Chapter 12

“You know what Victoria and I used to say to each other?” Heather said.

I looked at her. She was fighting back tears.

“God, we said it practically every day. ‘We’ve got to leave the life before the life leaves us.’ I had no idea how prophetic that would be.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I had a Japanese client when I worked at the Beavertail. He showed up like clockwork, once a month. Liked blow jobs. Really liked mine.” Heather pulled her legs up and hugged her knees. “He was a perfect client. Good hygiene. Great tipper. The other girls were jealous.

“One day he asked me if I’d go on a trip to Japan with him. A week—all expenses paid—plus twenty grand. I’d have my own room, fly first class, and all I had to do was—what I always did for him. It was totally against the rules, but the offer was too good to pass up.”

Heather jumped up and reached above the sofa to open a cabinet. She pulled out a framed photograph.

“My daughter,” she said, turning it toward me.

It was a lovely portrait of a tiny, fairylike child with white-blonde hair. She was sitting in a little rocking chair and holding a china doll.

“She’s beautiful,” I said. “What’s her name?”

“Hayley,” Heather said. She reached into the cupboard again and pulled out another picture.

The child was wearing the same smile, but in this picture, her eye sockets were hollow, and there were dark circles under them. She was wearing a knit cap and striped pajamas.

“My sweet little bald baby,” Heather said. “That picture was taken three weeks before she died.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Leukemia. We lived in Fallon.”

I looked at her blankly.

“Oh. You don’t know about Fallon’s reputation for killing kids.”

I shook my head.

“The desert has a thousand evil secrets,” she said. “In Fallon, it’s contaminated water. It’s killed a generation of babies.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m—I can’t imagine—”

“Sick kids. That’s what Victoria and I had in common. Big incentive to make a lot of money. That’s why I took Aki up on his offer. I figured if I didn’t tell anybody, the risk was pretty minimal, and it would buy good stuff for Hayley and my mom—she took care of Hayley when I was working.

“I told Bernice I was going to L.A. to look into new treatments for Hayley, which wasn’t a total lie. I never got any farther than that, because the first night out, I almost died.”

“Wow. What happened?”

“Fuck you,” Heather said.

“What? I—”

“Most people call it fugu. Big Japanese delicacy.”

“Blowfish?”

“Yeah. Aki and I went to this fancy dinner party at a mansion someplace in the hills, and he insisted I try everything. Afterward, I went to bed in a guest house next to the swimming pool. I almost didn’t wake up. Blowfish poisoning is usually fatal, but I guess I didn’t eat much, and it only paralyzed me for a few hours. Anyway, the house was empty by the time my legs would work again, and I had to hitch a ride with a FedEx driver to get out of there.”

“I never went back to work at the Beavertail,” Heather continued. “I never heard from Aki again, either. For all I know, he died. Hell, maybe everybody at the party did. All I cared about was that I was alive.” She paused, and her mouth turned up in a faint smile. “And Aki gave me five grand up front. It wasn’t enough to make up for nearly killing me, but it was still five grand. I took it as a sign to get out of the Beavertail while I was still breathing.” Heather stood up and shuddered a little.

“Hey, do you have a boyfriend?” she asked, forcing a cheerful note into her voice.

“Yeah,” I said. “Long-distance. But he’s coming here for Christmas and New Year’s.”

“Come with me.” Heather opened a door leading to the back end of the trailer. She flipped on an overhead light and beckoned to me to follow her.

I found myself in an elaborately decorated, fully stocked store. I stood there speechless, trying to take it all in. Clothing racks lined the side walls packed tight with dresses and sparkly outfits made of satin, lace, spandex, tulle, and feathers. Spike-heeled boots and shoes lined shelves above the racks. Display cases held corsets, bras, panties, garter belts, cosmetics, jewelry, gloves, whips, belts, chains, and an awesome array of what Daniel called self-diddling toys. A magazine rack was stocked with what looked like catalogues, and a cash register sat on a desk against the back wall, which was otherwise completely bare.

Oh, because the wall was a door, I figured out as I stared at it longer. The whole back end of the trailer could open up like a garage. And everything inside was held down with straps and bungee cords and wire fasteners to keep the merchandise in place while the rig was rolling down the road. Heather lived in a traveling store.

“My place of business,” Heather said as I ogled the display in front of me. “As you can see, American Beauty is only one of the lines we carry.”

I was too dumbfounded to speak until my eyes fell on a small framed certificate attached to the wall above the light switch:

This is to certify that Heather C. Vetra has qualified for and become a member of Mensa, the High IQ Society, it read.

“You belong to Mensa?” I asked.

Heather laughed.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s part of my grand self-improvement plan, too. I knew I’d never get to do the college thing, but for Mensa, all you have to do is pass the test, and you get the privilege of buying a nice certificate suitable for framing.”

She walked over to one of the clothing racks and unfastened the strap that was holding everything in place.

“It’s pretty impressive,” I said, referring to the store.

“Not really,” Heather said, misunderstanding my comment. “Mensa isn’t what you think. When I joined, I had no idea it was just a drinking club for fat Scrabble players.”

She pulled a strapless bronze satin minidress from the rack and continued working her way along it.

“But the cool thing is, they’re just thrilled that a former working girl has joined their ranks. They treat me like a celebrity, and—”

Heather’s voice caught, and she paused before continuing. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I never got to tell Victoria.”

“That you joined Mensa?” I asked.

