The Blackmail Club (16 page)

Jack found himself nodding in agreement while Nora thought out loud, but in the end he refused to believe that anyone could’ve gained enough sway over Christopher Andujar to convince him to blackmail his own patients. Still, Nora’s thinking was sound based on the sketchy information they had.

Jack didn’t like lying to Carol Sebring. She was aces, but he needed to compare the pictures Max had taken of the older Clarks with the bureau’s photos of the younger Anson and Jensen. He had to be absolutely certain.

Like she had the first time, Carol came up to the meet Jack in the lobby of the FBI building.

“I appreciate your doing this again,” he told her. “The notes from my last visit got soaked when I was attacked in the alley.”

“No problem.” She led him back to the same small office he had used during his previous visit. “Sorry to hear about your getting worked over. Still no word on whom or why?” She leaned back against the desk, denting her derriere.

“We may never find out. Thanks again for being so available.” He smiled, and sat into the chair gingerly. “Deep bends still tighten my gut.”

She took an envelope from under her arm and handed it to Jack. “I forgot to give you this last time—copies of their black and whites.” She smiled. “Considering what the fashionable hippie wore in those days, color would have done a lot to jazz up these pictures.”

Jack only needed a glance. Alan Clark was definitely the fugitive Carl Anson, although now he had less hair and more flab.
Hey, why should he be immune?

Also, no doubt, Mrs. Clark was the fugitive Joan Jensen.

On the way back to the office Jack dialed Max’s cell phone and set his own in its cradle for hands-free use.

“Howdy, boss. You got anything more on who booby-trapped your car?”

“I don’t expect we’ll get to the bottom of that until we solve the Andujar case. Is Donny doing anything suspicious?”

“You figure this play school gangster is involved in the blackmailing?”

“What do you think, Max? You’ve spent a lot of time watching the guy.”

“Donny’s a punk. He runs hookers and does payoffs and bribes downtown, but he don’t have the stones for blackmail and murder. What’s your take?”

“The same as yours. What’s the punk been up to?”

“He gets home late from his club, spends a couple of hours watching the boob tube and goes to bed. The unboring part is that every couple of days one of the dollies from his club follows him home. No repeats. This guy is living the fantasy life of every American man.”

Jack pulled to the curb before entering MI’s underground parking where he sometimes lost his cell signal. “Have your crew watch the Clarks for a few days. If they split up, tail Mr. Clark. Keep your tail on Donny, at least for now. If you need more men or overtime, do it. Log their movements the same as with Donny, where, when, and who, with photos of the whos. Anything you need?”

“Nothin’ boss. I worked out with Nora how to handle getting my guys paid. You got any comment on that?”

“If it’s okay with Nora, I’m fine with it. You’re doing a great job, Max. Are the arrangements we made working okay for you?”

“You’re living up to your end, boss. If you’re happy with me, I’m living up to mine. Maybe tailing the Clarks will give us the break we need. I’ll be in touch.”

Chapter 25

The time had come to visit Phoebe Ziegler, the high-demand lap dancer from Donny’s Club, who lapped under the name Jena Moves. Jack took Nora along to get her read on Ziegler and to reduce the chances of the dancer claiming Jack got out-of-line.

Nora’s research on Phoebe Ziegler indicated she had graduated from high school with academic honors. The police in her hometown reported she had never been in any trouble. Yet in DC she was lap dancing and probably turning tricks.

As he drove Jack kept glancing up the side streets that flowed in to join the main thoroughfare in much the way mountain streams trickle into major rivers. He also kept an eye on the rearview mirror. He never saw the black Escalade or the white Lumina or any other tail car. He couldn’t figure why whoever had been having him tailed, had stopped.

Or have they gotten so good that I can’t spot them?

The lap dancer’s address was on NW Twenty-First Street, just below Florida Avenue. When they turned onto her street, the neighborhood’s dogs were busily howling to the percussion of banging garbage cans orchestrated by the city’s sanitation workers.

A crepe myrtle sprouting its annual batch of spring leaves stood alone in the small front yard of Phoebe Ziegler’s brick row house. The bell didn’t work. Jack knocked on the wooden frame of the screen door. Hard. Three times.

