“What do you want to know?” Phyllis countered.
Larkin said, “Ms. Haycox disappeared thirty-eight years ago—three years before I was even born. That’s a considerable timeline I need to reconstruct.”
“Maybe the NYPD should have a more seasoned detective on this case,” Phyllis suggested.
“Age and ability are not synonymous,” Larkin answered. “I’m the best there is.”
“You’re not kidding, are you?”
“No,” Larkin said bluntly.
Phyllis huffed in mild irritation, but said, “We met in ’79.” She put her index finger on the Polaroids and tapped a few times. “She was a burlesque dancer at a place called Madame Frills’ Dancing Girls, but everyone just called it Frills. On the outside, Frills catered to men, but it was also this underground hookup spot for queer women. The straights had Plato’s Retreat and gay men had Adonis Theatre. We had to be more creative. It was a hell of a time to be alive,” she continued. “The sexual revolution amid the gay and women’s rights movements, all mixed together in the shithole that Times Square had become….”
“So you met Ms. Haycox during a hookup,” Larkin asked.
“Not really. Me and a few of my biker girlfriends went because we wanted to see pretty girls taking their clothes off. Essie came out after her performance to meet the audience—it was a ploy to get folks to stay and spend more money at the bar—but she was real sweet and took pictures with fans.” Phyllis cracked a smile at that long-ago memory and held up the picture of her, face-first in Esther’s cleavage. “This was the first night I met her, actually,” she said with a small laugh. “I was a huge fan.”
“So you returned to Frills on more than one occasion,” Larkin clarified.
“I went to Frills almost every night for like a month straight,” Phyllis replied. “I was obsessed with Essie… but if you saw her dance, you’d get it. It was like being hypnotized by a cobra. She loved burlesque. But it’s not stripping, you know.”
“It was originally parody and satire of serious theater and the behaviors of upper-class society,” Doyle said, by way of agreeance. “Lydia Thompson popularized it in America just after the Civil War by including comedy, dancing, singing, and an all-female cast donning provocative costumes. It didn’t really take on the sexually charged elements people think of today until the 1920s, when Josephine Baker and Gypsy Rose Lee got into the industry.”
Phyllis scratched her arm absently, staring at Doyle. “Well, I don’t know about all that, smart guy, but Essie took the art—her words—seriously. But I remember that Frills was in some pretty hot water financially by ’80 or ’81.”
“Why’s that,” Larkin asked.
“Because it was Times Square,” Phyllis protested. “Singing and dancing and artsy-fartsy stripteases didn’t pull in the cash when peep shows next door were letting men grope live pussy for twenty-five cents.”
Larkin frowned but asked, “How long was Ms. Haycox employed at Frills.”
“I’m not sure. Two, maybe three years. She disappeared in October of ’82, so she must have been pushed out a month or so earlier,” Phyllis said thoughtfully.
“Pushed out,” Larkin repeated.
“Hm-hm. Frills was moving away from burlesque and into stripping.”
Larkin turned enough in his seat to look up at Doyle, to suggest with a raise of his eyebrow that he required Doyle’s more sensitive approach when addressing the career they’d seen firsthand that Esther had transitioned to.
And thankfully, Doyle understood. “Ms. Clark,” he said calmly. “I understand this conversation might be difficult for you, and if you need a moment, please say so. But we have evidence showing who we believe is Esther Haycox, participating in a live sex show. Are you able to confirm this?”
Phyllis had crossed her arms as Doyle spoke. Her chin took on a pugnacious jut. With a noticeable change in her attitude—a long-ago hurt that’d scarred over with anger and offense—she said, “Yeah, after she left Frills. We were dating by then, kind of seriously, so why she—” Phyllis stopped and seemed to chew over how she wanted to proceed.
Gently, Doyle prodded, “She didn’t talk to you about it beforehand?”
Phyllis stiffly shook her head. “One of my girlfriends saw a theater on Broadway advertising a show with Essie’s face, and she thought maybe they were using her likeness or something, so she checked it out. But it was some fantasy kink shit where Essie played the hapless lesbian who really just needed a good boning by a man to set her right. That was the extent of the storyline, because obviously the audience wasn’t there for fucking Shakespeare.”
“Did you confront Ms. Haycox?” Doyle asked.
“Sure I did!” Phyllis protested, sitting up straight in her chair. “She played up the physicality at Frills, sure, but Essie was in control of her own body. She got to show off her talent—and I don’t mean her tits. I meanreal talent. And she left that—didn’t even try to take a stand against the stripping policy—and went to do cheap porn where a bunch of old geezers on their lunch breaks could sit in the front row with their dicks whipped out, beating one off. She never bothered to ask if I was okay with some stranger dropping a load in her a dozen shows a week.” Phyllis swore and hit the table with her fist. “Still makes me mad as hell to even think about.”
“It’s not anger you feel,” Larkin said suddenly. “It’s disgust.”
Phyllis looked at him.
“We react with disgust to a variety of situations: those perceived through our five senses, ideas, appearance of others, even their actions,” Larkin explained. “There’s ongoing debate, however, that disgust over another’s actions is a learned emotion, as ethics differ from culture to culture, to which I must agree. Sex work has existed since ancient times, yet due to Western influence on the rest of the world, it is largely illegal and seen as a morally bankrupt and degenerate way of life. But despite this near-global criminalization and revulsion, countries such as the Netherlands and Germany have organized, legal, and thriving sex industries, which further supports the claim that certain aspects of disgust are learned, otherwise these countries would have the same laws as the rest of us. Your anger isbecauseEsther Haycox makes you feel disgust.”
“Did you come here to insult me, Mr. Larkin?”
