DEAD BODY IN A SMALL ROOM
A novel
Charles Deemer
Copyright © 2011 Charles Deemer
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Contact Charles Deemer at: cdeemer at yahoo dot com.
Originally published by The Sextant Press in 2006,
Portland, Oregon
http://www.sextantbooks.com
ISBN 0-9786357-4-4
Summer, 1984
1
The first time I saw them, they were sitting at the counter in Mom’s Café. I had no reason to suspect they were other than the traveling salesmen they appeared to be. Each wore a suit and tie, which even the local banker considered too formal for a small desert town like Sogobia. Clearly they were passing through, perhaps on their way to pitching orders for work boots or hand tools in Vegas or Boise. What set them apart was that one had an uncanny resemblance to the old movie tough guy, the actor George Raft, his dark hair slicked back and shiny as if sweating in the warm morning. And actually they seemed too quiet for salesmen, unless they were resting up for the back-slapping ahead. Maybe they weren’t salesmen after all. They could be Mormon missionaries on their way home to Salt Lake City after proselytizing their way across the holy lands of the great American desert.
Even on an ordinary day, strangers like these passed through often enough to be taken for granted, but this was no ordinary day. A prostitute had been found dead in her small room at the legal brothel in town.
There hadn’t been a dead body in the Black Cat Bar & Brothel in almost a decade, not since the Bicentennial when Frank Ford came in to celebrate his 80th birthday with a lady and suffered a stroke in the excitement. This was a story traditionally told to strangers in town, always in a humorous tone that put the old geezer in heroic light, a man riding in the saddle to the very end. Maybe the story was true and maybe it wasn’t. It didn’t really matter.
But the body discovered yesterday morning, an apparent suicide by one of the working girls, mattered a lot, especially to her family and friends and maybe even to her clients. It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to happen to anyone, especially in a small town that took pride in its “live and let live” way of life.
I read the story in the Sogobia Free Weekly under the headline “Body Found In Brothel.” This was an unusual headline for the paper. Usually it was something like “Mayor Promises No Parking Meters.”
I remembered her. She went by the nickname Butterfly but the article said her real name was Brooke Cadbury, and she originally was from Boise. She was the newest of the Black Cat’s dozen girls and at 22 younger than most of them. Her youth and girl-next-door innocence had made her very popular. I’d even considered making a date with her myself. She’d come to Sogobia in the spring, looking as fresh and radiant as a desert wildflower.
Now she was dead. A suicide note had been found, the article said, but the police had not released it. I asked Sally, my sister the cop, if she knew what the note said.
“If I did, I’d think twice about telling you,” she said. “What is it you like to say? All writers are spies. Everything’s material with you.”
We were having morning coffee at Mom’s Café on Main Street. Sally was in uniform, wearing a western-style shirt in two shades of green with snap buttons, dark green pants and brown cowboy boots. I thought it made her look like something between a country singer and a forest ranger. Blonde and pudgy, she still looked like the Tomboy I remembered as a kid.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Hollywood perverted you. Sometimes you don’t distinguish between the stories in your head and reality.”
“Hey, if I’m getting perverted, it’s by living in Sogobia.”
“No one said you have to live at the Cat.”
That an establishment called Mom’s Café could be located only a few blocks from The Black Cat Bar & Brothel was one of the many surprises of living in Nevada, where legalized prostitution was a county option. Sogobia County, the state’s smallest, was located in the northern part of the state, between Winnemucca and Elko, on a stretch of dry desert the brothel industry had turned into extremely profitable real estate. I’d moved here from Hollywood after a serious bout with cancer in order to be close to Sally, my younger sister and only family. I was still here not quite a year later. The culture of professional brothels fascinated me, and when I’m fascinated, I tend to stick around.
I countered Sally’s remark with, “Why did the man climb the mountain? Because it was there.”
“I thought you came here to write a book.”
This was what I’d told her instead of the truth. Since I’m a writer, the book excuse came naturally, even though I’d never written one. I’m a screenwriter. Or at least I had been in my pre-cancer life.
“I’m filling the well,” I said, my pat answer when I wanted to avoid talking about my work.
“I bet you are. If I wanted to get away to write a book, I’d go to Tahiti or some place. I’m glad you’re here, though. Even though I worry about you.”
“Sometimes I worry about me, too.”
Sally started to say something, then changed her mind and said, “Maybe you should start that book. Get your mind off your troubles.”
“Can we change the subject?”
There was a silence. I didn’t tell her why I was worried. My doctor told me I had to remove stress from my life, which meant I had to find a new career. Screenwriting was stressful by the very nature of its strange combination of collaboration and powerlessness. In Hollywood I was forever being asked to change a script for stupid reasons given by idiotic producers, power-hungry directors and egotistical actors, none of whom gave a shit about my story as much as their own careers. Screenwriters were at the bottom of the pile, the janitors of the film industry. Your average guy on the street couldn’t name a single screenwriter, except possibly someone like Woody Allen, who directed his own scripts. But ask who wrote a recent blockbuster like E.T. and you’d be met with stares of ignorance – until someone guessed, Steven Spielberg? Melissa Mathison, the screenwriter, remained unknown by the public. The compensation for all this artistic abuse was a fat paycheck, and the money could become addictive. I had a lot of it in the bank, but it wouldn’t last forever. What was I going to do if I didn’t write movies?
I tried to return the conversation to the news.
“So what makes a girl in the world’s oldest profession decide to do that? Did she give any clues?”
“I actually haven’t read the suicide note.”
