I was lying on a chaise lounge by the pool at the Lauderdale Tennis Club, eyes closed, every limb in deep relaxation. It was one of those bell-clear mornings in early February that make believers out of the snowbirds who experience them. For somebody like me, who’d been on the pro tennis circuit until a chronic knee persuaded my thirty-something head to find it a more permanent home, the weather of South Florida was just the ticket, and the competitive level of the other members at the Club kept me sharp enough on the courts to still feel like a player.
“Rory,” said Don Floyd’s voice from standing height over my lounge, “this lady would like to speak with you.”
Of course, I also had to earn a living.
Opening my eyes, I swung my legs over the edge of the chaise before standing myself. I’m nearly six-three, but I didn’t tower over the woman next to Floyd. He wore an impish grin that, even at eighty-plus, would warn wives that they wouldn’t want their husbands hanging out with him in bars. One look at his companion, and I could understand why Floyd was grinning.
She was a stunner, in heeled sandals that helped the elevation, though I’d still have bet on five-seven or -eight barefoot. The big hair in crow-wing black probably benefited from a bottle, with heavy pancake and warpaint on the facial features. Her breasts pushed the envelope of whatever pink material the long-sleeved, bare-shouldered top was spun from, and her waist seemed cinched by the belt holding up lime green Capri pants that rippled when the woman changed stance from hipshot-left to hipshot-right.
From behind sunglasses with reflector lenses the size of plums, she said, “Calhoun, you’re gonna advertise yourself as a private eye, the least you could do is leave word with the gate guard.”
The Club has a strict security policy: nobody gets past the sentry box unless a resident in one of the eight condo buildings leaves the visitor’s name. “I didn’t get a call telling me someone would be coming.’’
“Well,” said Don Floyd, his grin widening, “I think I’ll just leave you both to your business.”
As he moved off, the woman looked around the pool area. I figured every male—and some females—would be focused on her, but she didn’t appear to notice.
She said, “How’s about we move out of the sun, okay?”
“Sure.” I gestured to the part of the patio under the porch’s orange-tiled roof.
She preceded me, her rolling gait in the heels reminding me of the expression “poetry in motion.” But again, I didn’t have the feeling my potential client was conscious of it. In fact, to the extent you can read somebody behind opaque shades, I’d have said she was distracted.
We were seated in the white resin chairs around the small, matching table before the woman said, “Monica Lewin.”
I was thinking that the name would have been a cross for her, what with the Clinton scandal. But as she extended her right hand to shake, I noticed each vein on the back stood away from the bones as the flesh sank between them, and I immediately upped her age from late twenties to high thirties.
“Rory Calhoun,” I replied as we clasped briefly.
“And that’s your real name?” Lewin withdrew her hand to hold the strap of a shoulder bag.
“My mother had a thing for the movie star, to the point of even marrying a guy with the same last name. When I came along, I’m afraid the first—”
“I don’t need your life story.”
That stopped me.
Lewin shook her head, took off the shades. Her eyes were darker than her pants, but not by much. “Look, I’m sorry, I...” Now she sighed, and I got a whiff of bourbon strong enough that I’d have said I was holding a glass of the stuff under my nose, even though the clock on the wall over her hair read only ten thirty.
I said, “Want to tell me about it?”
Lewin’s eyes now seemed more jaded than jade. “What, my problem, or the fact that I gargle with Wild Turkey?”
I started to like her. “I’m guessing they might be related.”
A nod this time. “That they are.” Now she resettled her butt on the resin chair, the pants squeaking a little. “Okay, the reason I asked about your name is I go professionally by ‘Monica LaMonica.’”
“Professionally.”
“I’m an exotic dancer. A ‘gentlemen’s club’ called Cottontail’s.”
Driving north of downtown Lauderdale, I’d been by the place, though never in it. “Go on.”
“You remember the headlines, last month?”
“Afraid I’m not much for newspapers.”
A slightly disgusted look. “Another girl from Cottontail’s was strangled on a cold night with her own scarf in the lot outside the club?”
The penny dropped. “I remember some TV news on it.”
“All right.” Lewin squared her shoulders now, as though about to deliver bad tidings. “Her name—stage name—was ‘TNT,’ which actually stood for her real initials, ‘Tara Nancy Tate.’ Only the animals at Cottontail’s had a different nickname for her.”
“Which was?”
“‘Two New Tits.’”
Cosmetic surgery wasn’t exactly unusual in South Florida. “I’m not sure I see where we’re going with—’’
“Where we’re going—” Lewin, realizing her voice was rising, glanced around at several people in tennis togs stopping to stare at her, then repeated more softly, “Where we’re going with this is, the cops think I was the one who killed her.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, well, that either makes you the best choice for me, or the worst.” The jaded eyes again. “You’re thinking I’m a flake, right?”
Maybe Lewin’s clairvoyance came from a career looking out at men watching her. “Pretty close.”
A grunt that wasn’t quite a laugh, but seemed to change her mood. “An honest man. I don’t run into many.”
“Why do the police think you murdered Ms. Tate?”
“My, my. Polite, too, aren’t we, doll?” Then she squared her shoulders again. “Christ, I’m slipping into role here. Okay, here’s the story. Tara was a natural, but a little small up-north, so she had a boob job.” Lewin closed her eyes a moment. “You know what’s involved?”
“Roughly.”
“Yeah, well, ‘roughly’ is the right word. Couple of years ago a friend of mine wanted one, made me promise to ‘be there for her.’” Lewin looked away, toward the pool where two girls maybe eight and ten were playing catch with a beach ball, laughing and squealing. “They painted her—naked—with this red stuff, maybe disinfectant or something. Then they...cut her, and pushed these implants—like yellow lily pads—through the slits. Only it was more shoving ten pounds into a five-pound bag, and I...I had to leave. Or throw up.”
I didn’t say anything.
After a moment, Lewin clucked her tongue. “But that’s what Tara was willing to go through to be a featured performer.”
“Meaning a star?”
