was a tip. If you tried to cheat on the meet tax Jordan had this huge guy called Chupa Junior with a tiny shaved head and tats all over him and he is not nice. Why cheat though? Could make an easy thousand plus on your lunch hour – you’d be surprised how good lunchtime could be – and afternoons, too, with the flex hours a lot of men worked. And a good night you got home before the sun came up with three or four grand in your purse, sometimes more.
‘Except me,’ she said. ‘I go straight to the ATM and deposit my winnings. That’s where the trouble starts for working girls – they spend faster than they save and some nights you don’t work at all. Sometimes a whole week you won’t work. But you wouldn’t believe the stuff they buy. Jewelry and electronics and clothes and trips and dope – they party like crazy when they’re off duty, just like everybody else. But not Carrie Ann Martier. Nope. I shop catalogs for my work clothes because I look good in anything. I shop Costco for bulk stuff because I’m sole proprietor of my own business. I happen to think that’s funny. And so what if I have two gallons of hair conditioner under the sink? I’m saving for a place in Maui and I’m going to get it before I’m thirty. I am going to get it. After that, it’s aloha Squeaky Clean Madam. I’m leaving the life. I’m going to surf and garden and learn to make my own sushi.’
‘Wow, that’s quite a plan,’ I said. ‘Good luck.’
She shrugged and a faraway look came to her eyes, which were blue. ‘Whatever.’
‘No, I really mean it.’
She studied me. ‘I think you’d pop me in a second if you could get a raise or a promotion out of it.’
I sipped the beer. She had a point, though it had nothing to do with money or status. The law was just the law. Sometimes a cop could look the other way, for the greater good, you know. Sometimes not. I thought back to the white VW Cabriolet I’d seen outside Stella Asplundh’s place and the red one coming from the HTA parking lot earlier that day. Both driven by attractive young women.
‘Why were your friends mad at Jordan?’
‘For raising their meet tax to six hundred.’
‘Why’d she do that?’
‘To make room for the younger girls. The younger ones get a little lower contact charge to get them started and locked in. Young is what the Johns want. Cost of business goes up the older you get. Six, seven, eight hundred per meet. Pretty soon you’re either working all for Jordan or you’re not working.’
‘So you and your friends sneak the videos and make some discs. You give copies to Garrett for his investigation because you got beat up by a politician’s aide and Garrett has made it right for you. But what about the two other girls? What were they going to do with their copies? Blackmail Squeaky Clean for the higher taxes?’
‘It isn’t blackmail if you’re being ripped off.’
I thought about two young working girls trying to run a hustle on their own madam. It sounded perilous. ‘Does Jordan know about the videos?’
‘She couldn’t. If Jordan even suspected we’d done that, she’d have pulled the plug on us by now – she’d never call. Or worse.’
‘Chupa Junior?’
She looked at me and drank the last of her second Irish coffee. ‘Yeah. There’s talk. Always talk, you know? Then something happens. One day a girl is working, then she’s gone. Maybe she crossed Jordan. Shorted her one too many times. Tried to get the Johns calling her direct. Made a scene. Disappointed or pissed off somebody important. Chupa shows up here. Chupa shows up there. Like something out of a nightmare. It makes you wonder.’
‘Have you ever met Jordan Sheehan?’
‘Not face-to-face. Not many of the girls have, unless she recruited them personally. Those are mostly the spot callers. Maybe that’s why Squeaky Clean is still in business. She lives in La Jolla somewhere, running her little investment company. Ha, ha.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Why?’
‘I’m curious,’ I said.
‘Trying to figure what I’m worth?’ She squared her shoulders, frowned, and shook her head once. Her shiny blond hair flared with light, then settled back into place.
‘I’m twenty-nine,’ I said.
‘You’re not selling.’
‘That must be kind of weird. Selling yourself. I don’t mean any offense by that.’
‘You can’t offend me, Robbie. You’ll wear out someday, too. We’ll both end up in the same trash pile.’
I thought about that, about everybody ending up in the same condition. I’d often had that thought and could never figure out if it was a reason to cry or to smile until I was thrown from the Las Palmas. Somewhere on the way down I realized that the fact that you’re going to die is a reason to smile. Every second you live, you’re getting away with the biggest prize there is.
‘You look familiar,’ she said. ‘TV or something?’
‘No.’
‘Magazine?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve seen you. I’m sure.’
‘A lot of people think that. I’ve got a common face. Sorry.’
She looked at me hard again and nodded. She began a smile, then turned it off.
‘I can take you back to your car,’ I said. I paid up and we walked into the foggy night.
‘I checked you out with the PD. And with some of my friends who do a little business with the PD once in a while. You came back clean. Bet you never thought a whore would run a check on you, but I didn’t know what I was going to run into on that pier tonight. Maybe someone who enjoyed Squeaky Clean girls. Maybe someone who knew what Garrett had. Maybe they figured I’d be better off quiet, too. That would make one less person to tell this wretched little story.’
I liked the way Carrie Ann Martier, or whoever she was, tried to take care of herself. I liked her aloneness and her bravery. Her foolishness worried me.
‘Don’t try to run a number on Squeaky Clean,’ I said, ‘You can’t win.’
‘I’m not suicidal.’ ‘Why don’t you just get out of this business?’
‘Stay off my side, Robbie.’
I drove us back to the pier. It wasn’t more than
a few blocks. The acrylic-surfboard sculpture still glowed in the darkness, its colors dampened by the fog. I could tell that Carrie Ann was looking at my profile, trying to locate a memory to go with it.
Her car was a yellow VW Cabriolet convertible, in keeping with her employer’s wishes.
‘When do I get my lighter back?’
I dug it out of my coat pocket and gave it to her.
‘You