“No. She knew about that. It was her idea. She said Mensa membership was the poor woman’s Harvard degree—elitist proof you have a brain for only fifty-nine bucks a year. I just never got to tell her that they’ve invited me to give the keynote speech at their next convention.”

Heather retrieved a pair of translucent stiletto-heeled shoes from the shelf above the rack and moved to one of the cases full of lingerie.

“In Detroit, next July,” she continued. “There are supposed to be people there from all over the world.”

Heather extracted a garter belt and a pair of stockings with sparkles. “I had no idea what ‘keynote’ meant, so I looked it up in the dictionary,” she said. “That didn’t help much, so I figure I’ll talk about whatever I want.”

Heather moved back toward me.

“I’m pretty sure I can keep them entertained with blow jobs and blowfish,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure you’re right,” I said, wondering whether the fat Scrabble players had any idea what they were in for.

Heather held up the satin dress.

“Ready to try something on?” she asked. “This’d look great with your coloring.”

“Um,” I said, caught off guard. “Um.”

“Well, you don’t have to. I just thought you might be going clubbing when your boyfriend’s in town.”

I looked at the dress. Daniel would love it, and my parents would be shocked. It was perfect!

“I’d love to try it on,” I said.

Heather walked to the end of one of the cases and untied a curtain that ran on a track on the ceiling.

“Voilà!” she said, pulling the curtain on the track. “Your dressing room!” She pulled a small stool from under the desk and set it inside the space created by the curtain. “Just let me know if you need another size,” she said, “although I’m pretty sure I got it right.”

While I was removing my slacks and sweater, Heather kept talking through the curtain.

“Victoria and I met at the Beavertail Ranch,” she said. “I’d been working there a year or so when she arrived, and we hit it off pretty quickly. We had a lot in common. Even beyond our sick kids.”

The dress fit remarkably well, and so did the shoes. I pulled the curtain aside and saw that Heather had opened up a three-paneled mirror on the far wall. As I teetered toward it, she laughed.

“You need some walking lessons,” she said.

I stared at myself in the mirror.

“You look great,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I knew Isabella Ponti was the designer for you.” I stared some more as Heather gathered my hair and clipped it up on top of my head. She was right. The dress needed an up-do to look right.

“It was really our grand schemes that brought us together,” Heather continued. “We used to talk about how someday I’d own a bank, and I’d finance her run for governor of Nevada. I was always into the money side of things. Victoria was more into social change.”

Heather kept talking while I changed back into my regular clothes.

“What really happened is that we went into business together—selling cosmetics to the working ladies of Nevada. That’s how we began, anyway.”

I stepped back outside the curtain. Heather was folding my dress into a large shopping bag. She added the garter belt, the sparkly stockings, the shoes, three hairclips, a necklace, and a variety of American Beauty products. I was dreading what it was all going to cost, but I was determined to pay it no matter what. The price of information, I told myself.

“At first, Victoria and I made the rounds of all the houses in Nevada selling American Beauty stuff—taking turns when we were off from the Beavertail. Then we realized that clothes were what the girls really wanted. It’s not hard to buy working clothes if you’re near Las Vegas, but try shopping for a garter belt in Winnemucca, or even a decent bra. Yeah, you can order stuff online, but there’s nothing like trying things on. And you can’t tell quality from a website. Believe me, there’s a lot of crap out there, and a lot of rip-off artists. We were providing a real service—designer clothes and lingerie right to your door. By the time I stopped working at the Beavertail, I couldn’t cram enough inventory into my car.” She spread her arms out. “So we got this trailer. Traveling store and home sweet home.”

Back in Heather’s living room-dining room-kitchen, we sat down again. As if on cue, Topanga bolted out of the bedroom, sprang into Heather’s lap, circled a few times, and fell down in a limp pile, her head hanging over Heather’s knees.

“Victoria could’ve left the Beavertail when I did,” Heather said, brushing her bangs out of her eyes. “We both said we would leave when the store could support us, but we didn’t. I had to almost die, and Victoria—” She paused as tears welled up in her eyes, and it took her a second to be able to talk again. “She couldn’t escape. The bastards got her.” She wiped her eyes and looked at me. Her mascara was smudged.

“Bastards?” I said. “More than one?”

“Kent Freeman, the Beavertail’s owner. Bernice Broyhill, the madam. They’re glad she’s dead. Besides her feud with Bobby, they hated all the headlines Victoria was generating. Most businesses love publicity, but not brothels. They’re afraid it will rile up the Bible thumpers and get them outlawed.”

“American Beauty must be glad she’s gone, too.”

“Yeah. Those bastards are terrified that their apple pie reputation will be ruined now that people know it’s popular with whores.” She rolled her eyes. “They lucked out as much as the Beavertail did. Bobby Marks was the perfect hit man, and they didn’t even have to pay him.”

The instant Heather said “hit man,” my mind flashed on the two guys in the silver Lexus. Who were they? What had they wanted? Suddenly, I was very glad I would be spending the night at David Nussbaum’s again.

Before I left, Heather gave me the bag of clothes and cosmetics. I don’t mean she handed it to me. She gave it to me. Free. Wouldn’t accept payment no matter how hard I tried. All she said was, “It’s not a gift. It’s payment in advance.”

“But I can’t—”

“Just do what you can.”

I know I shouldn’t have let her buffalo me into accepting a bribe, and I didn’t do it because I was eager to have the stuff. Heather was just stronger than me. I could no more refuse her offer than Topanga could escape having her hair brushed. I hate to admit it, but I caved in faster than a dog the size of a guinea pig.