“Star?” Another almost-laugh. “Yeah, that’s what she was, all right. Went around the country—well, the Southeast, anyway. Clubs all the way to Virginia, she said. But her husband was tied down here with a sick mother, so Tara did all the traveling on her own. Then she got tired of that, but not tired of the dancing. So she went up to Rocky, and said she wanted to—”
“Rocky?”
“Manager of Cottontail’s and tough as they come. Well, once Rocky got a look at Tara’s audition, that was it for me.”
“I don’t follow you.”
The eyes went past jaded to just plain tired. “Tara replaced me as the lead act.”
“The reason the police suspect you?”
“That, and Tara—well, we had a little catfight that night before she got killed.” Lewin used one hand to push the opposite sleeve of her top halfway up her forearm. “She gave me these scratches, and I guess when the cops checked under Tara’s fingernails, they found enough of my skin for that DNA thing.”
“You have an alibi for the time she was killed?”
“No, but near as I can figure, that’s true for Tara’s husband—or widower, now, I guess—and the Professor, too.”
“The Professor.”
Lewin mentioned the college. “He’d come to watch Tara, and I mean ogle her. The other animals, they’d hoot, or even heckle. But Jason—what he called himself, and talk about miracles, turns out that was his real name. Anyway, Jason would just sit there...I don’t know, ‘in awe,’ maybe?” Now Lewin closed her eyes. “He’d even look at me that way, sometimes.”
It was painful just to hear her say it. “I’m still not sure I see where I come in.”
She opened the eyes, blazing now. “Look, Cottontail’s isn’t any palace like Solid Gold or Pure Platinum. It’s a run-of-the-mill strip joint. But it’s where I make my living. Or used to.”
“This Rocky fired you?”
“Didn’t have to. Publicity like we got from the killing? You think even the wives and girlfriends who don’t wanna know what their guys are doing some nights would let them come to a place tied to a murder? So we lost most of our regulars, and I’m dancing double shifts for nickels and dimes from tourists who won’t pay the freight at one of the better places.”
“Why not move on to another club, then?”
The fire in Lewin’s eyes nearly went out. “My age? I’m gonna start auditioning again?” A wave that took in more than the pool area. “All the managers want is flawless. Tits, legs, ass. Without the surgery—‘augmentation,’ liposuction—that’s just not realistic.” Now she sighed again, the bourbon scent seeming sour now. “Besides, they’d see me as this Jonah from a club where another dancer got murdered. So I need to prove somebody else killed Tara.”
“Which is why we’re talking now?”
“Yeah. I want off the hook and back to normal.”
I shifted in my chair, felt my arms wanting to cross. The universal body language for “no.”
Lewin said, “You’re not gonna help me, are you?”
“It’s an open homicide. The police don’t take kindly to—”
“I can pay.”
“Wouldn’t change their mind-set.”
Lewin rolled her shoulders this time, her breasts roaming inside the pink top. “But if I laid you, that’d change your mind-set?”
I could feel a definite stirring below the drawstrings of my trunks. “Not that it isn’t tempting, but I try not to mix business with pleasure.”
“Or lechure?” The grunted, almost-laugh a third time. “To be honest, me neither. One rule I’ve always had. But try telling the animals that.” Lewin shook her head—more her hair actually—and put the shades back on like they needed to be clamped in place. “At least you’re honest about it. Not like the jerk managers who audition you and then say with a smarmy smile that you’re not quite right for ‘our image,’ when what they’re really trolling for is the kind of ‘incentive’ that sexual harassment was supposed to stop. But that’s another story.” She stood abruptly. “Thanks for your time, anyway.”
I rose, and we shook hands to say goodbye. “I’m sorry, Ms. Lewin.”
“Yeah, well, I got to look on the bright side, you know?”
“Which is?”
“You’re the first fucking guy in five years who’s called me Ms. Lewin.’”
I had a tough match that afternoon at 5:00 p.m. against the number-three nineteen-year-old from Canada who was staying at the Club. His game consisted of a big first serve—or service, as Don Floyd and some of the other older members still call it—and booming topspin forehands. Nevertheless, I had the kid down 6-5 in the first set, when my own serve bailed. He went on to beat me in the tie-break, then cakewalked over everything I tried in the second set.
Disgusted with myself after we finished, I spent half an hour in the hot tub, resolving to turn in early and carpe diem the next morning with an hour of serving practice on one of the back courts, maybe with Floyd watching to see if he could spot something mechanically wrong in what I was doing.
In fact, fourteen hours later I was at the outdoor tiki bar overlooking the pool, about to order some wake-up coffee. Floyd, sitting on a stool with a newspaper in front of him, spotted me and beckoned.
Sliding onto the stool next to him, I followed his finger again, pointing now to a headline in the Sun-Sentinel, Lauderdale’s major daily. It read second dancer’s death solves first, with a head-and-shoulders promo portrait of a smiling, younger Monica Lewin next to one of an even younger redhead captioned Tara Nancy Tate.
Don Floyd said, “Wasn’t this Lewin the lady from yesterday?”
Closing my eyes, I nodded.
Detective Kyle Cascadden looked across his desk at me and said with a deep-South accent, “Heard about you from Lourdes.”
Lourdes Pintana was the sergeant in charge of the Fort Lauderdale Homicide Unit. Cascadden and I were sitting in the unit’s large squad room, the high ceilings not doing much to freshen the moldy air. He wore a short-sleeve dress shirt with a same-shade tie, like a gangster from a thirties movie, but for the badge on the right side of his belt near a big, holstered revolver. Cascadden’s sandy hair, thinning and short on top, spilled in ragged curls over his collar in back.
Reclining in the swivel chair till it creaked, he said, “So, Aun-dray, what does a tennis-bum private eye want from me?”
I assumed Cascadden meant “Andre Agassi,” but I was in no position to take offense at the “bum” part. “Monica Lewin tried to retain me yesterday.”
“‘Tried to,’ huh? Good thing, otherwise her hanging herself last night woulda meant you got fired.”
