Moonlight & Vines (26 page)

I raise my eyebrows. “Can you remember his name?”

“A Peter Cross of the Vax Agency. He said it was just the odd sort of thing that would appeal to you.”

Great. First he dumps me—“You're too intense, Kira,”—and now he's sending crumbs of work my way. Like I can't find work on my own. Though I'm not saying business has been good lately . . . .

I realize I'm frowning, but I can't seem to stop myself. Instead I reach for the woman's cigarette package.

“Do you mind?” I ask.

“Not at all.”

“Thanks.”

She gives me enough time to put a cigarette in my mouth.

“Will you help me?” she asks.

I pause with a lit match in my hand. “You know you can't ever get something like that back. When someone wants to walk out of your life, you can't force them to stay.”

I'm thinking as I light the cigarette, trust me on this. I know. But I don't say it aloud.

She shakes her head. “Oh, no. You've misunderstood me. It's true we had a relationship, and it's true she left me, but I'm not looking to get her back. I just want my heart back. It's a pendant. She took it with her when she left.”

“This is still a job for a private detective,” I tell her. “Or maybe even the police, if you can prove ownership of the stolen property.”

“It's not that simple.”

It never is, is it?

I prop my elbow up on the desk, cup my chin with my hand. The cigarette smolders between the fingers of my free hand. It doesn't taste nearly as good as I was hoping it would.

“So tell me about it,” I say.

“The heart was a gift to me from Faerie,” she says.

This is getting kinkier by the minute. “So you're into gay, or I guess, bisexual guys, too?”

“Not at all.”

“Hey, I don't have a problem with it,” I tell her. “Live and let live, I say.”

“When I say Faerie,” she says, “I mean the Otherworld. I did a favor once for a prince of the realm and he gave me the pendant in gratitude. It allows one the gift of second sight. Of piercing the barriers between what we believe we see and what is actually there.”

Scratch the kinky, I think. This woman belongs in a padded cell at the Zeb. Except she's so earnest. I can't help but lean forward as she talks, knowing it's all hogwash, but
wanting
it to be real. I mean, how many of us didn't go through a rainbow-and-unicorn phase when we were eleven or twelve?

So I let her ramble on about gifts from the faerie folk and how they don't work for everybody, but then what does? How her particular pendant not only gives its bearer this second sight, but also protects her from some of the, shall we say, less friendly denizens of the Otherworld. The friendlies pretty much ignore you, but the others . . .

See, the way she tells it, once you get their attention, once they know you can see them, you've got to have protection or your ass is grass. Sounds like life on the street to me, business as usual, except she's describing creatures with knives for fingers and worse.

I feel like I'm trapped in a video edition of
The Weekend Sun
, directed by Roger Corman—somewhere between “Nun Gives Birth to Pig Twins”
and the Elvis Spotter page—so when I find myself agreeing to help her track down her friend and the pendant, I startle myself.

I mean, this really isn't my line of work. I'm strictly an over-the-phone girl. I do research, go electronic-tripping through the on-line services. Sometimes I have to leave the office to work the stacks at the Newford Library or something similar. I wouldn't know where to begin to find a missing person except from what I've seen in the movies.

My nameless client isn't stumped. She tells me to hit the girl bars on Gracie Street and gives me a photo of her friend. Tells me she'll be in touch with me tomorrow night. Leaves me sitting there in my office wondering, if she knows how to do it so well, why's she bothering to hire me? Leaves me wondering just how much Peter's leaving me has screwed me up that I'd agree to something like this.

I don't know my client's name. I don't know the name of the woman I'm looking for. My head's spinning with fairy tales. But at least she left her smokes. I give them up every couple of months. Right now I'm off them. Was.

So I stuff the pack in my pocket and hit the street. It's going on eleven, which means the action's just starting on Gracie Street. It's busy down here—not Times Square before Disney cleaned it up, but still big-city, inner-core, out-for-some-fun busy. The names of the bars range from the obvious to the less so: The North Star, Neon Sister, Girljock, Skirts. There's plenty of traffic on the pavement, cars cruising, cabs. Plenty of people on the sidewalk, too—street people, couples, single men and women. The couples I pass are all same sex: male and male, female and female. It's not too outrageous out on the street—you know, leather scenes and the like—but inside the clubs it's a whole different story.

Some of the women are femmes, some butch. Lots of sexy tops, short hair, body piercing, tattoos, dancing, smoking, drinking. I try not to do the tourist thing and gawk as I show around a photograph of two women standing on a street corner—one's my client. In the photo she's got her hair tied back. She's wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, black cowboy boots, and still looks like a million dollars. Around her neck, sparkling against the black shirt, is a small gold pendant in the shape of a heart. She has her arm around an attractive smaller woman who has short, spiky dark hair, angular features. The second woman is dressed in a short black dress and is barefoot. She's holding a pair of high heels by their straps with one hand and leaning against my client.

I show the photo around, but I seem to be generating more interest for who I am than the picture. I remember what I told my client earlier—live and let live—and I believe it. But I've never been hit on so many times in such a short period of time as I have in the past couple of hours. And not once by a guy.

It really isn't a problem for me. My best friend in high school, Sarah Jones, came out to me in our senior year and we're still good friends. But I'm being hit on so often right now that I find myself seriously wondering what it'd be like to go out with another woman.

I take a look at these cigarettes my client left behind and wonder what's in them, because first, she has me out here playing detective for her and now I'm actually considering . . .

There's an attractive woman with short red hair sitting at the other end of the bar, looking back at me, one eyebrow raised questioningly. She makes a victory sign with the first two fingers of her right hand and then flicks her tongue through them.

No, I don't think so.

