“I know you’ve done jail time in support of your ‘principles.’ “
“Principles with quotes around them, Lieutenant? Your bias is showing.”
“Not as much as your receptionist’s thong.”
“You are a puritan.”
“No, I’m a working woman too, and women who flash their sexuality make it harder for all of us.” Molina waved her hand. “Your receptionist is a billboard for your business, I understand that. But you’ll never convince me that anyone using their sexuality for gain, money, or advancement isn’t acting out personal issues.”
“What issues is someone like me acting out?”
“Well-meant late sixties liberalism. You know, I rather agree with you. If there’s going to be a sex industry, and there always has been, better it be under the control of the workers, not the middlemen. But you are one.”
“I’m not exploitive.”
“Maybe not, but that’s an individual thing. Who’s to say your successor wouldn’t be? Wherever money exchanges hands for things people are forbidden to do, by civil law or social mores, corruption, brutality, and exploitation creep in.”
“So you give up individual freedom to avoid the misuse of it? We’re all screwed then.”
Molina shrugged. “Life’s a struggle. So tell me about Vassar.”
“Tell me how you found out her name.”
“Easy. The hotel staff. She wasn’t exactly a stranger at the Goliath. Did she really attend Vassar College?”
“Attend? She graduated. Sex-industry workers aren’t the dumb bunnies they’re stigmatized as.”
“So why did she come West and start hooking?”
Rothenberg leaned back in her chair, the usual low-backed clerk’s model that gave her office a proletariat air. “I don’t cross-examine my employees. I would guess that she was sufficiently good-looking that she was going to enter some field where her looks would be an advantage. Maybe she wasn’t thin enough for modeling, or talented enough to dance or act. That’s how I get a lot of my employees.”
“She seemed plenty thin to me, except it looked like she’d had silicone and collagen enhancements. Before or after she worked for you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t subject these women to physical examinations.”
“But their looks play a big factor in whether you . represent them, or not.”
Rothenberg shook her head and smiled. “The employee suits the venue. For the big hotels, yes; looks are paramount. But I have employees in less elevated outlets. Some are successful, if not as highly paid as the five-star hotel workers, because they’re kind and sympathetic. Many of my employees function as much as counselors as sex partners. Wealthy men, for obvious reasons, require less shoring up of their egos.”
“Counselors? Please!”
“It’s true. A lot of people are very screwed up about sex.”
“I see the results of that every day. The lethal results. Back to Vassar. How’d she become your employee?”
“Heard about me. I’ve become a little notorious.”
Molina grimaced at the understatement. Through the years Judith Rothenberg had tormented the law enforcement personnel and governing bodies of three cities, even enduring long jail terms on behalf of her “principles,” but she was always set free by some judge. Police had learned to lay off her. She had a doctoral degree and excellent lawyers and wasn’t about to be pushed around as easily as street-side madams.
And, too, the police recognized that Rothenberg hookers were less likely to be drawn into the violent eddy of street crime. The woman did protect her own, and her business did operate more as a legitimate enterprise. Which drove the Moral Majority crowd nuts, because it did seem to prove that prostitution could be a “clean” business.
“She could have fallen,” Rothenberg said out of the blue. “I don’t see Vassar getting into any tacky situation. She was extremely savvy. She would ‘phone home’ instantly if anything seedy seemed to be happening.”
“Phone home. That’s just it. We didn’t find a beeper or cell phone anywhere near the body.”
Rothenberg leaned forward, her modest chair squeaking in protest. “No phone? All our workers have phones, and every one of them has an emergency number programmed in. All they have to do is press a button, and we know who and where, if not why.”
“And then the Hooker Police go rushing to the rescue.”
“Something like that. I do have my own security.”
Molina had seen the bodyguards accompanying Rothenberg to court on the TV news. She favored high-profile muscle, like retired wrestlers. She knew how to direct a media circus.
“So Vassar didn’t sound any alarms that night.” At Rothenberg’s shaking head, she went on. “Maybe the phone is still lost in that neon jungle at the Goliath. One of her shoes almost came off in the fall.”
Rothenberg nodded.
Molina suddenly realized that her fears were not valid. Rothenberg would not cry murder, because everything was invested in her belief that sex for sale could be safe and civilized.
“Frankly,” Molina went on, “the evidence is pretty overwhelming that no foul play was involved. There isn’t an inappropriate mark on the body that couldn’t be explained by a fall. The Goliath is the only Vegas hotel that has that dangerous central atrium design. She would have had to be leaning over the edge, but that neon ceiling is pretty fascinating from above. Still, I find it hard to believe that the woman was simply admiring the view and plunged to her death.”
“We’ve never had an untoward incident at the Goliath,” Rothenberg said. “Admit it, Lieutenant. Accidents can happen. Even to sex companions.”
Molina allowed the sick, troubled feeling that had taken up residence on her insides to show on the outside. Judith Rothenberg took it for officialdom hating to admit that Vassar’s chosen line of work was healthy, safe, and subject to ordinary worker accidents now and again.
“I won’t let you sensationalize Vassar’s death to make a moral point,” Rothenberg added more sternly. “I won’t let you use her to undermine everything she believed in, including herself.”
So now the police were the stigmatizing villains, Molina thought.
Amazing how circumstances and everyone she talked to were making it so easy for her to hide the embarrassing truth and save her own and Matt Devine’s skin.
As a mother and the woman who had advised Devine to take the course that had ended in Vassar’s death, she knew massive relief. He would be safe. She would be safe. Mariah’s future would be safe.
As a cop, she was seriously unhappy. It had been too easy to bury this fatal “mistake” to be honest or true or decent.
Her job was to do something about that, even if it hurt.
Chapter 12
All in a Night’s Work:
The Midnight Hour .. .
Only one other person besides Molina knew the why and wherefore of Matt’s desperate rendezvous with a call girl, and she was on the air solid from 7:00 to 11:58 P.M.
Matt called her at four in the afternoon, and they agreed to meet at the black bar named Buff Daddy’s, one place Kathleen O’Connor couldn’t slip into without standing out like a hitchhiking Caucasian thumb.
Matt, being anxious, got there first. The repainted Probe was the only white car in the parking lot, he noted, anticipating his entry into the club.
There were many ways one could feel an outsider. Being a priest had been one. Being an ex-priest had, surprisingly, been another. Being the only one of your race in a particular place was more external, even more obvious and alienating.
Matt just strolled in, checked to see that Ambrosia’s far table was empty, and made for it without much looking around.
He sensed no hostility, just curiosity. Curiosity only killed cats, and the last time Matt had looked he’d had no fur or a tail.
He sat down and, when the dreadlocked bar girl came by about seven minutes later, ordered a beer and a Bloody Mary for Ambrosia.