Cascadden laughed, a grating, guttural sound, and I seriously thought about walking out right then. But that wouldn’t have eased my conscience any. “Suicide for sure?”
“Plain and simple. Tied one end of her bathrobe sash to the kitchen doorknob—living room side—and tossed it over the top. Then got up on a stepladder—kitchen side, now—and tied the other end of the sash around her neck. One leg kick—” Cascadden sent his foot into the air behind his desk, “—and old Monica ‘exotic-danced’ down the big runway in the sky.” Another laugh.
I said, “No evidence of anybody else being involved?”
“Just the manager from her strip club, finding the body.” Cascadden darkened. “Why would you think there might be?”
“Seems kind of odd, the woman comes to see me for help mid-morning, then kills herself by midnight.”
He cocked his head. “How’d you know what time she got found?”
“Newspaper.”
Cascadden hunched forward a little, and actually seemed concerned for a moment. “Look, Aun-dray, the city don’t need this kind of publicity. Bad enough that first one, Tara, gets strangled. Twenty years ago, the college boys and girls on spring break wouldn’ta given a flying fuck, but now that Lauderdale’s all yuppie respectable, Chamber of Commerce just as soon see this case closed. Which Homicide says it is.”
“Any other indications of suicide?”
A third laugh. “You could say that. Woman had enough tracks on her arms to start a railroad.”
With Lewin’s long-sleeved top, I hadn’t seen any needle marks.
“Not to mention an empty bottle of Wild Turkey on the kitchen counter, reaching distance from where she lynched herself.”
Which I couldn’t argue against, either. “How about a note?”
“No.” Cascadden leaned back again, the chair creaking the only sound in the room. “But then, not many leave one. Plus, you got to figure Monica’s all fucked up in the boyfriend department, account of I never run across a stripper yet who wasn’t.”
“Lewin had a boyfriend?”
Kyle Cascadden clenched his jaw. “Time for you to go, Aun-dray. I got other cases to work.”
“Especially since this one’s ‘closed,’ right?”
“Out!”
Cottontail’s fronted on a side street within sight of Route 1 North. Given the time of day, I wasn’t surprised there were only a few cars in the parking lot to the side of the building, where Tara Tate had been strangled.
Leaving my Chrysler Sebring convertible—purchased with my last tournament check—in as much shade as I could find, I walked up to the entrance, a white, fuzzy tail as big as a basketball over it. The tail appeared to be on a pendulum mount, so I imagined at night it would “twitch” over anybody going into the club.
The door opened to my tug on one of the handles, shaped like bunny ears. Inside, the canned music was loud, but the lighting low, and it took a minute for my eyes to adjust.
Except, that is, for seeing the very young woman on a slightly raised platform, half out of her minimal clothing and showing babyfat at most junctions, caught briefly in the light from the door’s being open like a deer in high beams.
Out of the darkness, a female voice—raspy from cigarettes, booze, or both—yelled, “Shut the fucking door!” Then, in a more coaxing tone, “Go ahead, Hon. Finish your routine.”
Maybe I’d spoiled the mood, but I got the impression it was more the young woman’s overall nervousness that made her seem shy, even scared, as she did a stiff bump/grind/strip that was all corners instead of curves.
When the “song”—some techno, bass-dominated dirge—finally ended, the raspy voice said, “Okay, Hon. You start Friday. Be here by six, and stop at that store I told you about, pick up three outfits a size too small for you.”
The young woman nodded, then crossed her hands over her breasts before she realized at least a couple of fingers were needed to pick up her clothes.
I now could make out the silhouette of a petite woman sitting at the bar, a plume of smoke also backlit to the point of inspiring romance. As I drew near her, I was aware of the younger one from the stage shuffling off into the shadows, clothes now clutched over her rump.
“Who the fuck are you?” from the barstool.
“My name’s Rory Calhoun.”
The kind of laugh that told me the petite woman was old enough to recognize the actor. Up close, though, she surprised me. Her hair was conservatively permed, and her dress looked more Laura Ashley than Victoria’s Secret.
“So, guy, what do you want?”
“I’d like to see the manager.”
“You are.”
Maybe she meant, “You do?” I said, “Rocky.”
Extending the hand without the cigarette, the woman said, “That’s me, Roxanne Devereaux, only I don’t do boy-shows. And even if I did, you got the face, maybe, but that one arm is way-too-much bigger than the other for—’’
“It’s from tennis. Your serving side gets disproportionate.”
Tennis?” Devereaux stubbed out the cigarette. “The fuck are you doing here?”
After showing her my investigator’s license, I told her.
“Oh, Jesus. Better come on back to the office.”
We went past a couple of padlocked doors before reaching one that stood ajar. If there was anybody else in the place, I didn’t see or hear them.
The office proved another surprise: sectional furniture with upholstery like oatmeal, oriental rug, cherry desk.
Devereaux said, “You expected a fucking dump, right?”
Another woman in the trade who could read my mind.
She waggled nicotine-stained fingers around the stale air. “Well, this is where I spend a lot of hours, so why shouldn’t it be comfortable?” Devereaux motioned to one of the sectional pieces. “Sit, we’ll talk.”
After we both were settled, I said, “Why would Monica Lewin come to see me about Tara Tate’s murder, then kill herself?”
“You’re the detective, guy.”
I tried a different approach. “I understand you found Ms. Lewin’s body.”
“Yeah.” Subdued now. “Monica was supposed to dance a shift last night. When she didn’t show, I went apeshit, drove over to her place. “Jesus, I need a drink more than a smoke.”
Devereaux opened the lower drawer of her desk, came out with a single-malt scotch and one tumbler. “Join me?”
“No, thanks.”
She poured a generous couple of ounces into the glass, then downed it, shot-style. “Okay,” in a raspier voice, “let’s have your questions.”
“Ms. Lewin told—”
“Look, let’s drop the formality, huh? She was ‘Monica,’ I’m ‘Rocky,’ and that poor heifer you saw out front is gonna be whatever I can think of to call her to try and drum up a little business.”