“What if she didn’t write it?” said Gil Seebeck, taking the chair beside Sally. He brought a cup of black coffee with him. “That would suggest murder, right?”
Gil was the editor-publisher of The Sogobia Free Weekly, the only local newspaper. It was one of those freebies you picked up at the market or gas station, which most folks read for the supermarket specials and used-car ads. Gil, who was Sally’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, took the paper more seriously than this and often acted as if he were an investigative reporter working for The Washington Post. I didn’t know him well enough to know if this were a charade or a delusion, but finally he had the real story he’d been waiting for.
I said, “Your paper called it a suicide.”
Gil smiled. He looked Italian but according to Sally was half-Basque. He had movie-star good looks but didn’t seem to know it or take advantage of it. His clothes, artsy bohemian, came from a thrift store. He dressed the way he thought writers were supposed to.
“Don’t believe everything you read,” Gil said. “The plot thickens. I found something very interesting this morning.”
Sally slid her chair back, looking like someone who’d heard this all before. Since this was a working day, she had a ready excuse to split whenever she got the urge, which was now.
“Guys,” she said, “I’m out of here.”
“Keep the streets safe, officer,” I said. “Excuse me, sergeant.”
Last month Sally had been promoted from patrol officer. Once, when I asked her why she didn’t try to get a job in a larger city, she’d asked, What makes you think I won’t end up being chief here?
Gil said, “Don’t you want to hear?”
“You can tell me later.”
And she was out of there.
“She thinks I meddle.”
“That’s your job,” I said.
“I’m glad somebody understands this. Anyway, what I found is a hole big enough for a body to crawl through in the fence behind the Black Cat.”
But this was not unusual. Holes in the fence that surrounded the brothel appeared every few months, most often the work of a disgruntled customer who’d been ejected for disorderly conduct, drunkenness, or other behavior against brothel protocol.
“A hole that may or may not be related to the girl,” I said.
“True enough. But it’s certainly something to check out. I thought Sally would be interested.”
“I think she’s sold on the suicide note.”
Gil nodded, suggesting that even he recognized the weight of such evidence.
We drank our coffee in silence a moment. I liked Gil, though I didn’t understand what he was doing in a small town like Sogobia, barely two thousand strong, if he had real journalism aspirations. I sometimes wondered if he was really here because my sister was.
Police Chief Three Moons entered the café. Half white and half Shoshone Indian, he was a short man whose trim moustache reminded me of leading men in 1930s Hollywood. He seemed to be looking for someone, and as soon as he glanced our way, he found him.
Arriving at our table, he grabbed the weekly off the table in front of me and shook it at Gil.
“What the hell is this about?”
Gil shrugged.
“How the hell did you get the story out so soon?”
The chief had a point. The body had been discovered early on Monday morning. The weekly hit the stands forty-eight hours later with the story on the front page.
“It’s my job,” said Gil. I thought I caught a suppressed grin.
The chief nodded several times, as if thinking how to respond.
“You ever hear of the Basque Festival?” he finally asked. “How come that’s on page three? It’s as big around here as last week was.”
On the Fourth of July, the park on the river had been filled with people eating barbecue, dancing to a country band from Reno, and waiting for the fireworks to begin. A small town was never more cohesive than during a local celebration, and I’d wandered through the crowd feeling like a tourist until running into Sally and Gil, who took me under their wing.
Gil said, “It got bumped by breaking news.”
“Bullshit. This kind of news ain’t your job, son. People don’t pick up your rag for this shit. They look for a special on a six-pack. They want news, they get the Reno paper. This ain’t the first time I’ve had to remind you. What do you think tourists think, picking up the paper to find a story like this? Thank God it was only a suicide.”
I studied Gil to see if he were going to suggest the alternative.
“I was just doing my job,” he said again.
The chief looked at me for the first time.
“How you doing, Dallas?”
“Fair to middling.”
“I promoted your sister.”
“A month ago, I know.”
“I already told you?”
“She told me.”
“She deserved it.”
“I assumed as much.”
“She’ll have my job some day. If she can stick around that long. And if she doesn’t get hooked up with this idiot.”
Gil started to speak but changed his mind.
“You wanted to say something?” the chief asked.
Gil shook his head, no.
“What you should do for the Festival is more than a story,” the chief said. “A special insert, with history, pictures, the whole shot. The Basque Festival is a big fucking deal around here. You know that, it’s your people. How come you don’t support your own people? Folks like to read about the old days and how Sogobia got started and all that shit. You’re missing a real contribution to this community, ignoring the Festival and trying to come off as some kind of real newspaper or some goddamn thing. You need to get your head out of your ass, son.”
With that the chief turned and headed for the counter, where he sat a few stools down from the two salesmen. Or missionaries. If someone had told me who they really were, I would have wondered what drugs he’d been taking.
“Do you really think it wasn’t a suicide?” I asked.
“Sure, it looks like a suicide. But the fact remains, there’s a hole in the fence. If someone was eighty-sixed and raising hell, Lavinia would have called it in.”
Lavinia was the owner of the Black Cat Bar & Brothel and the smaller Annex which stood behind it, the only two brothels in Sogobia. She had taken me under her wing immediately after learning that I was a screenwriter. She liked to run her extraordinary movie ideas by me, most of which belonged in the Adult Entertainment industry, about which I knew little.
“Have you talked to her about the hole in the fence?”
“Not yet. I just noticed it this morning.”
“Then it may have happened after the girl was found.”
“I thought of that. I’m not saying it’s important, just that it’s worth checking out.”
