Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence Read Online Free PDF

Age CD that had been playing with another, newer age one. She checked the incense: smoldering, just as she had left it. And the lights: dimmed. She dimmed them a little more. “You can lie down,” she said. “On the table.”
    I finished unbuttoning my shirt and laid it on the sofa, rolled my pants up into a ball next to it. Dropped my wristwatch into one of my shoes. She looked away as I pulled down my underwear, busied herself with a row of plastic bottles by the CD player as I hoisted myself onto the table and lay down.
    It was too dim to see whether she blushed when she turned around. “Face down,” she said. She passed me by and fiddled with the lights some more.
    I rolled over. She crouched by the bottles again, uncapped one, and carried it back to the table.
    She was wearing a peach-colored bra and a red bikini bottom now — she’d lost the tank top somewhere along the way. Once she was behind me, I heard her taking the bra off.
    Harp strings played on the CD. So did flutes.
    Her hands were cool and damp with lotion. They traveled down my back and up, down and up, down and up. Eventually they stayed down, and eventually she said I could turn over onto my back and I did.
    The incense had a sweet-and-sour smell. It was probably supposed to be jasmine, but it smelled like Chinese food.
    “Close your eyes,” she said. She’d been working her way up from the soles of my feet and by then had spent about as much time as she could get away with kneading my shins. She worked up to my thighs, and then hesitated. After a second, she squirted some more lotion into her palm and kept going.
    I opened my eyes. Her legs weren’t shaking now. They were locked rigidly in place. Her shoulders were thrown back and her elbows were pinned by her sides. She was still wearing the bikini bottom and a thin gold necklace with a tiny cross on it, but nothing else. Tiny goosebumps stood out all over her breasts.
    One of her hands was resting on my arm. The other wasn’t, either on my arm or resting. She was looking across the room at a poster for the 1988 season of the Metropolitan Opera, staring so hard at it that you’d have figured her for a real opera lover.
    It didn’t go on much longer.
    She’d told me the story, standing on the sidewalk at midnight; how one of her former classmates from Hunter had let her know about an open part-time position as a receptionist—just a receptionist—for a massage parlor, answering the phone, quoting prices, scheduling appointments. How after a few weeks the nine dollars per hour she was pocketing started looking paltry compared to the ninety the other women kept out of every hundred-eighty, not to mention the tips, and all for what? Fifty-five minutes of no more than you’d do if you worked at the finest spa in Manhattan and five of no more than you’d do after a so-so date with some guy who’d bought you two drinks and a plate of chicken marsala. No sex, not even oral, just a massage with a happy ending, a manual release, call it what you will; a full-body massage, and Jesus Christ, girl, what was wrong with that? You’re going to tell me, one of her co-workers said, that rubbing some guy’s thighs and shoulders and smelly feet for an hour is okay but rubbing his cock for ninety seconds is not? That’s bullshit. It’s just some more skin.
    This from the woman who’d held the receptionist position immediately before Dorrie and who’d since moved up to become a masseuse herself. Later, Dorrie heard the joke that everyone in the business knew: What’s the difference between a phone girl and a masseuse? Thirty days.
    There was a time when this would all have bothered me more than it did now—back before my high school girlfriend, who’d been headed for medical school to become an eye doctor, had ended up working as a stripper, and worse. Back before the years I spent, fresh out of NYU, doing legwork for Leo Hauser and getting to see every shitty thing one human being could do to