Since the young woman was already hired, I said, “She seemed kind of self-conscious.”
“She seemed kind of awful, but losing Tara and even Monica inside thirty days is a little tough on the stable, you know?”
So much for “subdued,” too, though Lewin had told me Rocky was “as tough as they come.” I said, “You don’t seem too emotionally involved.”
“Emotionally...?” I expected a raspy laugh, but Devereaux kept surprising me, coughing and swiping a hand across her eyes before reaching for a pack of cigarettes and what turned out to be a lighter in the form of—what else?— a rabbit bending over to touch its toes. “Look, that poor thing out there? She’s two, maybe three months gone, and needs for the baby whatever money the animals out front will stuff wherever on her they can reach.”
Devereaux used the same catchphrase Lewin had for Cottontail’s customers. “I meant more about Monica.”
“I know what you meant, guy. Monica, now she had it once.” Devereaux took a deep drag, sent it out in another artsy plume. “When she first got started, Monica was just a kid—younger than the heifer, even. Had to lie about her age to get a job.” Now the raspy laugh. “And Monica was stupid enough to last long enough to come full circle.”
“Meaning, lying about her age?”
“You saw the girl. How old?”
“Thirty-seven, thirty-eight.”
“Try forty-three. But Monica wouldn’t go under the knife, so her ass was puckering from the cellulite, and without the suspension bridge she wore up top, those tits would sag low enough you wouldn’t want her carrying your cafeteria tray.”
Lovely image. ‘‘Rocky—”
“And the track marks on her arms? Jesus, why couldn’t she shoot the shit between her toes like a normal person?”
I didn’t have an answer for that one.
Devereaux took another long puff. “No, once you’re over the hill, it shows. And not just in the goods. When Monica danced the last few years, it was only shake-and-jiggle, like she was floating on drugs, though she swore she wasn’t, at least for the shows. But there was no choreography anymore, not even any...eroticism with the exoticism, if you get my drift.”
I thought back to the jaded green eyes. “But I understand this Tara was different?”
“Tara? Oh, guy, you never saw her, now, did you?”
“No.”
“Tara—‘TNT’ for short, which fit her like a glove. Original Sin with a cheerleader’s face, and just the right amount of...surgical enhancement. Not those volleyballs some of the girls go for.”
“So who’d kill her?”
Devereaux flicked some ashes. “I didn’t know Monica so well, I’d’ve said she’d be the one.”
“Because Tara had replaced her as the star act?”
“Yeah, but Monica was on the slide, and she knew it, between the heckling getting worse and the tips getting smaller. So I never saw her as the killer, even if that idiot cop did.”
No need to ask Devereaux who she meant. “Other candidates?”
“Tara’s husband. He wasn’t real happy about her dancing, period, and the time she spent on the road made it rough on both of them.”
I had the husband’s name from the Sun-Sentinel article, and remembered Lewin mentioning his mother. “On Barry Cardiff and...?”
“And Tara. Who the hell we talking about here, guy?” Devereaux stubbed out the second cigarette. “She’d call me once in a while, from East Bugfuck, Alabama, or wherever, crying about how life traveling alone from club to club really sucked.”
“Tara called you?”
“I gave the girl her first boost, back when I was house mom at one of the nicer joints in Lauderdale. Showed her how to do makeup, some of the moves—though, truth to tell, Tara was a natural in the dance department. And not just on a stage: She could fly across the room like a ballerina, or twist herself into a pretzel, give even guys with lousy eyesight the best beave in the Southeast.”
“But when Tara came home, her husband Barry must have been happy?”
“Or relieved,” said Devereaux. “Or even more suspicious, if he figured Tara earned her money other than from Polaroids.”
“Polaroids?”
“The camera, guy. On the road, a lot of the girls will let any customer with ten bucks have his picture taken with her hanging out and hanging all over him. Something to show the boys back on the chicken ranch, you know?”
“So, by ‘other than Polaroids,’ you mean—”
“The dirty deed. But I’ve never tolerated any of that in Cottontail.”
I nodded like I believed her.
Devereaux said, “I’ll give Tara this, though. She had a brain, and she had a plan.”
“A plan?”
“To retire. Or move on. Lots of the girls—Monica’s a prime example—stay too long at the fair. But Tara, now she had it worked out. So many shifts a week here, so many weeks a year, less operating expenses like costumes and capital improvements—’’
“Capital...?”
“The boob job, guy. Then, after so many years, out of the life and back to her real one.”
“And Tara was well on her way with this plan?”
“So she said.”
Felt like a dead end. “Monica mentioned somebody named Jason. A professor?”
A closed look now. “I don’t like for anybody to be bothering my customers.”
I named his college for her. “Would you rather have that stupid cop do it?”
A sigh as Devereaux snagged a third cigarette. “So talk to the Professor. I can’t stop you.”
“You have a last name for him?”
Another sigh, or maybe just the expulsion of smoke. “Nolan. But I don’t know what he teaches.”
“Monica have a boyfriend?”
“Not that I ever saw, though a lot of the girls play that hand close to the vest, least around the club.”
“Anybody here close to Tara or Monica? Besides you, of course.”
Devereaux stopped her cigarette on the way to her lips. “Lacey, maybe?”
“L—A—C…”
“E—Y. ‘Missy Lacey,’ though ‘Lacey’s’ her real first name, just like Monica’s was. Lacey Peevers, so you can see why we didn’t go with the last one.”
“This Lacey works here, too, then?”
“Couple nights a week. She’s got a kid, but no man, so she does lap dancing, table dancing. Not in Tara’s league, though, looks-wise. Not even Monica’s, till the last few years.”
“Can I speak to Lacey?”
“Long as it’s not on my time, okay?”
“Then I’ll need a home address.”
Sticking the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, Devereaux went to her Rolodex. “Only be careful of your dick, now. Lacey’s kind of a barracuda.”
“And here I was hoping for a blowfish.”
