SPIKE SAID I was usually much deeper into a case before I decided to go out of my way to annoy somebody like Gabriel Jabari. I told him that neither of us could be sure that I actually would annoy him, that maybe I’d just be making a new friend. In addition, I saw it as a constructive way to keep my mind off Kathryn.
He asked how the visit had gone. I told him that I was a sucker for the little boy, and how Rosie had practically thrown herself at him.
“How’d you take that?”
“Love me, love my dog,” I said.
“And vice versa,” he said.
“Rosie acted like she wanted to bite Kathryn on her skinny ass,” I said.
“I assume this pleased you.”
“To no end,” I said. “The former Kathryn Burke acted like a total shit to Richie practically from the time the boy was born. Now it’s like he’s giving her a total pass.”
“What choice does he have?” Spike said.
“That’s what he said,” I said.
“He and I are a lot more alike than you think,” he said, “other than some fundamental differences.”
“And you both love me.”
“Madly.”
We were in an Uber on our way to Suite, on a fixed-up block on Tremont right before Chinatown. I told Spike that Lisa and Tony had been here one time together, but that Tony said she had gone back without him.
“What I’d like to know is why,” I said.
“Probably not the same reason I used to go to HunkOMania,” he said.
“Oh, ick,” I said.
My own firsthand knowledge of strip clubs, of any kind, was about as extensive as my knowledge of video games. I know there actually were Magic Mike places, both for men and for women. Having not done any research on the subject, I just felt there were more straight-guy places, fulfilling a need men had for easy and immediate and impersonal gratification short of outright paying for sex. And I had read enough about clubs like Suite to understand that the setting and ambience were supposed to make the patrons feel as if they were watching women undress at the Harvard Club.
But to me, whatever rationalizations young guys with money in their pockets used on themselves, it still seemed to be like swimming with your clothes on.
“I still can’t believe you actually went to places like this,” I said to Spike.
“It was mostly for giggles,” he said. “And with a former squeeze.”
“But was there some kind of hinky turn-on?”
“Was for him,” he said. He turned so I could see him grinning. “Want to hear more?”
“Sweet Jesus, no,” I said.
We got out of the car and walked toward the front door of what looked like a pretty fancy Boston restaurant from the outside. I wondered how many couples showed up at Suite, if any. But Spike and I looked like one. He was wearing a blue suit and open-neck white shirt under his topcoat. I had decided to wear the same dress I had worn to Dr. Silverman’s, trying not to dwell on the fact that I’d made the same fashion choice to come here that I’d made before seeing my shrink. Mostly I’d just wanted to find something that didn’t make me look like a slutty job applicant.
When I mentioned that to Spike he said, “Liar.”
The music was louder than I’d expected once we were inside. The cover charge was fifty dollars. Spike handed a hundred-dollar bill to the guy at the desk. If he thought it unusual that a man and woman had come here together, nothing on his face revealed it.
The guy said, “Been here before?”
“We have not,” Spike said.
“Not many house rules,” the guy said. “No drugs, no solicitation, no inappropriate touching.”
Spike gently poked me with an elbow and said, “Sounds like our marriage, sweetheart.”
No reaction from the guy on that, either. But then I hadn’t expected the place to be a capital of lightheartedness.
He just said, “If you’d like to pay more, or even consider a membership on the spot, you’d both be entitled to the VIP area upstairs and the champagne lounge.”
Spike said that he and the missus would like to just look around a little bit. As we moved away from the desk I told Spike, “If you call me ‘missus’ again, I will shoot you later.”
“Little woman?” he said.
There were tables set around the dance floor, where a tall blond woman was just beginning a pole dance. She was nearly six feet tall, had short-cropped blond hair, was wearing only a G-string for the moment, and seemed to have some kind of sparkle thing going for her on her cheeks. Facial cheeks.
She was also more limber and flexible than some otters I had seen once on the Animal Channel.
We were able to find two seats at the bar. Spike ordered a Crown Royal, neat. I asked for a chardonnay.
When the bartender brought back the drinks, I said, “Boss around?”
“Got a lot of bosses,” he said.
He was tall and wore a white T-shirt as tight as my jeans, as a way of showing how ripped he was, upper arms and chest. Lot of brown hair on the top, not so much on the sides. What did the kids call it? High and tight.
“Gabriel,” I said.
“Don’t know anybody by that name,” he said.
I reached into my purse and pulled out the photograph of Lisa Morneau that Tony had given me.
“You remember seeing this woman around here in the last week?” I said.
The guy looked at the picture and laughed, though his heart didn’t seem to be in it. Then he handed the picture back to me.
“Don’t know her,” he said. “And me, so good with faces, usually.”
