Harmony In Flesh and Black (24 page)

“Tell me about Smykal's operation.”

“Oh, God,” Sheila said. “That's why Dawn ran off. You're taking over. Fuck you, Fred. I'm finished. That bastard screwed us blind. Fifty bucks an hour? To let the geeks and creeps crawl all over you, taking their pussy pictures? I'm through, unless we're talking a real different financial arrangement.”

She giggled and went on, “God, the creeps they rounded up. Lean over, honey, get that effect there of the flash, abstract, you know, I just thought of something. Let's grease it, make it shine; there's twenty extra if you let me do it myself.

“And all the while that geek Smykal's filming from the next room, with video. A secret hole he has. He's getting tapes of the geeks sweating and fumbling, maybe drinking, doing lines—he sells them coke if they want it, makes them feel like studs, they need all the help they can get—and trying to get lucky; getting lucky sometimes with some girls, it's up to us, we want a bonus, if the guy doesn't look sick.

“Jesus, men are ugly.”

Fred sat and waited. He had no argument at the moment, though he'd be inclined, himself, to broaden the subject of her sentence to include a larger segment of humanity.

“Okay,” he said at last. “Suppose I take over, run it better.”

“You kill the old man?” Sheila asked, studying Fred. She started to tremble. “You're shitting me.”

“How does it work?”

“Smykal's thing—the models and art photos—was a scam. The deal for the girls was setting up the marks, see, because Smykal would choose a mark and follow him to the precious little home in Belmont, or the sacred glass office on Beacon Street with the view, or the vestry at Old North Chapel—whatever—and he'd offer to sell his film, which, Jesus, half the time the guys aren't doing anything.”

“A honey trap,” Fred said.

“That's me,” Sheila said. She stretched her limbs and yawned. “All honey.”

Fred said, “How does Russ fit in?”

“Sweet Russell's the fucking pimp,” Sheila said. “Smykal was too much of a fucking artist.”

“Smykal met Russ at Video King,” Fred said. “Around the corner from his apartment. Right?”

Sheila nodded. “That's where Russ recruits the marks. Which Smykal called unfulfilled talent. Russ pulls them in, and we fulfill them. The people who rent porn, you know, they want to do porn, do all that stuff they rent to look at, but they're scared. Smykal provides a setup they think is safe. Russ has their address and credit-card number and phone number, work number, everything, from the Video King computer, which he sells to Smykal.”

Sheila scratched the inside of a thigh and lay back on the futon. “Fifty bucks an hour,” she said. “A bonus if we get the guy's little dick out of his breeches to where Smykal can film it, and the guy's face showing so Smykal can nail him—dicks being pretty much alike—and the girl. That's all we normally do. Smykal took it from there. Sometimes, though, he'd put one of us on the phone.”

“Lights, cameras, action,” Fred said. “That was Dawn's voice.”

“A girl's voice on the phone at the guy's house, Sunday morning—‘Hi, I'm Dawn, remember me? Is this a bad time to call? Who's that answered the phone? Is that your wifey?'—sometimes that got results. A girl's voice on the phone, or a girl's pants coming off—these guys sometimes go to pieces.” Sheila giggled.

“So what are we gonna do about this, killer?” she asked Fred. She ran her fingers through her hair, starting underneath and moving upward, fanning it outward.

“It figures Smykal was killed by one of his marks,” Fred said.

“He never hit them for all that much,” Sheila said. “You can see from how the guy lived. The asshole kept us all poor. Still, some of the geeks he got—you never know. Maybe one of the girls. So you can do better? If you can, maybe I'm interested, and maybe I'm leaving for Omaha in the morning.”

She looked at Fred in sudden, tardy, genuine alarm. “What happened to Dawn, anyway? Where's Russ?”

“Where did Smykal keep the answering machine?” Fred asked. “I didn't see it at his place; it's not here; it isn't upstairs.”

“I wouldn't know,” Dawn said. “Upstairs? You've been upstairs?”

“I gave myself a house tour while I waited for you. Russ had Smykal's file box of records,” Fred said.

Sheila stood poised, off-balance, on the futon. “Russell has Smykal's records? You serious?”

