Ellie tapped her pen against the desk, wondering what it all meant.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

2:45 A.M.

“Niiicccce.”

The meathead in a black leather blazer and too much Polo cologne eyed Ellie’s chest as she approached the club’s entrance. Apparently in her sleep-deprived state, she had not tugged sufficiently at the zipper of the hoodie she had pulled on as she ran out of her apartment.

“You’re not doing so bad yourself,” she said, poking one of the man’s flabby pecs. “Where’s my brother? Jess Hatcher. About your height but eighty pounds lighter.”

“As smart-assed as you but a hell of a lot less cute?”

“That’s the one.”

“Saw him go in the back office with one of the girls about ten minutes ago. Knowing your brother, you might want to knock first.”

Against all her better instincts, Jess managed about once a month to persuade her to drop by this place for one reason or another. Given that he’d started working here in March, she guessed this was her seventh trip to Vibrations. For years, Jess had been that guy who couldn’t hold down a long-term job. He managed to hang in for three months as a short-order cook at a Garment District diner one time, but only out of guilt, since Ellie had been the one to find him the gig. His average was a few weeks.

But for reasons she might never understand, this cheesy, neon-lit, 1980s hair-band-blasting strip club on the West Side Highway had brought out the best in her brother. Vibrations was the kind of upside-down, backward, bizarro universe where Jess was the sensible adult and the packs of lawyers and money managers whooping it up for a bachelor party were the raging idiots.

Ellie’s periodic pop-ins were usually preceded by some promise from Jess of the most amazing display of carnal creativity ever witnessed. Ping pong balls were commonly involved.

But this time Jess had promised her more than entertainment. She found him on a couch in the office, the woman perched beside him eyeing Ellie with skepticism.

“Is that her?”

“Yeah. My sister. Ellie Hatcher. She’ll take care of you, Jasmine.”

Jasmine’s look matched the name. She had dark brown hair with caramel streaks that fell well past her shoulder blades. She had teased and sprayed it just enough to replicate pillow-tousled sex hair. She threw Jess a pout that managed to be simultaneously angry and sexy. No doubt she scored big tips with that pout.

“Your brother has a way of talking people into stuff they really don’t want to do.”

“Tell me about it. He says you know something about Prestige Parties?”

CHAPTER FORTY

9:30 A.M.

It turned out that Jasmine was her actual, legal name. Jasmine Anne Harris, twenty-six years old. Her only appearances in the NYPD’s data system were ancient history: listed as a witness to a domestic assault against her mother when she was ten; as the complainant in a Rape II when she was thirteen by an assailant who shared the last name Harris; and then four runaway juvenile reports over the next two years. Jasmine’s home life had not been a happy one.

But she had managed to keep her own criminal record clean, even as she admitted to Max and Ellie that she’d been on and off drugs for the last eight years—from pot to coke to heroin to meth—periodically turning tricks as she needed to support first her habit and now her three-year-old son.

Currently she sat in a conference room of the district attorney’s office, wearing the Columbia Law School sweatshirt that Max had offered her when she’d arrived this morning in a low-cut spaghetti-strap top to detail everything she knew about Prestige Parties.

According to Jasmine, the head of the operation was an older man she knew only as Uncle Dave. According to the articles of incorporation that Prestige Parties had filed with the attorney general’s office, the company’s CEO and sole shareholder was named David Taylor. Jasmine knew only a little more about the two sisters who helped Dave find girls and book dates. Their names were Corliss and Cadence LaMarche.

Jasmine suspected she wasn’t supposed to know their last names, but Corliss had let it slip once. She’d asked Jasmine if that was her real name, and Jasmine had confirmed that it was and then asked Corliss the same. “Yep. Corliss, Cadence, and our brother Caleb. I guess our mom figured that with the last name LaMarche we may as well double down on trying to sound like royalty.”

“She only mentioned it the once,” Jasmine said, “but I remember because I kept repeating it to myself. Corliss LaMarche. Really classy. A lot better than Jasmine Harris, you know?”

Jasmine paused intermittently to wonder aloud whether she was “shooting herself in the hip.” That was a phrase that Jasmine seemed to favor.

This time when she invoked the saying, it was after she took a big sip from the bottle of Mountain Dew that Ellie had fetched for her from the DA’s vending machine. “You know, I keep thinking that I’m shooting myself in the hip.” She let out a tiny burp of carbonation from the soda and then covered her mouth and giggled. “Even giving Prestige half the cash, I’ve been taking home between seven and twelve hundred bucks a night when I work for them. They only use me every couple of weeks, but combined with what I’m making at Vibrations, I’ve been doing pretty good. I can’t go back to hundred-dollar dates with the pricks I meet at the club.”

Someone at Prestige Parties had managed to persuade Jasmine that she had earned her way into that elite category of high-class, high-price call girls. They had sold her on the idea of a fantasy world in which smart, beautiful women earned financial independence and a kind of feminist empowerment by taking money from weak but adoring men for something as easy as sexual contact.

But working decoy operations on patrol, Ellie had gotten to know the girls on the corners, the ones with the callused feet, hardened eyes, and faded bruises. And she knew that the line that divided them from the Prestige Party girls of the world was nonexistent. Just as a lawyer could use his skills to move from job to job and industry to industry—defending gas companies and then drug makers and then the latest indicted politician—sex workers moved from stripping to porn to dominatrix dungeons to street corners to three-thousand-dollar-a-night hotel penthouses.

“You’ll land on your feet,” Ellie assured her. “Think about it this way, Jasmine. Are you any prettier now than you were when you were getting a hundred dollars a date?”

“Hell, no,” she said, smiling. “I’m only getting older, and thanks to my kid, I’ve got stretch marks on my belly.”

“And are you doing anything drastically different for these men now that they’re paying a thousand dollars a night compared to what you were doing before?”

She shook her head. “No pervs. I strictly cover the basics.”

“So if you’re the same attractive woman, doing the same exact thing, why do you think these men are paying more?”

“Beats the shit out of me.”

“Because they’ve been told you’re worth it. Tell a guy that you’re worth a hundred bucks, and that’s how he’s

Вы читаете 212
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату