep coming by the club, asking Eddie for his money. At first, Eddie would tell him, “Tomorrow, I promise,” or “Next week, Billy, sure thing.” He’d put him off with free girls, who would take Billy back into the office for a blow job, or down the street to a motel for a quickie.
But Billy wasn’t satisfied with pussy, Billy wanted hismoney.
And he wasn’t getting it.
And he had to sit there and watch while Eddie rented entire clubs for a night and threw himself a party, or drove around in his Rolls with Playboy models cuddled up to him, or gave C-note tips to doormen and coat-check girls and just generally threw money around like paper airplanes and didn’t pay Billy penny one.
It didn’t help that Eddie was handsome, Eddie was cool, and that Billy was neither. He had a mutt of a face, and this hangdog expression. Bad hair and bad skin. It must have been, Frank thought years later, like Richard Nixon watching Bill Clinton pull chicks.
If Eddie had just been nice to the guy, things might have gone down different, but Eddie got tired of Billy nagging him all the time and started blowing the guy off, ignoring him, not returning calls, brushing right past him in the club like he wasn’t there.
“What am I?” Billy said to Mike Pella one night. “An asshole?”
This was New Year’s Eve, and they were sitting at the bar of the Pinto Club, where Billy had arranged to meet Eddie to talk about the situation.
The fact that it was New Year’s Eve had not sat well with Patty.
“New Year’s Eve,” she’d complained. “I thought we could go out.”
“I have to work.”
“Work,” she said. “Hanging around with a bunch of whores.”
“They’re not whores,” Frank said. Well, some of them aren’t, he thought. “They’re dancers.”
“What they do isn’t dancing.”
“It’s the busiest night of the year. Do you know the tips I’ll make?” Frank asked. Besides, he thought, going out on New Year’s Eve to a restaurant or a hotel? Paying double for the same meal, which was usually subpar, with slow service and a mandatory 18 percent service charge thrown into the deal? When I could be out making good money? “Look, we’ll go outtomorrow night. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
“No one goes out on New Year’s night,” Patty said.
“So we can get a table,” Frank said.
“Big fun,” Patty said. “Two cheap people in an empty restaurant.”
“I’ll call you at midnight,” Frank said. “We’ll smooch over the phone.”
For some reason, that didn’t seem to mollify her. She didn’t even speak to him when he left.
When Frank got to the club, he sat at the bar, listening to Billy Brooks bitch to Mike. Mike and Billy had done time together in Chino, so they were old friends. As Frank sat there that night, listening to Billy whine about his Eddie Monaco problem, he knew what Mike would say about that, and Mike did.
“No offense, Billy,” Mike said, “but you should know people are talking, the way you’re letting Eddie laugh at you. It can’t be good for business.”
No, it can’t, Frank thought.
A loan shark has two assets-cash and respect. You let one guy not pay you-and throw it in your face in public, to boot-and pretty soon, the rest of your customers get the idea they don’t need to pay you, either. Word gets out that you’re a sucker, a pussy, a wimp, and then you can kiss your money good-bye. It ain’t ever coming back, principal or interest.
Then you’d better give up the shylock business and go into something you’re more suited to-like nursing or library science.