I frowned. “You were my pleasure,” I grinned.
Connie shook her head. “No, I mean thank you for not turning what we just shared into some gaudy scene from one of your films. I appreciate the fact that you made love to me – not just tried to use me for sex.”
The smile stayed on my face but the emotion behind it became more serious and deeper. “You’re a very easy lady to love like that,” I said.
Then – as if on cue – Connie’s cell phone began to trill from the living room… sounding like an alarm.
Chapter 26.
Connie flung herself from the bed and dashed on shaky legs and naked down the hallway. I dressed slowly, taking my time. I could hear snatches of Connie’s response to the caller.
“What?” I heard her say in a stunned, shocked voice and then after a brief pause she said, “I thought I had more time.”
When I could delay no longer I wandered into the living room. I had Connie’s blouse and skirt in my hand. I held them out to her but she ignored me. She was standing, leaning against the wall with one arm folded across her chest, phone pressed hard against her ear, and she was facing away from me so that I could clearly see the raised little knuckles of her spine, and the seductive and very feminine flare of her waist and hips.
“Jesus!” Connie spat. She slapped a hand across her forehead and then shook her head as though everything in the world had gone horribly wrong.
I heard her mutter a soft, “thank you,” that sounded like she didn’t mean it, and then she ended the call.
She turned to me, her face was pale, her eyes wide and stricken. There was some appalling tension in her expression. Her mouth fell open as though there were words seized somewhere deep in her chest.
“What’s wrong?” I went to her. I put my hands on her shoulders and stared into her eyes. “Tell me what’s the matter, Connie.”
It was like she forgot to breathe – or couldn’t. She just stood there, darkness behind her eyes for long seconds, and then everything that had been locked up inside her escaped in a sudden ragged rush.
“The favor,” she gasped. “Rick, I need your help, and I need it now.”
I frowned. “Right now?”
Connie nodded her head vehemently. “Now, or I’m afraid it will be too late,” she said and her voice was laced with dread.
I nodded. “Alright,” I said. “What do you need me to do?”
Connie forced herself to snatch three settling breaths, the last one sounding like a forlorn sigh. “I need you to come with me. No questions asked,” she said. “I just need you to trust me – and we need to go now.”
Chapter 27.
I drove quickly, heading down in the hum of the city through a gauze of fumes, smog, and traffic noise. Connie had her phone in her hand, barking directions from a little map that displayed on the screen. It was late enough to have missed the early morning traffic jams, and too early for the crush of lunch break congestion, so we made good time racing between sets of traffic lights.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Turn left,” Connie stabbed a finger at the windshield. I took the next turn and a flash of morning sunlight filled the car from a gap through the buildings that towered high on either side of the road.
“Where are we going?” I asked again. I stole a glance at Connie. She was frowning with complete concentration, clutching the phone in her hand like it was a precious missing fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
“San Fernando.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Not until we get there,” she said it in a tone that was ominous. “Take the next left.”
I followed her directions and swung the car across traffic, heading deeper into the bowl of the valley.
“Then at least tell me why we are going where you can’t tell me we are going.”
That little piece of gibberish made her glance at me sharply. Her face was pinched and drawn with tight apprehension. Her eyes flicked back to the screen and she must of decided that she had time to spare before barking out the next direction. She sighed heavily. “My daughter,” she said, like that explained everything.
I was shocked. “You have a daughter?”
Connie nodded. She glanced back down at the screen then across to me once more. “She’s nineteen,” Connie said. “She shares a house with a girlfriend of hers.”
“And we’re going to her house?”
“No,” Connie shook her head but said no more. She peered through the windshield for several seconds and then her face registered some kind of recognition. “You need to change lanes,” she said. “We have to turn right at the next set of lights.”
I dutifully followed her instructions. The lights turned to red and I braked in a snarl of traffic.
“Then where are we going?”
“A place in the valley,” Connie said. “That’s where my daughter is.”
Talking to Connie like this was like pulling teeth during interrogation. I felt like I was working her over the way cops do when they are prying information from a shady suspect. “Is your daughter in trouble?”
Connie nodded. “I think so.”
The lights changed to green. “My daughter’s name is Roxy,” Connie said softly. “Her and I don’t get along,” she shrugged her shoulders as if to tell me that she didn’t know why that was. “She moved out of home about eighteen months ago, and she has been living with a girlfriend in the valley ever since.”
“What does she do? I mean, what does she do for a living?”
Connie grunted like she had been punched in the chest. “She is about to appear in her first porn film.”
Aaah…
I said nothing, but behind my eyes everything was beginning to fall into place. I had a sudden sense of motivation behind Connie’s vehement objection to the industry when she had first arrived for the interview.
“About a month ago, Roxy met a guy who said he was a modeling agent who happened to be scouting local nightclubs looking for girls who had the potential to be a star,” Connie said in a flat voice. Then she turned her head to me and there was a weak watery smile on her lips. “Sound familiar?”
I nodded – but I said nothing, and with my silence I encouraged Connie to continue.
“This guy – he told Roxy that she could make a lot of money performing in adult movies. He told her he auditioned several girls a week and that she was someone special.”
