Lassiter 08 - Lassiter Read Online Free PDF Page B

her off.”
    We were both silent a moment. I heard two more whistle blasts. Then I asked the same question I leave with every friendly witness. “Can you think of anything else that might be useful, Sonia?”
    After a moment, she said, “There’s one thing, but I almost hate to say it.”
    “What?”
    “I knew a couple girls who worked in one of Ziegler’s clubs. They were always stoned, so you can’t believe half of what they said. But one of them told me something really scary.”
    “Yeah?”
    “That Ziegler was making snuff films in Mexico. Whenever one of the girls gave him a problem, he’d say, ‘How’d you like your next movie to be your last?’ Or ‘You’re worth more to me dead.’ Creepy stuff like that.”
    “Did she see any of the films herself?”
    “No, she was just repeating what she’d heard.”
    “Hearsay on hearsay.”
    “I know, Jake. But that day I went to Ziegler’s office, looking for Krista, they told me he was out of the country.”
    “So?”
    “They said he was in Mexico.”

6      She Likes It Rough
    “Sure, I remember Charlie’s Girlz,” Coleman said. “Thin story lines but decent production values. All hard core. A lot of S and M.”
    “I don’t suppose you have any of their videos.”
    “ ‘Videos?’ No. Everything’s been transferred to DVD.” Coleman sucked on a Lucky Strike and gestured toward a back aisle. “Check between Hustler and Vivid in the last row.”
    A former client, Elmore Coleman was manning the cash register at a XXX-video store on South Dixie Highway. He was a small-time grifter in his fifties with grayish skin, a snow-white ponytail, and nicotine-stained fingernails. A couple years ago, he’d been caught at the airport soliciting cash for tsunami relief, but the only tidal wave was the whiskey he’d consumed with the money he’d collected. I walked him out of the courtroom with a nice fat Not Guilty. Then, a few weeks later, he was busted for selling counterfeit Girl Scout cookies. I lost that case, and Coleman served eight months before getting early release, courtesy of jail overcrowding. That’s when he landed the job at the video store, thanks to his only lawful skill, an encyclopedic knowledge of pornography.
    “The Charlie’s Girlz brand had its run in the early nineties,” Coleman told me. “Won a couple AVNs for its Bound and Gagged series. They’re the Oscars of porn.”
    I thanked him and moseyed toward the aisle he’d pointed out. It wasjust after six P.M. , and there were three or four guys in the place. All well groomed and normal-looking, deeply engrossed in examining DVD covers.
    I scanned the covers of the Charlie’s Girlz videos, searching for Krista Larkin. The photos were a succession of boobs and butts and a few bald crotches. The head shots started to look alike. Young blondes with fake eyelashes, phony smiles, and invented names. Cherry Cola. Lolita Lick. Jenny Talia. Many titles were highly descriptive:
Three Guys and a Girl
. Some sounded like instruction manuals:
How to Fuck on a Jungle Gym
. And others were just lousy puns:
Remembrance of Times Gone Bi
.
    I found the “Bound and Gagged” series and thumbed through the stack of DVDs. It only took a minute before I found Krista—all auburn hair and freckles—on the cover of
She Likes It Rough
. Bent over a wooden stool, she wore a black leather bustier that propped up her small breasts, and her bare butt was being paddled by an unseen man.
    Coleman inserted the DVD into a master player behind his counter, and I settled into a booth in the back. The plot, such as it was, combined incest with sadomasochism. Krista was a schoolgirl in a plaid mini-skirt, bunny barrettes in her hair. She’d been cutting class, a handy excuse for her father—potbellied and balding—to paddle her. The plot turned to irony here. Krista was supposed to like the paddling. The pinker her butt shone, the more she licked her lips and begged for another whack. But her eyes were