well did you know Della?” I asked her.
“We weren’t bosom buddies.” The words were tough. So was the girl’s face. Caring cost you in a club.
“You work the second shift?”
“Usually. I’m pulling a double tonight, filling in for one of the regular girls who got spooked by the whole deal.”
“What happened didn’t scare you?”
“I got three kids to feed.” The girl inhaled hard. “The show goes on.” She tapped an ash, ground it into the worn carpet with her foot.
“I heard she was pretty broken up about her brother’s death.”
“First I heard about it.”
“He was run over by a train few months back. Over near Fort Grant where he was stationed.”
The girl dragged on her cigarette until the end burned hot orange.
“Something like that, well, it could make a person…” I waited for Lucy to fill in the blanks. She didn’t. I tried to make it easy for her. “She was using when I knew her.”
The girl shrugged. “I’d seen worse.”
So had I. “You know why she came here?”
“The ambiance.” The girl gave a tight smile, proud of herself.
“Anybody she was seeing?”
The girl stood and went to the washroom.
“Maybe somebody special?”
“Yeah, they line up at the door here to sweep us off our feet.” I heard a small hiss as she pitched her cigarette into the toilet.
“How about any of the customers? Maybe one of the regulars? Someone who likes to get rough?”
Lucy came back into the room, plopped herself down at a dressing table, started applying blush with force. She caught my gaze in the mirror. “I already answered all these questions earlier for the police. What are you looking for anyway?”
I told her the truth. “I don’t know.”
I had surprised her this time. She smiled. For a moment she was just a young girl enjoying a grin. She reached for a hairbrush. “We worked together, that’s pretty much it. She was pretty tight-lipped, didn’t go around giving you her life story like there was some fat chance you’d be interested.”
“How about the other girls? Anyone she hung out with outside of work?”
“This is a strip club. Not a sorority house.” Lucy got up, went over to the lockers. “Listen, I wish I had something to give ya, but I don’t. There’s a lot of freaks out there. It happens every day.”
She opened a locker door, took out a fresh pack of cigarettes.
“So last night just happened to be Della’s turn?”
The girl glanced at me over her shoulder. No one had thought of me as naive for a long time…until now. “You got a better explanation?”
“Not yet.”
The girl gave a crooked smile, slammed the locker door. “I gotta get to work.” She opened the fresh pack of cigarettes, tapped one out and lit it. She didn’t move.
“Della was always bumming cigarettes off everybody at Billie’s. She do that to you?”
The girl went to the couch, sat on its edge. She crossed her legs and eyed me through the smoke. “Yeah, she was a pain like that.”
“She was always trying to quit.” I went on, hoping I’d hit a nerve. “Thought if she didn’t buy ’em, she wouldn’t smoke ’em.” Della flashed too real in my memory.
“Yeah, she did that here, too. Never helped her none. Don’t matter much now, anyway, does it?”
I couldn’t hold my gaze anymore on the girl with the swinging foot and the slack robe. I turned to leave.
“She used to let a lot of the girls borrow money though. She do that at Billie’s?”
I stopped, nodded.
“She’d never harass them about paying her back. She was good like that.” The girl tapped the ash off her cigarette and looked at me. “It was as if she didn’t care about the money.”
“You know anything she did care about?”
Lucy leaned forward and set the cigarette in the ashtray. She picked up a cosmetic bag, took out a lip pencil. “She was meeting someone last night. After her shift.” She lined her lips as she talked.
“You know who?”
She smacked her lips together twice. I snapped my rubber band.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t eavesdropping or anything like that. I came into the dressing room and heard her talking on the phone. Whoever it was, she was telling them she’d meet them after work.”
I schooled my features, concealing any excitement. Lucy could be playing me, after all. Some girls have a natural mean streak.
“Did you tell this to the police?”
“I’m telling you.”
“Why?”
“You go to college. You’re a smart woman.” Lucy picked up her cigarette. She took a long draw, stubbed it out and stood.
I found a pen, ripped a blank page out of my pocket planner which was easy since all the pages were blank. I scribbled numbers down. “This is my cell, this is my house.” I heard the hope in my voice and didn’t even care. I held out the paper to Lucy. “Just in case you or maybe one of the other girls wants to get in touch with me.”
She folded the paper, slipped it inside the cigarette pack’s cellophane wrapper. Ten chances to one it’d be thrown away with the empty pack, but those odds were all I had. I’d take them.
On my way home, I called the number Serras had given me.
“Serras.”
“LeGrande.” I answered as an equal. “What’s the current status on the Devine case?” Lesson I learned long ago—fake it and most people will follow your lead.
“We’re about to crack it wide open, doll face.”
Serras wasn’t most people. He was police.
“You find any family?”
The pause told me Serras was deciding exactly where I fit in. Not easy to waylay a cop. They’re paid to see right through you.
“How ’bout you?” He came back at me.
“What about me?”
“You got something for me? You learn anything at the Oyster you’d like to share?”
So they were cruising the Oyster. Good for them, although the manpower and case’s stature wouldn’t let it go on for more than a day or two.
“Yeah, I got a lecture on ‘life is a bitch’ from a chicken-legged number named Lucy.”
He chuckled. “You’re one up on us.”
“Trying to make me feel better?”
“No.”
I hadn’t thought so. I debated telling him about the phone call Della had made. Only because he’d tucked Della in as if wishing her sweet dreams.
“I did learn one thing.” Or maybe because I remembered his backside rumba and appreciated the effort. Still I was going to make him bite. A girl had to have standards.
Two seconds of silence passed until I heard “I’m here.”
I’d take it. “Della was heard making plans to