Roxanne Devereaux first hacked, then sputtered a little on her smoke. “I’ll say this for you, guy.... You’re an optimist.”
Given the driving distance to the college, I called ahead. After being shunted around, a receptionist in the English Department finally told me that Professor (or “Doctor”) Nolan was “working at home today.” She wouldn’t tell me where “home” was, but 411 got me Nolan’s number, and the reverse telephone directory I keep in my car trunk came up with his address.
After going some miles west, I started to think college teaching must be paying better than when I attended, because Jason Nolan’s place turned out to be hidden behind what seemed like nearly an acre of trees and shrubs. I pulled into the marl-graveled driveway and wound around two privacy curves before reaching a modest, gray-planked house that looked a hundred years old.
I left the Sebring as a man came around a comer from the backyard. The first thing to strike me was that he had too much hair. Not just long, but like a mane rather than a ‘do. The top also showed a darker brown than the surrounding fringe, and I was torn between a bad rug and a thick transplant. He was maybe five-ten and slim, with prominent cheekbones and a receding chin. Dressed in a denim shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled up, and khaki hiking shorts over old running shoes, the man seemed wary.
“Can I help you?” in a modulated voice that implied he was sure he couldn’t.
“Jason Nolan?”
“Yes?”
I introduced myself, flashing the ID. He insisted on reading the fine print. For an English professor, Nolan seemed to take a long time doing it.
“What’s this about?”
“Tara Tate and Monica Lewin.”
“Who?”
“Professor—or ‘Doctor,’ if it’s more comfortable—I just spent an hour with Rocky at Cottontail’s, so let’s save both of us some time, all right?”
Nolan pursed his lips, then nodded once, resignedly. “Speaking of comfortable, perhaps in the back?”
“Lead the way.”
If the front yard was a jungle, the back one rivaled Flamingo Botanical Gardens for flowers. I said as much.
“Thank you. It’s my one vice.” Then a sheepish grin, which I had the feeling he didn’t use very often. “Very well, my only other vice.”
Figuring this couldn’t be easy for Nolan, I followed him to an arrangement of wrought-iron patio furniture. The cushions appeared bright and new, but like the house, the metal gave off an older look.
As we sat, I said, “Don’t see chairs and tables like this much anymore.”
“No. They came with the house. I bought it twenty years ago, when this was still ‘the Land Beyond Lauderhill.’”
I knew just enough local geography to get the “middle-of-nowhere” aspect. “I don’t suppose that kept the police from finding you?”
“Actually, they didn’t.”
Could even Kyle Cascadden miss somebody at Cottontail’s as obvious as Nolan must have been? “How come?”
“I went to them, you see. Given my position at the college, thought it best to steal a march, so to speak.”
“Beat them to the punch.”
“Exactly. This was after Tara was killed—strangled. I thought the woman she was ‘bumping’—forgive the pun— might have been her killer.”
“Monica Lewin.”
“Ah, no. Actually, a woman named...” Nolan blushed. “Missy Lacey.”
I needed to get my signals straight. “Wait a minute. I thought Tara came back to Lauderdale—”
“And began dancing at the club, yes. But Monica was already...well, past her prime, so to speak. Therefore, I thought Lacey was the more likely suspect, and I told this Neanderthal police detective as much.”
“And Lacey was more likely because...?”
“Well, Tara simply put her to shame. Tell me—Rory, if I may?”
“Fine, Jason.”
That made him stop, but only for a moment. “Rory, are you a devotee?”
“Of strip joints?”
“Of exotic dancing?”
“Neither.”
“Well, let me try to explain Tara’s dancing, then. Man to man.” Nolan clasped his hands in front of him, bizarrely like a minister about to preach a sermon. “One of the finest British novelists once wrote, ‘it was like meat and wine and the air one breathed and whatever else was essential to existence.’”
“W. Somerset Maugham.”
Nolan perked up. “Name the book.”
“Of Human Bondage.”
“Very good, Rory. But how...?”
“I played pro tennis in a lot of countries where the used bookstores carried only the classics in English.”
“I wish I’d had a student in the last ten years who’d know that Maugham quote without my teaching it.” Then Nolan blinked. “But back to cases, eh? Tara was grace incarnate. Joyful as well. She really wanted the audience before her to have a good time, also to appreciate a certain...artistry about her work.”
“Tara was top of the line.”
“Tara was her own line. Young, unspoiled—oh, I know I’m laying it on a bit thick, but truly, she had no parallel in any other club I’ve ever visited.”
“You’ve been in enough places like Cottontail’s, your students never spotted you?”
A wise smile. “The beauty of South Florida, Rory. After the first few weeks of a semester, the only students in the exotic clubs are the ones visiting Lauderdale from afar.”
I assumed he meant the residual spring-breakers. “Okay, Tara’s the best. Lacey?”
“Ah, youth may not be everything, but sometimes it’s enough. And she has the energy of a pony. ‘Rookie fire,’ I believe the baseball pundits call it.”
“But not the...artistry.”
A sad smile. “Please, Rory. Don’t mock me for trying to help you, eh?”
Nolan had a point. “How about Monica?”
“Monica, Monica. I felt badly for her. I’d often stand a drink for her on nights when Tara wasn’t performing.”
“You mean Monica would come to your table.”
“Yes. And we’d talk, but only a bit. I’m afraid Monica’s natural endowment had fallen from between her ears to between her elbows. However, she was...‘poignant,’ I’d put it. Like the last glass from yesterday’s bottle of wine.”
“You wouldn’t be suggesting that she’d...breathed too long?”
“Why, Rory, what a nice turn of phrase,” said Jason Nolan. “We may make a novelist of you yet.”
“Hey, hey. If you’re selling, I might actually buy something.”
Jason Nolan proved right: Lacey Peevers had a certain energy about her. She was about five-six and a little to the stocky side of solid, with blonde hair, brown roots, and a flat tone that sounded Midwestern. Her “flatness,” though, ended at the voicebox as her breasts jounced under the T-shirt and over the baggy shorts she wore answering the bell to her apartment.
