Free The Walkaway by Scott Phillips Page B

shopping centers, and anyplace else with a public bulletin board, putting up posters and flyers for the car shows, flea markets, and oldies concerts the company produced for twenty-five cents per flyer posted.
    “They’re only half done putting up the flyers for the car show.”
    “They can do both at the same time. Duh.”
    The phone rang and Sidney headed for his office. “I’m only here if it’s about the old man.”
    He sat and opened his morning paper, and within twenty seconds the intercom buzzed. “Sidney, that’s Dennis on line one. There’s some kind of problem with the new lighting at the Sweet Cage.”
    “Tell him I have other things on my mind right now.”
    “That’s what I told him you’d say.”
    “You were right.” The new lighting system in the Sweet Cage had been, up until yesterday around noon, his most time-consuming problem. He missed the sleazeball atmosphere of the clubs before he cleaned them up; ten years ago the idea of a professional theatrical lighting system for a strip joint would have seemed ridiculous.
    But once in charge he’d modernized, offering edible food and getting a full liquor license when the club laws finally changed, even wincingly adding the laughably ambitious phrase “A Gentleman’s Club” to the marquee. In the end he’d succeeded in attracting the crowd he’d aimed for, young executives who couldn’t stop whooping and high-fiving one another and generally behaved like a beer commercial brought to life.
    He hated them, but they brought in a lot of money; between improvements to his other club and moving the Sweet Cage out to a new facility west of town his overhead had increased considerably. He had also stopped hiring the druggy, dowdy, inexpensive, hard-luck-case dancers who had long been the mainstay of both clubs, bringing in instead the kind of sleek, hard-muscled dancers he’d seen at clubs elsewhere. His account books proved that he was in the minority on this score, but how these skinny, silicone-injected hardbodies with the cold looks, artificially enhanced cheekbones, and big spiky hair could make anybody horny was beyond Sidney. He found he couldn’t bring himself to fire any of the old dancers, and it took attrition nearly eight years before Francie, the last and oldest of the old girls, quit to marry Mitch Cherkas.
    The phone rang again and a moment later Janice stuck her head in the door. “For you. Some lady, says she saw Gunther.”
    He punched line two. “Sidney McCallum.”
    “Mr. McCallum? My name’s Loretta Gandy. I just spoke with a Captain Howells and he gave me your number.”
    He stared out the window at some kids in the backyard of one of the houses behind the building. They sat listless in the shade, the sun already too hot for play, waiting to be brought inside. The house next door to it had a flagstone back patio with a glass-topped table, at which an old man sat in a checkered bathrobe reading the paper and drinking from a mug. As he listened to the woman talk about picking Gunther up and taking him for a haircut Sidney spotted Gunther’s picture on the man’s newspaper.
    “I gave him some money when he got out,” she said.
    “And he took it?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Doesn’t sound like Gunther.”
    “It was him all right. I thought he was the nicest man when I was little. He took me and my friend Sandra to the Shrine Circus when I was about five. I threw up my lime Coke all over him as we were leaving and he was so sweet about it. My mom would have smacked me.”
    Sidney leaned back in his chair and watched the kids’ mother trooping them back inside their house like a vanquished, retreating army, listening to the woman rattle on. Another gal who thought sullen old Gunther was the greatest guy she’d ever met. “Yeah, he’s got his good points.”
    “Could you do me a favor and call me when you find him?”
    “Sure.”
    He took her number and hung up, and despite himself the picture of the little girl throwing up