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clothes?”
    “After. They go in and count the tips and then settle up on their way out.”
    “You saw her go out?”
    “Right. I was sitting at the bar and having my drink, like always. She says, ‘Here you go, Ed,’ and hands me my money, and then out she goes.”
    “Alone?”
    “Yeah—right.”
    “You saw her go out the front door alone?”
    “No. The back door. Over there.” He pointed off across the vacant ramp whose waxed surface threw back the ceiling’s cold glow like a strip of ice. “There’s an employees’ lot out back where we park.”
    “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted her dead?”
    Gollmer shook his head.
    “Nobody in the audience who showed special interest in her? Gave her a big tip? Asked her out after the show?”
    “No more than usual. You know, ‘Can I give you a ride home?,’ that kind of crap. The out-of-towners do that, not the regulars. She got her share of it—she was a good-looking girl. Really a good figure.” He shook his head again. “Murdered … What, was she raped and killed?”
    “It looks that way.”
    “Well, I guess I’m not all that surprised.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “You do get your share of sickies coming in here. Some of them…well, Cal has a tough job, you know?”
    “That’s the bouncer?”
    “Right. Mr. B. keeps the place clean; nothing rough, nothing dirty. It’s not like some of the other skin houses. Still,” he added, lighting another cigarette, “we do get our ration of sickies.”
    Wager went through the rest of the questions, asking the same thing a couple of different ways, but getting the same answers. Shelly left for the parking lot a little after two. She had been alone. No one seemed especially interested in her. Gollmer knew of no trouble between her and her husband. He knew of no one who might want her dead. And he could think of no sickie that stood out in the audience Saturday night.
    When Wager came back down the stairs, Axton was waiting for him.
    “Anything?”
    “It looks like the disc jockey was the last one to see her leave.”
    “Alone.” It wasn’t a question now.
    “Yeah. Let’s go out this way—it’s the employees’ parking lot.”
    It was a dirt square tucked between the windowless brick walls of the adjoining buildings and open at the back to an alley that glittered with crushed glass. Across the pavement, a high wooden fence with a board broken here and there guarded someone’s backyard, and beyond that a darkness of thick trees protected an old neighborhood from the noise and gleam of Colfax. High on the club’s wall above them, spotlights flooded the parking area with light. A black Mercedes sat in the slot closest to the door. Its license plate read M R . B. and on the wall in front of it was stenciled Reserved for Numero Uno . Other slots were numbered in older paint half-hidden under sprayed graffiti. Only four cars were left in the lot by now. They were all late models and one other had vanity plates reading D.J.-1.
    “Not much hope for any witnesses,” said Axton.
    He was right. It was, despite the openness and light, a secluded spot. Wager glanced again at the solid brick walls boxing in the lot. A girl could step through that door and, crossing suddenly into another world, simply disappear. “Looks like another wait-and-see killing,” he said. Wait-and-see if anything would turn up, because there sure as hell wasn’t much to help them right now.

CHAPTER 3
    A NNETTE S HELDON WAS autopsied the next day. Parts were taken out, weighed and measured, sampled and tested, then tossed back into the body cavity, which was tacked together for burial. Golding and Munn, on the day shift, interviewed Mr. Sheldon again to see if he could remember anything else after a night’s sleep. They handed their report on to Ross and Devereaux on the four-to-midnight, but those two were called to a shooting on the west side. A Chicano gang had squared off against a Vietnamese gang over the question of who