“Ms. Peevers, I’d like to talk with you about Tara Tate and Monica Lewin.”
The sunny expression faded, but only a little. “Oh, bummer. But, yeah, why not.”
I followed her into a small living room strewn with toys. A toddler with sandy hair and his mother’s features was sitting in the middle of them, chewing on a plastic duck.
“Hey, C.C., we got ourselves a visitor.”
I looked down at the kid, who was smiling and giggling. “See See?”
“The initials. When I got pregnant, I wasn’t absolutely sure whether the sperm who made the big swim was from this guy ‘Chuck’ or this other guy ‘Craig.’ Since I wanted to, like, keep my options open, I used both of their initials.”
As I sifted through that, Peevers plopped herself into a worn but large couch. I took the chair opposite it.
“So,” she said, “what can I do you for?”
“Let’s start with who you think killed Tara Tate.”
I wanted to hit Peevers with it, just like that, gauge any reaction. Instead of shock, though, there was only a frown and some nibbling on her lower lip. “Tara’s husband. I’d say.”
“Why?”
“Well, Barry’d always carry on about why she couldn’t be around more now that Tara wasn’t on the road anymore.”
“Around?”
“To help with his mom. She’s kind of like this invalid. Not exactly a coma, though she slips in and out quite a bit, leastwise the times C.C. and I went over to baby-sit.”
“To baby-sit Barry’s mother.”
“Uh-huh. That’s why he got pissed at Tara. Barry couldn’t see why his own wife couldn’t help out.”
I thought about it. “Why do you suppose Tara wasn’t around?”
A naughty smile. “I think she was doing a little more than letting some customers bromsky her tits.”
“Bromsky...?”
“Her tits.” Peevers lifted her forearm to her mouth and blew out a breath to make a farting sound last five seconds. Her son giggled some more. “Yeah, C.C., you know that noise, right? Dumpy dumpy.”
The kid shrieked in joy now, his mom slaying him.
“So, you think Tara was turning tricks?”
“Yeah. Oh, not hooking exactly. More like providing service to a small circle of friends. But she really was gorgeous and all, so she could, like, have her pick.”
I decided to test Peevers. “Some of the people I’ve talked to think you might have killed Tara.”
A hurt look, then the sunny expression again. “Well, I can see their point, I guess. You put Tara and me on stage together, I’d sure look like Miss Fifth Runner-up. But I learned from Tara, and I would’ve learned from Monica, too, she didn’t go and hang herself.”
“You think that’s what happened?”
“Monica committing suicide?” A confused expression. “That’s what the papers and all said.”
Time to test Lacey a different way. “Would you be interested in making a little money beyond...a bromsky?”
Now a hard look, one I wouldn’t have predicted Peevers had inside her. “Thanks anyway, but C.C. needs me more than I need that.”
“Lacey, I appreciate your time.”
A sadder look as Peevers rocked from the couch down onto her knees and pushed a different toy into her son’s face. “Rory, you hadn’t gone and brought money into it, you could have had a lot more than my time.”
Barry Cardiff’s address also was an old house, but that’s where the comparison to Jason Nolan’s place ended. No jungle of shrubs out front, just some scrub pine and weeds. The clapboard exterior needed paint, and the left rear tire of the old Chevy in a tacked-on carport needed air.
I headed up the overgrown path from the street, being careful not to cause any more damage to the crumbling front stoop. A knock on the front door brought a male’s “Hold on a second” from somewhere inside.
When he appeared behind the wire mesh, I thought Barry Cardiff looked more like a bear than a man. He wasn’t wearing a shirt above some tattered blue jeans, and his chest, arms, and shoulders were matted with hair. Maybe thirty, his face had the battered look of somebody who’d been to war and couldn’t quite lose the memories of it.
Given his mother and his wife, maybe he’d been more victim than victor, too.
Cardiff said, “I don’t know you.”
I decided to vary the opening a little. “My name’s Rory Calhoun. I’m a private investigator looking into the death of Monica Lewin.”
“Monica? You mean the bitch that killed my wife.”
That seemed to establish our ground rules. “Can I come in?”
A resigned shake of his head. “I suppose.”
To the right of the door was a shabby living room that gave the impression of being less abused and more just unused. Cardiff didn’t turn into it, continuing instead through the kitchen. A smell of something medicinal hit me as he entered a back bedroom.
Lying on some soiled sheets was a woman who could have been anywhere from sixty to seventy-five. She seemed shrunken, with noticeable black whiskers around the mouth, and hair half as thick as Cardiff’s on her arms. Both eyes were closed, and her breathing was ragged, occasionally overpowering the hum of a small, oscillating fan standing on a night table inside the open window. Some videocassettes lay jumbled on the table’s lower shelf, but I didn’t see a VCR or even a television.
“My mama,” said Cardiff.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? She’s been like this for near two-and-a-half years now. I took her to three doctors, and they sent her to three hospitals, and nobody can figure nothing about what to do for her except ‘keep her comfortable as possible.’ Only, Mama don’t get better and she don’t die neither.”
I’d been in the room less than a minute, and already it felt oppressive. I wondered what I’d be capable of doing from desperation—or even just frustration—in Cardiff’s shoes.
“Why do you think Monica Lewin strangled your wife?”
He looked ready to spit. “Jealousy. Tara was a beautiful girl, just beautiful. And Monica was drying up like Mama here, only Monica could see it every time she went by a mirror.”
“Jealous enough to kill, though?”
Cardiff’s eyes came up to me. More rolled up to me, really, as his head barely moved. “Tara and me got married before Mama here took sick. I was out of work, so Tara decided she’d make us some extra by dancing in a club. I didn’t like it, and told her so, but somebody had to look after Mama, and that meant somebody else had to put food on our table. So Tara started her ‘career.’” He said the last word like it was a cuss.
I said, “And began traveling?”