I grunted. I felt my fingers tightening on the wheel. “How do you know all this?”
Connie’s wan smile faded away. “The girl she lives with,” Connie explained. “She’s the one who phoned me back at your house to tell me that Roxy’s audition was happening today. We have been in touch over the past few weeks because her friend is as concerned as I am.”
“She’s a good friend indeed.”
“I think so,” Connie said and then lapsed into worried silence.
We were heading into a rundown decrepit part of the city. The high glimmering skyscrapers and vibrant bustle of the city began to give way to older derelict neighborhoods filled with abandoned buildings splashed in graffiti colors. The traffic thinned, and I stomped my foot down on the gas pedal.
“Second left,” Connie said. For some inexplicable reason, she felt the need to point and curl her fingers at the same time as though maybe I wasn’t sure which way left was.
“What do you expect from me?” I asked.
I stole another quick glance at Connie’s face. Her eyes sparkled with brimming tears. “I just want you to talk to her, Rick,” she said softly. “I just want you to be you. Tell her what she needs to know. That’s all I ask.”
I nodded… and then put an edge to my voice. “Is this why you hate the porn industry? Is this why you were so resentful when you first arrived to interview me?”
Connie shrugged her shoulders and then glanced at me with a look like she had been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. When I found out th
at Roxy was being coerced by this man to make a porn film, I got angry,” she said. “And when the opportunity arose to interview someone from the porn industry, I saw it as my last chance to understand – or maybe to try to make Roxy understand. When I met you, I didn’t hate you. I hated that my daughter was being preyed upon.”
I took the turn and then slowed to a crawl. We were on a narrow grimy suburban street. Run-down buildings lined the litter-strewn sidewalk. Old beat-up cars were parked at haphazard angles along the curb. At the end of the street, I saw a young girl in ragged clothes pushing a stroller.
“This is it!” Connie said urgently. “This is where she is being filmed.”
We found the building and I parked. I sat for a moment, staring across at Connie. Muted sounds of base-thumping music filled the air outside the car.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked again.
Connie turned to me. She reached for my hand and the grip of her fingers were fierce. “She’s a good girl, Rick. She’s my daughter. She is the only good thing that came from a brief and terrible marriage a long time ago. She’s still a teenager – she doesn’t know what the world is like. She’s doing this…” Connie shook her head uncertainly, “… she’s doing this to punish me, or maybe to show me that she’s her own woman with her own mind capable of making her own decisions.” The air seemed to go out of Connie like she was suddenly drained or exhausted. She sighed one last long breath and squeezed my fingers. “I just want you to talk to her.”
We got out of the car and Connie took my hand and led me to a doorway. She was anxious, bristling with wrought nerves and tension. Her eyes searched mine.
“Please say you’ll help me.”
I nodded. “I’ll help you.”
We went in through the door and I stood in a dingy narrow hallway. There was water-stained wallpaper peeling off the walls and a riot of graffiti sprayed over an opposite doorway. The room smelled of urine and decomposition. I crossed the hall, pushed open the door – and stood there with Connie close at my side. The room was large. There were windows along one wall. Several panes of glass were broken and the rest were hazed in a film of thick dust so that the light was gloomy and dull. The room was large – like maybe it had once been a reception area or foyer for some kind of business. The floor was covered with old newspapers and in the far corner of the room a young woman was on her back, laying on a stained rumpled mattress set down on the hard floor. Kneeling between her spread legs was an overweight man, maybe fifty. He was naked. There was a thick pelt of dark hair matted across his chest and across the broad of his back. His face was pinched and seedy, and he was sweating profusely. The stink of him mingled with a swirl of stale cigarette smoke and hung thick in the air. The man had a small hand-held camera up to his eye as he plunged himself in and out of the girl’s pussy.
Sitting on the floor nearby, knees tucked to her chin, arms hugged tightly around her legs, was a pretty young girl with enormous eyes set into an attractive pale face. The girl had long dark hair that hung past her shoulders. She was staring at the man as he rutted into the girl on the mattress in a series of oily obese lunges.
The pretty girl’s head turned slowly towards me.
“My daughter,” Connie said with a heartbreaking expression of torture on her face. “That’s Roxy.”
“Who’s the other girl? Who’s the one on the bed?”
Connie shook her head. She didn’t know.
The man on the mattress was grunting. I could hear the girl’s breath choking in her throat as she lay beneath him like she was made of stone. Her eyes were screwed tightly shut and she was biting on her bottom lip. I could see the loathing and sense of violation etched into the grimace of her expression. The man leered down at the girl.
“That’s it, you horny slut,” the man grunted. His lips were slack with desire, exposing a mouthful of bad teeth, and there was a froth of spittle on his lips. “Keep that tight little snatch of yours nice and wet for me until I’m ready to come.”
I had seen enough.
“Go and get Roxy,” I said.
I strode across the room and as I crossed the floor, the man suddenly turned his head and his eyes were wide with shock and then astonishment and then finally outrage and confusion. “What the fuck –!”
I reached down and fisted a handful of wiry coarse hair. The man shrieked like a girl. I heaved him to his feet. There was a simmer of red rage behind my eyes. The guy stank of sweat and alcohol – the odor wrinkling in my nostrils. I glared at him, thin lipped with fury. “Let the girls go,” I hissed.
