“What’s your name?”
She looked up, clearly surprised by my question.
“Gold Dust.”
I shook my head. “Your real name.”
She sat up straighter, eyes darting up to mine and then back down again. “Gina. Gina Mulvado.”
“How long you been stripping, Gina?”
“Just had my three year anniversary last week.”
“So you’re…what? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?”
“Twenty-one. Last week.”
The numbers lined up. “Started stripping when you were eighteen?”
One side of her mouth quirked up in a mocking smile. “As soon as they’d let me in the door.”
“Why?”
She finally met my eyes. “Why not? I got bills to pay. Ain’t like I got any other skills that’ll make me this much money, at least not without fucking and sucking my way across town.”
“That shit don’t fly here.” That was my policy, but it wasn’t like I had time to personally police it. My manager was on the up and up, and that was the best I could do. But I didn’t want girls using my place as a hook up for picking up Johns. It left a bad taste in my mouth.
“I know, and that’s why I like it here.” She tucked a dark lock of hair behind her ear. “So I heard you pay for information.”
“True.” And paying for information drew all sorts of attention my way. And some of that attention—especially from the gang bangers, ex-cons, garden-variety lowlifes—I’d never want spilling over onto Vanessa. Which is why keeping our relationship on the down-low was advisable on several fronts.
“Pay good?” she asked.
I surveyed her. “More than you’ll earn tonight otherwise.”
She nodded. “I used to work at a club on the other side of town, and there used to be this guy who’d come in for a dance once a week. He was always broke. We joked about having to dodge the quarters he tossed on stage because he could barely scrounge together a damn dollar.”
I rolled my shot glass back and forth between my thumb and forefinger, wondering where this was going.
“Well, one night he came in flush with cash. He went from digging in the cushions for loose change to tossing twenties on the stage and tipping fifty for a dance. He was drunk as hell, and rambling on and on about it being blood money for the little blood-sucking whores.”
I reached for the bottle of Wild Turkey and sloshed another three fingers into my glass as she continued.
“The girls started getting nervous, with all the cash flying around and his crazy ass comments, so we did some checking after he left.”
I swallowed a gulp, savoring the burn.
“When was this?”
“The night some rich white folks were murdered. I didn’t know…didn’t realize they were your folks until I started working here.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and gripped the glass so hard it’d shatter if I didn’t relax.
I felt a soft hand on my arm, and I forced myself to calm. “You get a name?”
Her voice was whisper soft when she said, “He gave me a hundred dollar tip after my dance. Told me it was a Benjamin from Black Ben himself. He also said that if more white folks wanted to off white folks, the world might be a better place. I thought that was real weird. Never forgot that part.”
Black Ben. A name to run down. But it was the last part that threw me.
She started to slide out of the booth, but I grabbed her wrist. “You’re telling me he said he was working on the orders of a white guy?”
She stilled, eyes dark and full of sadness. “He didn’t say anything for sure. Just ramblings of a drunk guy looking to rub up against a tight ass and fake tits.”
“You ever see that guy again? Black Ben?”
She shook her head. “Nah.”
I released my hold and reached for my wallet. Peeling off a stack of hundreds, I slid them across the table.
I needed to process the information. It didn’t make sense. I was missing something.
Gina scooted out of the booth, folded the bills, and shoved them in the waistband of her thong.
“Wish I knew more.”
“Thank you. This is…helpful.”
As I watched her strut away, I knew a call to my boy was in order. I didn’t understand how this fit with the gangbangers my buddies and I had tangled with when we were on leave. But it had to be connected somehow. Nothing else made sense.
Updating the cop on the cold case wouldn’t help. They’d listened to my theory early on, and they’d found “no connection between the two incidents.” Those empty words hadn’t smothered the guilt rising up from my gut to suffocate me.
It’d been over three years and still the guilt hadn’t abated. Which is why I sat in this back booth and paid girls like Gina for information. And anyone else who had a lead I could follow.
After Joy and Andre’s funeral, I’d gone back to service and finished out the remainder of my commitment. Instead of doing my twenty like I’d planned, I’d separated and made my way home. I’d bought Voodoo first, then Chains, my pawnshop, and most recently, Tassel.
Lord, the manager of Chains, helped Reggie and me out with the boys. But more than that, he ran a tight ship and kept his ear to the ground. I rarely had to set foot in the store, but I got the benefit of the information he gleaned off customers and the cash flow.
I’d chased down more leads and had my Army intelligence buddies misappropriate more government resources than I could count. Every damn time we ended up in the same place: a dead end.