“Save your money,” she said. “I can’t talk to you.”
She got up then and moved quickly away toward the door next to the stage. Bosch threw her name out after her but it was crushed by the sound of the music. He casually took a look around and noticed behind him that the tuxedo man was eyeing him through the darkness. Bosch decided he wasn’t going to stick around for Rhonda’s second show. He took one more gulp of beer—he hadn’t even touched his second glass—and got up.
As he neared the exit the tuxedo leaned back and knocked on the mirror behind him. It was then that Bosch realized there was a door cut into the glass. It opened and the tuxedo stepped to the side to block Bosch’s exit.
“Sir, could you step into the office, please?”
“What for?”
“Just step in. The manager would like a word with you.”
Bosch hesitated but through the door he could see a lighted office where a man in a suit sat behind a desk. He stepped in and the tuxedo came in behind him and shut the door.
Bosch looked at the man behind the desk. Blond and beefy. Bosch wouldn’t know whom to bet on if a fight broke out between the tuxedoed bouncer and the so-called manager. They were both brutes.
“I just got off the phone with Randy in the dressing room, she says you were asking about Tony Aliso.”
“It was Rhonda.”
“Rhonda, whatever, never-the-fuck-mind. She said you said he was dead.”
He spoke with a midwestern accent. Sounded like southside Chicago, Bosch guessed.
“Was and still is.”
The blond nodded to the tuxedo and his arm came up in a split second and hit Bosch with a backhand in the mouth. Bosch went back against the wall, banging the back of his head. Before his mind cleared, the tuxedo twirled him around until he was face-against-the-wall and leaned his weight against him. He felt the man’s hands begin patting him down.
“Enough of the wiseass act,” the blond said. “What are you doing talking to the girls about Tony?”
Before Bosch could say anything the hands running over his body found his gun.
“He’s strapped,” the tuxedo said.
Bosch felt the gun being jerked out of his shoulder holster. He also tasted blood in his mouth and felt rage building in his throat. The hands then found his wallet and his cuffs. Tuxedo threw them on the desk in front of the blond and held Bosch pinned against the wall with one hand. By straining to turn his head Bosch could watch the blond open the wallet.
“He’s a cop, let him go.”
The hand came off his neck and Bosch gruffly pulled away from the tuxedo.
“An L.A. cop,” the blond said. “Hieronymus Bosch. Like that painter, huh? He did some weird stuff.”
Bosch just looked at him and he handed the gun and cuffs and wallet back.
“Why’d you have him hit me?”
“That was a mistake. See, most cops what come in here, they announce themselves, they tell us their business and we help ’em if we can. You were sneaking around, Anonymous Hieronymus. We have a business to protect here.”
He opened a drawer and pulled out a box of tissues and proffered it to Bosch.
“Your lip’s bleeding.”
Bosch took the whole box.
“So this is true what she says you told her. Tony’s dead.”
“That’s what I said. How well did you know him?”
“See, that’s good. You assume I knew him and put that assumption in your question. That’s good.”
“So then answer it.”
“He was a regular in here. He was always trying to pick off girls. Told ’em he’d put ’em in the movies. Same old stuff. But, hell, they keep falling for it. Last two years he cost me three of my best girls. They’re in L.A. now. He left ’em high and dry once he got them there and did what he wanted with ’em. They never learn.”
“Why’d you let him keep coming in if he was picking off your girls?”
“He spent a lot of bread in here. Besides, there’s no shortage of quiff here in Vegas. No shortage at all.”
Bosch headed in another direction.
“What about Friday? Was he here?”
“No, I don’t—yes, yes he was. He stopped by for a short while. I saw him out there.”
With his hand he indicated a panel of video monitors showing every angle of the club and front entrance. It was equally as impressive as the setup Hank Meyer had shown Bosch at the Mirage.
“You remember seeing him, Gussie?” the blond asked the tuxedo.
“Yeah, he was here.”