After a few minutes he heard someone turning the knob. The door opened narrowly. Jena Moves wouldn’t get paid to dance on many laps in the outfit Jack saw through her chained door—a snugly tied, pink terrycloth robe, a sleep-creation hairdo, and no makeup.

“Miss Ziegler?” Nora asked, leaning around to be seen through the crack. “Phoebe Ziegler from Durango, Colorado?”

“Yeah. So?” She ran the words together as if they were two syllables of the same word. She yawned and thumbed a wick of hair back behind her ear. “Do you know what fucking time it is? I work nights.”

Jack opened the unlatched screen far enough to wrap his hand around the edge. “We’re private investigators. We need your help on a case. It does not involve you directly. Take a minute and call your boss, Donny Andujar. Tell him Jack McCall is asking for your help.”

She brought her hand up to hold back her brassy hair, her right breast rising with the effort, and stared at Jack. “May I shut my screen while I call Donny?”

Jack smiled and released his hold on the screen door. She engaged the latch, and her pink slippers disappeared.

After a few minutes she came back and again flipped the latch off the screen. “Come in. This doesn’t involve any charges against me, right?”

“None,” Jack said as he handed her his card.

She pinched the card with two fingers along the outer edges, bowing it slightly, and looked at it as if it were radioactive.

The young dancer turned and walked further inside. Her pink robe had crusted grayish-tan splotches around her hips and on her butt. A brown throw rug centered the hardwood floor. The room had a faint musty odor Jack couldn’t identify. A half full bottle of gin sat on the side table beside its screw cap.

“Miss Ziegler, this is my partner, Nora Burke.”

Nora smiled. “Like Jack said, we’re not cops. We bring you no trouble.”

The lap dancer gnawed at her lip.

“Miss Ziegler,” Jack said, “I’ll bet you’re often treated a certain way because of the notions people have of what a dancer in a club like Donny’s must be like.”

She emitted a short humorless laugh.

“That happens to us, too. People react to us like we’re cops or out to give them a hard time. That’s not so. May I tell you why we’re here?”

Her eyes darted back and forth between the detectives. She was an attractive woman with a body whose forward thrust had not yet been pulled off course by gravity. Her wholesome look not yet spoiled, but Jack could see hardening taking root around her edges.

He motioned toward a blue fabric couch with a cigarette burn on one cushion. “Could we sit down?”

“Yes. Please. Have a seat.” Saying that, she sounded more like the honor student she had been in high school. “I apologize for forgetting my manners. You know, it’s just … well, you kinda caught me off guard. Ya know? Would you like some coffee? I have instant.”

“That would be nice,” Nora replied.

Phoebe lost the hold on her bathrobe; she grabbed it back, clutched it against her stomach and headed for the kitchen.

Jack looked around the living room. There were no family pictures. The shelves next to the TV held books on art, a few novels, and a college English Lit text. A table bathed in light from the window held a lumpy-looking shape covered with a soiled damp cloth. Whatever was under it would likely be the source of the damp odor.

He heard a microwave oven beep, then the scrape of stirring. After another minute Ms. Ziegler came back carrying a tray with three cups of steaming coffee, a small carton of half-and-half, a bowl of sugar, three spoons, and three square napkins folded half over. She had also put on some lipstick and pulled her brassy hair back into a pony tail. Her face had nicely-spaced features although her mouth was a bit large, her only visual imperfection.

“I hope the coffee’s okay.” When she sat the tray down, the morning light from the window blinked off her tightly pulled hair. “I’d really like to know why you’re here.”

Jack surmised she had grown up in a solid middle-class family. She had no streetwalker in her style—at least not yet.

He poured a little cream and stirred while he spoke. “Please call me Jack. Okay if I call you Phoebe?”

Her mouth curled a little. “I don’t get called by my real name very often.”

“Phoebe, our man was watching at the hotel during your recent tryst with Mayor Molloy. We have pictures of him entering the room and of the two of you in the hallway when the mayor left.” He handed her copies of the photos.

Her hand went to her mouth, the first knuckle of her clenched fist white against her teeth. She shook her head with enough force to dislodge the tears welling in her eyes. She wasn’t declaring no to anything, just spending the energy of not wanting to accept she had become the way she appeared in the pictures.