“Did Sally mention anything about the note to you?”
“I don’t think she’s seen it.”
“She told me that, too.”
“You don’t believe it?” Gil asked.
“I think if she’d read it, she wouldn’t tell you or me squat.”
“That’s true enough.”
“Anybody claiming the body?”
“Her mother. Today, I think.”
“She may be able to tell you something about her daughter’s state of mind.”
“Already thought of that.”
“Wasn’t insinuating otherwise.”
“I know, Dallas.” After a pause, he went on. “I try to put myself in the mindset of a girl like that. You sell your body for good money but surely there’s a down side, a psychological down side, to doing that night after night. I can’t imagine some of the creeps she has to have sex with. Finally it gets to you so much that …”
Gil stopped, as if waiting for a creative conclusion to drop out of the air like a gift from the gods.
I filled in the rest. “You take the money and run. You get out of the business.”
“What are you saying?”
“She probably did what she did for personal reasons, not professional ones.”
Gil thought about this a moment.
“You may be right. If this were a movie, how would it go?”
“Well, if I were writing it, of course it would be murder. Murder’s a hell of a lot more interesting than suicide.”
“Okay, in this murder movie, who done it?”
“It would depend on the back story. Where the girl came from, the enemies she’d made, the people who would benefit by her murder.”
“Give me an example.”
I already was warming up to the exercise and would have given him a scenario without being asked. Story-building was the most fun part of my profession. Screenwriting was more collaborative than any other form of narrative, and I enjoyed bouncing ideas around with other writers, putting together plot points to build a story, the way some people enjoy doing crossword puzzles or playing bridge. Until the bean pushers got involved in the process, it was great fun.
“Let’s say she has a pimp. Misty tells me about half the girls at the Black Cat have pimps. She’s been skimming off the top, keeping more than her share of the money, and the pimp finds out. He makes an example of her.”
“A little obvious maybe.”
“I agree. So the pimp is an early suspect, not the real murderer.”
“Who then?”
“Butterfly was younger than most of the girls. A real girl-next-door type. So let’s say an older woman got jealous of her. Maybe Butterfly stole an especially generous client from her – you know, they really depend on their tips, almost as much as waitresses.”
“A rival eliminates the competition,” said Gil.
“Exactly.”
“Better but …”
“I know, I know. We’re just getting started. Actually, the girl is not a genuine prostitute. She’s an underground investigative reporter.”
“Now you’re cooking!”
“She’s been looking into the fact that the brothel actually is a front for something much more sinister.”
“What would that be?”
I was silent. Nothing immediately occurred to me.
“Hold the thought,” I said. “We can figure out that part later. The point is, the brothel’s owner finds out she’s turned up the dirt and has no choice but to eliminate her.”
“Drugs is too obvious.”
“Agreed.”
We were silent a moment.
“This isn’t easy,” Gil said.
“Tell me about it.”
“But I love her being an undercover investigative reporter. That’s cool.”
“But we still need the story she’s investigating.”
“Is this the way you do it in Hollywood? Tossing ideas around like this?”
“Pretty close. There’s a difference.”
“What’s that?”
“If you come up with the solution, and sometimes even if you don’t, you get a magnificent pay check.”
“So it’s not really about having fun? It’s just another form of greed?”
“No, no, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Fun and greed are not mutually exclusive terms.”
“God, Hollywood must be something. When are you going back?”
“I really haven’t thought about it,” I lied.
I got up to go on my way. My brain suddenly was preoccupied, the story game having triggered thoughts of a book idea, something based on the suicide. Sally was right. I should get off my ass and start something. I could become a screenwriter-turned-book author. A new writing life, a post-cancer life without the stress of collaboration and lack of power. I could write a book any damn way I chose to, and no producer could say diddly about it.
I decided to walk over to the Black Cat and see the hole in the fence for myself. When George Raft and his friend followed me to the cash register, I thought nothing of it. I assumed they’d pay their check and be on their way.
2
It was a gorgeous day, the desert sun warm at midmorning, the sky as deep a blue as you could ask for. Many people hate the desert and find it monotonous. I love it. When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, my family often spent weekends camping in the Mojave desert, where I would spend the night looking at the stars through a reflecting telescope I’d built as a school project. For a brief time I nurtured vague notions of becoming an astronomer but learned by high school that the profession required mathematical skills beyond my comprehension. Since I’d never thought of becoming anything else except a professional baseball player, which also was out of the question, I joined the marines after high school. In Vietnam I took shrapnel in a leg and was sent home for rehabilitation and discharge. I tried UCLA for a year but felt out of place, surrounded by students screaming against the war who considered me and other vets on campus some kind of moral delinquents. Dad got me a shit job at Columbia Pictures, where I discovered a natural talent for screenwriting (mainly because it’s more about storytelling than actual “writing,” in the sense that novelists write) – and the rest, as they say, is history.
“Hey, Texas, it’s a little early for this sort of thing, isn’t it?”
I was walking along the side fence at the Black Cat when a voice I recognized called from the adjacent parking lot. It was Cheyenne, who was unloading her cleaning supplies from a teal-blue van on which was written, Mop Around the Clock, under a logo of a broom and mop doing the twist together. Cheyenne had the janitorial contract for the brothel.