Another spit look. “All the way to hell and back. Gone a month or more at a time, near killed the car with the miles she put on it. And put on her, too.” Cardiff rolled his eyes up again. “Tara was fine the way she was, didn’t need no...surgery. But she had it anyways, make her a ‘better’ dancer. Mister, I’ll tell you it was like they disfigured her. The scars, the stretch marks, the way her skin...shined. Doctors couldn’t help my mama, but they could hurt my Tara.”
I fought the air in the room, the medicinal smell beginning to choke me, and I thought I could see why Cardiff’s wife would want to travel as much as possible. “But then Tara came home, right?”
“Couldn’t take the road no more. Too lonely, she said. Nobody to talk to who wasn’t coming on to her. Nobody to joke with or hold her at night. Hell, that was my job, but she wouldn’t let me do it.” Cardiff looked to the bed. “I couldn’t leave Mama, and Tara wouldn’t stay here.”
He was wandering, so I repeated my question.
Cardiff shook his head. “Yeah, Tara come home, all right, if you mean here to Lauderdale. But she’d still be out more’n half the nights. The best shifts are at night, she said. The biggest tippers. But I needed her here sometimes, too. For me and for Mama.”
I decided to risk a fight. “There’s some evidence your wife was prostituting herself.”
Cardiff didn’t jump up, he didn’t even look up. He just reached a hairy hand over to the lower shelf of the night table and slid a videotape from the stack. “Found these yesterday when I was cleaning out Tara’s closet. Don’t matter, maybe, now she’s dead. But it’s the reason I can’t even mourn her proper.”
I took the cassette from him, the name “Frank” in curlicue handwriting on the label. “Mr. Cardiff, thank you. And I’m sorry.”
This time he reached for his mother’s forearm, squeezing it. And then Barry Cardiff began to cry.
That night, I ran “Tara Does Frank” through my own VCR. I didn’t recognize the man. And while I’m no expert on production values, it seemed the camera stayed stationary, capturing the two of them but without “Frank”—if that was his real name—seeming aware he was starring in a low-budget epic. Of course, given how genuinely beautiful and sexually enthusiastic Tate appeared to be, Frank might just have been blinded by ecstasy.
I thought about going to Cottontail’s, see if I could spot Frank in the crowd. Or even asking Roxanne Devereaux or Lacey Peevers to watch enough of the tape to identify him for me. Except that, for all I knew, Tara had filmed it on one of her road trips.
So I decided to sleep on it.
However, the next morning I felt hollow inside, partly the result of talking with Barry Cardiff, but mostly from watching the tape. Or more accurately, from realizing Tara Tate’s probable purpose in making it and maybe others like it.
To clear my head, I picked up Don Floyd at his unit, and we walked to one of the back courts, a bucket of balls slung handles up over my shoulder the way Monica Lewin had carried her handbag the one and only time I’d met her.
Floyd said, “Rough night, Rory?”
“And a rough day before it, too.”
He just nodded.
When we got to Court 19, Floyd took a seat under the awning on a little knoll so he could watch me practice. Over the years, I’d found that when my serve went down the toilet, the best cure was to break it down to its component parts, with another pro watching for telltale errors.
I started by folding a facecloth in fours, then setting it down inside the baseline about sixteen inches forward and between my lead left foot and my trailing right one. Then, holding the racquet in my right hand and a ball in my left, I practiced bouncing the ball and rocking my body until the rhythm felt right.
Only problem was, I couldn’t get the case out of my mind.
Monica Lewin comes to see me. She’s upset, but more angry than depressed over being a murder suspect. That night, though, she dies at the end of her bathrobe sash, Detective Kyle Cascadden is convinced—for political as well as police reasons—that it’s suicide.
Floyd said, “Might want to try some tosses now.”
I tried to clear my mind, then rock in rhythm while tossing the ball from my left hand straight up, but not swinging at it, just seeing if it landed on the facecloth. One, two, three...all on the folded square.
Then, when I visit Roxanne “Rocky” Devereaux at her club, Cottontail’s, I get a little better feel for the three people Lewin thought could have killed Tara Nancy Tate. The only problem is, each of them has a different idea on who murdered Tate. Professor Jason Nolan thinks it was dancer Lacey Peevers. Peevers thinks it was husband Barry Cardiff. Cardiff thinks it was my almost-client Monica. Which brings me back to where I started.
Floyd said, “Okay, now try to hit a first service, flat and down the middle.”
I shook off the case facts, tried to put one eight inches inside the T of the box on the other side of the net. First two tries were long. Next two, into the net itself.
At least a couple of the people I speak with think Tara Tate might be moonlighting by turning tricks, though. Which makes sense, if the “retirement plan” she’d discussed with Rocky Devereaux was to come true. And if Tara wanted to speed up that plan, she might have used videos like the one of “Frank” as blackmail. The problem there would be who else fit into Tate’s “small circle of friends,” and how she’d been able to finesse past her husband the providing of—
Floyd said, “Rory, when I can’t ever get the first one in, I generally try to focus on the second service.”
I stopped with my racquet halfway through its arc, the ball just hitting the court. Or the facecloth, since there was no bounce. Then I stared up the knoll and under the awning.
“Rory, are you all right?”
It made sense, it was consistent. Only I had no proof.
Floyd stood. “Did you maybe pull something in your shoulder?”
Which didn’t mean I couldn’t run a bluff.
“Rory?”
“Sorry, Don, but I have to practice something other than my serve.”
“And what would that be?”
“Somebody else’s handwriting.”
Don Floyd just scratched his head.
It was a well-kept campus, if a little too new compared to the place I’d attended up north. The registrar’s office told me where the class I wanted was being conducted and when it would end, so I just sat with my brown paper bag on a bench under a gnarly banyan tree that looked as though it was the only living thing to survive the bulldozer twenty years before.
Within half an hour, Professor Jason Nolan came out the front door of the classroom building, a couple of groupies coat-tailing him. Shifting a loose-leaf notebook and text of some kind to his other arm, he noticed me, then turned to the students before all three nodded in a “see you next time” way.
Nolan walked toward my bench as warily as he had from behind his house the day before, the mane of hair standing up a little from his movement. “Rory, taking me up on that ‘novelist’ comment?”
