“ ‘A market niche.’ ” Molina couldn’t resist mocking the eternal sell that drove Las Vegas. “So does death. Okay. I’ll handle Rothenberg myself.”
“Think she’ll raise a stink?” Barrett wanted to know.
“Doesn’t she always? I’d rather have heard our dead girl worked for Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter than Judith Rothenberg.”
“I hear you, Lieutenant,” Barrett said, snapping his notebook shut as if he wished it were crushing a bug. “Good luck.”
Molina didn’t believe in luck: good, bad, or middling.
Not even now that the one call girl in Las Vegas that ‘ Matt Devine happened to draw had turned up dead in a lethal endgame of stud poker.
She found the bland off-Strip intersection where Neon Nightmare squatted unimpressively. The building was blacked out for the daylight hours: it looked like a huge version of the Mirage Hotel’s volcano surmounted by an elaborate neon image of a galloping horse, mane flying, that would blaze against the night sky when lit.
Neon was odd stuff. The tubes that housed the magical, mystery gas were the lackluster dead-white of tapeworms until electricity charged through them like stampeding elephants. Then the colorless gases inside glowed against the dark like lurid chalk marks on the velvet painting of a Las Vegas night.
Neon was mostly a historical display now, not part of the New Las Vegas, which was more about squeezing money out of tourists for theme park attractions rather than gambling. Fifteen bucks to ride an elevator fifty stories up in a half-size ersatz Eiffel Tower. Twelve bucks to ride a phony Venetian gondola through a hotel lobby. Fifteen bucks to view an art display you could see for eight bucks at an established museum.
Such high-ticket prices were paying down the development costs of the multibillion-dollar new hotels that ped-dled culture instead of the crasser side of Las Vegas nowadays. It was still all about money, and so was a call girl operation, no matter what veneer of political correctness you slapped over it.
Like the mob that had ruled Vegas once, vice had gone corporate. Judith Rothenberg had an “office” as well as an agenda.
Molina was not impressed, but this time she was backed into a corner of her own making. If Matt Devine got painted into it by any unhappy conjunction of events, her career was history, like neon. And maybe in as blazing an inferno as the Mirage volcano.
NEW WOMAN, was the name above the door and window. Molina snorted. There was nothing new about the world’s oldest profession but PR spin.
She gritted her teeth and went in, prepared to play the politician she loved to hate on most working days.
A young, anxious receptionist took her name. Molina did not give rank.
“It’s been kinda … rough around here lately,” the girl confessed. A phone line on her machine blinked. “New Woman. Miss Rothenberg’s not in. I’m sure she’d be happy to speak to you. May I take a message?”
She grimaced at Molina as she hung up, apologizing to a witness of an obvious lie, “You’re here about—?”
“The death.”
“Oh. From the media. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for Miss Rothenberg to get back to you—”
“From the Metropolitan Las Vegas Police,” Molina was forced to admit. She had wanted to stay as low-profile as Rothenberg went for the high-profile.
“Oh! I’d better … talk to her on this one. Just a minute.”
She leaped up, revealing a skirt that suffered from an awesome fabric shortage, and skittered behind the bland door that led to an inner office.
A minute passed, then two. When the girl emerged, she assumed an air of authority that went badly with her beringed facial features and deep teal metallic fingernail polish. In Molina’s observation, the more piercings, the lower the self-esteem.
She thought of her daughter Mariah’s pierced ears and hoped it would stop there, but there was no guarantee of restraint for the twelve-year-old aching to go on thirty-two, and physical puberty hadn’t even hit yet.
“She’ll see you now.”
Molina forbore comment and went into the office.
Madams certainly weren’t what they used to be.
Judith Rothenberg looked more like a New Age guru, with her mane of coarse, grayed long hair, makeup-free skin, frank sun-wrinkles, and Southwestern-style turquoise jewelry.
Molina showed her shield.
“A lieutenant. I’m impressed. I expected the usual tag team of male detectives. They always love to visit my shop.”
Molina was well aware of the male fascination with ladies of the evening, which was why she’d come here instead. That, and the terrible fix she was in over Matt Devine.
“This a priority case,” Molina said, not underestimating the habitual expression of skepticism Rothenberg employed with police officers of any rank or gender.
“One dead sex-industry worker? Who would care? I’m grateful for the pull of your corporate masters, the hotels.”
“You should be. You and your girls make a hell of a lot of money off the hotel trade.”
“We call them women.”
“Whatever you call them, they’re call girls. I am not working vice here. I am not interested in your cynicism. I am not interested in the shining career path of the victim. I’m interested in her death, and how it happened. Any insight?”
“Vassar wasn’t accident-prone, or suicidal.”
“How do you know?”
“I know my employees. That’s the point of them working for me instead of a pimp.”
“So what was Vassar’s personal background?”
“It was all in her working handle. She was a Vassar graduate who decided to freelance instead of struggling up a ladder with a glass ceiling in some corporation run by greedy white men.”
“Hooking was an improvement?”
“When you work for me it is.”
“What about her family? Where was she born?”
“I don’t know any of that, and I don’t keep records on my employees. It only provides ammunition for the police and the moral vigilantes.”
“And you say you ‘know’ your employees?”
“Enough to do business. Their pasts are their property. I know their present state of mind. That’s enough. I don’t take on women with abuse or control issues.”
“Aren’t those the women who could most use a compassionate pimp?”
“I am not a pimp. I’m an office manager. My point is that ordinary, well-balanced, well-educated women should be free to pursue whatever line of work they find most rewarding. That corporate ladder-climber often finds she has to sleep her way up a rung anyway. For nothing.”
“Somehow I thought you operated more like a dorm mother.”
“No. We are all involved in a business enterprise. A business that should be legitimatized.”
“Never happen in Las Vegas and the rest of the real world. A few Nevada counties that okay operating `chicken ranches’ don’t make a trend.”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t keep working at it. My employees are never coerced, they are drug-and diseasefree—that I make sure of—and they’re not alcoholics. They are working women in the sex industry. I pay them well, and it would be even more if I didn’t have to maintain a legal fund to defend them from harassment by the puritanical authorities. Are you puritanical, Lieutenant?”
“Probably. By your standards.” Molina couldn’t help smiling. “You enjoy cop-baiting, don’t you?”
“I enjoy harassing back a society that harasses women from the git-go, yes.”
“I’ve read the print interviews with you. I know your position. Prostitution should be legal, regulated, and an upstanding profession. Prostitutes should either be free agents, or represented by a ‘manager’ like yourself, who provides a ‘support system.’ How you are not a parasite like any street pimp, I don’t know.”
“First, I’m the same gender as my workers. There’s no male domination involved. Second, I do pay and protect my employees. To the wall.”