If there was one woman in Sogobia who interested me in a romantic way, it was Cheyenne. Not that I was on the lookout for a girlfriend. After three marriages and two live-in girlfriends, I’d finally gotten the message that relationships weren’t my strong suit. This was one of the reasons Sogobia, with its legal brothels, was such a fascinating place for me to hang out while I decided what to do with my life after cancer. The Black Cat was nothing like I imagined a brothel would be. First, the women were neither sleazy nor tramps. In the Annex, which was a trailer behind the main building, they were mostly housewives and single mothers working to make ends meet. In the main house, they were more career-oriented girls, some with considerable experience, and in appearance they were as diverse as any random sampling of women on a city street at noon hour. But they looked better.
What especially fascinated me was how direct and natural the transaction for sex was. When you buzzed for admittance at the front gate, you were let into the compound, took the long walk across a cobblestone pathway to the front door, where you rang again before being let into the building. A floor manager met you and led you to the house living room, called the parlor, where all the available women were already standing and sitting around, usually dressed in lingerie or cocktail dresses, all hoping to be chosen. When you picked the woman you liked, she led you back into the foyer, past a small gift shop and down a hallway to her room, where you privately negotiated a price for whatever sexual favor you were in the market for. If the price was too high, you were free to return to the parlor and negotiate with someone else. Or to leave. Or to go into the adjacent bar and have a drink or play the slots while you thought about it.
There was never a doubt what you were there for or who was available to provide it. It was the sex act turned into a biological commodity, sex no bigger a deal than getting a burger at a fast food joint, one hunger no different from the other, and to my surprise I had discovered in Sogobia an amiable logic to such an arrangement. Soon I got the habit of visiting a young Japanese woman who called herself Misty several times a week. By now I felt like I was visiting a friend, not a prostitute.
But not a girlfriend. What was missing in the brothel environment was romance (including kissing, which was against house rules at the Black Cat). Romance, of course, was one of the things I specialized in while writing for Hollywood. If the brothel took sex to its logical biological extreme, Hollywood specialized in creating a fantasy world where men on white horses actually did rescue damsels in distress and sweep them off their feet. The culture, it seemed to me, was more rooted in Hollywood than Nevada, more in fantasy than biology, which explained my vague romantic interest in Cheyenne. As much as I enjoyed my time with Misty, I entertained no romantic notions about her at all.
“Hey, Wyoming,” I said as I approached the Mop Around the Clock van. We found it curious that we’d both been named after cities. It suggested a vague bond between us.
For all my time in the world of starlets and high fashion, I’m viscerally attracted to bohemian women who wear little makeup and get their clothes from second-hand stores. Cheyenne, in her janitorial duds, fit the bill nicely. She was tall and slender, with dark eyes and hair, dark enough, in fact, to suggest a gypsy in the bedroom somewhere down the genetic line. She was always quick with a quip, her greeting a perfect example, and was obviously bright enough to do something other than janitorial work if she had a mind to. I’d been contemplating asking her to dinner for months. Although Misty and I had great conversations, before sex and after, somehow it wasn’t the same thing as talk over dinner and wine, coffee and brandy.
“I didn’t think Hollywood writers got up this early,” Cheyenne said.
“I’ve been up for hours.”
“Really? Long enough to get horny, it appears.”
“Actually I’m here on another matter.”
“Let me guess. Gil talked to you about the hole in the fence and got you curious and now you’re snooping around.”
“You’re certainly well-informed.”
“I did his office before I came here. I’m getting an early start today so I can take some time off. It’s my birthday.”
“Well, happy birthday! I’d ask how old but I’ve been told it’s impolite.”
“It is but I’ll tell you anyway. Thirty-two.”
“A fine age. I remember it well.”
Cheyenne’s helper, a plump teenager named Trixie, came to the truck for another load of supplies. Trixie smiled when she saw me but said nothing. She grabbed a vacuum cleaner and headed for the side entrance.
Cheyenne said, “Let’s check out the hole. I haven’t seen it myself yet.”
She started toward the back fence, and I followed along. The wire-link fence had been cut into half an oval and bent back. It was large enough for me or any average-sized man to stoop through.
Cheyenne said, “Gil should follow you back to Hollywood. He has a great imagination.”
“Meaning you accept it as a suicide.”
“Come on. The plastic bag over her head. An empty bottle of pills was on the bedside table. She even left a note. What else could it be?”
“Did you know her?”
“Not very well. I thought she was really nice for a hooker.”
“You don’t like hookers?”
“I don’t trust them. You wouldn’t believe all the back-stabbing that goes on here, or in any brothel for that matter. Which makes perfect sense when you think about it. All the ladies are in competition with one another.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“Think of the pressure and the frustration when you’re the one not getting the gig, and you have bills to pay. A lot of these women have kids to support.”
“Puts a whole different light on things.”
“It’s a business, Dallas. Big business in Nevada. Don’t ever forget it. Well, I’d better get to work. You coming in?”
There was something about her tone of voice and the way she looked at me now that made the question more than something casual, as in going my way? It was as if my answer mattered to her.
“Well, I’m not in the mood for sex, as hard as you may find that to believe. But I think I’ll have coffee with Misty if she’s free.”
“Is she your regular?”
“I don’t have a regular,” I lied. “And I’m really not the sex fiend you make me out to be.”
“I sure see you here a lot.”
“No, you just think you do because you never see me anywhere else. You want some help?”
“No thanks. Catch you around.”
I walked around to the front gate as Cheyenne closed up the van. I buzzed twice, the signal that I wasn’t looking for a date, and was met at the front door by Hazel, the day floor manager. She was a big woman with hair bleached so blonde it looked white.
“What are you doing here this early, Dallas?”
“Just killing a little time, if that’s okay. The bar’s open, isn’t it?”
