Swan Dive

at your place, because your pimp would read it.”
    I looked over at Niño. Maylene said quickly, ”Oh, Niño wouldn’t do something like that.”
    Sal said, ”Maylene, grow up or shut up.”
    I said, ”Niño doesn’t mind you all branching out?”
    ”No.” This time Salomé glanced over at him and couldn’t quite hide a crinkle of genuine affection. ”No, Niño’s good that way. Steers us the business, takes his cut but lets us keep the lion’s share. And, he doesn’t muscle in with the free-lancers. He understands how it is.”
    ”Any of Ten’s clients go in for rough stuff?”
    ”No way. First of all, Teri had the looks, way too good to need the rough boys. Plus, you don’t keep that kind of action as a free-lance. You need your man around to keep them in line sometimes.”
    ”So Teri didn’t talk with you about her freelancers.”
    Maylene seemed eager to contribute. ”Well, she did, sort of.”
    ”How do you mean?”
    ”Well, she talked about her sources.”
    ”Her sources?”
    ”Yeah, where she got the free-lances from. Like sometimes one client refers another to her. And then she had this lawyer who did a lot of divorce stuff, the lawyer would send the husbands to Teri for, well, kind of like that Masters and Jones stuff?”
    Salomé said, ”Masters and Johnson.”
    Maylene said, ”Yeah, them.”
    ”Teri ever mention the lawyer’s name?”
    ”No, just that it was a girl. A woman lawyer, I mean. Teri never mentioned names or anything, but she’d talk about some of them like that.”
    ”Like what?”
    ”Like give them made-up names, you know?”
    ” Like street names?”
    ”No, no. More like...”
    Salomé said, ”Labels. Like ‘the Senator,’ ‘the Wizard’—”
    ”He was like a computer genius, the Wizard—”
    ”—’the Producer,’ and like that.”
    I thought about sister Sandra mentioning Teri’s interest in the movies. ”What did she mean by ‘the Producer’?”
    Salomé said, ”Not the real thing. Not Hollywood , I mean. She just had some guy liked to look at himself getting done. He took movies of it.”
    ”Movies of him and Teri together?”
    ”That’s what she said.”
    ”Videocamera?”
    Salomé took a cigarette from Maylene’s pack and lit up. ”How else you gonna make them?”
    ”Did Teri ever mention anything else about this Producer?”
    Salomé blew a cone of smoke sideways from her mouth and away from me. ”No.”
    Maylene said, ”But Sal—”
    ”She didn’t say anything else, Maylene.”
    ”She did, though.” Maylene turned to me and elaborately away from Salomé’s glare. ”The Producer was her candy man.”
    ”Drugs.”
    ”Right. As much as she wanted, although she never used a lot.”
    ”She ever describe him?”
    ”Like what he looked like and all?”
    ”Yeah.”
    ”No—yeah, wait, she did! She said he had these tattoos. Like of a tank or something.”
    No question we were talking about Marsh now. ”Did she see this guy on a regular basis?”
    ”Yeah, sure.”
    ”Same time and place each week?”
    ”Oh, I don’t know about that. She did say... Sal, when did we have lunch with her that last time?”
    ”I don’t remember.”
    ”Sure you do. It was... no, no, it wasn’t here. It was down at the Market.”
    ” Quincy Market?”
    ”Yeah, yeah. Right down by the water. And she said... no, no, it wasn’t lunch, it was brunch. Remember, Sal, we couldn’t get served our drinks ‘cause it wasn’t twelve noon yet?”
    ”I don’t remember.”
    ”Sure you do. We wanted Bloody Marys, and the waiter said we had to wait, and Teri joked about taking care of him if he’d take care of us, but you could see he was a fag so he didn’t think she was funny.”
    ”What did she tell you?”
    ”About the Producer?”
    ”Yes.”
    ”Just that she was going to do a screen test.”
    ”Screen test?”
    ”Yeah, you know, like an audition, only for the movies. She thought the way she could get into the movies was to be in one of those porno things, and the Producer told her he knew somebody who did them. He was the candy man, so maybe he did, I don’t know.”
    ”And he was going to introduce her to this real movie guy?”
    ”Yeah. Well, no. No, I think what she said was that the real movie guy would want a sample of what she could do.” Maylene put her hand to her mouth and giggled. ”I don’t mean that way, in person. I mean on film. How she’d look doing it.”
    ”With one of the guys she free-lanced?”
    ”Yeah.