Read Online Tempted by Trouble by Eric Jerome Dickey - Free Book Online Page B

.”
    “Since you’re talking to me.”
    “Stop it.”
    “I can’t touch you?”
    “Why are you acting this way?”
    “You’re so nice to these men. At home, you hardly smile.”
    “Please. Go.”
    “You’re mad? I’m a paying customer.”
    “That isn’t called for.”
    “Strange men do that and you smile like you’re in love. Your husband does that and you frown.”
    “Don’t raise your voice, Dmytryk. Please, don’t.”
    “You touch them and I have to beg you to touch me.”
    “Don’t do this here.”
    “Give me a few minutes. Then I’ll go home.”
    I walked away. I didn’t leave, just walked back into the main room.
    My wife passed by me a few moments later, went to walk the floor, flirting with customers.
    She was made up. As beautiful as she had looked on our wedding day, only instead of being dressed in white she was prancing around the room in honeymoon clothing. Her ring finger was as barren as our savings accounts. She wasn’t the prettiest woman in the room, nor the sexiest, nor the one with the biggest backside, nor the one with the largest breasts. If a man judged on those standards alone, she wasn’t the best in the room. But that didn’t matter. She was my wife. What I saw when I looked at her, no other man would be able to see because there was no love in their hearts for her.
    She used to labor on the assembly line at GM too. After she had graduated from Mumford High School, she had worked less than a year at GM, then joined the navy and did two years on the Shenandoah. My wife had been a lithographer; rank E4, petty officer, third class.
    She had said the navy had been a good experience, but in the end, financially, she had been no better coming out of the navy than she had been going in. Her high school friends who had stayed behind were spending money and living the life; people who had gone to Henry Ford, Pershing, Mumford, and Cass were all side by side, working on the line, driving new cars and owning homes.
    In the end, despite the training from Uncle Sam and training at GM, she was swinging from a pole with the rest of the women, half of whom were likely cut from the same cloth as the men and women who showered them with wrinkled dollars—the classless, the felons, and the undereducated.
    That night I sipped dark alcohol and tortured myself, watched lustful animals throw wrinkled and stained offerings at my wife, watched animals touch her flesh like they knew her in a biblical way, watched her move like a gazelle as she smiled and flirted and laughed and acted like a woman who was less than a stranger to me, watched those uncouth animals slap her flesh like she had no value as a woman.
    It was punishment.
    Some dancers led high-paying customers to the back area, behind the magic curtain. Some nights I knew my wife did the same. Knowing that made my head throb. Made my heart ache.
    The room was crowded, but the club used to have three times as many customers. People who were making it rain twenty dollars at a time used to make it storm two hundred dollars at a time.
    Another man walked to my wife, threw two wrinkled dollars, and slapped my wife’s backside. That was when I picked up my fedora and headed for the front door.
    The night felt like a form of self-flagellation and I’d suffered enough.
    That was around the time I heard about the man who had flown in from Rome. He wasn’t in the club that night, at least not while I was in the room. I would’ve noticed him because, like me, he would’ve stood out from the rest of the patrons. My guess was that as I walked out to go to my car, that career criminal had pulled up and was walking into the den of ill repute from the opposite direction. The career criminal was the man they called Eddie Coyle. My wife had met Eddie Coyle at the gentlemen’s club and later on she’d told me that he’d been in the club that same night. Maybe that was one reason she’d been uncomfortable. He was one of her top customers, and if I