“Had,” Fred corrected her. “I'm taking them, and his computer disks. In case he has stuff on them I want.”

“Jesus,” Sheila said. “Fucking Dawn, she told you her and Russell's troubles are over? She and Russ cleaned him out? Russell? They popped him? Russell was going to run the business for himself?”

“That's what it looks like,” Fred said.

Sheila stooped, picked up her bag, and started toward her bedroom. “They played me for a fucking fool,” she said.

Fred reached out and held on to the bag.

Sheila tugged, but without much energy or hope. “Oh, what?” she said, disgusted.

“Take your clothes off,” Fred said. He kept holding the bag.

“Shit, are you kidding?” Sheila said. She pulled harder at her bag. Fred stood up.

Sheila turned red, then gray, with anger.

“Put your clothes on the floor. Come on,” Fred said. “I don't have a whole hell of a lot of time.” He pried the bag out of her fingers and dropped it behind him. Sheila stared.

“Or you'll take them off,” she said. “Right?”

Fred nodded.

“Take off the clothes,” he said. “I'm searching you, that's all.”

“Jesus,” Sheila said. “Right. What's the big deal, another rape. Don't hurt me, do you mind?”

“Do my best,” Fred said.

Sheila peeled the black sweatshirt over her head. Champion, it said. Under it she was wearing nothing but a narrow gold chain around her neck. The skin on her upper arms rose in goose bumps. Her breasts were as round and firm as if they had been painted in about 1450, by the Master of Flemalle, to be offered one at a time to a large-headed baby.

“I don't have anything,” Sheila said. “Whatever there was, Dawn and Russ have it. Now you. Russ wouldn't have the balls to do it, but I guess Dawn has enough for both of them. I mean doing Smykal.”

She dropped the sweatshirt and opened her belt buckle, businesslike, slid the jeans down, and stepped out of them. Then the black lace underpants, designed for show: young body, tired, with hints of flab establishing a toehold at belly and buttocks.

“Turn around,” Fred said.

Naked, the woman had the same dramatic power as a man in uniform.

“It's what I have to sell,” Sheila said with a smirk, turning until she faced him again. “Whatta you think, Fred?”

“It's good, but just the same I wish you'd spend more time working on your curveball,” Fred said.

“What?”

“Something to fall back on,” he explained. “I was distracted. In fact, I was thinking about someone else.”

“Thanks. I don't want to use Dawn's futon,” Sheila said, standing in a slouch, making no effort to mitigate her nakedness by posing.

“Put something on if you're cold,” Fred said. “I wanted to make sure not to miss anything.”

“You've been through my fucking apartment, too, haven't you?” she said.

Fred started looking in the pockets of her jeans. She stared at him. He laid out Certs and change, a comb, subway tokens, a ticket stub from the Loew's in Harvard Square.

“You want to search the body cavities, too?” Sheila said, standing there naked.

“Nope.” He began working through her bag.

Sheila charged him, fighting and striking at his face with her nails until he rolled her into a red blanket and more or less sat on her. His face was tender enough from the previous day's attentions, thanks.

He found it in her bag, among the tissues: the Sony videocassette she was carrying.

Sheila sighed and went limp. Fred put the tape in his coat pocket. He stood up.

“We can work it together,” she said.

“I'll be off,” Fred said.

“That's mine. It's all I got.”

“It's mine now,” he told her. “The works.”

The woman rolled out of the blanket and came toward him, fragrant with effort. “Tell you what,” she said, persuading. “It needs more than one person. I was thinking of going with Russ, but it needs a man. Fuck Russ. Him and Dawn. Think they can cut me out? He's out now anyway, according to you.

“You'll see, we can work good together. I was there that night. This guy showed up while I was working, said he was coming back, and he did. In spades.” Sheila shuddered. “I figure I'm not going back there again and I want some protection. So I rip the tape off.”

She noted both that she was cold and that her nakedness was a useless tool, and she stooped for the blanket, wrapped it around her. “Seeing what happened, it's gotta be worth big bucks. But if you get this guy and put the squeeze on him, keep me out of it. He scares me.”

“I'll be in touch,” Fred said.

