midtown area. This town is Mecca for thousands of teen-aged girls like that. Out in Queens and New Jersey the pimps recruit them in candy stores by promising them parties and expensive clothes. They’re stupid, backward, maybe already hooked on hard stuff, fourteen or fifteen years old. I mean the ones that cruise Times Square and hole up in flophouses on Ninth Avenue. Those two across the street work out of that hotel. They’re a little higher in the social order-they get maybe twenty dollars a trick, which they have to split with bellhops and cops and a pimp. They may gross a hundred and fifty a night, but they only keep sixty of it, and most of that goes to support their habits. They’ll snag a chief petty officer on overnight shore leave, or a typewriter repairman whose wife’s home pregnant and won’t let him touch her, but if you’re a district sales manager in town for a meeting, or a doctor at a medical convention, you want something better-a girl you can take to dinner at the Copacabana and show off to the other doctors at an after-hours hotel party. Someone who can make good conversation and look gorgeous and spend the night, provided you’re willing to shell out for it.”
Hastings’ eyes were squinted almost shut; his hands had become still. Carol said wearily, “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“I guess.”
“Then you do understand what the mystery was all about.” She met his eyes and said with brutal directness, “I see no reason not to believe I’ve been the principal player in more dirty locker-room stories than the farmer’s daughter. It’s part of my stock in trade-one of the reasons I can charge what I charge is that the johns want to boast about it later. It feeds their egos and their sagging libidos to brag to the boys in the club car that they just blew a stinking great fortune on one of the highest-priced call girls in New York City. A girl who only accepts johns with references, who looks innocent and gives them the illusion of glamour. A girl who shops in the best Fifth Avenue stores and likes paying two hundred dollars instead of nineteen-ninety-nine for a dress. By appointment only.”
She sat back and gave him a brassy stare.
He paid the check, drew back Carol’s chair, and took her elbow. Outside she disengaged herself and turned to walk away, her back stiff. He gripped her arm, saw her puzzled scowl, and held her beside him while the doorman smiled and nodded and summoned a cab. Hastings tipped him and got in beside her. He gave the driver the address of her hotel, and settled back. There was no conversation. It was a short ride. They got out of the cab and, on the sidewalk, Hastings said, “One question. Do you enjoy it?”
Her smile was twisted.
“My God, you’re rude. I suppose now you want to go up with me for a nightcap. No man’s got any conscience below the waist.”
He took her inside, his mouth making a pinched line across his face like a surgeon’s wound. They went up silently in the elevator, and he walked her to her door. When she inserted the key she said coolly, “I’d better warn you, I come damned high.”
“Sure,” he said. “I guess the fat ugly ones have to be extra generous if they want you.”
She opened the door and went inside, not barring his way. She said, “Misunderstood husbands, sweating little-boy men-I thought maybe you were a little different.”
“You’d be surprised,” he said. Then, shutting the door and going into the big room after her, he said, “What I’d really like is a cup of coffee.”
She froze. “What the hell are you up to?”
He shook his head. “I don’t honestly know. I was putting on a tough act, the same as you were, but I can’t bring it off, can I? The trouble is, once I make up my mind about someone, I resist changing it even when I get proof that I was wrong. I’ll be honest about it-you’re outside my experience, but then you’re probably outside most men’s experience. I have never understood men who were capable of buying sex. I’ve never been with a whore in my life-frankly, if there wasn’t some kind of emotional communication, I doubt I could get it up. So you see, I didn’t come up with you for that. I came because I’m intrigued. You tried to shock me right out of your life, and it almost worked-it would have, except I’m curious, and a little stubborn, and it seems to me you can’t just label somebody ‘prostitute’ and let it go at that. When you say the words ‘call girl,’ that’s fact, but it’s not truth. I still want to know the truth.”
“Truth,” she said, “is anything but beautiful. You’re babbling like a romantic idiot. Act your age.”
“Why not humor me?”
“Oh, damn it, Russ-if you’ve got any sense at all, you’ll walk out that door and never see me again.”
He said in a flat voice, “I might-if I knew enough about one thing.”
“Oh, God, now we’re back to those shares of stock.”
“That’s right. We are.”
“What the hell do you want of me?” She threw up her hands. “They were a gift from an admirer, all right?”
“A two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar gift? Come off it. I could get a subpoena, you know.”
She gave him a wicked small grin. “Now you’re trying to bluff me.”
“Bluff? Don’t you believe I have subpoena power?”
“You have the power to subpoena the records of corporations and insiders and control stockholders. I’m none of those. I own nine thousand shares of NCI common voting stock. That’s not even one-half of one percent of the outstanding stock. You couldn’t convince a federal judge I was an insider by any stretch of the imagination.”
He made no immediate reply. Only one lamp was lit. Carol stood highlighted in the center of the carpet, statuesque, shadows deepening the roundnesses of her high breasts, soft thighs, and long legs. He came to her, leaned forward, kissed her mouth. It was a long lover’s kiss but her lips were still and stiff under his. She slipped her face away. “Don’t be ridiculous-don’t get intense, Russ.”
He straightened. His face was expressionless. “You’re damned beautiful, you know.”
“You’re forcing me to be cruel,” she said. “You asked me if I enjoyed it. The answer is, it’s the way I earn my living-it’s no more enjoyable than punching a clock, and no less.”
“Maybe-maybe. But you’re a good liar. How do I know that’s true?”
She only gave him the twisted smile he was getting used to.
He said, “You made a mistake, you know, coming back at me with that business about insiders and control stockholders. You were trying to prove it wouldn’t be any good for me to try to push you around, but all you did was convince me you’re involved in something. Whatever it is, you’re in it up to your gorgeous hairline. You’ve been too well briefed in legal technicalities for an innocent.”
She uttered a harsh laugh. “I have never pretended to be an innocent.”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“Do I? You’d have to prove that, wouldn’t you?”
“Being top-priced in your line may be lucrative, but it’s not that lucrative. Why don’t you tell me who you’re fronting for?”
“Fronting for? I don’t know what you mean.”
“All right,” he said, turning toward the door. “I’ll keep digging until I find out.”
“Please don’t, Russ.”
“It’s my job-what do you expect me to do? You could make it easier for me.”
“I could only get you hurt if I did what you want me to do.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
“Melodramatic? You don’t know the kind of people I have to deal with.”
“Do you mean the Mafia?”
“No. That’s not what I mean.”
“I thought they were tied up in-your racket.”
“You don’t have to use that tone on me, Russ. The skin trade doesn’t pay enough to interest the Mafia anymore, they don’t bother to organize it. Oh, they force a lot of kids onto the streets by hooking them on heroin, and it’s true racketeers are like anyone else with money-they can get a girl when they want one. But it isn’t what you think. I’ve got no connection with them.”
“Then stop threatening me. It’s asinine. You’re only throwing raw meat on the floor.”
“No. I’m telling you the truth. I don’t want you to play boy detective in my affairs. There are too many powerful people who can’t afford to have that kind of thing going on.”
“Like the one you fronted for when you bought the stock?”