“I know, Jason.”
He faltered a little, then drew close, but stayed standing over me. “Know what?”
“About you and Tara Nancy Tate.”
“Of course you do. I told you all about—”
“Tate was an exotic dancer, but she was also a...service provider?”
Nolan frowned. “What Tara did on her own time could hardly—”
“I’m guessing you and she started in around the time she started up, first at a club where Rocky Devereaux was the ‘house mom.’ Only Tara decided to go on the road, maybe to make more money, maybe just to get away from the conditions at her own home.”
“I’m sure her mother-in-law’s illness must have been a—”
“Only thing is, you’d gotten used to having her regularly, and then had to adjust to a more occasional, irregular schedule. But she was worth it, wasn’t she?”
“I don’t think I care to be insulted on my own—’’
“However, when Tara got sick of the loneliness of being on the road, she came back. And you expected the schedule to revert to what it had been before. Only Tara had come close to achieving her ‘retirement plan,’ and she even figured out a way to...accelerate things.”
When Nolan didn’t reply to that, I brought the video cassette out of the bag. It was the one with “Frank” depicted in it, but I’d copied Tate’s handwriting onto the new “Jason” label pasted over it.
I said, “Tara kept a copy.”
Nolan saw the label and squeezed his eyes shut.
I waited. “So strangling her didn’t solve anything.”
His knees actually began to shake, and Nolan unsteadily moved to sit next to me on the bench, the loose-leaf going to his lap, the text sliding to the grass. “You have...no idea what she was like.”
I felt a lump inside my gut begin to dissolve. “Tell me.”
Nolan took a sudden, gasping breath, but sounded all right when he began speaking again. “Because her husband was always home, tending to his mother, Tara usually came to my house. Its seclusion allowed us...freedom and privacy. I loved her, Rory. Plain and simple.”
“Too much to stand losing her.”
“She was standing in the parking lot outside Cottontail’s that night, as though she’d been watching for me to arrive. When Tara told me about the...that tape—from one of our few ‘motel trysts’—I couldn’t believe it. That she’d blackmail...me.” Nolan seemed to range inside himself, speaking next without any emotion. “The air that night was cold, even for January, so she wore a scarf, and I, gloves. It all happened so...quickly.”
“And you got back in your car and left?”
“Yes. I went straight home, and stayed up till dawn, cleaning and vacuuming so there’d be no trace of Tara left. But by going to the police the next day and implicating Lacey, I was spared them searching my house, anyway.”
“And you might have gotten away with it, except that—” I thought back to Don Floyd’s comment at my practice session, “—you realized you needed a second ‘service provider.’”
Nolan squeezed his eyes shut again. “Yes. I broached it with Lacey one night over drinks. She was rather cool to the idea.”
I remembered her reaction to my testing on the same point. “Which left Monica?”
“Yes. She—”
“Why not one of your students, though? You had—’’
“Rory! That would be...incest. Academic incest, even without all the sexual harassment rules the college has now. The quickest way to lose all I’d worked for the last twenty years would have been to try something with a student.’’
Listening to Nolan’s finely parsed ethical distinctions, I tried to keep a straight face.
Then he softened again. “And besides, there was something...better about having intimately one of the women I and hundreds of others saw publicly.” Nolan looked me in the eye. “Rutting with the slut from the strip joint, you know?”
“Even the ‘poignant’ one.”
“Quoted against myself. Or perhaps more in support of my confession, eh?” A sad smile, and he looked down at his textbook on the ground. “But when I went to Monica about it two nights ago, she was drunk, and that didn’t make her any more...amenable to my proposed arrangement, so to speak. No, just the opposite. Monica swung an empty bottle of booze at my head, just missing, and as I pushed her off, I came away with the sash to her robe. Then she strutted into the kitchen to call the police, accusing me over the shoulder of murdering Tara. Well, what could I do, Rory? I tied a quick slipknot in one end of the sash, and as Monica was setting down the bottle and lifting the wall phone from its cradle, I flipped the noose over her head and around her neck. But she struggled fiercely, and I didn’t have the right leverage, so I tossed the free end of the sash over the top of the door and just pulled on it for all I was worth.”
Nolan seemed to run out of steam. “When I knew she was dead...her eyes, even her tongue...I tied the end of the sash to the outside doorknob, and used a napkin to replace the telephone in its cradle and to move a stepstool to where a suicide might kick it over. I thought the empty bottle would lead the police in that direction, and it did.”
When he didn’t continue, I said, “Feel better now?”
“Strangely, yes. I remember us discussing Maugham before, but frankly the last two days from Monica—no. No, the last thirty from Tara—have been more...Dostoyevsky.”
“Crime and Punishment?”
“Just so.” Nolan took another of those gasping breaths. “Well, what’s next?”
“What do you think? The police.”
A nod and the sad smile. “I wonder, Rory, could I ask if you’re a taxpayer?”
Now I did laugh. “A taxpayer?”
“Yes, because I have a favor to ask. And not an unreasonable one, I think.” Nolan paused. “If you’d do me the courtesy of never telling anyone about what you’ve found out about—”
“Are you off your—”
“I’d like to spare our state’s legal system some costs.”
I looked at him. It bothered me that Nolan’s point made ninety percent sense. “What about Barry Cardiff and his mother?”
“Not your concern. It was Monica who approached you, correct?”
“And Tara Tate provided for her husband and—”
“Very well, then.” Nolan blinked. “I’ll change my will in the bargain. That house of mine and anything else I own can go to Cardiff to replace Tara’s...income.”
I weighed the deal. It was better than what’d be left after everybody’s lawyers got into the act.
Which let me see a loophole. “What’s to keep me from breaking my word after you’re...afterward?”
“I’ll risk that, Rory.” A pause. “I’m really rather short on options, aren’t I?”
Leaving Professor Jason Nolan on the bench with his books, I promised myself to get up early the next few days and check the front page of the Sun-Sentinel.