“Deader than a doornail but it’s open.”
The floor plan of the Black Cat was pretty typical of brothels, Misty had told me. I’d never been to another, not even to the Annex in back. What made the Black Cat different was that it was a converted house, not a double-wide trailer like most of the brothels in Nevada. It also was unusual to be located in the city limits, near the heart of downtown.
I headed for the bar. Off the foyer was a small gift shop, often manned by a mentally deficient adult everyone called Sonny Boy, and beyond it a doorway into the large living room or parlor, which was filled with stuffed chairs and three sofas. A doorway with a swinging door led to the bar, and an open doorway led to a long hallway off of which spilled the dozen rooms occupied by the working women. If I had buzzed only once, signaling that I was a customer, by the time Hazel led me to the parlor it would have been filled with all the ladies who were free and looking for a date.
This morning Hazel let me walk through the parlor and through the swinging door on my own. Sitting at the bar were three of the working girls, only one of whose names I could remember, a redhead called, believe it or not, Scarlet. Several others were playing the slots against the far wall. Everybody looked bored.
The day bartender, Jeff, was a Shoshone Indian and brother of the chief of police.
“Dallas, my friend,” he said, dropping a napkin onto the bar. “What will it be?”
“Just coffee.”
“Sure you don’t want me to sweeten it?”
“Positive.”
“Hey, Dallas,” said Scarlet. “You making up your mind or just slumming?”
“Is Misty working?”
“No one’s working working. It’s boring as hell around here. I can’t wait for the festival to start.”
“I think she’s reading in her room,” said a dark-haired woman pushing forty. Not many working girls lasted as long as she had. “Want me to get her?”
“If it’s not too much trouble,” I said.
She shrugged and went to fetch Misty.
When Misty arrived, wearing a red Japanese robe, I immediately said, “I need to talk to you about a date.”
This wasn’t true but it gave us the excuse to go to her room together. Misty was a small woman, Japanese, beautiful by my tastes. I loved her dark eyes. She was thoroughly Americanized, the “east” in her accent suggesting New York more than Tokyo.
At the end of the hallway we passed Rachael, the cashier, who sat on a stool reading a magazine. She looked up and back down without saying a word.
Misty’s room, like all of them in the brothel, was very small and pared down to essentials: a bed, a wash basin, a closet. Misty had personalized it by putting posters on three walls, an assortment of Japanese water colors and calligraphy. She shared a full bathroom with another room on its opposite side, two rooms sharing a bathroom all the way down the long hallway.
I took out my wallet and handed Misty two twenties.
“You want a blow job?”
“No, I want to talk to you without getting you in trouble. Give this to Rachael and tell her what you want.”
In a few minutes, Misty was back.
“What’s up?”
“I was wondering if you knew who cut the fence in back.”
“For forty bucks you need to know? Now you’re making me feel guilty.”
“If you feel guilty, you can give me a special rate next time. So what do you know?”
“Nothing specific but it got crazy as hell around here a few nights ago. Sonny Boy and the preacher they call Elmer Gantry both got themselves eighty-sixed and weren’t too happy about it. That’s usually when someone tears up the fence.”
“Couple days as in Sunday night?”
The body of Brooke had been discovered early Monday morning, I remembered, by one of the other prostitutes.
“Right.”
“Why’d they get eighty-sixed?”
“I only know specifics about Sonny Boy. He’s one of these johns who’s always falling in love. He fell in love with me last year. He came in with a diamond engagement ring for Brooke, and when she didn’t accept it, he went bananas.”
“The night she killed herself?”
Misty shrugged.
“I don’t let myself think about it. It’s all too weird for me.”
“Did Lavinia call the cops?” I asked.
“Nobody calls the cops on Sonny Boy. He’s got mental problems. He’s a kid in a man’s body. Lavinia treats him like a mascot around here.”
“Do you think Brooke killed herself?”
“I didn’t see it coming but I can see how it could happen. She was a troubled soul. I could see it in the way she carried herself. In the eyes. You get a sense of when someone is about to go over the edge.”
“Maybe the engagement deal was the last straw. You think?”
“No, I don’t think it had anything to do with it. That’s Sonny Boy’s deal, not hers. She would’ve done what she was going to do anyway. Why are you so interested in all this?”
I had to laugh.
“Good damn question.”
“You ever have a date with her?”
“No. Just you, sweetie pie.”
I meant it. Misty was a knockout and knew more about oral sex than I knew about dramatic structure. Our arrangement suited me just fine.
“So what are you asking so many questions for?”
“I’m a writer. It’s my job to be curious.” She looked doubtful, so I went on. “Gil, the guy who has the weekly paper, got me thinking about a few things.”
“It’s your job to make up stories,” said Misty, “and I get the idea you’re making up one here. You plan to write a book or something?”
“Never wrote a book in my life.”
In fact, the notion of writing something based on Brooke’s suicide was looking better all the time. But this wasn’t the sort of thing a writer shared with anyone. At root, writers were spies.
“She left a note,” Misty said. “She left the empty pill bottle. She put a bag on her head to make sure.”
The same evidence Cheyenne had noted.
“Pretty convincing,” I said.
“Since you’re here, you sure you don’t want to get off?”
“One more question. Who did Brooke share a bathroom with?”
“Jane. You know her?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Natural blonde, 30ish, tits as big as Jayne Mansfield.”
“You’re too young to remember Jayne Mansfield.”
“In Japan, she was considered one of the seven wonders of the world. A real freak show.”
