All White Girls. Michael Bracken

as well.”

      “Yeah?”

      “Three file cabinets filled with photos of young girls. One of the drawers had been opened and rifled.” Castellano sat silent for a moment, then asked, “How’s your hand?”

      “Healing nicely.”

      The Lieutenant lifted the Budweiser can to his lips and drained it. The last time he’d been in Rickenbacher’s apartment he’d put away a six of Bud and a fifth of Jack and had spent half the night driving the porcelain bus, heaving his guts out. He asked, “You working on anything these days?”

      “Missing girl.” Rickenbacher tossed the folder on his coffee table. Missing girls had become his specialty.

      Castellano reached down for another beer, popped it open, then reached for the folder. He opened it and spent a moment staring at Katherine Cove. “Looks like another small town dreamer. She come to the big city to find her fortune?”

      “Don’t know why she came,” Rickenbacher answered. He peeled off his windbreaker and his baseball cap and stuffed them in his coat closet. Then he glanced at his answering machine and found no messages waiting. He said, “Not even sure she made it here.”

      “Mommy want her little girl to come home?”

      “Daddy does.”

      “I got a girl just like her on ice. She’s tore up so bad you can’t tell what she looked like. Got a few good prints off her left hand, but there’s no match.”

      Rickenbacher didn’t say anything.

      “Dragnet’s on in fifteen minutes,” Castellano said. “Let’s watch something with a happy ending.”

      “You need a wife to go home to,” Rickenbacher said. His former partner had never married. “Then you wouldn’t need to hang around here.”

      “When did you become an authority on marriage?”

      Rickenbacher shrugged. He found an unopened bag of pretzels in the kitchen, poured himself a large glass of unsweetened orange juice, and then sat on the couch beside his former partner. They watched old programs on Rickenbacher’s portable black-and-white television until Castellano finished the last beer, pissed, and went home.

      * * * *

      The woman on stage at the Muff Inn had been flat-chested until her twenty-second birthday when a plastic surgeon who’d received his medical degree from a disreputable Mexican university had stretched the skin on her chest taut across a pair of silicon bags. The make-up she used to hide the scars under her cosmetically-inflated breasts and below her pale pink nipples ran in sweaty rivulets down her abdomen to catch in the thick mat of curly black pubic hair at the junction of her thighs. The men in the audience didn’t seem to mind that the breasts jutting from her chest didn’t move naturally, nor did they care that the thin caesarean bikini-cut scar along the top of her pubic hair continued to remind her of the still-born daughter she’d had while a high school sophomore. Those who could still focus their eyes after an evening of drinking three dollar beers cared only that she might spread her legs for them in the privacy of a back room if they offered her enough money.

      Canfield knew better. The raven-haired bitch on stage had been working the crowd between shows for months, but had never done more than a few quick hand jobs under the tables, pleasuring the lonely while whispering dirty words in their ears. It was a service he’d never requested.

      He slapped a crumpled five on the bar and Carlos quickly replaced it with a cold bottle of Busch. “Last call, Mr. Canfield. You want I should open another bottle for you?”

      Canfield shook his head. A line of coke with a half-dozen beer chasers had taken him just where he’d wanted to go.

      He watched as the woman on stage spun her g-string around on her index finger, then let it fly into the audience. An inebriated Marine who looked young enough to have lied about his age to the recruiting officer, caught it and brought it to his face. His three older buddies laughed and hollered as he took a deep whiff of the dancer’s scent. Then she looked straight at him and licked her glossy red lips with the tip of her tongue, a seductive gesture that Canfield knew was just part of the show.

      “She wants you, Eddie!” the Marine’s buddies shouted. They pushed him to his feet as the dancer made her way off stage and the music ended.

      “Didn’t you see her?”

      “She wants you, man.”

      “Go back stage and slip her the pork, Eddie. You know she wants it.”

      Goaded by his friends, the young Marine headed toward the dressing rooms in back. Carlos reached under the bar and flipped a switch. A red light flashed in the back hallway and Ben Kirkland, a squat fireplug of a man who stood just about as wide as he stood tall, prepared to meet the unwanted guest.

      Canfield laughed a few minutes later when the young Marine returned, his uniform torn and his face bloodied.

      “She didn’t want me, man. She didn’t want nobody,” he explained.

      “Who the fuck did this to you?”

      “She got a boyfriend back there? A bouncer?” The Marines stood, ready to extract revenge for their buddy’s blood.

      “No man, there’s three or four of them back there. Don’t start nothing, man. Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

      “What’ve you got planned tonight, Mr. Canfield?” Carlos asked as the Marines headed for the door. He knew all about Canfield’s predilection for underage girls. “Anything special?”

      Canfield shook his head. “Not tonight. You?”

      Carlos smiled. One of the new dancers had promised him head if he scored a little blow for her. Blow for a blow. “Could be, Mr. Canfield. Could be.”