“There you go. He was here.”
“No problems? He just came and went?”
“Right, no problems.”
“Then why’d you fire Layla?”
The blond pinched his lips tight for a moment.
“Now I get it,” he said. “You’re one of those guys what likes to weave a web with words, get somebody caught in it.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, nobody’s caught anywhere. Layla was Tony’s latest fuck, that’s true, but she’s gone now. She won’t be back.”
“Yeah, and what happened to her?”
“Like you heard, I fired her. Saturday night.”
“For what?”
“For any number of infractions of the rules. But it doesn’t really matter because it’s none of your business, now is it?”
“What did you say your name is?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then how ’bout if I just call you asshole, how would that be?”
“People ’round here call me Lucky. Can we get on with this, please?”
“Sure, we can get on with it. Just tell me what happened to Layla.”
“Sure, sure. But I thought you were here to talk about Tony, least that’s what Randy said.”
“Rhonda.”
“Rhonda, right.”
Bosch was losing his patience but managed to just stare at him and wait him out.
“Layla, right. Well, Saturday night she got into a beef with one of the other girls. It got a little nasty and I had to make a choice. Modesty is one of my best girls, best producers. She gave me an ultimatum: either Layla goes or she goes. I had to let Layla go. Modesty, man, she sells ten, twelve splits of champagne a night to those suckers out there. I had to back her over Layla. I mean, Layla’s good and she’s a looker but she ain’t no Modesty. Modesty’s our top girl.”
Bosch just nodded. So far his story jibed with the phone message Layla had left for Aliso. By drawing it out of the blond man, Bosch was getting a sense of how much he could be believed.
“What was the trouble between Layla and the other girl about?” he asked.
“I don’t know and don’t really care. Just your typical catfight. They didn’t like each other since day one. See, Bosch, every club has its top girl. And here, it’s Modesty. Layla was trying to move in on that and Modesty didn’t want to be moved in on. But I have to say, Layla was trouble since she came here. None of the girls liked her act. She stole songs from the other girls, wouldn’t stop with the pussy dust even when I told her, we just had a lot of trouble with her. I’m glad she’s gone. I got a business to run here. I can’t be babysitting a bunch of spoiled cunts.”
“Pussy dust?”
“Yeah, you know, she put that sparkly stuff on her snatch, made it sparkle in the dark and twinkle in the lights. Only problem is those sparkles come off and get on the suckers. She does a lap dance on you and you end up with a crotch that glitters. Then you go home and the wife figures it out and raises holy hell. I lose customers. I can’t have that shit, Bosch. If it hadn’t been Modesty, it would have been something else. I got rid of Layla when I got the chance.”
Bosch thought about the story for a few moments.
“Okay,” he said. “Just give me her address and I’ll be on my way.”
“I would but I can’t.”
“Don’t start that shit now. I thought we were having a conversation. Let me see your payroll re
cords. There’s got to be an address.”
The man called Lucky smiled and shook his head.
“Payroll? We don’t pay these broads a dime. They ought to pay us. Comin’ in here, it’s a license to make money.”
“You must have a phone number or an address. You want your man Gussie here to go down to Metro on an assaulting-a-police-officer clip?”
“We don’t have her address, Bosch, what can I tell you? Or her phone number.”
He held his hands out, palms up.
“I mean, I don’t have addresses on any of the girls. I set a schedule and they come in and they dance. They don’t show, they aren’t allowed back. See, it’s nice and simple, streamlined, that way. It’s the way we do it. And as far as the assault thing goes with Gussie, if you want to do that dance we’ll do it. But remember you’re the guy what came in here by hisself, never said who you were or what you wanted to nobody, had four beers in less than an hour and insulted one of the dancers before we asked you to leave. We can have affidavits to that effect in an hour.”
He raised his arms again, this time in a hands-off manner as if to say it was Bosch’s call. Bosch had no doubt that Yvonne and Rhonda would tell the story they were told to tell. He decided to cut his losses. He smiled glibly.
“Have a good night,” he said and turned to the door.
“You, too, Officer,” Lucky said to his back. “Come back when you have time and can enjoy the show.”
The door opened by some unseen electronic means apparently controlled from the desk. Gussie allowed Bosch to leave first. He then followed behind as Bosch went through the main door to the valet stand. Bosch gave a Mexican man with a face like a crumpled paper lunch bag his parking stub. He and Gussie then waited in silence for the car to be brought up.
“No hard feelings, right?” Gussie finally said as the car was approaching. “I didn’t know you was a cop.”
Bosch turned to face him.
“No, you just thought I was a customer.”
“Yeah, right. And I had to do what the boss told me to do.”
He put his hand out. In his peripheral vision Bosch could see his car still coming. He took Gussie’s hand and in a sharp move pulled the big man toward him at the same time he raised his knee and drove it into his groin. Gussie let out an oomph and doubled over. Bosch let go of his hand and quickly jerked the tail of the man’s jacket up over his head, pinning his arms in the tangle. Finally, he brought his knee up into the jacket and felt it connect solidly with Gussie’s face. The big man fell backward onto the hood of a black Corvette parked near the door just as the valet jumped out of Bosch’s rental car and came scrambling around to defend his boss. The man was older and smaller than Bosch. This one wouldn’t even be close and Bosch wasn’t interested in any innocent bystanders. He held his finger up to stop the man.
“Don’t,” he said.
The man considered his situation while Gussie groaned through his tuxedo jacket. Finally, the valet raised his hands and stepped back, allowing Bosch a path to the car door.
“At least somebody around here makes the right choices,” Bosch said as he slid in.
He looked through the windshield and saw Gussie’s body slide down the slope of the Corvette’s hood and fall to the pavement. The valet ran to his side.
As Bosch pulled out onto Madison, he checked the rearview mirror. The valet was pulling the jacket back over Gussie’s head. Bosch could see blood on the bouncer’s white shirt.
Bosch was too keyed up to go back to the hotel to sleep. He also had a bad mix of emotions weighing on him. Seeing the naked woman dancing still bothered him. He didn’t even know her but thought he had invaded some private world of hers. He also felt angry at himself for lashing out at the brute, Gussie. But most of all, what bothered him was that he had played the whole scene wrong. He had gone to the strip club to try to get a line on Layla and he got nothing. At best, all he had come up with was the probable explanation for what the specks of glitter found in the cuffs of Tony Aliso’s pants and the shower drain were and where they came from. It wasn’t enough. He had to go back to L.A. in the morning and he had nothing.
When he got to a traffic light at the beginning of the Strip, he lit a cigarette, then took out his notebook and opened it to the page on which he had written down the address Felton had given him earlier in the night.
At Sands Boulevard he turned east and within a mile he came to the apartment complex where Eleanor Wish lived. It was a sprawling development with numbered buildings. It took him a while until he found hers and then figured out which unit was hers. He sat in his car and smoked and watched her lighted windows for a while. He wasn’t sure what he was doing or what he wanted.
Five years earlier Eleanor Wish had done the worst and the best to him. She had betrayed him, put him in danger and she had also saved his life. She had made love to him. And then it all went bad. Still, he had often thought about her, the old what-might-have-been blues. She had a hold on him through time. She had been cold to him this night but he thought for sure the hold went both ways. She was his reflection, he had always been sure of that.
He got out of the car, dropped his dead cigarette and went to her door. She answered his knock quickly, almost as if she was expecting him. Or someone.
“How’d you find me? Did you follow me?”
“No. I made a call, that’s all.”
“What happened to your lip?”
“It’s nothing. Are you going to ask me in?”
She backed up to allow him to enter. It was a small place with spare furnishings. It looked as though she was adding things over time, as she could afford them. He first noticed the print of Hopper’s Nighthawks on the wall over the couch. It was a painting that always struck a chord with him. He had once had the same print on his own wall. It had been a gift from her five years before. A good-bye gift.
