A dive called The Telephone Company, Carella didn’t know what to expect.
Maybe something on the style of the Kit Kat Klub of Cabaret fame, telephones on all the tables, numbered placards indicating which table was which, girls phoning from table to table, “This is table twenty-seven, calling table forty-nine. Sitting all alone like that…” and so on.
But when they got there at ten o’clock that night, the only telephones in sight were the house phone sitting behind the bar and a pay phone on the wall to the right of the entrance door. The joint was located on Lower Stemmler, all the way downtown, where The Stem became a narrower passage lined with meatpacking houses, the occasional restaurant, and an assortment of clubs featuring masturbaters in drafty dungeons; crossdressers wearing smeared lipstick, high heels, and crude tattoos; raving teeny boppers in spangles and pinkish-green hair; pneumatic West Coast starlets thrilling to the big bad city or-as was the case here in The Telephone Company-an assortment of topless girls wearing thong panties and gyrating on a crescent-shaped stage.
The detectives roamed around like casual customers. Smoke drifted in bluish-gray layers in the beam of follow spots illuminating half a dozen girls slithering restlessly across the stage, eyes slitted, tongues wetting glossy lips, imitation sex oozing from every pore with each insinuating spikeheeled step they took. If a man signaled from one of the tables below the stage, a wink of the eye or a flick of the tongue acknowledged that the girl would join him on the dance break, to negotiate whatever suited his fancy behind the plastic palms in a back room called The Party Line. One peek into that room told the detectives exactly what was going on back there. A bouncer gave them a look, but said nothing to them.
A dozen or so men sat at tables below the stage, drinking, chatting among themselves, trying to look bored by the exhibition of all that flesh up there because demeaning these women was part of the joy of participation.
Even the men who would never dream of taking one of these girls into the back room for actual sex knew that just sitting here while the girls displayed themselves was a way of telling them they could be had for a price- were, in fact, being had for a price, witness the ten-dollar bills tucked into G-string bands. The girls, on the other hand, perhaps to convince themselves they hadn’t already been broken by this city or the men in this city, told themselves that only a jackass would part with ten bucks to watch a girl bouncing her tits or bending over to spread the cheeks on her ass.
Here in the spotlight-pierced gloom stinking of stale cigarette smoke and sour sweat, over the deafening roar of music blaring from speakers on pillars and posts, the detectives introduced themselves to the man behind the bar, who told them he was Mac Gordon, owner of the club. Gordon looked to be some six feet, three inches tall. His eyes appeared blue, but who could tell in the near-darkness? One thing for sure, he had a red handlebar mustache.
“Did a girl named Althea Cleary work here?” Carella asked.
“Still does. Should be in any minute now.”
“Don’t count on it,” Ollie said.
“What do you mean?”
“She was murdered last night.”
“Holy smokes. And here I thought this was about some kind of violation.”
“What kind of violation did you have in mind?” Ollie asked.
“Well, gee, how would I know?”
Carella wasn’t here to throw a scare into the owner; all he wanted was information. Ollie, on the other hand, couldn’t resist being a fucking cop.
“You’re not thinkin of the hand jobs in the back room, are you?” he asked.
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, sir.”
“Fifty bucks a throw.”
“Not here, sir.”
“A hundred for a blow job where the jungle gets thicker?”
“I don’t know what jungle you mean, sir.”
“Back there at the very back of the back room,” Ollie said. “All them fake trees dripping moss and shit.”
“You must be thinking of some other place,” Gordon said.
“Yeah, maybe. You didn’t see Althea taking some kind of Jamaican back there last night, did you?”
“I sure didn’t,” Gordon said.
“Guy with a knife scar on his face?”
“Nossir.”
“Who did you see with her?”
“I believe she was talking to various gentlemen at various times during the night.”
“Gentlemen, huh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Talking to them, huh?”
“Yes, sir. And sharing an occasional drink.”
“Sharing a drink, I see. Did she happen to leave here with one of these gentlemen?”
“That is strictly against the rules, sir.”
“Oh, there are rules.”
“Yes, sir, very strict rules. None of the performers here…”
“Performers, I see.”
“… is allowed to leave the club with any of the customers. Or even to make arrangements to meet any of the customers outside the club.”
“How many girls you got working here?” Ollie asked.
“A dozen or so. Fourteen. Sixteen. It varies on different nights.”
“How many were here last night?”
“I would say ten or twelve.”
“Which?”
“Ten. Eleven.”
“Are they all here tonight? All ten or eleven of these girls?”
