The past never ends, p.19
The Past Never Ends, page 19
Morgan shrugged, nodded. He wondered about the young bleached-blonde girl. A runaway supporting a worthless boyfriend, perhaps. A parent's dinner ticket, maybe. A baby at home? How long before she would be another casualty of Kiowa Heights? Is this who Tanya had been? Chester Morgan sipped his beer and wondered. Two of Stevens' bills lay on the table in front of him.
The music stopped and applause echoed. Stevens whistled and clapped. Misty threw gentle kisses from the stage.
"Bravo!" yelled the man in the pale blue Vixens Vexed T-shirt. "Encore!" He raised his beer glass in a toast. A powerful bass beat pounded from large black speakers looming on both sides of the stage, and Misty moved and danced more.
Morgan took another draw on his beer and felt that boozy feeling of separating and watching himself drunk, although he knew he didn't and couldn't. He looked at the full soft body of the woman moving on the stage and longed and wanted. Next to him, Mark Stevens held up a dollar bill. Misty took it in her hand and dropped it to the floor behind her. Am I any different than him? Morgan wondered. He held up one of the dollars. The dancer moved in front of him, leaned over, and placed his hand between her breasts, gently squeezing the dollar from his fingers.
"Ooooh, feels good," she murmured. She turned and shimmied down stage.
Morgan took a deep breath and sighed. The last of Stevens's bills lay on the table in front of him.
"See, I told you she likes you," Stevens said. He had two cigarettes burning in the ashtray.
The music kept playing. Morgan felt the room get fuzzy. He pushed away his glass of beer and saw Stevens give the naked young woman another dollar. Morgan held up his last bill. Would she turn away? he wondered. The bleached blonde woman child stopped in front of him and gingerly pulled open the front of her blue bikini bottom. Morgan questioned her with his eyes. She nodded and as he tucked the dollar in, she held his fingers against her soft, moist skin.
"Thank ya, darlin'," she whispered, then smiled at the middle-aged man before letting go of his hand.
The music faded. With a high-heeled shoe, Misty kicked the dollar bills fallen to the floor into a pile and then gathered them with her blue top and left the stage.
"Do you feel alive?" Stevens asked. "Do you? Huh?"
"I suppose," Morgan said and then remembered why he had come to Vixens tonight. He shook his head for clarity, but even so knew why he had stayed.
"Mark," Morgan said, "does Candy work tonight?"
"Naw, she always takes Tuesday off when she can, but I'll tell you something: The guy at the Orpheum Theatre, down at Third and Renfrow, has just about all these girls -- and some who aren't even here anymore -- on tape for viewing. Can you believe that? Just tell him that Mark Stevens sent you. He might give you a discount."
Morgan motioned for the waitress. "Bring me a cup of coffee and a glass of ice," he told her. He handed her a twenty. "And bring all the change in ones."
"In ones?"
"Yeah."
Stevens handed her his empty pitcher and motioned her to fill it up. "You see why I wear this T-shirt and sit on the first row right next to the stage?" he asked Morgan.
"I understand," Morgan said. He started to speak, then stopped. "Even a stranger's touch can be imagined kind."
Morgan kept sixteen ones after paying and tipping the waitress. He spooned ice into the black coffee and let it melt. He then took a business card out of his pocket and scribbled his home phone number on the back. He drunk the coffee swiftly as another unknown woman of the Kiowa Heights' night began to bare herself on stage. When the cup was empty, he handed the business card to Mark Stevens.
"The next time you see Candy, give her my card and ask her to please call me. Tell her I was here looking for her. You're my witness."
As Stevens looked at the card, Chester Morgan placed sixteen dollars in ones on Stevens's neat stack of bills. "Have a good time," Morgan said.
When the lawyer reached the door, he paused, looked at the man in the pale blue T-shirt with the words "Vixens Vexed" crudely ironed on and gave him a thumbs up. Across the room, young Misty tried to seduce a man into buying her a drink, just as Tanya had perhaps years ago.
Had this been Tanya, the woman whose death compelled him to find truth?
