“Detective. No, I did not.”
“Well, you have. Essie had a right to do that crap, sure, but I have a right to find it…distasteful.”
Larkin opened his mouth, but Doyle briefly touched his back and spoke before he had another chance. “Are you able to walk us through the circumstances of Esther’s disappearance?”
Phyllis’s body language was still highly agitated, despite a transition in subject matter that should have softened her jagged edges. “It’s all in the missing persons report.”
“If you’d humor me,” Doyle said.
“She never came home from work. That’s literally it.”
Larkin abruptly stood, and in a single, fluid motion, Doyle settled into his seat. Larkin found Phyllis’s scathing opinion peculiar and wanted to keep poking at it, but he was also self-aware enough to know she was putting the walls up fast, and they weren’t ready to consider this interview wrapped. He walked across the living room and stood in front of the jungle of ferns before the windows looking out onto the street, hands clasped behind his back.
Doyle asked, “What was Esther’s work routine like?”
“She usually came home early morning.”
“Where was home?”
“East Village.”
“And you lived together?”
Larkin could hear the shrug in Phyllis’s voice. “Well, wedid. This was like a week or two after I found out Essie left Frills for that sex club and she was coming home less often, crashing with her friends, you know? She had such an attitude about the whole thing—she didn’t need my permission to whore herself out, blah, blah blah. So when I woke up the next morning and it was obvious she hadn’t been home, I didn’t really think anything of it. I didn’t want to spend my morning fighting.”
“When did you suspect there was a problem?”
“Not for another day. A girl’s gotta shower, change her clothes at some point, right? She’d left her birth control pills at home. I called around to a few of my friends, a few of hers—no one had heard from her. It was like she’d walked outta the club Saturday night and disappeared.”
Doyle asked, “What was the name of the sex club?”
“The Kitten Klub.”
Something about Doyle’s voice changed, faltered, when he asked, “Club with ak?”
“You heard of it?”
“On Broadway?”
“Yeah. West Forty-Third, I think.”
Larkin turned around. He approached the dining table from an angle, giving it enough of a berth that he caught Doyle in profile and was alarmed to see a family of microexpressions running the gamut on his face: disappointment, distress, abhorrence,shame.
“Most of the clubs these days are in Midtown.”
And Larkin had overlooked that clue, that very first insight, when he’d replied mockingly,“I’m curious as to your extensive knowledge on the stripping industry.”
“I think a lot of people could claim to have had traumatic childhoods.”
“The mother is pissing me off.”
“‘Ira’s poor, his mom’s a whore.’”
Oh.
His mother’s vocation.
The mocking, ostracizing.
