There are few things more depressing than the California Delta in the rain and the first time I set eyes on Locke was in the middle of a downpour. Water poured off the balconies of the houses along main street, sending a steady gush along the porticos like blood spurting out of a freshly cut throat. The wetness blurred the pink and yellow lights in the windows of the establishments and made them look just as warm and welcoming as the girls inside them.
I’d spent the last two months in the hold of a boat in China and the last two days in a dormitory with seventeen other girls in the back of a factory in Oakland. I thought nothing could surprise me at that point, but Locke in the rain was beautiful, and that wasn’t my only shock. I thought I’d come to America to be a seamstress or work in a laundry, but though the work I ended up doing instead wasn’t always pleasant, the Chinese house managers were very kind to me, and so were the other girls who quickly became close friends. Every evening we would sit in the upstairs parlor, laughing and chatting while we waited for customers. The men would sit down in the front of the house, playing cards for high stakes and drinking until they were often too inebriated to be much of a bother when they hired us. Most of them were easy to handle, but occasionally someone would try to take something he hadn’t paid for or would manhandle one of us in a way we didn’t appreciate.
We had ways of dealing with them for that.
Dooley was a policeman who used to come down from Sacramento to see us, and he wasn’t any fatter or more greasy than your average client. He came once a week to the brothel to drink whiskey and visit the women and the woman he visited the most was me. Prostitution is a crime in California but he lets us stay open because of the 15% he takes from us.
15%, and free visits.
Dooley started coming a few months ago, when bodies began rising up in the canal, and he kept coming even after those cases went cold. The cops’ theory was that men would roll out of one of the bars here, cross the street and fall into the Marina across the highway. A few days later, they’d be fished out down by Walnut Grove; by that time, they were so bloated you couldn’t tell how they died, and their belongings were probably stuck to the bottom of the Delta. They had yet to have found a wallet. Dooley told me one time he thought someone was coshing the customers after robbing them and then dumping them over the side of the cut, but he admitted that there wasn’t any proof.
I laughed at the idea that they’d been murdered. “Those men are all drunk,” I said. “They fell in. Why would you think the other thing?”
He said that all those wallets being gone looked fishy. And that there had been a lot of them lately, more than you’d expect.
“Yes. There’s also a lot of of drunk men here lately,” I agreed. “More than you’d expect. Speaking of which…would you like another whiskey?”
He reached over. “You know I would.” I knelt as his feet as I served him, and he patted my head amorously. Then he drank the whiskey and immediately began to feel sleepy. He was smarter than the others and caught on to the situation right before he passed out, so I had to explain that there was no point in shouting for help. There’s nothing unusual about a man making a bunch of noise in a backroom of a Locke brothel, so,” I said soothingly, “you can stop screaming…it’s me.”
I left his wallet in his overcoat this time in case the next officer they send down here is equally suspicious.
This is a great story!
thanks! I had fun with this one!