05 Snow White and Rose Red by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781612181981
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 1985-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Sylvia first met Tracy Kilbourne—

“That’s her real name, you know. I mean, a lot of girls working the topless joints, they take exotic, sexy names…well, Tiffany Carter, for example…but that was the name Tracy was born with.”

—met her for the first time on a sultry night last May, the temperature hovering in the high eighties, the promise of a thunderstorm in the air. June usually marked the beginning of Calusa’s summer-long heat wave, but sometimes the last part of May could turn oppressive, and this was one of those nights. The girls, Sylvia remembered, would have been willing to dance naked that night, if the law had allowed it, that’s how hot and sticky it was. You came off that stage dripping sweat, and then you were supposed to find some guy’s face to grind into when all you really wanted to do was take a cold shower.

Most guys touched you, even though there were signs all over the place warning that the dancers were not to be touched, all according to law, you know, but they did it anyway, and the girls let them do it because that’s what added up all those dollar bills tucked into the band of the G-string, five-dollar bills sometimes if you let one of them slide his hand up a little higher than it was supposed to go, or maybe cop a quick kiss on the nipple. All in the dark, all hidden from the eyes of the law; if a blue uniform popped into the doorway over there, everybody was suddenly very prim and proper—well, the cops knew that, Sylvia was sure they knew it, and besides, they were probably being paid off to look the other way, no offense.

Tracy had been working there for a week by then, but Sylvia didn’t meet her until that night because she herself had taken two weeks off to go visit her mother in Louisiana, whose old man had just left her and who was feeling rotten. Her mother worked in a massage parlor in New Orleans. She was still pretty good looking at thirty-eight years old, and pretty much in demand up there. Sylvia herself would never take work in a massage parlor—“Let’s face it, that’s plain and simple hooking, my mother’s a hooker, that’s all there is to it.” A massage parlor was a whorehouse, period. So were all these escort services you saw advertised. All legalized prostitution was what it amounted to. A lot of girls dancing topless, they later drifted into massage parlors or escort services, what they did was become hookers.

This topless shit was close to hooking, she guessed, but the most any of the girls ever did by way of outright sex was a hand job every now and then, for which the going price was ten dollars. The girls were pissed off at Cindy just now—

“Cindy’s the teddy-bear girl, and only sixteen, but don’t tell Angus I said that, or it’s my ass…”

—because she was giving hand jobs away practically free, seven dollars a shot, which brought the price down for the other girls.

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