The guys face became swollen and contorted with defiance, and then an instant later it melted away. “Hey!” the guy said suddenly, and I caught a whiff of his rank fetid breath. “You’re Rick fucking Cassidy! Jesus, you’re Rick fucking Cassidy!”
I nodded. “I know,” I said. “Who the fuck are you?”
The man suddenly thrust his hand out at me, his face alight and giddy. “Man, it’s an absolute fucking honor to meet you. You’re a legend, an absolute legend,” he gushed. “My name is Jimmy D.” I ignored his hand. I let go of the handful of hair I held and thumped the man in the middle of his chest with the point of my finger.
“You’re finished with these girls,” I said suppressing my rage just enough to snarl the words. “Have you touched the young one yet?”
The guy’s head swung to where Connie was kneeling beside her daughter. The guy shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “But she signed a waiver.”
I felt my hands clench into tight fists. “Get it,” I said. “I want to see where she signed and while you’re at it, get the other girl’s too.”
The man spun in a daze for a moment and then seemed to remember. He went naked to a briefcase in the opposite corner of the room that I hadn’t noticed before. He came back waving a sheath of papers in his fat hand. “Signed, and all legal,” the guy said. A trickle of sweat ran down his brow and across his shiny face. He ignored it.
I snatched the pages from out of the guy’s hand, and tore them into shreds without even glancing at them.
“Hey!” the guy started to protest.
I snapped at him. “Shut up!” I spat the words like venom.
I looked past his shoulder to where the young woman lay on the mattress. She had her knees pressed together now, and had wrapped her hands over her body in a pathetic attempt to cover herself. She was staring back at me with dull out-of-focus eyes. I turned my attention back to the guy. I wrapped one muscled arm around the back of the man’s neck in a kind of headlock and pulled him close so that only he could hear the menace in my voice.
“This is what’s going to happen,” I told him. “Both of these girls are going to walk out of here. Then you are going to erase the footage you have filmed of the girl on the bed.” The guy started to get tense and I tightened the muscles in my forearms like a boa constrictor strangling a victim. “After you do that, I am going to film a promo for you. I will stand right beside you and tell the world what a good friend of mine you are and how great your films are.”
The guy looked surprised.
“Then I’m going to hurt you.”
The guy balked. His eyes became wide and fearful for a second as he realized what I’d said, and that I meant every word of it. He started to squirm, his sweating body slick and oily. I moved my arm so that there was pressure beneath his jaw, forcing his neck back until he was straining against me, and his eyes grew very wide with panic.
“Okay,” the guy went limp in a rush of breath. His arms flapped a little and then he stopped resisting. “Okay,” he said again.
I helped the girl off the bed. She seemed dazed and unsteady on her feet. She fumbled her clothes on and teetered from the room without ever glancing back.
“Erase the tape,” I ordered, “and put some fucking clothes on.”
The guy snatched up the camera he had been filming with. His fingers were trembling. He stabbed some buttons and offered the camera up to me. “All done
,” he said. “Take a look for yourself.”
I looked. There was nothing left recorded. I grunted. The guy went to a pile of dirty unwashed clothes at the foot of the bed. He dressed quickly. “You really going to shoot a promo for me?”
I nodded. He shook his head like he couldn’t believe it and then lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper. “Are you really going to hurt me?”
“Count on it,” I said. I didn’t give the guy any time to think. He had a battered old tripod. I set the camera up, stabbed the ‘record’ button and dragged the guy over to stand beside me. I wrapped an arm around his shoulder and in an instant my expression transformed.
“Hi,” I smiled warmly towards the camera. “This is Rick Cassidy and I’m down town in L.A. with my good buddy Jimmy D.” I gave the fat bastard a warm slap on the shoulder. “We are on the set of Jimmy’s brand new film called ‘Fuckable MILFS’. Jimmy has scoured the west coast of America looking for the hottest ladies and filming them just for you,” my voice was warm and urbane and full of good will. I glanced at the guy. There was an uncertain smile on his face.
“You will want to watch this film,” I enthused. “There’s not a woman under forty and they’re all red hot and horny as hell. Take it from me,” I pointed at the camera and my smile broadened. “This will be a film you have got to see.”
I crossed to the camera and thumped the buttons to stop recording. The guy looked at me with a pained wrought expression on his face. “Hey, man. I don’t film MILFS. I film young stuff.”
I smiled grimly. “Not anymore,” I said. “Not ever again.”
I held the camera up for the guy so he could check the playback, and as he took it from me I punched him hard in the guts. The guy made an ‘ooomf!’ sound of pain as all the air was crushed from his lungs. The camera fell from his nerveless fingers and skittered across the ground. He bent over and clutched at his guts and as he did, I lifted my fist in an uppercut that caught him squarely under the jaw. It was one of my better punches – my legs were perfectly balanced and I drove up from my hips with all my weight and muscle behind the blow. The guy’s head snapped back and I heard something crunch and break. He began to topple backwards like a felled tree and I saw a spurt of bright red blood spill from his gaping mouth.