It was Diana who had suffered most at Jackie’s death. With Mom so hard on him, saying he was “just like his father,” Diana had become surrogate mother. It was she who had known how bad he was turning, how dangerous his life was becoming. It was she who had planned to get him away from St. Louis as soon as possible. And it was she who had sat up with his body all night in St. Anne before allowing the morticians to have it.
A strange night, that one. A night of healing as well as grieving. A night during which she had grown in a way that few people her age grew.
She’d known her own mortality that night. She’d lost her true virginity that night. She’d understood life in a certain way, and while Carla had continued to look for love, for marriage, it had somehow ended for Diana.
And now what? Now her sister was dead and she hadn’t been able to make herself call her parents. Her embittered parents who kept asking when she and Carla, who had followed her to L.A. within eight months, were going to “come home.” Her mother who explained the continued beatings by saying, “It’s your fault. Yours and Carla’s. Your father takes his grief, his loss, out on me.”
Which was bullshit! Her father took his failure at work, at being a man, out on her. Her father, who talked of having been scouted by the major leagues when he was a high-school baseball star. Who said her mother had “planned to get pregnant with you,” looking at Diana, “so she could trap me into marriage and make me quit school and lose my chance to pitch for the Cardinals. Oh, Christ, what I could’ve been if it weren’t for you and your mother!”
He would have been just what he was now. He’d worked hard enough at the Anheuser Busch Breweries. He was about to retire.
But he was nothing in his own eyes, so he was nothing.
And he’d never been able to enjoy his wife, his children, make them part of the fabric of his life. So they were nothing . . . when they were with him.
She and Carla had escaped. Her mother was trapped by habit, history, an inability to conceive of making it on her own.
She was standing near the phone. She simply had to inform her parents!
But her mother would shriek and both would blame her for—as her mother had once put it—“influencing your younger sister to follow you in a life of sin.” And that was without having any idea about the massage parlor.
What if the story hit the St. Louis Post Dispatch which her father read faithfully for crime and sports? What if they had already found out? What if the phone rang . . .
It did ring! It sent her stumbling backward, trembling. It kept ringing until she had to pick it up to stop the awful clangor.
“Diana?”
“Who is it?”
“Lieutenant Admer.” He paused. “Call me Larry.”
She was silent.
“I’m sorry for the way I informed you of your sister’s death.”
He didn’t sound sorry to her. He sounded glib.
“Has anything come up about the case?”
“Not yet. But I promise I’ll do a job.”
“Like the job you did releasing my occupation to the news media so that everyone thinks my sister was a streetwalker?”
“That I had no control over. The reporters get all the infomation we get, with the exception of a few facts about the modus operandi, the killer’s technique . . .” He interrupted himself. “Anyway, we can’t hold anything back from newsmen these days.”
“Newspersons. Or haven’t you ever met a woman reporter?”
He chuckled. “Push women’s rights, do you? Chop down the macho?”
She thought of giving him an answer, but she was sick of him and said, “Unless you get to the point of this call, I’m hanging up. And don’t ever bring that other officer, Marv, near me again.”
“Take it easy. I only want to apologize for the way I broke the news. I’ve never been good at things like that.” He was more convincing this time. But then he said, “As for Sergeant Rodin, he’s an experienced detective and he’ll work as hard to solve this thing as I will.”
“Don’t let him come near me.”
“C’mon now, Diana. I’ve warned him not to repeat . . .”
“Or else I’ll file a complaint.”
His voice hardened. “I wouldn’t recommend that, lady. You know what you’re worth in front of a judge, the D.A.?”
She hung up.
In half a minute, the phone rang again.
“I lost my temper,” Admer said. “I’d like to come over and talk about your sister, her habits, the people she worked for, her dates . . .”
“I gave you everything yesterday.”
“Why can’t we be friends?”
“At two in the morning?”
“So what? You deal with men all night, don’t you?”
“For a fee,” she said, despising him.
“Okay. What is it? Twenty? Twenty-five? I’m curious enough to pay. Once.”
“I only do business at the parlor.”
The man’s temper blew. “You’re a real bitch, you know that? If I wanted to apply a little pressure, you’d never work again!”
She continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Of course, I’m not allowed to deal with a cop. Fm required to ask the question, ‘Are you a police officer?’ of each prospective customer, to avoid entrapment. I’ve never had a yes, but should the answer be yes, I’d ask that customer to leave. With you, I already know the answer.”
It was he who hung up this time.
Probably not smart to antagonize a police lieutenant. But the uncaring nerve of the man, trying a make, with her sister still on ice at the morgue!
She decided to speak to Arthur about transferring to another of his four parlors. Or to check on the Taj Mahal in Santa Monica . . . though that was a little too close to home. She’d always kept her professional life and home life far apart.
But what home life could she have now? Carla’s visits had been family. Without family, what did she have?
No man in her life besides her clients.
No real girlfriends, though she occasionally saw one of the less freaky parlor girls.
No one at all, really.
Quite suddenly, grief was overshadowed by panic.
Dear God, she was alone in all this world!
And there wasn’t even any dear God for her.
The doorbell rang. Gratefully, she ran downstairs to answer it.
Arthur was a small, dark-haired man with sharp, ferret-like features and a pair of the purest, widest, bluest eyes she’d ever seen. Looking into them, you would never think he pushed dope, women, men, children, pornography. Even an occasional murder-for-hire, she’d heard.
He came inside and looked around. “Nice.” He pressed a small plastic jar into her hand.
“How much?” she asked, turning to her purse on the coffee table.
“You owe me.” He sat down on the couch. “Why do you live way the hell out here?”
“I’m an ocean freak.”
He nodded, accepting that. To Arthur, everyone was some sort of freak.
She