Strega - Andrew H. Vachss [37]
"I don't have a price for this job, Michelle. It may not be a job at all, okay? But if she's got anything in her purse, we'll see about a donation."
"Close enough," she said, "but if she's got no cash, you take me to the Omega to hear Tom Baxter before he leaves town. Deal?"
"Deal," I told her, and she climbed into the back seat behind the redhead.
I found the dark spot in the shadow of the trucks and pulled in.
"Get in the back seat," I told the redhead.
"Why?" she snapped.
"Here's why," I told her. "I don't know you—I don't know what you want. My secretary back there is going to search you. If you're wearing a wire, out you go. It's that simple. She's here because I can't search you myself."
"I still don't see why…"
"Look, lady, you asked me to talk to you, okay? This is the way we do it. You don't like it, you take whatever business you have and you shake it on down the road."
The redhead softly scratched her long nails across one knee, thinking. I didn't have time for her to think.
"Besides," I told her, "haven't you had enough experience with men telling you to take your clothes off?"
Her eyes flashed at me, hard with anger, but she didn't say a word. I looked straight ahead, heard the door open, slam, open and slam again. She was in the back seat with Michelle.
"Toss your purse over the seat," I told her.
"What?"
"You heard me. My secretary's going to check your body; I'm going to check your purse…for the same thing."
The lizard–skin purse came sailing over the back seat and bounced off the windshield. I picked it up, unsnapped the gold clasp. Sounds from the back seat: zippers, the rustle of fabric. The purse had a pack of Marlboros, a gold Dunhill lighter, a little silver pillbox with six five–milligram Valiums inside, a tightly folded black silk handkerchief, a soft leather purse with a bunch of credit cards and a checkbook—joint account with her husband—and three hundred or so in cash. In a flap on the side I found thirty hundred–dollar bills—they looked fresh and new, but the serial numbers weren't in sequence. No tape recorder. Not even a pencil.
"She's clean," said Michelle from the back seat. I heard the door open and slam again, and the redhead was next to me.
"So…?" I asked Michelle.
"All quality stuff. Bendel's, Bergdorf's, like that. The pearls are real. Very nice shoes. But that underwear is just tacky, honey. Nobody wears a garter belt outside a motel room didn't your mother tell you that? And that perfume…honey, you need some heavy lessons in subtle."
The redhead snapped her head around to the back seat.
"From you?" she asked, trying for sarcasm.
"Who better?" Michelle wanted to know, genuinely surprised at such a stupid question.
"How much do I owe you?" the redhead asked Michelle in the same voice she would have used on the man who tuned her BMW.
"For what?"
"Well, you are a prostitute, aren't you? I know how valuable your time is."
"I see. Okay, Ms. Bitch—the hand job was on the house, but you can give me a hundred for the fashion advice."
The redhead reached in her purse. She never touched the new bills. She put together a hundred from the other supply and tossed it into the back seat. Michelle was dismissed.
She floated around to the redhead's open window, winked at me to say goodbye. Then she spoke in a soft voice to the redhead. "Honey, I may be a whore, but I'm not a cunt. Think about it." And she was gone.
23
"WHAT NEXT?" the redhead wanted to know, in a voice meant to tell me she was just about out of patience.
"Now we drive