had a second thought. “Anybody see her give this to you?”
Crater shook his head.
“Then don’t worry about it,” Palmerston said. “Nobody’s getting hurt. But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to ask around.”
“Ask around about what?”
“I wonder why this lady is being so nice to you. It sure isn’t because of the size of your cock. If I come up with something, I’ll let you know.”
Two weeks later, as Officer Crater was walking his beat, an unmarked car pulled to the curb beside him.
“Get in the back, Charley,” Officer Palmerston, who was in the front passenger seat beside the driver, said.
Charley got in the backseat.
“This is Lieutenant Meyer,” Palmerston said.
“How are you, Crater?”
“How do you do, sir?”
“I work for the Lieutenant, Charley,” Palmerston said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Bill tells me you’re an all-right guy, Crater. Not too smart, but the kind of a guy you can trust.”
Palmerston laughed.
“He also told me about your lady friend, the one you helped out, the one who’s been showing her gratitude to you.”
For a fleeting moment, Charley was very afraid that Bill Palmerston had turned him in for taking the hundred dollars from Marianne every week. But that passed. The Lieutenant wouldn’t be talking the way he was if he was going to arrest him or anything like that.
“That’s what I meant about you not being too smart, Charley,” Lieutenant Meyer said.
“Sir?”
“You really don’t know much about your lady friend’s business, do you?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, let me tell you what I found out after Bill came to me. What Bill and I found out. Your friend works for a woman named Harriet Osadchy. Her sheet shows three busts for prostitution here, and she has a sheet in Hazleton-you know where Hazleton is, Charley?”
“Out west someplace, in the coal regions.”
“Right. Anyway, this Osadchy woman has a sheet as long as you are tall in Hazleton, mostly prostitution, some controlled-substance busts, all nol-prossed, even a couple of drunk and disorderlies. But she’s smart. You got to give her that, right, Bill?”
“Yes, sir,” Officer Palmerston said.
“We didn’t even have a line on this Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service until you brought it to Bill’s attention.”
“The what?”
“The Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service. That’s what she calls her operation.”
“Oh.”
“But like I was saying, now we have a line on her. She’s got maybe twenty, twenty-five, maybe more hookers working for her. It’s a high-class operation. The minimum price is a hundred dollars. That’s for one hour.”
“Damn!”
“Bill had a talk with your friend Marianne. She said the split is sixty-forty. For her forty percent, Harriet makes the appointments for the girls, and takes care of what has to be taken care of.”
“Excuse me?”
“Her girls know that when they knock on some hotel door, they’re not going to find some weirdo inside, or a cop, and that they’ll get their money. They even take one of those credit card machines with them, in case-and you’d be surprised how often this happens-the john can put the girl on his expense account as secretarial services, or a rental car, or something like that.”
“I didn’t know they could use credit cards,” Officer Crater confessed.
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” Lieutenant Meyer said. “You got any idea how much money is involved here?”
“Not really. You said a hundred an hour.”
“Right. Sometimes they stay more than an hour. Sometimes the john wants something more than a straight fuck. That costs more, of course. But the low side would be that a girl would work three johns a night. Let’s say Harriet has twenty girls working. That’s three times a hundred bucks times twenty girls.”
“Six thousand dollars,” Officer Crater said wonderingly.
“Right. Times seven nights a week. That’s forty-two thousand gross. Harriet’s share of that would come to almost seventeen thousand a week. It’s a money machine. Now out of that, she has to pay her expenses. Three, four telephones. The rent on a little apartment she has on Cherry Street where the phones are. She has a couple of lawyers on retainer, and a couple of doctors who make sure the girls are clean, and she takes care of the people in the hotels who could make trouble for her. And then I’m sure she has some arrangement with the mob. Usually that’s ten percent.”
“With the mob? What for?”
“To be left alone. Years ago, the mob ran whorehouses. The Chinese still have a couple running. We keep shutting them down and they keep opening them up, but the mob found out that whorehouses are really more trouble than they’re worth, so they went out of that business. Why the hell not, if they can take, like I said, ten percent of Harriet’s forty-two thousand a week for doing nothing more than putting the word out on the street that Harriet is a friend of theirs? A freelance hooker can almost expect to get robbed, but even a really dumb sleazeball thug knows better than to mess with anyone who is a friend of the mob.”
Officer Crater grunted.
“OK. So let’s talk about where we fit in here,” Meyer said. “The first thing you have to understand is that prostitution has been around a long time-they don’t call it ‘the oldest profession’ for nothing-and there’s absolutely no way to stop it. All we can do is control it. What the citizens don’t want is hookers approaching people on the street, or in a bar. The citizens don’t want disease. They don’t want to see young girls-or, for that matter, young boys-involved. For the obvious reasons. And I think we do a pretty job of giving the citizens what they want.
“What the citizens also want, and I don’t think most people understand this, or if they do, don’t want to admit it, is somebody like Harriet Osadchy. The johns pay their money, they get what they want, they don’t get a disease, they don’t get robbed, nobody gets hurt, and nobody finds out that they’re not getting what they should be getting at home.”
“Yeah,” Officer Crater said. “I see what you mean.”
“And the Harriet Osadchys of this world don’t give the police any trouble, either. They do their thing, and they do it clean, and we have the time to do what we’re hired to do, protect the people. We close down the whorehouses, we keep the hookers from working the streets and the bars, we keep the people from getting a disease or robbed, or black-mailed, all those things.”
“I see what you mean.”
“So now we get back to you, and your friend Marianne. You did the right thing by her and the guy who beat her up. I mean, what good would it have done if you had run him in? Your friend Marianne would not have testified against him anyway, and he made it right by her by giving her a lot of money, right?”
“I think she would have really lost her job if the PSFS heard about that,” Officer Crater said.
“Sure she would have,” Lieutenant Meyer agreed. “And her john would have gotten in trouble with his wife, a lot of people would have been hurt, and you solved the problem all around. I would have done exactly the same thing myself.”
“I thought it was the right thing to do,” Officer Crater said.
“OK. So what happened next? Marianne told Harriet what happened, and Harriet knew that it would have been a real pain in the ass, really hurt her business, if you had gone strictly by the book and hauled either one of them in. So she was grateful, right, and she told Marianne to slip you a couple of hundred bucks right off, and a hundred a week regular after that. A little two-hundred-dollar present to say thank you for not running Marianne in,