Chester Morgan turned and walked out into the black damp night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Ten minutes later, Chester Morgan stood outside the Orpheum Nu-Art Theater in the hazy night of old Vivia. Small dim lights glowed overhead leaving the entrance way a dusky yellow. The glass in the doors and the ticket booth had been painted an opaque gold and a frame which had once held movie posters was empty. A sign read: "Erotic Escapades! Featuring Vivia's Finest! Adult Videos. All Shows XXX Each Time. Every Time." Tanya had made some kind of recordings in the months before her death, Chester remembered, tapes or disks to get her out of Kiowa Heights for good. She had told that to Alan Kinman. In the shadowed light, the lawyer shook his head and saw large gold horseshoes embedded in the terrazzo leading to the theater's heavy glass door. A string of bells jingled as he pulled open the door and walked in.
A short, stocky man with a full moon belly, greasy black hair, and a pointed silver-streaked beard stood behind what had once been a concession stand. Two three-ringed binders lay on the counter, one open and one closed. Morgan smelled popcorn and insecticide and heard muffled groans and artificial sighs from the back of the stark, stripped and black lobby.
"Ya gotta sign in," the man said. He pushed the open notebook towards the attorney. "Oh, yeah. Good evening." The accent was from someplace north of the Mason-Dixon line and someplace east of Newark.
"Everybody wants my signature tonight," Morgan said. "Do I get a prize if I win the drawing?"
"Maybe," the man said as he patted the cover of the other notebook.
Morgan took a pen from the counter and saw scribbled signatures in the notebook. In clear, bold letters, he wrote: CHESTER MORGAN. "How does this place work?" he asked, snapping the cap onto the pen.
"Ya ain't been here before, huh?"
Morgan shook his head.
"Ya look in the book. Pick what you want. We got individual showing booths or ones for groups. We set it up. You watch. Guess ya won't want one for a group."
"No, I won't."
Morgan started to open the other notebook and the man slammed it shut.
"Five dollars for a view," the man said, staring at Morgan. "Keeps away cheap vice cops." He grinned, but his eyes were cold and gray and watery.
"A man by the name of Mark Stevens down at Vixens told me about this place. Said you had almost all the girls who work there -- and some who don't anymore -- on tape."
The man rubbed his hand against his greasy hair. "Fuck. Fuckin' cheap Okies," he said. "Awright, ya can look at it for three."
Morgan handed him a five-dollar bill. "There are no chains on you."
The man slipped the bill into the cash drawer and closed it. "You can go ahead and look." He motioned towards the closed book.
"My change. You said three bucks."
The man opened the cash drawer, and with thick fingers, pulled out two bills and dropped them on the counter.
Morgan opened the book. Cheesecake photos of bosomy women and beefy men lined the pages. Columns in the middle listed titles and prices. "Black Venus and Peter Pan...$10.00." "Sexcetera and Friends...$8.00." At the bottom of each page was a copyright notice, and the year, and the name Olsen Productions.
"Organized by actor's name and what your into, and vice versa," the man said. "So if there is anyone you want to look at in particular, you ought to go to her, or his, page."
"There used to be a dancer down at Vixen's. Her name was Star. Where would I find her?" Morgan looked down. "Where would I find her?"
"Try the cemetery."
"You'd charge me for looking there, too, if you could," Morgan said. "I meant -- where in this book would I find her listing?"
"Alphabetical order," the man said.
Morgan thumbed through the acetate pages and looked at the home computer-generated lists of videos. He saw pictures of women he had seen at Vixen's. He saw others, too: Women and men who shopped at deep discount stores, who rode Harleys, and who walked alone in the dark Kiowa Heights night. He wondered whether Candy appeared in a video here, but he flipped quickly through the C and K pages. He didn't want to know. At the bottom of each, he saw the same copyright symbol and the words: Olsen Productions.
"How would I locate Olsen Productions?" Morgan asked.
"Depends," the man said. "We ain't interested unless you have a monster, nine inches at least."
"You made the book? You make the tapes, too?"
The man grinned. "It's art." He tapped on the open pages of the book. "It's art."
"Show me Star. I want to see Star."
