No Regrets

stay in business, although detectives from the Vice Squad were frequent drop-ins to check out their business licenses and verify the ages of the girls who halfheartedly rotated their hips, shook their breasts, and cast what they hoped were suitably sultry looks at passersby. There always seemed to be new girls— none of whom lasted very long when they found how little they actually got paid. Promised one hundred dollars a night, they were lucky to get a fourth of that.
    The managers and the bouncers got most of the money exchanged. Because Pike Street was the downtown “stroll” for Seattle hookers, and the Exotica’s patrons almost always left angry, it took beefy bouncers to keep a semblance of peace.
    Yung Kim told John Nordlund and Pat Lamphere that the George he knew worked in that capacity at the Exotica and frequently dropped into the Korea Tavern when he had time off.
    “Do you know Arden Lee?” Nordlund asked.
    “Oh, yeah, Arden—I’ve known her for about four years. She used to date a guy I went to school with.”
    “Did you introduce her to George from the Exotica?”
    “Yeah—last week, sometime. See, Arden never comes in here because we all know she’s only eighteen, so she knocks on the window if she wants to talk and we go outside. I guess that’s when I introduced them.”
    Kim and his sister said that George had a pretty bad reputation, and they’d heard he’d beaten up a lot of Exotica customers. “None of the girls from there will date him because they think he’s crazy. He wanted a job here as a bouncer, but we didn’t hire him because we’d heard about him.”
    “You know,” Kim’s sister said, “it’s funny. I didn’t even know his name was George. He’s the guy who always comes in to talk with me during the noon hour. Today’s the first day he hasn’t been in in weeks. I guess I never heard my brother say his name.”
    “Did Arden work at the Exotica?” Lamphere asked.
    Kim shook his head. “She just comes by here sometimes to talk. She has a baby about eight months old, I think.”
    “When was the last time you saw her?”
    “Last night. She came by twice—once about nine or ten, and again about midnight. We were really busy, and I didn’t go over to talk to her when she tapped on the window. I never did see her again.”
    “Did you see her with George last night?”
    Kim shook his head. “She was alone when I saw her, never saw her with George at all.”
    The Kim siblings were certain that George was not an Indian. They thought he was possibly of Italian or Mexican extraction. “His skin is dark,” Yung Kim said, “and he has teeth missing in front, but sometimes he wears his bridge.”
    “Anything else?” Nordlund asked.
    “He’s got black hair and he wears it long, but he’s real careful about his haircuts and he’s always combing his hair. Oh, yeah—he’s got a big mustache.”
    “And a big belly, too,” his sister added.
    Nordlund and Lamphere headed to the Exotica Studio. They didn’t expect a warm welcome, and they didn’t get one. The only employees there at this time of day were two teenage dancers who were performing their desultory moves in the window. Business at two in the afternoon was hardly booming.
    The girls sulkily insisted that there was no one in the place except the two of them; no managers, no bouncers. Lamphere and Nordlund didn’t believe them; it wasn’t likely that the managers had left the girls alone in the Exotica after all the fights that had taken place there recently. The detectives felt hidden eyes watching them. But they didn’t have a search warrant and they had to accept the dancers’ word.
    The girls did allow that they knew a George, who was the night bouncer. “But we don’t know his last name or anything about him,” one teenager said.
    “We haven’t seen him at all today,” the other said, as if she had rehearsed it.
    The detectives waited for half an hour in the Exotica for someone to appear who might give them more information on George—but no one showed up. They left and called vice detectives who told them to forget about getting any cooperation at the Exotica. “We’ve raided them so many times that they’re not about to help us.”
    Back at headquarters, Lamphere and Nordlund spoke with five members of the Vice Squad, but none of them knew who George was. That meant he had to be a fairly recent employee of the flamboyant dance studio. They doubted that many questions were asked