I turn away quickly and bump into a tall black woman who's standing on the other side of my stool. She's wearing a white halter top, a short skirt and pumps, and has a ship captain's hat scrunching down her kinky black hair. There are three studs in her nose, half a dozen more in each ear, running up from the lobes.

“Easy now,” she says, steadying me.

I jerk away from her. “Look, I'm not interested in—”

I break off when I realize the woman was just helping me keep my balance. She smiles at me, obviously non-aggressive, and I feel like a fool.

“I'm sorry,” I tell her. “I'm just feeling a little . . .”

“Flustered?” she asks.

I nod.

“First time down here?”

“Yes, but it's not what you think.”

When she cocks an eyebrow, I show her the photo and point to my client's companion.

“The other woman in the picture has got me looking for her,” I say.

We're both leaning against the bar now, the photo lying on the bar between us. The music's still loud, making it hard to talk. All around us is the press of bodies, women dancing with each other, flirting with each other.

“I know them,” the woman says. “Are you sure you're really into their scene?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, the whole S&M thing. The girl you're looking for is your client's slave.”

“Slave?”

The woman smiles. “You really are a virgin, aren't you? Your client's a top—you know, a leatherdyke.”

I give her a blank look.

“The sexually dominant one of the pair. The other girl's a femme.” She's still friendly, but maybe a little too friendly now. “Like you.”

I shake my head. “No way.”

And I mean it. Except even I can hear the trace of uncertainty in my voice.

My companion shrugs. “Then what're you doing with a recruiter?”

I'm getting more confused by the minute.

“I'm not sure I know what you mean,” I tell her.

She gets a tired look on her face. “The leatherdykes are always looking for new blood, but the trouble is, you sweet young femmes don't always know you're looking for them, too.”

She turns away, leaning against the bar with her elbows supporting her. She doesn't look at me anymore, her gaze on the crowd. I get the sense that this conversation is finished, thank you very much, but then she adds, “So people like your friend go out and recruit them.”

“Oh.”

What the hell have I gotten myself mixed up in?

The woman turns to look at me. “It's nothing heavy. Nobody's forced to do anything against her will. But sometimes people get talked into doing things that they regret later. The leather crowd can get a little rough.”

“I'm really just trying to find this woman,” I tell her. “After that, my job's over.”

“Whatever.”

She points to the photo then, finger resting on the chest of my client's ex-girlfriend.

“Somebody told me she's dancing at Chic Cheeks,” she tells me. “That's a straight club over in the Combat Zone. I don't think her top knows about the gig. It's a big city. Easy to disappear in, especially if you
go someplace where no one's going to look for you. At least no one in this crowd. We've got our own strip joints.”

“Thanks,” I say. “I really appreciate—”

“And considering the kind of clientele it caters to, you might want to go round the back like the girls who work there do.”

“I will,” I tell her.

“I'd say be careful, but you girls never listen, do you?”

I smile and leave with the photo in hand, pretending I didn't hear her.

Back out on Gracie Street, I find myself thinking about lesbian relationships again. Do women treat each other better than guys treat us, or is it the same-old same-old only with the gender changed? Call me naive, but I don't feel like that sailor girl would have treated me the way Peter did. But while I liked her, and I know she liked me, I still can't muster up a sexual interest in another woman.

I pause to light a cigarette.

I remember something another friend of mine said to me once. She told me she was attracted to lesbianism, but “It's not because I have the hots for another woman or anything,” she confided. “What I'm attracted to is the kind of freedom the word implies. These women don't seem to worry so much about what everybody else is thinking; they just do what they think is right.”

And that makes me think of what Sarah said about lesbian sex. “It's soft and slippery and it just never ends. There's no hard-on to worry about and one orgasm leads to the next. Who wants a guy, if that's what you get to do all day?”

As I light my cigarette, I see yet another woman watching me with interest from across the street. She looks as straight as I am, but I can tell she's getting ready to come over and chat. Before she crosses the street, I walk briskly on, trailing cigarette smoke.

No, I decide. I like guys. That's not going to change. I want my sexual partner to be tender, but I want him to have a hard-on, too. It's just the way Peter treated me that's got me all screwed up.

So . . . live and let live.

I catch a cab and have it drop me off in the Combat Zone. It's only a half block to Chic Cheeks from where the cab lets me out. When I get to the
strip club, I stand in front of it for a long moment, frowning at the advertising posters and thinking about what I've been told.

What about my client?
Is
she a recruiter? I think of what the woman back at the club called her—a leatherdyke—and how she looked when she came into my office, and I don't know which is the mask. And how about all this talk about Faerie and magic and shit?

What was
that
all about?

I turn down the alleyway that runs alongside the club.

I'd pack it all in right now, except I've come this far and really, what else am I going to do? Go home and obsess about Peter? Or maybe go home and think too much about what I've seen tonight?

I don't have any trouble getting in through the side door—the bouncers are all out front. From the wings of the stage I watch a woman dressed like Alice in Wonderland go through her routine. She's got blonde hair—same cut as mine—but I recognize her, even with the blonde wig. She looks enough like me from a distance that I'd be amused, if I didn't feel a little sick. The Lovin' Spoonful's “Do You Believe in Magic?” is blasting from the sound system. She's playing the little girl, like she's twelve years old, and the freaks in the audience are lapping it up.

I find myself wishing I was back on Gracie Street. They're selling sex as blatantly there, but they're sure as hell not pandering to pedophiles.

I watch a little longer. The dancer's removed her blouse now. When she turns, I see the heartshaped pendant.

I go have a smoke while she finishes her act.

The dressing room's about what you'd expect in a dive like this. There's not even a door to allow the women some privacy. Anybody walking by backstage can stand in the doorway like I am and check things out. Some of the women are putting on costumes, or simply trying to relax. Some are smoking cigarettes, drinking. I can smell the joint that one of them's lit up.