The Fallen. Jefferson Parker
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‘Garrett would have lit my cigarette.’
‘Maybe that’s why he’s dead.’
At the Beachside she drank Irish coffees and I had a beer. I asked her what her name was and she said Carrie Ann Martier worked just fine. She said she grew up in San Diego, rich family, though her father was a bastard and her mother was kind but insane.
‘Schizophrenia, with a paranoid subtype,’ she said. ‘Not a good combo when you’re married to a sneak like him.’
She told me Steven Stiles, an aide to Ninth District Councilman Anthony Rood, had punched her in the body twice and stiffed her because he couldn’t get it up. This was back in February. Two bruised ribs – he really laid into her. His wedding band had scraped her skin, which she found ‘highly ironic,’ along with the fact that it was the day before Valentine’s Day. She leaned toward me and waited until I leaned toward her.
‘And, Mr Brownlaw,’ she whispered, ‘nobody treats Carrie Ann Martier like that.’
She said that after getting hit, her ribs had tensed with pain every time she breathed or talked. Laughing was worse, but sneezing and coughing took the cake. She missed two weeks of work. She told me she’d gone to Garrett because Garrett wasn’t a cop and she knew he’d be interested in city employees and contractors buying girls. She wasn’t about to go to the police and she still was not willing to file a criminal complaint, though her ribs still hurt every time someone told her a good joke, which wasn’t often.
She said she’d made the discs for Garrett with a video cam hidden in her flop. She used a room at the Coronado Oceana Hotel, had ‘good relationships’ with security out there. Two girlfriends had similar recording setups, not because Stiles had beat them too, but because they were ‘pissed off at Jordan’ and thought they should be able to show a solid connection between Jordan’s phone calls, which they’d recorded on the sly, with actual men paying for actual sex.
‘Tell me about Jordan,’ I said.
‘You don’t know anything, do you?’
I shook my head. Actually, I knew a little. Vice had been working up a case against Jordan Sheehan for months.
Jordan was the ‘Squeaky Clean Madam,’ said Carrie. She got the name because years ago she actually started a maid service called that. She had made some good money, gotten popped for illegals, labor violations, and back taxes. She did her time, and when she got out she discovered that sex paid more than custodial skills and she didn’t even have to buy mops and vacuums if her girls were pretty enough. Now she ran fifty or sixty girls, more for conventions and special events like the Super Bowl. She had some kind of investment-counseling business as a cover, some fakey name like Sheehan & Associates or something. She had associates, all right. Jordan’s girls dressed like corporate receptionists, they looked like the girl next door, they had to have good manners and pretty smiles, and they cost a lot. Hotels couldn’t even spot them if they rotated right. Pure class and plenty of rules, she said – nothing kinky, nothing rough, no toys, no drugs, no pain or threesomes. Never in a car. They were not allowed to wear risqué clothing. No ‘CFM shoes’ and no pierced body parts except the ears. No swearing, no smoking. No girls over thirty. Every girl had a pager. You never talked to Jordan because the madam was like the top of a pyramid and beneath her were the ‘spot callers’ who told you when and who the John was. Jordan lined them up by the dozen. She had this way about her, pure and simple. Jordan owned men. Jordan could turn a priest into a paying customer in five minutes. The girls did their own marketing, too; they didn’t just wait around for the pager to go off. Jordan told them to drive VW Cabriolet convertibles so the guys could get a look at them. The fleet manager at Mission Center VW was a friend of Jordan’s and would make them deals on the Cabriolets. It was just automobile advertising, like for pizza or exterminators, only for women. Jordan got the idea from Ida Bailey, the old madam in the Gaslamp who used to parade her girls around in carriages so the guys could see the choices and pick. So you got fifty total foxes zooming around San Diego, and guess what happens when you whistle or wave, man, they pull right over and make you a deal. An hour later you’re a grand poorer but you’ve been Squeaky Cleaned. Jordan got four hundred per contact, the ‘meet tax.’ The girls got what they bargained for over that. A thousand was ‘industry standard’ for a Squeaky Clean but sometimes you had to take less. If you were with a city guy, one of Jordan’s ‘special clients,’ then you got a lot less, just the tip, but some Johns thought twenty bucks 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.