I took a better look around, especially in the table area, where the waitresses were not only serving drinks in their short black dresses, but clearly presenting themselves to the customers like runway models. White, African American, Asian, Latina, they ran the gamut, but all were stunningly pretty. Even at a time in my life when young women had begun to look incredibly young to me, so many of these women seemed barely legal.
“They look like college kids,” I said to Spike.
“A lot of them probably are,” he said.
There was a tap on my shoulder. I turned around. A man taller than Spike, totally bald, broad-shouldered, and looking about as friendly as a prison guard said, “You come now, please.”
If it wasn’t a Russian accent, it was in the neighborhood.
Spike smiled brilliantly. “Least he said ‘please,’” he said.
The guy said, “You are coming now, or we are wasting time fucking around, huh?”
We followed him past the stairway leading up to what we had been told was the VIP area, past the blonde now somehow working her way up the pole using only her long legs, to an elevator in the back of the place. The bald guy pushed the button for the third floor. On the way up, he checked my purse for a gun and quickly patted down Spike. But we’d both known better than to be carrying.
When the doors opened, we were in a spacious office that told me that the boss was indeed around.
The man behind the desk stood as we entered. I thought of Tony Marcus’s description of Gabriel Jabari, but the man was even prettier than Idris Elba, if such a thing was even possible. He was wearing a skinny dark suit, shirt to match, silver tie.
“Ms. Randall,” he said. “And should I call you Mr. Spike?”
“Spike will do,” Spike said.
“I’m Gabriel,” he said.
“So nice to meet you, Gabriel,” I said.
He sat. We sat.
Gabriel Jabari said, “Gled, as I don’t seem to be in much danger here, please go have a look around on the second floor.”
The elevator doors opened and Gled was gone.
“Let’s get to it, shall we?” Jabari said. “Why are you here showing around a picture of Lisa Morneau?”
“Your bartender said he didn’t know her,” I said. “But you obviously do.”
“And you obviously know that already,” Jabari said.
“Tony Marcus believes that the last time anybody saw her, she was here to see you,” I said.
Jabari shook his head dismissively. “I offered her a job,” he said.
“What kind of job?”
“A lucrative one,” he said. “I am looking to expand my interests in Boston.”
“At Tony’s expense?”
He showed me so many white teeth I wanted to count them.
“From your lips,” he said, “to God’s ears.”
“Soon after being here,” I said, “Lisa disappeared.”
“So I’m told,” he said.
“Tony seems to think you might know where she has gone,” I said.
“I think the French have a saying that covers that one,” he said. “Fuck Tony Marcus and the horse he rode in on.”
Spike said, “I knew that line had to start somewhere.”
“You don’t appear to have much use for Tony,” I said.
“To me,” Jabari said, “he is a sad old man refusing to accept that the world is in the process of passing him by.”
Jabari said then that he’d forgotten his manners, and asked if we wanted a drink. “On the house,” he said. I looked at Spike. Then we both shook our heads.
I said, “Why did you even invite us up here?”
“I’ve heard a lot about you, Ms. Randall,” Jabari said. “Everybody in town knows about how you beat our friend Mr. Marcus out of all those guns. Which, to me, only validated my theory.”
“About the world passing him by,” I said.
“Precisely,” he said.
“And you wanted to speed up the process by taking Lisa away from him.”
“In a far more legitimate enterprise,” he said.
I smiled.
“Well,” I said. “Legitimate-ish.”
“I will give you the same advice I would give Mr. Marcus, were he here,” he said. “Stay out of my business.”
“Eek,” I said. “Is that a threat?”
He smiled again.
“As I said. Just friendly advice.”
“Well,” Spike said. “Friendly-ish.”
“I am not looking to make trouble for you, or myself,” I said to Jabari. “I’m just working a case.”
“Work it somewhere else,” he said. “I’ve told you everything you need to know about my interactions with Ms. Morneau.”
“What if I need to speak with you again?” I said.
“Resist the urge,” he said.
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “If all you wanted to do was offer her a job, why do you care whether I’m asking about her or not? Is she somehow in the middle of something between you and Tony in a way neither you nor Tony have articulated?”
“Say she is, just for the sake of conversation,” he said. “It would not be a place anybody would want to be. Including, and maybe even especially, you, Ms. Randall.”
“See, now,” Spike said pleasantly, “that right there sounded like a threat.”
The elevator opened. Gled reappeared. If Jabari has somehow pushed a button to summon him, I hadn’t seen him do it.
“Gled, show our friends to the front door, please,” Jabari said.
We got into the elevator, standing against the back wall. Gled hit the button for the first floor.
Spike whispered to me, “So I’m guessing the champagne lounge is out of the question?”