“Is Jane working today?”
“I think she’s in her room. What do you have in mind?”
“Maybe I’ll buy a conversation with her, too.”
“You are very reckless with the bills today.”
“Hey, I’m a big Hollywood writer, remember? Have to spend it on something.”
Which was more or less true. I’d made a damn good living in Hollywood, but I’d acquired few of the habits of the rich. I’d driven here in a twenty-year-old VW Bug, I wore department store clothes mostly bought on sale. My only vice when working was renting a beach house in Malibu. In Sogobia I rented an apartment for less than two hundred dollars a month, which was less than my bar bill in my previous life. Throwing out a few twenties on a whim was not an act I considered reckless. At least not yet.
I waited in Misty’s room while she went to see if Jane would talk to me for half an hour at her usual rates. Misty was back in no time.
“Just down the hall. She left the door open.”
“You’re a sweetheart. I may be back in earnest tonight or tomorrow.”
Misty had not exaggerated about Jane’s endowment. I’m not a breast man, but if I were, I would think I’d died and gone to heaven. Even in her bathrobe, which she wore over pajamas, her extraordinary figure seemed to defy the gravitational laws of balance. Her platinum blonde hair completed the resurrection of Jayne Mansfield.
“Misty said you’d pay me to talk. You want to talk about your wife, right?”
I heard and saw immediately that Jane was a tad inebriated. I glanced around for the party juice and found a vodka bottle and carton of orange juice near the sink. She’d been having screwdrivers for breakfast.
“You shared a bathroom with Brooke, I understand.”
“Fuck you!”
The outburst took me completely by surprise.
“Were you two close?”
“I don’t have a goddamn thing to say about her!”
She was heading my way, those large breasts of hers coming at me like huge boxing gloves. I turned and hurried out the door. Jane slammed it behind me.
I tapped on Misty’s door and opened it.
“She got very upset when I mentioned Brooke,” I said.
“What do you expect? She’s the one who discovered her.”
“She’s already drinking.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her sober.”
Trixie was vacuuming the foyer as I passed on my way out. She blushed when she saw me, and I felt vaguely guilty about something. Then I saw Cheyenne looking at me from the hallway, shaking her head. The woman definitely was getting to me.
I was through the gate and walking past the parking lot when I saw the black Chrysler parked at the curb across from the brothel. The two salesmen were in it, the George Raft look-alike sitting behind the wheel. Whoever they were. As soon as they saw me, the car pulled away and headed off down the street. It never occurred to me that they had followed me. A more logical explanation presented itself: they were checking out the brothel, missionaries rather than salesmen after all, either visiting Mormons or zealots from our local group, Christians Against Prostitution, although the latter usually wore white suits to show off their purity. Whoever they were, they may have been doing legwork before their next crusade against sin. It wasn’t something to trouble myself about, and when I didn’t see them again for a few days, it was easy enough to forget I’d seen them at all.
3
I remember a period in the middle of chemo when I wanted to die. It wasn’t that the cure was worse than the disease; the cure was worse than any imaginable human experience. A bullet to the brain held the promise of ecstatic relief. But there was a problem. I didn’t own a gun, and I was in no shape to venture out into the world to find one. An overdose of pills was out of the question. I couldn’t even keep down cold cereal or chicken soup. To leap from a great height required the climb to get there, and I became exhausted just thinking about it. Even stepping up on a chair, from which to insert my neck into a noose, required energy beyond my capacity. I faced the frightening realization that I was powerless to do anything about my misery. I was a pawn at the mercy of my doctor. I did what he told me to do because what he told me was the only thing I could manage.
But I got over it. I survived and my hair grew back and I put on weight until one day I felt as if little had changed in my life after all. The problem was, a great deal had to change – and sooner rather than later. My doctor said so. The next cancer would be worse, he assured me, and the one after that worse still, and if I wanted to reach forty I had to change the bad habits of my life in a major way. I knew in my gut that my doctor was right but I had little confidence I could change, even given the ultimate price for failing at least to try. I was a creature of habit. Moreover, I had come to like my habits, my routine, my life. Perhaps this was my fatal flaw.
Change your environment, my sister told me on the phone. Come spend time up here with me. The air will do you good. The solitude will do you good. You’ve got money, you can afford to take a year off. Hollywood will survive without you. Come up here and who knows?, maybe you’ll find a way to reinvent yourself. Come to Sogobia, Nevada.
And so I did.
The nicest thing about my apartment is that it’s across the street from a small park that runs along what is called the Sogobia River but which, by all but the standards of the Chamber of Commerce, would be called a creek. It’s a one-bedroom on the second floor with a deck overlooking the park. It’s become the most comfortable home I’ve ever made for myself, no doubt another reason I was still in town. But mainly I was biding time. Sooner or later I had to make a decision about my life and my future. I had to figure out how to live my life after cancer – and how to live my life when the cancer came back, which the odds said it would do one day. I had to start living with my new roommate, mortality.
My answering machine was blinking as I entered. The message was from Gil, who said to call him back as soon as possible. His tone of voice reinforced the urgency.
I called but the line was busy. Since his office was a short walk away, I took it.
Main Street was a four-block stretch of brick and stone buildings, each block lined with cottonwood trees, which in summer provided considerable shade, creating a tiny oasis in the desert. The usual small-town businesses were represented: a men’s clothing store and a women’s clothing store, a mercantile, an appliance store, a hardware store, a barber, a cigar store, several restaurants, cafes and bars. And, of course, in the middle of everything, a block off Main Street, was the Black Cat Bar & Brothel, a business as accepted as any other.