"Always popular," the man said. He turned the pages in the notebook and stopped on a well-worn one. At the top, "Star!" appeared in gold and blue. "Here."
Morgan looked. He had seen the high school yearbook picture of Tanya Everly with the light, hopeful eyes and the bleached blonde hair, mussed cheap. He had imagined, too. He looked at the naked image of the acetate page. The bright colored make-up and creamy skin. Generous breasts and hips and pudgy baby fat. The narrow legs with tight, black windowpane stockings. He sighed, then shook his head and mumbled, "Who was she?" Morgan stared at the image.
"She liked what she did," Olsen said. "Some of 'em come in here and never get over being naked. Takes all my directorial skill to get 'em to be more than corpses that fake orgasm. But Star? She was an artist. She could say 'hello' and make ya feel like you'd gotten a hand job. And, she liked the action. That helps."
"What happened to her?"
"On this side of the river? Who really knows?" Olsen stepped back. "Look as long as you want. Let me know if you want to look at a tape."
"Did she just walk in and say, 'Make a movie of me'?"
"Yeah, pretty much. The girls down at Vixens, they know my money's good. They come looking for me. Most of my talent now -- men and women -- does. I take good care of 'em."
Morgan looked at the old, cheap stockings Star wore. "I'm sure you do." He took a wad of bills from his pocket. "Show me the last tape she made for you. She made some about six months ago, didn't she?"
"Nah. Longer than that. More like a year," Olsen said. "Yeah, about a year, a year and a half."
Olsen pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked a large drawer full of black cassettes. "Fifteen bucks," he said, "and I don't care if ya know the pope. It's fifteen bucks."
Morgan separated his bills and put perfect change on the counter. "You could put all this on the Internet and save yourself a lot of overhead."
"Yeah, until some born-again prosecutor in Goobertown, Arkansas, sees something he don't like and calls the F. B. and I and I'm defending a fuckin' interstate charge in God knows where." Olsen took a tape from the drawer and set it on the counter. "Here, I've got it all under control."
"How do you know I'm not a vice cop?" Morgan asked.
"You're not," Olsen said. He motioned Morgan to follow him into the black lobby to a bank of closed doors, each outlined in gold. "Naw, you write your name too clear and, besides, you've got the look." He opened one of the doors. "There's Kleenex in there. Don't make me start charging a cleaning deposit."
Morgan walked into the viewing booth and Olsen closed the door behind him. Olsen opened another door and walked down a back hallway to push the tape into a machine and to start the big screen projection in Morgan's booth. Olsen went to the lobby and back to his post behind the counter. He rubbed his eyes and looked at his watch.
Time passed, then Olsen heard the lawyer's voice yell:
"TURN IT OFF! TURN THE GODDAMNED THING OFF!"
The door to the booth opened and Chester Morgan bulled his way out into the lobby. "How much for the goddamned tapes? Every damn one of them." He peeled off bills from his wad of cash and threw them on the counter.
"I don't sell copies," Olsen said.
"I don't mean copies. I mean every tape you have of her. The list in the book. The one showing in the machine. Everything of Star's you have. How much?" He kept throwing bills on the counter.
"Heh. Heh. Heh. Same thing happened three or four months ago, except the guy was older. Silver-haired and taller than you. Threw bigger bills at me and had a little more class, too. Same tape. I told you I was good."
"You goddamned worthless sorry son of a bitch."
"I'll tell you what I told him: They ain't for sale." Olsen pushed the cash back towards Morgan. "Keep your money. Stick it in a teenager's g-string down at Vixens."
Morgan slid four ones across the counter and slipped the rest of the bills into his pocket. "Here, mail a copy of the tape you showed me to your mother in Brooklyn. She'll be proud of you out here in Oklahoma."
Morgan turned to walk out.
"Well, ain't this deja vu all over again," Olsen said, then yelled, "That bitch loved the action!"
Morgan didn't look back.
At home, he poured a shot of bourbon and pressed the power button on his sound system. He picked up a compact disc of a Beethoven symphony. He shook his head and set it down. He did the same with a Verdi opera. He fingered a disc of Hank Thompson and then one of Lefty Frizzell. He took a cassette tape of his mother's singing and started to put it in the tape player of his machine, but he stopped.
