My last phone call had been as much a shot in the dark as poking redial on Fred Meecham’s phone earlier. I’d copied the number off of the yellow legal pad on his library table. Twice and I’d probably have called it coincidence, but three made me wonder. The first mention of the nightclub had been on the book of matches on Flora Nuñez’s little hallway shrine, and in the Polaroid I’d taken from her bureau drawer. At her funeral, her friend Lucy Colón had revealed that she and Flora and some others used to go there of a late evening for drinks. And now the number on the yellow pad had been answered against a background of voices by a woman saying, “Viva!” I’d listened long enough for her to repeat it and then hung up. Maybe it was still just coincidence, but I wanted to know.
Viva! had become a cause célèbre several years back when some of the citizenry, who had been after the club owners for years, trying to pull their license, citing public nuisance and affront to public morality, had written enough letters to editors that it became news around New England. But the owners held firm. Between payoffs and the Constitution, it’s easy enough to do.
The area by the bar was packed deep with patrons so I had to worm through and then wait while the several bartenders set up drinks for the
waitresses who jockeyed them out to tables. On the spotlighted stage, a slender Asian pole dancer was beginning her routine. When one of the barmen came my way, I asked him over the noise if Danielle Frampton was working tonight. He asked me why I wanted to know, and I said I wanted to see her. He sounded Greek or Albanian; he took me literally, glanced at a clock, nodded, and held up five fingers. If it had been more, I’d have tried to make myself clearer, but five minutes I could wait. In a shadowy corner I found a table the size of a pie plate. A fresh-faced young waitress wearing a black vest over a white blouse, black miniskirt, and fishnet stockings appeared, and over the noise I told her a Heineken. In a pocket of her apron was a microcassette recorder. When I asked about it, she tapped it with a finger. “The pad is for orders, this I use for ideas.”
“What kind of ideas?”
“Stuff that occurs to me. Bits of conversation, characters I meet. Images. A Silly Putty face. That came to me the other night. See the assistant manager over there? By the office door? A Silly Putty face.”
“Bingo.”
She looked pleased. “Think so?”
“Nailed it. Writing your memoirs?”
“Screenplay. My mother thinks I’m nuts, a parochial school education and I’m walking around dressed like this. I quit Starbucks and came here because I wanted atmosphere.” She shook her head. “I’ve got to move on.”
“Don’t let me keep you.”
“No, I mean L.A. maybe, or Vancouver. It’s the same old same old here. Nothing exciting ever goes down. I mean you’re probably here tonight because you’re bored, right? Tired of four walls.”
“Pretty much,” I said.
“I’ll be twenty-one next month. It’s like I’m in an Indigo Girls song. My options are running out.”
“We’re all being drawn down into the quicksand of time,” I said.
“So true. Hey—is it okay if I use that?”
“Sure, if you want cliches.”
“That’s mostly what Hollywood stories are anymore. If you can retool them in just the right way, though, you’ve got a winner. Did you see American Beauty? You didn’t miss much. It’s nothing but clichés, with
a quarter-turn twist. It won Oscars.” She murmured the moldy chestnut about quicksand into her tape recorder. Then, to me, “What did you want to drink again?”
A few minutes later, another woman slid into the other chair. “Hello, Detective.”
It took me a second to recognize Danielle Frampton. She was wearing a thin robe, her platinum wig picking up faint highlights, despite the dimness. At my questioning look, she nodded toward the barman, who was watching us with potential menace in his dark eyes. She gave him a wave, and he returned his attention to making drinks. “So … long time, Alex,” she said over the ambient noise. “Are you slumming?”
“Business trip.”
She pouted. “You didn’t come to see me?”
“You’re the first one I asked for. Drink?”
“Can’t, I’m on next.”
We did a quick catch-up, and I asked about her son, who stayed with her mom nights Danielle worked. The blond wig and the stage makeup aged her a bit past her twenty-five or so, but there was something slightly different, and I wondered if she’d had cosmetic surgery. The Asian dancer had finished up to whistles and scattered applause, and a tall redheaded dancer with meaty thighs took the stage. “So what’s the business?” Danielle asked.
“Information. I’m interested in someone who used to come in here.”
“His name?”
“Hers. Flora Nuñez.”
“I’ve never heard … . Wait—the one in the paper? Killed at the carnival?” Her expression looked troubled, and slightly evasive. “What’s that got to do with here?”
“Maybe nothing. Is there someplace where we don’t need megaphones?”
“If you can wait ten more minutes or so, I’ve got a break.” I gave the “OK” sign, and she tapped my arm and drifted away, dematerializing into the crowd. I was there, I might as well watch the show. I turned toward the strobe-lighted stage and nursed my beer.
Danielle was somewhere between acquaintance and friend. She’d evidently had her troubles with narcotics some years back but, as far as I
knew, had gotten beyond them. She was a single mother, devoted to raising her young son. A year or so ago, a man had taken to turning up at the club every night and pestering her to go out with him. Then the phone calls began, and on a referral she asked me for advice—though she didn’t want rough stuff, she insisted. I checked the guy out and learned he was a basically harmless sad sack who worked in a muffler repair shop and lived with his widowed mother and spent his spare time hanging around Comic Book Heaven. Maybe he’d confused Danielle with one of the tawny, tights-clad sexpots who passed for superheroines in the comic books and had fixated on her, I don’t know. Getting him loose was a relatively easy job: I turned the game on him. I was reasonable with him and said, “You wouldn’t want your mother to know where you go nights, would you?” That was all it took. As far as I knew, he was back in Metropolis. As for Danielle, I admired her spunk, her desire to be a good person.
When the redhead finally got down to her gold hoop earrings and belly button lint, the lights winked out to wolf whistles and lusty cheers. A steadier light bathed the stage, and Danielle Frampton came on with barely a pause, her platinum wig sparkling like spun sugar. She didn’t need the distractions of strobe lights or a pole. She was actually a very good dancer; she had a lithe body—no need for cosmetic surgery there—and got away with a little more suggestion and less flesh. Still, by the time the set ended, there wasn’t much I needed to imagine. I paid my tab, with a few extra bucks for the budding screenwriter. I waited by the door and soon saw Danielle coming my way, dressed in a faux leopard-fur coat and white stretch pants. We went outside and stood in the glow of the marquee lights.
I handed her the snapshot that I had found in Flora Nuñez’s apartment. She looked at it and nodded. “I remember that. It was taken in the spring.” She pointed out the other three women sitting with her around the table. “There’s like a crew of us that got to know each other.”
“And the guys?”
“They’re off-duty cops.”
“City cops?”
She didn’t miss my surprise. “I think so. They come in sometimes on their nights off. They’re okay.”
“Do you know their names?”
“First names.”
“How about this one?” I indicated the guy lifting his glass.
“Bob, maybe. Or Paul?”
“How about Paul Duross?”
“That sounds right. I haven’t seen him in a while. Or any of them, actually.”
I wanted time to think, to try to make sense of the details that were swarming like wet snow, but Danielle was restless to get back inside. She had begun to shiver in the cooling night. “What about Flora Nuñez? Did she come here often?”
“Only sometimes. I got to know her and some others when we took night classes. But this is the only other place I saw them. We weren’t tight or anything.”
“Did she ever mention someone named Troy Pepper?”
“The guy who killed her? No, I don’t remember her ever mentioning him. The newspaper is the only place I ever heard of him. Why? What’s this about? Are you working on that case?”
“I don’t know. I guess I am slumming.” I thanked her and touched her cheek. “Wrap up warm when you go home.”