“Phoebe,” he said, “we aren’t trying to cause you any trouble. This is not about you. But I can tell you it will all come out in the end. Donny is cooperating. It would be best if you did too.”

“I got nothing to hide.” She put her cup down and closed her eyes, tears squeezing out through her lashes. She hid her face in her hands and peaked through her fingers as if they were bars on a private prison.

Nora said, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, don’t hide nothing.”

Phoebe’s body began to shake, her voice escaping in little more than whispers. “If it’s not Donny or I, who are you after?” She put her cup on the table and crossed her arms under the mounds of her breasts. “Oh, my God. Not the mayor?”

“We are not at liberty to say,” Nora answered in her gentler way, “not until we get more answers.”

Phoebe crossed her legs and tugged the robe up to cover her exposed knee.

She dances naked, yet she’s self-conscious about an exposed knee.

She retrieved her coffee, scrunched back into the big chair, and stared into the blackness that filled her cup. After a long moment she looked up, the whites of her eyes revealing her stress. “What do you want to know?”

“It would be political suicide for the mayor to leave his wife for you, so nothing will—”

“I want him to leave me alone,” she interrupted, “not leave his wife. He’s a pig.” The tip of her tongue darted out to wet her lips. “I argue with Donny every time, but he always offers me so much money that I do the mayor again. I hate myself for always giving in.”

“May I use your bathroom?” Nora asked.

“Through the curtain. On the right.”

Phoebe’s eyes watched Nora until Jack spoke to her. “We also know that you have had multiple sexual rendezvous with retired police detective Arthur Tyson, some that included his girlfriend.”

“Yes, Mr. McCall, I’m a whore! Okay? There. I said it. Are you satisfied now?” She pressed her eyes with her thumb and index finger, then dropped her hand and spoke in a lower tone. “I sell my body.” Through her sobs, she stammered, “Can you imagine a man who farts while he’s fucking? Arthur Tyson is a worse animal than the mayor.”

Nora came back through the curtain. When Phoebe looked away, Nora gave Jack a short headshake. She had found nothing indicating Phoebe had an addiction to anything.

“Why, Phoebe?” Nora asked. “Why do you do it? Sex is a gift, not a commodity.”

Phoebe took in a long, slow breath and let it out the same way. “DC has fabulous sculpture art. I came to see it, to study it, to work while researching schools that taught sculpting.” She fussed with the hem on her robe. “I thought I would work a few months while deciding on a school. I waited tables some back home at the Ore House in Durango, so two years ago I took a job at Donny’s waiting tables. They provided outfits just big enough to stay on, and the girls taught me how to move and lean in toward the guys to improve my tips. Some of the girls at Donny’s kept urging me to do the deed, saying I could make a lot of tax-free cash. It wasn’t their fault though. They didn’t make my decision; I did.”

Phoebe seemed comfortable talking with Nora, so Jack took their cups and went into the kitchen to make fresh coffee. Sometimes you can hear what people are saying between the lines better when you’re not also watching them. Her story came out as one she had wanted to tell for a long time, but couldn’t say to her family.

“Donny introduced me to one of the regular customers. A harmless older guy. His name is Randolph Harkin. He’s a curator at the National Portrait Gallery. Donny knew I loved art and sculpture. On my shift Donny would let me just sit and talk with Mr. Harkin. He was really shy around the girls, but he would relax when I got him talking about art. He was always inviting me to come to the National Portrait Gallery. Finally I went. He gave me a private after-hours tour. No funny stuff. He was a perfect gentleman.”

She wedged her hands between her clasped legs, the pink robe pushed down by her fingers.

“We spent hours. He let me look and patiently answered all my questions. It renewed my longing to be a sculptor. I spent a very long time looking at Ferdinand Pettrich’s marble bust of Andrew Jackson, our seventh president. Pettrich sculpted Jackson in 1836. It’s still as spectacular as the day he finished it. Jackson’s hair. The definition in his face. If you’re ever there, you must see it.”

Nora promised she would.

Jack came back into the room with fresh coffee, just as Phoebe said, “It was the most inspiring evening of my life.”

Her long fingers overlapped when she wrapped them around the warm cup Jack handed her. She looked at Nora with moist eyes and spoke through almost unmoving lips.