Gil was off the line by the time I entered the small downtown office on Main Street. The Sogobia Free Weekly was mostly a one-man operation, with a part-time secretary who was not there at the moment and several salespeople who worked strictly on commission.
“The mother’s in town,” Gil said, not hiding his excitement, “and she says no way the suicide note is her daughter’s handwriting. We’ve got a murder case, my friend. Right here in Sogobia.”
You would have thought this was the biggest thing to happen on the desert since Butch Cassidy robbed the bank in Winnemucca.
“How’d you find out?”
“My source has to remain confidential.”
“Sally?”
Gil shrugged.
“I’ll find out if it is, you know. She doesn’t keep much from me.”
“She can’t keep much from anyone. Yes, it was her, but you can’t let her know I told you. She’s in a big argument with the chief about it. Apparently he still doesn’t buy it was murder.”
“Murder looks worse to the tourists than suicide,” I noted.
“That’s for damn sure. Anyway, since it’s murder, there’s a murderer – and that means we’ve got a genuine whodunit on our hands. Is this exciting or what?”
Exciting wasn’t quite the right word, though I didn’t tell Gil so. But I knew where he was coming from. If you report week after week on drunken driving citations, barroom fights and a periodic crusade against legalized prostitution, a murder story must look pretty good. It also made my book idea more commercial. I might be on the ground floor of one hell of a story. Maybe this was exciting after all.
“So are the police going to investigate?” I asked.
“I’m sure the chief won’t touch it till after the festival. Maybe not even then. Sally, though, will definitely be looking into it.”
“And you, too.”
“Absolutely. Want to help?”
“In what way?”
“You probably know more about it than I do. I’ve never written about a murder case. You ever write a murder movie?”
“Several.”
“See there. I can use all the help I can get. I might be able to break a big story in the weekly if we get ahead of the curve. Once this becomes known, of course, Reno and Vegas will have writers here like flies on shit.”
“It’s pretty small stuff by Vegas standards.”
“Maybe so. Anyway, I’m hot to trot. Where should we begin?”
“Will Sally keep you up to speed?”
“I think so.”
“I think she’s your best ally at the moment. You don’t want to interfere with the official investigation or the police will stop talking to you.”
“I just feel like I should be doing something!”
“Have you talked to the mother?”
“Right, I have to do that. I mean, I know how important it is.”
“Do you know where she’s staying?”
“Sally said she got a room at the Sogobia Inn.”
There were only a handful of motels in town, and this was the upscale one by local standards.
“Is she there now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s find out.”
The Sogobia Inn was on Main Street at the west edge of town, the first motel you passed coming from Winnemucca or Reno. It had thirty rooms, a swimming pool and free donuts and coffee in the morning. It was within easy walking distance of the Black Cat.
The woman’s name, Gil had learned, was Anita Cadbury, and she was staying on the top floor, in room 23. Gil was so excited he took the steps two at a time. He waited for me before knocking on the door.
Anita Cadbury clearly had been crying. She was a woman who looked like she had money, probably pushing fifty and hating it, which led her to wear too much makeup and a tight pants suit that probably fit her a couple years ago. She had a cigarette holder in her hand but no cigarette.
“Mrs. Cadbury?” Gil asked.
“Yes?”
“I’m from the weekly paper. This is my assistant. I wonder if we could talk to you.”
She was eager enough to talk, which I took to mean she was relieved to have someone who listened and took her seriously. Gil impressed me by the way he led her into telling the story of her daughter and why she believed Brooke would never kill herself.
They were estranged, Anita said from the start, because she did not approve of her daughter’s occupation as a prostitute, legal or not. How such an idea could even occur to a nice girl from Boise was beyond Anita’s comprehension. But then the teenager had started running with the wrong crowd after her father died when she was fourteen. Bad influences. Brooke’s first job had been outside Reno, at the Mustang Ranch, probably the best-known brothel in the country. She’d been there several years, mother and daughter not talking at all, when out of nowhere Anita received a letter from her daughter saying she was leaving the brothel. Brooke was joining the new ashram that followers of Swami Kree were building in Juniper County in central Oregon.
For Anita, this was jumping from the frying pan into the fire. The Kree, as far as she was concerned, was a religious cult that brainwashed its followers into changing their names, abandoning their family ties, and giving all their income to the ashram. She’d never think she’d miss her daughter being a prostitute but as far as Anita was concerned, better a legal whore in Reno than a religious zealot on Swami Kree’s ashram.
For this reason, she’d hired a deprogrammer in Portland, with the idea to kidnap Brooke from the ashram and get her into therapy to become herself again. By the time Anita and the deprogrammer arrived in Juniper to stake out the ashram, Brooke was already gone. No one knew where. All a representative at the ashram would say was that Brooke’s stay didn’t work out. That was about three months ago.
Brooke, of course, had returned to the work she knew best, getting a job at the Black Cat. When Anita got the first call from the police, telling her that her daughter had killed herself, she could very well believe it. Whatever spiritual quest her daughter was on, apparently using religion to escape her life as a prostitute, the failure at the ashram and subsequent return to prostitution must have been devastating to her. Her self-esteem, which Anita never considered healthy, must have plummeted to depths too great to live with. As sad as it made her, Anita could understand her daughter taking her own life.
Then the police showed her the suicide note. Anita knew her daughter’s handwriting, and this was not it, not even close. Whoever wrote this note, it was not her daughter – and if her daughter didn’t write it, then who did? Obviously the person who had killed her.