28

Fred drove to the house in Charlestown. He was relieved, given the nature of Pearl Street, that the material he'd taken out of Russell's apartment—the computer disks and the two cardboard Porta-file boxes that Russ had taken from Smykal's place, and the video camera (after the man was dead, and before Fred got there? that didn't sound like Russ, but it wasn't Fred's concern)—was all still in his car.

Dawn, the one with balls, was also the smart one—smart enough to know, yesterday morning, after looking Fred over, that it was finished, and time for her to get lost.

It was four in the morning. The city of Charlestown was not dark, but its buildings and its Bunker Hill monument made silhouettes of black against a sky in which light was struggling to establish itself.

Teddy was at the desk, on watch, his eyes wide. He was dressed in a black suit, looking like a Mormon missionary, but missing shirt and tie and haircut. Here, in the safety of the house and with sentry duty to give him focus, he seemed more like himself.

“I'm in your room, Fred,” Teddy said. “I told you you'd be back. You carryin'?”

Fred nodded. Teddy, alert, was referring to the gun under his arm, not to the file boxes.

“I'm on until eight,” Teddy said. “So go ahead, sleep. It's your bed anyway.”

“Gotta work,” Fred said. “Bill Radford still got his TV stuff in the kitchen? I have to look through some tapes.”

Bill Radford was inclined toward brief, expensive hobbies.

Teddy nodded, saying, “Don't tell him I told you.”

Fred took the things upstairs. They had the whole three-decker, but it was a small one, with a total of only ten bedrooms. Some people bunked together; the normal population varied from five to thirteen. The only rules were no drink, no stealing, no women, mind your business, and it helps if you play chess.

Teddy made little more impression in the room than Clay made in his.

Fred had looked into the file boxes already, before he took them from Russell's neatly arranged apartment. The lighter one held cassette tapes labeled with names and dates. The other was divided into compartments for individual clients, with names, addresses, prurient stills, and, in some cases, notations of collections made—in surprisingly small amounts. Smykal had been a cautious man, bleeding his people in two- and three-hundred-dollar increments at intervals of several months. The quick impression was of an operation going back three years.

Fred recognized several names but dismissed them as not his business, unless one had done for Smykal. The man had wanted to have a Clayton Reed—or Arthur Arthurian—folder, too, not content with the windfall in an amount much larger than what he was used to.

Fred would study the client list if he had to, but only if he had to. He had no doubt that what he wanted was on the tape Sheila had been hoarding for her own purposes.

He dropped Sheila's cassette into Bill's machine and rewound it, sitting on the floor next to his mat, which now smelled somewhat of Teddy. The tape presented segments, bits and pieces, filmed surreptitiously from a position in Smykal's bedroom (if he recalled the layout correctly), from which the camera had the advantage over the studio, its bed, its doorway, and—through that—the front door, visible when the studio door was open.

What Smykal got was depressing: portraits of men intent on deluding themselves into a parody of art that was also a parody of sex. A microphone hidden in the studio collected sound. It was ugly and pathetic, with occasional flashes of sadism or bravura. The women worked, exhibiting their limbs and parts, responding and suggesting, and seducing their clients into further creative invention. “I know, why don't we take your clothes off, too?” “Twenty bucks more and you can put that camera down and put your head up in here instead.”

A running date and time moved along with the image on the film. That would be useful.

“Honey, what did you say you were doing at eleven twenty-two
P.M
. on the evening of April second?” the little woman asks.

“I was at that PTA thing. It ran late.”

“Funny, I just got this tape in the mail that shows you being sucked off by a girl with red hair,” she says, confused, handing him the pipe and slippers. “You wanna talk about this?”

Aside from Sheila and Dawn, three other women appeared. Some segments were brief and others as long as ten minutes. The show was worse than the educational painter with the hair. Smykal himself seldom appeared, though on occasion he would step into the frame to give suggestions or reassurance—“It's all right, they are professional models, this is art.”

It was mostly sleazy, soft-core stuff—like mud wrestling—but it was sufficient, on the Boston scene, to inspire guilt and terror in carefully screened men if publication was threatened. It was enough to ruin lives and plenty, if the victim was timid, to form the basis for extortion.