'Something?'
'Well, maybe you've been off the force too long.' She looked about to say something else,then gave her head a quick shake. 'I think I'll make myself a cup of tea. I'm a rotten hostess.A drink? I'm out of bourbon, but there's Scotch.'
It was time.'A small one, straight.'
'Coming right up.'
While she was in the kitchen I thought about the relationship of cops and whores, and the relationship of Elaine and myself. I had gotten to know her a couple of years before I left the police department.
Our first meeting was social, though I do not remember the precise circumstances. I believe we were introduced by a mutual friend at some restaurant or other, but we may have met at a party. I don't remember.
It's useful for a hooker to have a cop with whom she's on particularly good terms. He can smooth things out if a brother officer is giving her a hard time. He can furnish her with a brand of reality-oriented legal advice that is often more useful then the advice she would get from a lawyer. And she reciprocates for all ofthis, of course, as women have always reciprocated for the favors men do for them.
So I spent a couple of years on ElaineMardell's free list, and I was the person she called when the walls started coming together around her.
Neither of us abused the privilege. I would see her once in a while if I happened to be in the neighborhood, and she called me perhaps half a dozen times all told.
Then I left the force, and for a period of several months I wasn't interested in any human contact, least of all sexual contact. Then one day I was, and I called Elaine and went over to see her. She never mentioned that I wasn't a cop anymore and that our relationship was thus due to change. If she had, I probably wouldn't have wanted to see her again. But on the way out I put some money on the coffee table, and she said she hoped she'd see me again soon, and every now and then she does.
I suppose our original relationship had constituted a form of police corruption. I hadn't been acting as Elaine's protector, nor had it been my job to arrest her. But I had seen her on the city's time, and it had been my official position that earned me the right to share her bed.
Corruption, I suppose.
She brought me my drink, a juice glass with around three ounces of Scotch in it, and sat down on the couch with a cup of tea with milk.
She curled her legs under her compact little behind and stirred her tea with a demitasse spoon.
'Beautiful weather,' she said.
'Uh-huh.'
'I wish I was closer to the park. I take long walks every morning.
Days like this I'd like to take my walks in the park.'
'You take long walks every morning?'
'Sure. It's good for you. Why?'
'I figured you'd sleep until noon.'
'Oh, no.I'm an early riser. And I'll get visitors from noon on, of course. And I can get to sleep early because it's rare I have anyone here after ten o'clock at night.'
'That's funny. You think of it as a business for night people.'
'Except it's not.The guys, you know, they have to get home to their families. I'd say from noon to six-thirty is maybe ninety percent of the people I see.'
'Makes sense.'
'I got somebody coming in a while, Matt, but we got time if you feel like it.'
'I'd better take araincheck .'
'Well, that's cool.'
I drank some of my drink. 'Back to Portia Carr,' I said. 'You didn't come up with anybody who might have had some kind of a government connection?'
'Well, I might have.' My face must have changed expression because she said, 'No, I'm not hustling you, for God's sake. I learned a name, but I don't know if I got it right and I don't know who it is.'
'What's the name?'
'SomethinglikeMantz orManch orManns . I don't know it exactly. I know he's somebody connected to the mayor, but I don't know what. At least that's the story I got. Don't ask me the guy's first name because nobody knows. Does that give you anything?MannsorMantz orManch or something like that?'
'It doesn't ring a bell. He's connected to the mayor?'
'Well, that's what I heard. I know what he likes to do if that helps.
He's a toilet slave.'
'What the hell is a toilet slave?'
'I wish you knew because it doesn't especially thrill me to discuss it.' She put her teacup down. 'A toilet slave is, well, they'll have different kinds of kinks, but an example would be that he wants to be ordered to drink piss or eat shit, or to clean out your ass with his tongue, or clean out the toilet, or other things. What you have to tell him to do can be really disgusting or it can just be sort of symbolic, like if you made him mop the bathroom floor.'
