“Because it just happened. Big black guy walks in here last night with a bag of cash, asks a few questions, says him and his partner will take the club and apartments off my hands for a very nice sum of money, if I do say so myself. I’d been thinking of retiring anyways, maybe going to one of them beaches in the Caribbean where the government don’t care where your money comes from as long as it’s green.” He shrugged both his shoulders. “So I says, ‘All right. Why not?’”
“Why not?” she repeated. “How about because you don’t know this guy from Adam?”
Another shrug. “His money’s green. That’s all I need to know.” He scanned her up and down. “Anyway, I just came in here to let you know. The new boss is coming by in a few minutes when the club opens. Wants to meet everybody, so I’m going around making sure the girls look extra clean, including the one I hired to run the joint, the one I told them would give them the full tour.”
He gave the hole in her sweater vest a pointed look. “If you’re going to dress like a librarian, kid, can you at least wear clothes that don’t got holes in them?”
But Lacey held up her hands. “Don’t even start. I’m still trying to get over the fact you just sold the club to some random guy off the street without even talking to me first.”
Tony leaned forward with his elbows in his lap. “Don’t be like that, kid. I’ve been thinking about getting out of the game for a while now. But I told the guy about our arrangement and I made him promise to keep you on after I left.”
“Thanks, Tony,” she said. She stood up behind her desk. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. It’s just…you’ve been like a second father to me, and I can’t believe I’m losing you.”
She didn’t add that she knew the earnings Tony brought in were too petty to be anything really serious, but this guy had just paid for Tony’s business in cash. Who knew what all he was into? Her stomach turned at the thought. She could reconcile cooking the books for a small time criminal, but someone selling drugs or women—no, she couldn’t do it. Even if her father was dead, she was still his daughter, and she’d never go against his legacy like that.
“I’ll be here until the end of the month at least. You can still come by and see me.”
She was about to respond that she’d definitely be taking him up on his offer when a stick-thin, caramel skinned, stripper with a balloon chest walked past the open door.
“Candy?” she called, jogging after her. “Is that you?”
Candy turned on her six-inch heels. She was wearing shiny, red, thigh-high boots that were actually longer than the entire outfit she was wearing above it.
“Hey girl,” Candy said, with the breezy smile that had made her a hit with the clientele as soon as she started at the club a few months ago. But then her smile turned upside down. “You know you’ve got a hole in your sweater, right?”
“What are you doing here?” Lacey asked, ignoring her question.
“I heard we under new ownership and it’s a black guy!” Dollar signs practically flashed in her eyes. “You think he’s single?”
Lacey shook her head at the dancer. When she’d applied for a job a couple of months ago, she’d hesitated to hire her because she said she’d gotten her start at a strip club located up the road from Cofi’s, her father’s old restaurant. Hiring a woman from her hometown seemed too close for comfort, not to mention safety.
But Tony, who’d also been sitting in on the interview loved her—“she’s got all the stuff guys pay for,” he’d said, “And a killer smile.”
And he was right. Candy made a lot in tips, more than any other African-American dancer at the club, and about even with a few of their popular blond dancers. Tony had even talked about putting her photo on some of the club’s internet ads.
But it had become clear to Lacey that Candy was more interested in finding her next sugar daddy than becoming a main attraction. She was forever lecturing the younger woman about not flirting too much with the customers, especially the rich ones. And even then, she knew Candy was accepting invitations to party with customers in different locations, which was against the rules and not a great idea since she had an eight-month old baby waiting for her at home.
“This is your morning at the co-op. You’re supposed to be on babysitting duty,” Lacey reminded her, because obviously Candy needed reminding. “Where’s your kid and Ben?”
Candy sucked on her teeth. “Girl, I put them in the playpen. It’s just for a few minutes. They’ll be all right.”
“No, they won’t be—“ Lacey closed her eyes, and took a moment to breathe. Technically the babysitting co-op she’d started back when Sparkle was still living with her and needed after-school supervision had been a rousing success and accounted for the low amount of turnover among their single mom dancers. But unfortunately, she’d had to deal with dancers leaving their babysitting duties to come downstairs “just for a few minutes” often enough that she now had an established protocol.
She walked away from Candy. She’d give the dancer a stern lecture about how babies were never to be left alone in the apartments upstairs, and how if Candy really felt the need to go out, she should drop the kids off at her office where she kept an extra playpen just for such occasions.
But right now her main concern was checking on the babies. So far, no child had been badly injured in the program, but there was always a first time for everything.
She let herself into Candy’s apartment with her master key just in time. Candy’s little boy, whose name was Leo but who they had all taken to calling Spiderbaby—“Spidey” for short—because of his early climbing skills, had one leg all the way over the playpen wall and was already teetering over the edge. He would have cracked his little head open on the hardwood floors if Lacey hadn’t dived, just in time, to catch him.
Spiderbaby giggled as if he hadn’t just been snatched from the gaping jaws of head trauma.
And despite the circumstances, Lacey’s heart couldn’t help but melt. If her life had turned out differently, she would have loved to have more than one baby. She’d given birth to Sparkle at eighteen under less than ideal circumstances, and she often thought about how nice it would be to have a baby now she was older.
But that was never going to happen, could never happen, not with the mess she’d managed to make of her life.