The aroma of sweat and stale coffee greeted Danny as he entered the station with his arrestee. He kept a hand on the upper arm of the handcuffed man, guided him around the other dregs and the other cops.
“You can’t do this!” his guy kept saying, as if hoping that if he said it enough, it would be true, that a cop couldn’t simply walk into his bookstore and find drugs that were never there before. “Please. Please! I have a family. You can’t do this. Those drugs weren’t mine. You—”
Danny gave him a hard yank, pulled him off-balance. His guy let out a yelp as he struggled for footing and went down on one knee. Danny crouched, making a show of helping him back to his feet while he leaned in close to the guy’s ear.
“You need to settle the fuck down and be a good boy,” he said in a calm, low voice. “This is going to happen whether you behave or not. You want it to be worse?” He met the guy’s eyes. “It can be worse.”
Sweat tracked down the side of the man’s face. Danny watched as a spark of rebellion struggled for life within his eyes.
“There’s a lot of paperwork in an arrest like this,” Danny continued smoothly. “Some of it might get lost. Maybe it’s the part that describes the evidence and the chain of custody. Or maybe it’s the part that says you were booked into jail and need to have a bond set. Which one you want lost? You want to have the case thrown out before it goes to trial? Or you want to spend an extra week or so in central lockup?”
The spark of rebellion died. His head dropped.
“That’s right,” Danny said, helping the unresisting man back up to his feet. “You be a good boy and this’ll all be over soon.”
Danny booked him in, filed the initial paperwork, and was on his way down the hall to his office when he saw her sitting in an interview room. The girl from the corner. She’d changed into jeans and a deep maroon blouse, but he’d have known her no matter what she was wearing. She looked small and scared in the metal chair, her hands clasped around a paper cup of coffee and her eyes on Detective Farber in the opposite chair.
He stepped into the open doorway, knocked on the jamb. She jerked her eyes up to his. A whisper of a smile touched her mouth and he thought that maybe now she didn’t look so scared. “Whatcha got?” he asked Farber without taking his eyes from her.
“She talked to Jimmy Ernst late last night,” the detective explained. “Might’ve been the last one to see him alive. We’re just getting started.”
“I’ll take over,” Danny said, moving into the room. He shifted his gaze, caught Farber’s eye. The other man hesitated, then flicked a glance back at the girl, hid a grin.
“Yeah, sure thing.” He stood and picked up his things. “By the way, Ernst had a gun on him. It’s been sent to the lab.” Ballistics testing was routine. Maybe they could pin some cold cases on Ernst and improve their stats. Farber’s eyes flicked toward the girl, then back to Danny. “Lemme know if you get anything,” he added, the double meaning hanging in the air.
Danny waited for him to leave, closed the door, and took a seat in the empty chair. “I’m Captain Danny Faciane,” he told her. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Okay.” She paused. “I’m Delia,” she said, releasing her grip on the paper cup.
“Last name?”
She sat back. “Rochon. Delia Rochon. I talked to Jimmy last night. About midnight or so, I guess. He used to come by the club a lot.” Distaste skimmed across her features.
He wrote her name on the pad. “Club?”
“Freddy-Z’s.” Her eyes dropped to the hands in her lap. “I’m a dancer.”
A stripper. Freddy-Z’s was one of the best in what was left of the city. Danny jotted the info down. Not because it was important to the case, but because he wanted her to think it was, that it wasn’t simply important to him that he knew where to find her again.
He went ahead and asked her about her conversation with Jimmy Ernst, went through the motions the same way they did with most other cases like this. She gave him a clear but sparse tale of the encounter. Jimmy had asked her about a girl who’d used to work at the club, wanted to know where she was now. Delia hadn’t told him anything. Nothing too exciting.
She didn’t like the victim. She never came out and said so, but it was clear in her manner, the hardening of her eyes when she spoke of him. Then again, Danny knew that he’d be hard pressed to find anyone who did. Jimmy was a pimp, specializing in girls who looked really young.
Danny finally set the pen down on the pad. She looked at the pen, then to him. “Am I under arrest?” she asked, voice small but steady.
He let out a snort. “For Jimmy? Nah. We don’t give a fuck about him.” No one would ever go to jail for that murder. Not unless they came to the station and made a full confession—and that’s how it was for most of the murders in this city, not only for scum like Ernst. Danny, and everyone else, did just enough to keep from being indicted for malfeasance.
The cops in this city knew how to survive. And a few smart ones, like him, knew how to prosper.
He walked her out, offered to have an officer drive her home, but she merely smiled and shook her head. It was raining again, a steady downpour that would wash all the trash into the streets and clog the drains, but she simply opened her umbrella and walked out into it without a hitch in her stride. He watched the red umbrella grow smaller in the distance until it was lost in the grey haze of the rain.
Danny talked to the bartender at Freddy-Z’s later that day, found out that Delia had started there about a month ago. No one knew much about her. Then again, no one really cared, according to the bartender. They didn’t give a shit about the girls’ personal lives as long as they showed up on time and kept any trouble they were in away from the club. Delia did both.
She was working that night. He made sure he was there to see her. He didn’t even try to convince himself he was checking out a possible witness. He knew damn well that he wanted to see more of her, and not simply the more that happened when she pulled her clothing off.
Neon flashed in tempo to the bass thump of the music. The mingled scents of sweat and sex, money and misery, swirled around the dancers and the men gazing up at them. Delia worked the pole with a lithe grace and sureness that spoke of years of training, and Danny wondered if, in some distant past, she’d been a far different sort of dancer. Yet, despite her obvious strength and control, she exuded a sensuousness, a base sexuality, that he doubted she’d learned in a ballet class.
She only looked at him once, a lingering caress of attention paired with a shy smile, at odds with the sultry glances she bestowed on the other patrons. And because it would have seemed odd or rude for him not to, he held up a fiver and slipped it under her G-string when she paused before him, then felt dirty for doing so with this girl.
“She’s a fucking hot piece,” said a familiar voice. Danny turned his head, forced a smile for Peter. The other man’s eyes were on Delia. Appreciative. Admiring. Hungry.
“She’s a witness in one of my cases,” Danny found himself saying. Maybe Peter would be scared off by that. He was usually pretty careful about not associating with criminal types. After all, that’s what he had Danny for.
But Peter merely smiled, kept his gaze on Delia.
Danny knew what would happen next. Peter would get a lap dance, then pay for a private room. It was possible that he’d invite Danny to come with him, and with any other girl he’d have gone and enjoyed himself.
Danny stood, moved to the bar on a pretense of getting another drink. The envelope crinkled within his jacket and he frowned. He’d been so caught up in thoughts of her that he’d forgotten to take it out and put it someplace safe. But now he felt only relief. He didn’t even think before calling the manager over, paying the money for a private room with Delia and another one for Peter with a different dancer. Part of him knew that there was every chance that this wouldn’t