Read Online Skinflick by Joseph Hansen - Free Book Online

light was bad. He found a switch and bulbs went on inside brown, hard-finish lamp shades over pottery bases around the room. They gave feeble light but it was enough. Lettering was stamped into the sticks. He put on his glasses and bent close again, trying not to breathe the stink of the decayed food. The lettering read THE STRIP JOINT and gave an address on Sunset.
    He tucked his glasses away, rubbed at the aluminum plate around the door lock with a handkerchief, and rolled the door shut with the handkerchief covering his fingers. The lock clicked. He pushed the handkerchief away in a pocket and pressed the button at thirty-five. No one came. No one came when he pressed the other buttons down the line. All the units on this level watched the soiled and poisonous air blind, deaf, and lifeless. It didn’t matter. He already had too many answers. What he needed now were the questions to go with them.

7
    C INZANO WAS STENCILED LARGE on the red-and-blue umbrellas over the tables in front of the Strip Joint. At the tables, youngsters in bikinis and surfer trunks, ragged straw hats and armless shirts, breathed the exhaust fumes of the close-packed homebound traffic on the street, and washed down avocado-burgers with Cokes, Seven-Ups, Perrier water. Scuba-diving goggles set in black rubber rested on top of the long wet golden hair of a suntanned youth. Edging between the crowded tables, Dave stumbled over swim fins. There was the cocoa-butter smell of Skol.
    Inside, the smell was of bourbon and smoke—not all of it tobacco smoke. The lights, if there were any, hadn’t been turned on. If you wanted to see, you saw by what filtered in from the dying day outside through bamboo-blinded plate glass. The crowd in here appeared older, and Peter Frampton wasn’t blaring from loudspeakers as he was outside. Dave sat on a bamboo stool beside a plump, chattering man in a checked linen jacket, and told a vague shape in skin-tight coveralls behind the bar that he wanted a gin and tonic. In the gloom at the room’s end, a pair of angular lads in black, not-very-crisp shirts and jeans was puttering with microphones, amplifiers, speakers, on a small platform. Feedback screamed. Everyone looked at the corner. The feedback stopped. The bartender set the gin and tonic in front of Dave but didn’t go away. He stood leaning with his hands on the bar.
    “You want something else?”
    “What more could I possibly want?”
    “It’s always something,” the bartender said. “What is it this time? Who’s supposed to be dealing in here now? Who’s supposed to be snorting in the men’s room?”
    “I’m not a cop,” Dave told him.
    “You’re something like that,” the bartender said. He had a drooping, corn-color moustache and his hair was going thin, but his skin had a youthful sheen to it and his eyes were clear and healthy. They blinked, speculative. “Maybe you’re a deprogrammer, except I can’t smell greed on you. You can’t be a private eye. They don’t have those anymore. And when they had them, they didn’t look like you.”
    “Insurance,” Dave said. “Have you seen a thin girl child named Charleen? Blond, about five-four, no breasts to speak of, no hips to speak of, maybe in company with a small, dark, intense church-deacon type in his forties?”
    “The kids can’t come inside during the day,” the bartender said, “and that’s when I work so I wouldn’t see a kid.” He looked past Dave. He called, “Priss?”
    The young woman who came wore the same sort of baby-blue bib coveralls as the bartender, except the legs of hers were cut very short and with little splits at the sides. She had loose poodle hair like the secretary at Superstar Rentals. Her smile was bright, brisk, professional. The bartender asked her about Charleen.
    “She came here,” Dave said. “She had swizzle sticks with the name of this place on them.”
    “Oh, honey.” The girl laid a hand with open fingers on her forehead. “They come by the