“Your chief of police didn’t believe me,” Anita went on. During her story, she’d planted a cigarette into the holder and had smoked it to a stub, which she stabbed out now. “He said that a person’s handwriting can change dramatically under duress. That’s poppycock. I never heard that, have you? No one will ever convince me that the note was written by my daughter. There was a woman there, a police woman, and she understood the situation as clearly as I did, but this didn’t matter to the chief either. The way he condescended to her! Like a woman cop, what the hell can she know? I’m having an autopsy done. Her body was taken to the funeral home in Winnemucca, and somebody has to come in from Reno to do it. I don’t know what I’ll do if the autopsy doesn’t prove anything.”
“We believe you,” Gil said the moment Anita stopped long enough to cue us that she was done.
“Thank you,” she said softly. She managed to smile.
I’d been quiet until now. I said, “Do you have any idea who might have done this? Even a wild guess?”
Anita thought a moment.
“Someone from the Kree.”
“And why is that?” Gil asked.
“There was something about the way they treated me, the way they said it hadn’t worked out for her. They’re all crazy anyway. And rich! They have doctors and lawyers from California in that cult. I don’t understand it. From what I hear, they want to buy up all of central Oregon and turn it into a religious state or something. It’s scary. I don’t understand why no one seems to be doing anything about it.”
Before she got too far adrift on a tangent, I said, “And they made you suspicious about something? What exactly?”
“I don’t know. Like they were hiding something. Like there was more to it than Brooke not working out at the ashram. I just got a bad feeling in my stomach about the whole experience of going there.”
Gil said, “If they wanted to get rid of her, wouldn’t it have been easier to do at the ashram?”
“Unless she fled before they could,” I put in.
Anita’s eyes widened as she warmed up to the possibility.
“They could have followed her here,” she said.
“Wouldn’t that be hard to do?” Gil asked.
I had an answer for him.
“Not if they knew she’d worked at the Mustang Ranch. How many legal brothels are there in Nevada? Not all that many. It did take them a few months to find her.”
I immediately regretted saying it. Anita was too quick to take the theory in. I caught myself using my storytelling instincts instead of my investigative instincts.
“This is just a wild theory,” I reminded everyone. I turned to Gil. “What did the police take as evidence from Brooke’s room?”
“I have no idea.”
Some investigative reporter.
I said, “One of us should ask Sally about that. Maybe she kept a diary.”
“Brooke always kept a diary,” said Anita. “Ever since junior high.”
“There we go,” I said.
Anita said, “I thought she was going to become a writer. She loved interviewing people and writing about them. She was so good with people. She could open anyone up; they’d spill out their entire life story to her.”
I didn’t say that she probably did very much the same thing with her customers. According to Misty, most of the men who visited brothels were married and spent a lot of time complaining about how their wives didn’t understand them.
I asked Anita when the results from the autopsy would be done.
“They’re going to try and get it done before the festival. I understand there’s a big festival this weekend and everything shuts down.”
“The Basque Festival,” said Gil.
“Really. I didn’t know there were Basques in this part of the country.”
“A lot of the early miners were Basque. Before they herded sheep.”
“Really.”
I told Anita we’d be in touch tomorrow to see how the autopsy was coming, and we left her putting another cigarette in the holder.
Walking to Gil’s car, I said, “I think the cult angle is too far-fetched.”
“It sounded good when you said it.”
“It’d make a great movie. Movies are more interesting than life. Our killer is probably someone more dull than a follower of Swami Kree.”
“Shouldn’t we at least look into it?”
“You mean go to Oregon?”
“I don’t know what I mean,” Gil laughed. “I feel like I’m in the middle of a lake without a paddle. This is harder than I thought it would be.”
I understood completely. I’d learned long ago that storytelling was a hell of a lot easier than life.
4
If you didn’t zoom past Sogobia, Nevada, on the Interstate and instead took the off-ramp to hang around town for a few days, talking to locals in the bars and cafes, you likely would hear this story sooner rather than later. It was told even more often than the story of old Frank Ford’s Bicentennial last ride in the saddle.
A retired couple from the Midwest had been celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in Las Vegas and Reno. On I-80 East on their way home, they stopped late in the afternoon in Sogobia to find a motel. When they saw the large sign at the edge of town advertising The Black Cat B&B, they decided to check it out. They still felt like celebrating, and a bed-and-breakfast would be more festive than a motel.
They were surprised to find that The Black Cat B&B was surrounded by a high chain-link fence with a security gate at the entrance. But it looked ideal: a large Victorian building on a sprawling lot within walking distance of the Sogobia River, surrounded by shade trees to temper the heat coming off the Nevada desert. They agreed to check it out further by going inside.
There was a buzzer at the security gate, and as soon as Emil pressed it, the gate buzzed back to let them in. There was a fairly long cobblestone path to the front door, and Mabel took her husband’s arm to steady herself for the long walk. Along the way she remarked that the security reminded her of the new planned living communities, like the one in which her sister had bought a condo in Bend, Oregon, a neighborhood called Camelot that was completely surrounded by a security fence. You couldn’t be too careful in today’s world.
The front door was open. Emil and Mabel entered to find themselves facing a large living room to their right – and this is when they stopped dead in their tracks. The room was filled with scantily clad ladies, almost a dozen of them, who sat and sprawled across the stuffed chairs and sofas in a variety of seductive poses.
Another woman, older than the others, with platinum blonde hair stacked on her head like a thatched hut, rushed to them and asked if they needed help.