The music would not carry him away tonight.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
"You did come and look for me," the voice on the phone said. Chester Morgan leaned back in his chair and flipped a paper clip across his desk.
"Are you bragging or complaining?" Morgan said. "If you aren't complaining, you're the first person who's called this law office today who hasn't."
"If you just came to look, then I'm complaining."
It had been two days since Morgan had gone searching for his dancer with the candy-coated drawl. Mark Stevens had done his job.
"I would have looked, but that wasn't the only reason I tried to find you," Morgan said. He heard and saw movement outside his office door. He sat up straight. "I needed to talk with you. Still do, about Star."
"You really did come looking for me," Maria said. Her voice was tentative, unsure for a moment.
"Of course. If I'd known where you might have been, I would have gone there, too." he said. Marylin's bright laugh echoed from her work area in the lawyer's office suite. "I'd like to talk with you. Could you come in for an appointment, during the daytime?"
"Tuesday's my day off next week, too. The place is closed on Sundays and we try to rotate so everybody gets the same exact amount of slow and busy nights."
"Do you want to come in next Tuesday?"
"Well..."
Silence.
Morgan eyes wandered to the stack of files on his desk and his mail to go through like every other day. "Do you want to go to dinner Tuesday night? Have you ever been to Abernathy's Steak House?"
Maria spoke. "You know this girl likes to eat and Abernathy's is a fine place, I'm sure, but it'd make me feel bought and I'm not for sale. Just appears that way most nights. I'd rather go someplace intellectual, like a museum or the planetarium..." She stopped for a moment, then giggled. "Or the roller skatin' rink!"
"And do what? Study the mating habits of six graders?"
"A little roller skatin'. That'd untighten your ass a little. What'd ya think?"
"I didn't know it needed --"
"I got me a new, blue pick-up truck. Is your address the one in the phone book?" She didn't wait for him to answer. "I'll pick you up around seven."
"Dinner?" he asked.
"Skatin'," she said and hung up the telephone.
Morgan tapped his desk with two fingers and smiled. He made a note on his calendar for Tuesday night, but knew he wouldn't forget. Skatin'.
Shawn walked in carrying an empty file box. "So, you've voted for life," she said and set the empty box on the empty chair in front of Morgan's desk. "And, you're making dates on company time."
Morgan ignored her. He picked up a court filing he had been reviewing.
"So Chest, who is she?" Shawn folded her arms across her chest and tapped her foot.
"Your mother," Morgan said without looking up.
"Funny." She said it in three syllables.
Morgan kept reading the pleading.
"I'm waiting," she said.
"Your sister?"
"Morgan, you make me crazy."
"Make you?" He looked at the empty box. "You have work to do."
"That's exactly what I want to talk about," Shawn said. She slipped into the other vacant chair in front of Morgan's desk.
"I'm not going to tell you who she is, what she does, or where she lives. I'm not going to draw you pictures or take photographs, draw diagrams or take videotapes and I'm not going to give you the play-by-play the next day," Morgan said. "Now, what do you want to talk about?"
"Do you know they have data retrieval services you can call? They come to your office, pack your closed files, and haul them away -- leaving your receptionist/business manager available to do her job. If you need a closed file, you call them, they retrieve it, and deliver it here. It's simple."
"I'm sure it is. Now, what do you want to talk about?"
"It would be a much more cost effective way of dealing with your old papers than having your valued office staff pack up the stupid closed files and then take them to the idiotic mini-storage. Correct?"
"Shawn, you have a sports utility vehicle that costs more than what some people pay for a home. There might be three places in this county steep enough to even need an SUV. You work out every day. You exercise muscles my body doesn't know it has. Taking closed files to storage gives you an opportunity use your SUV and your muscles."
"A service would save you money."
"The owner of the Downtown Mini-Storage is a client. He gives me a discounted rate -- "
"I bet he tells every lawyer that."
"He might, but I bill him for work and he pays within thirty days, never late. Since you're my business manager, you know he pays me more than I pay him. You also know he refers new business and -- "