He looked from the painting to her. Their eyes met and he knew everything she had said earlier had been a front. He stepped closer to her and touched her, put his hand on her neck and ran a thumb along her cheek. He looked closely at her face. It was resolute, determined.
“This time it’s been a long time for me,” she whispered.
And he remembered that he had told her the same on the night they’d first made love. That was a lifetime ago, Bosch thought. What am I doing now? Can you pick up after so long and so many changes?
He pulled her close and they held each other and kissed for a long moment and then she wordlessly led him to the bedroom, where she quickly unbuttoned her blouse and dropped her jeans to the floor. She pressed herself to him again and they kissed while she worked her hands up his shirt, opening it and pressing her skin to his. Her hair smelled of smoke from the tables, but there was an underlying scent of perfume that reminded him of a night five years before. He remembered the jacaranda trees outside her window and how they put a violet snow on the ground.
They made love with an intensity that Bosch had forgotten that he had. It was a bruising, huffing physical act devoid of love, invigorated and driven solely, it seemed, by lust and maybe a memory. When he was done she pulled him toward her, into her, in rhythmic thrusts until she, too, reached her moment and subsided. Then, with the clarity of thought that always comes after, they became embarrassed about their nakedness, about how they had coupled with the ferocity of animals and now looked at each other as human beings.
“I forgot to ask,” she said. “You’re not married now, are you?”
She giggled. He reached to the floor to where his jacket had been thrown and pulled out the cigarettes.
“No,” he said. “I’m alone.”
“I should’ve known. Harry Bosch, the loner. I should’ve known.”
She was smiling at him in the darkness. He saw it when the match flared. He lit the cigarette and then offered it to her. She shook her head no.
“How many women have there been since me? Tell me.”
“I don’t know, just a few. There was one, we w
ere together about a year. That was the most serious one.”
“What happened to her?”
“She went to Italy.”
“For good?”
“Who knows?”
“Well, if you don’t know, then she isn’t coming back. At least to you.”
“Yeah, I know. That one’s been over a while.”
He was silent for a moment and then she asked him who else there had been.
“There was a painter I met in Florida on a case. That didn’t last long. After that, there’s you again.”
“What happened to the painter?”
Bosch shook his head as if to dismiss the inquiry. He didn’t really enjoy reviewing his ill-fated romantic record.
“Distance, I guess,” he said. “It just didn’t work. I couldn’t leave L.A., she couldn’t leave where she was.”
She moved closer to him and kissed him on the chin. He knew he needed a shave.
“What about you, Eleanor? Are you alone?”
“Yes. . . . The last man to make love to me was a cop. He was gentle but very strong. I don’t mean in a physical way. In a life way. It was a long time ago. At the time we both needed healing. We gave it to each other. . . .”
They looked at each other in the darkness for a long moment and then she came closer. Just before their mouths met she whispered, “A lot of time gone past.”
He thought about those words as she kissed him and then pushed him back on the pillows. She straddled him and started a gentle rocking motion with her hips. Her hair hung down around his face until he was in a perfect darkness. He ran his hands along her warm skin from her hips to her shoulders and then underneath to touch her breasts. He could feel her wetness on him but it was too soon for him.
“What’s the matter, Harry?” she whispered. “You want to rest a while?”
“I don’t know.”
He kept thinking of those words. A lot of time gone past. Maybe too much time. She kept rocking.
“I don’t know what I want,” he said. “What do you want, Eleanor?”
“All I want is the moment. We’ve fucked everything else up, it’s all we’ve got left.”
After a while he was ready and they made love again. She was very silent, her movements steady and gentle. She stayed on top of him, her face above him, breathing in short rhythmic clips. Near the end, when he was just trying to hang on, waiting for her, he felt a teardrop hit his cheek. He reached up and smeared the tears on her face with his thumbs.