I downed my drink. They all looked typical–hophead whores in cheap slit kimonos. Counting five heads, I watched the girls smoke cigarettes and adjust their slits to show more leg. None was anywhere near close.
Then a skinny brunette in a flouncy cocktail dress stepped onto the bandstand. She blinked at the glare, scratched her pert button nose and toed figure eights on the floor.
I hooked a finger at the bartender. He came over with the bottle; I held a palm over my glass. “The girl in the pink. How much to take her to my place for an hour or so?”
The barman sighed. “Mister, we’ve got three rooms here. The girls don’t like–”
I shut him up with a crisp new fifty. “You’re making an exception for me. Be generous with yourself.”
The fifty disappeared, then the man himself. I filled my glass and downed it, eyes on the bartop until I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Hi, I’m Lorraine.”
I turned around. Close up she could have been any pretty brunette–perfect molding clay. “Hi, Lorraine. I’m . . . B-B-Bill.”
The girl snickered, “Hi, _Bill_. You wanna go now?”
I nodded; Lorraine walked outside ahead of me. Straight daylight showed off the runs in her nylons and old needle scars on her arms. When she got in the car I saw that her eyes were dull brown; when she drummed her fingers on the dashboard I saw that her closest link to Betty was chipped nail polish.
It was enough.
We drove to the El Nido and walked up to the room without saying a word. I opened the door and stood aside to let Lorraine enter; she rolled her eyes at the gesture, then gave a low whistle to let me know the place was a dive. I locked the door behind us, unwrapped the wig and handed it to her. “Here. Take off your clothes and put this on.”
Lorraine did an inept strip. Her shoes clunked on the floor, she snagged her nylons pulling them off. I made a move to unzip her dress, but she saw it coming, turned away and did it herself. With her back to me, she unhooked her bra, stepped out of her panties and fumbled with the wig. Facing me, she said, “This your idea of a big thrill?”
The coiffure was askew, like a gag rug on a vaudeville comic; only her breasts were a good match. I took off my jacket and started to work at my belt. Something in Lorraine’s eyes stopped me; I snapped that she was afraid of my gun and handcuffs. I got the urge to calm her down by telling her I was a cop–then the look made her seem more like Betty, and I stopped.
The girl said, “You won’t hurt–“; I said, “Don’t talk,” and straightened the wig, bunching her lank brown hair up inside it. The fit was still all wrong, whorish and out of kilter. Lorraine was shaking now; head-to-toe shivers as I stuck the yellow barrette into the coif to make things right. All it did was rip loose strands of black as dry as straw and tilt everything off to one side, like the girl was the slash mouth clown, not my Betty.
I said, “Lie down on the bed.” The girl complied, legs rigid and pressed together, hands underneath her, a skinny length of tics and twitches. Prone, the wig was half on her head, half on the pillow. Knowing the pictures on the wall would spark perfection, I pulled off the sheets covering them.
I stared at portrait-perfect Betty/Beth/Liz; the girl screamed, “_No! Killer! Police!_”
Wheeling around, I saw a naked fraud transfixed by 39th and Norton. I hurled myself onto the bed, pressed my hands over her mouth and held her down, talking it right and perfect: “It’s just that she has all these different names to be, and this woman won’t be her for me, and I can’t be just anybody like her, and every time I try I fuck it up, and my friend went crazy because his little sister might have been her if somebody didn’t kill her–“