Free Thorazine Beach by Bradley Harris Page A

creeping in. “You want pictures…” She reached into a slim leather case set on the floor, pulled out a file folder. “Here.” She slapped them down on table. “You’ll want to make sure we’re not seen or heard,” she said.
    I looked. Listened. No one else inside the place but Nikki. I asked her to switch the PA to jazz and turn it up some.
    Opened the folder. First picture: The girl couldn’t have been more than eleven, even allowing for the smaller sizes you see in Latinas. Couldn’t tell whether she was pretty or not, in any sense a guy like me could relate to. First, I’m attracted to women, not girls, usually somewhere between the wrong side of forty and Barbara Jean’s age. Second: This poor wee thing was painted up like an aging transvestite in an Amsterdam red-light window.
    I looked at Barbara Jean, trying to appear expressionless. “Go on,” she said, motioning.
    Two: Thai, Malaysian, something. Seventeen, maybe. Poured into a blue lycra tube dress with a red-lips kisses motif, and—I didn’t
get
this part—clutching what looked like a toilet brush. Bad lighting. Amateur shot. And a facial expression that rolled resentment and embarrassment and perplexity all into one.
    Three: Filipina, looked like. Mid-teens. Pretty, this one—but in a sweet, baby-sister kind of way. She was squeezed into something that looked like a prom dress for the gal voted Most Likely to Be Busted for Soliciting. She looked, nonetheless, still innocent. Smiling, wide-eyed. As if all she knew were that the dress was the prettiest thing she’d seen in her life, she was grateful to be given it, and she felt like
somebody
wearing it.
    Eighteen, twenty pictures in all. Every one an eight-by-ten glossy. Interestingly, some colour, some black and white. Some digital, and some, it was clear, good old fashioned film enlargements. Every one a girl or young woman—almost all something other than Caucasian—dressed to, as it were, impress. Impress in one particular way, to one very particular kind of audience.
    You be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy
…
and they’ll be nice to you
.
    “You’ve called the police, of course.”
    “Oh. No. Certainly not,” she said in the most matter-of-fact tone. “You see, they’re in on it.”
    One last picture. A guy. Balding. Middle-aged and a bit beyond. An odd cross between a man with money, confidence, and the kind of guy who sells aluminum siding. I looked at her.
    “My husband,” she said. “Clayton.” A faint smile that came a little late.
    I smiled back, equally faint, hoping my smile didn’t convey what had just occurred to me: He was the guy I’d seen with His Eminence, at the New Nam King.
    “So…blackmail,” I said.
    She nodded.
    “Blackmail of…?”
    “I’m…not sure.”
    “Blackmail
for
…?”
    “Well, money, of course,” she said in a silly-question way.
    “How much?”
    “They haven’t asked.”
    “Who’s ‘they,’ Barbara Jean?”
    “They…haven’t said.”
    “No calls, no note?”
    “Um…not…not as yet.”
    “And I am investigating…
what
? Exactly.”
    “It’s a bit…” I was beginning to hate the way she paused as if searching for words, and the way I’d caught myself doing it, too. “Delicate,” she said.
    “Always is. So…”
    She hesitated.
    “Look,” I said, sharply enough to regret it. I re-set my tone. “What I mean, Barbara Jean, is, I need to know where I’m looking, who I’m looking at, and what I’m looking for.”
    She nodded, gathered herself. “The where is determined by the whom, and the whom is…”
    I ventured a little, to fill it in. “Clayton,” I said. She looked back at me, expressionless, and I knew I was right. “And what am I looking at the whom
for
?”
    Kleenex. Face turned away. Incipient tear. I half-thought it was contrived. But only half. “I think he may be, how can I put this…implicated…in something.”
    Christ, we’re all
implicated
. I breathed. “Barbara Jean,” I said. “I