Swan Dive

his head, but he stood up. ”You really think they tell you something they don’t tell me after you leave?”
    ”Who can say?”
    Niño picked up his drink and said, ”I order you the arroz con pollo and some white wine. The chicken and rice the spec-i-al-ity of the house.” He looked from Salomé to Maylene and back again. ”You ladies tell this man anything he want to know.”
    Maylene said, ”Yes, Niño.” Salomé finished her hunk of bread while Maylene struggled to lift her handbag onto the table. Made from natural cowhide, it had outlandish fringes, the kind of present Dale Evans might have bought Buttermilk for Mother’s Day.
    Waiting till Niño resumed his seat at the bar, I decided to start with Maylene. I figured Salomé would know more that would help me, but I doubted she’d talk until she’d become fed up with Maylene.
    ”How close were you to Teri Angel?”
    Maylene frowned, as though that wasn’t the question for which she’d prepared an answer. ”I wouldn’t say close. The Angel didn’t want anybody to be close, I don’t think.”
    ”Why was that?”
    Maylene took a pack of cigarettes from her bag. Her hands were big and rough, almost manly. ”I don’t know. She really wouldn’t let any of the girls get to know her. Not like Salomé and me.”
    Salomé avoided laughing by taking a swig of wine. ”You ever meet anybody with her?”
    ”You mean like a date or something?”
    ”Yeah.”
    ”No. Really, we don’t... didn’t see her that much. Just here and other places for lunch once in a while.” J ”Why is that?”
    ”Well, Niño sets us up through these hotel people he knows, so we’re mainly on with convention types in the afternoons and maybe some traveling executives like at night. We just do one-ons.”
    ”One-ons?”
    Salomé groaned and said, ”She means one-on-ones. No parties or group gigs.”
    ”Oh.”
    Maylene said, ”That’s why we wouldn’t see her except at lunch here sometimes. We just weren’t together when we were working. We weren’t... 1 aren’t even supposed to say hi to each other if we see a girl in the hotels or anything.”
    ”Because of their security people?”
    ”Right.”
    The fat man came toward us, carrying my chicken dish and a half-carafe of wine. Given the timing, I was pretty sure La Flor didn’t exactly cook to order. I tried it. Not bad.
    ”Did you know any of her free-lance clients?” Salomé laughed. ”You don’t know a hell of a lot about the life, do you?”
    ”No.”
    ”Well, I got a client expecting my Dance of the Seven Veils in about an hour, and I gotta get painted and changed by then, so let me save you some time, okay?”
    ”Okay.” I took more chicken.
    ”You’re in the life for a while, you got two choices. Get out, or get your own.”
    ”Your own prostitutes?”
    ”No. Oh, that too, yeah. If you can stand dealing with pompom girls.”
    Maylene said, ”Sal! You promised never to tell any—”
    ”So let’s say you don’t want to be Niño the Second. You gotta get your own book of clients. Free-lance, okay?”
    ”Got it,” I said around my chewing.
    ”Now, you get the right book of clients, you can be pretty well set. Lots of these guys are just looking for somebody reliable, you know?” Salomé cranked up her tempo, an enthusiastic broker describing a property with potential. ”Somebody who’ll do the things for them that the wives won’t without gagging and bitching about it. They find a girl they like, they’re loyal like fucking football fans about it. They stick with the same girl for years. God, I know a girl has the same three lawyers for fifteen years. Fifteen fucking years. They all know each other, but nobody knows they’re all doing her except her. She covers all her overhead on those three guys alone, and that’s just twice a month each.”
    ”So?”
    Salomé slowed down. ”So, a girl gets a good freelance, she ain’t about to spread that information around to her competitors, follow?”
    ”I thought you said the free-lance clients were loyal?”
    ”Yeah, but they ain’t perfect. If they were, they wouldn’t be clients to start with.”
    ”So you never saw her book?”
    ”What book?”
    ”Her book of free-lancers.”
    ”Jesus. I didn’t mean she had a book. That’d be stupid.”
    ”Why?”
    ”Because they call her, not the other way around. Besides, if you did have a book, you couldn’t carry it with you, because the cops’d grab it, and you couldn’t leave it