“Yeah, unless he’d been giving a civet a rim job.”
She almost did a spit take with the Manhattan.
But she managed to ask, “I don’t suppose you know anybody who uses that cologne.”
“Actually, doll, I do know of one.”
“Well?”
“Our client’s son.”
“Vincent Colby?”
“Vincent Colby.”
“Who,” she said, “is about your size and is proficient, his sensei says, in martial arts. For a beginner, anyway.”
“Roger that. Speaking of which, find out anything about the late, unlamented Roger Kraft?”
She nodded. “He had another profession, besides getaway car driver. He was a stuntman, working a lot of the films and TV shows shot in the city.”
“He had the build for it,” I said.
Velda glanced past me toward the front of the place, then patted the air with a palm. “Lily is just coming in the door. Be nice.”
“Who’s Lily? And I’m always nice.”
Velda gave me a look. “Lily is the other call girl who worked out of that suite with Jasmine Jordan. She agreed to meet with you. Here’s a picture of Jasmine Jordan, by the way. It tells a story.”
Velda slid a color 5” by 7” studio photo across to me. It told a story, all right — a full-figure shot of a handsome, voluptuous woman with a milk chocolate complexion that seemed light against a dark chocolate leather catsuit and very high-heeled black shoes. In her right hand was a riding crop.
I tucked it away.
Velda had gone to intercept the young woman, and they stopped at the bar to get the newcomer a drink. She was tall and appeared to be slender, but was wrapped up in a tan hooded raincoat with only a little showing of what seemed to be a lot of long, permed platinum hair. Only nylons and glittery red shoes showed, like she’d just arrived back from the Land of Oz. She had entered from a dark night that was getting wet enough to justify the raincoat, but her big-lensed, white-framed sunglasses were less explainable, unless she was a movie star. If so, I didn’t recognize her.
And if anonymity was what she was seeking — Lily, Velda had said her name was — it wasn’t working. Everybody in the bar, which was half-full (as optimists like me would say) was looking at her. New Yorkers who won’t give you a glance on the street were happy to stare indoors.
But then Lily and Velda tucked themselves in across from me in the booth and the pretty if somewhat hard young hooker was forgotten.
“This is my boss,” Velda said, “Mike Hammer. You may have heard of him.”
“Sorry, no,” she said, in a little girl voice — the kind of Judy Holliday pipes that probably got some of her clients off. She tugged back the hood and revealed my prediction about a mass of curly permed white-blonde hair had been correct.
“Call me Mike,” I said.
“Call me Lily,” she said, with the tiniest smile.
“Thanks for talking to us, Lily. You were Jasmine’s roommate?”
“We lived together,” she said, with a nod. “I knew Ronnie since high school. That was her real name — or anyway Veronica was. Like the Ronettes? She was a couple years older than me. We both had bad family scenes and caught a bus together and got the hell out. We were a couple of runaways who got lucky.”
“How so?”
Do I have to say that two girls who fell into a life of prostitution hardly qualified as “lucky”?
She frowned above the big sunglasses and asked, “You don’t need the whole story, do you?”
“Just enough to get my feet under me, honey.”
“Okay.”
She sipped her drink, a Bloody Mary, and folded her hands; her nails were painted red, like Velda’s, their sole similarity beyond being lookers.
“Well,” she began, “a pimp approached us at the bus station and he took to both of us, right away. Thought we had potential. He trained us. For Ronnie, the S & M scene made a sweet setup — she didn’t even have to do the guys. Just punish them till they came. She worked out of various apartments over the past six or seven years.”
“How old are you, Lily?”
“Twenty-seven.”
She was good-looking, but you’d say thirty-seven.
“Ronnie had it better than me, because she worked at home,” she continued. “Working at home is really great. I went to the clients, hotels mostly. My specialty was costumes. I dressed up like little girls. You know, schoolgirls. Catholic girls are really popular.”
“I bet they are.”
“I have a Little Bo Peep costume one regular really likes. Most of these clients just pleasure themselves. I hardly ever do the deed. And if I do, it costs them.”
“Jasmine... Ronnie... never ‘did the deed’?”
“No. She hated men. That’s what was so cool about her being in that profession. No sex, and she mostly was the dominatrix.”
Velda asked, “Never the submissive?”
“Much less often. But even then, it was bondage, discipline, not sex. Sometimes it got out of hand, though. She had one client... well, everybody has a client like that.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Who pays extra for you to go... too far.”
“Tell me about this client.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know much. Don’t know his name. But I do know he was rough. A real sadist. But the money was good, and he never went... too too far.”
“And this bus-station pimp still gets his cut?”
She flashed a smile; her teeth were nice, on the small side. “No, that’s part of what made us so lucky. He got killed. Some other pimp slit his throat.”
He got his cut, after all.
She was saying, “Which is sad in a way, because he was good to us, way better than most. We’ve been freelance ever since. Solo venders, no organized ring, no pimp. We have arrangements with taxicab drivers, hotels, law firms, businesses, the M and B game.”
Manufacturers and buyers.
“Our clients wear Brooks Brothers,” she said. “I never walked a street in my life, Mike. Neither did Jasmine.”
Maybe she was lucky. But Jasmine hadn’t been.
I asked, “Did one of those Brooks Brothers types kill Jasmine, d’you think, Lily?”
Her forehead furrowed. “Almost has to have. She wouldn’t let a stranger in. A cop with ID, maybe. It would be clients, mostly regulars. Sometimes referrals from those places I mentioned.”
“Businesses. Was one of them Colby, Daltree & Levine?”
“No. Is that a law firm?”
“Brokerage. Was Vincent Colby a regular?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know who that is. I stayed out of Ronnie’s business. She stayed out of mine. She was discreet. But I’ll tell you one suspicious thing.”
“Please.”
“She did keep a book, strictly for herself. A notebook, meticulous — neat rows of names, places, figures.”
“For blackmail purposes?”
“No! She wasn’t that kind of girl. It was to protect herself. She called it a life insurance policy.”
Hadn’t really paid off, had it?
“You need to understand the setup, Mike. We had the whole floor. We lived in one half, Jasmine did business in the other. I never brought anybody home.”
“This notebook...”
“Gone. Somebody took it. Might be the cops, but I’d guess whoever did this terrible thing to her is who has it now.” She sat forward, the big dark lenses staring at me. “Mike — Velda says you’re a detective. That you’re looking for whoever did this.”
“I am. Jasmine isn’t the killer’s only victim — we know of two others, who died the same way. And it’s possible another two were disposed of otherwise.”
Her mouth tightened. “Disposed of.”
“Sorry. That was a cold way to put it. You girls had been friends for a long time.”