Lynne Heitman - First Class Killing

I had no idea what kind of attention span she had, so I figured it would be best to get to the point. “I know what you do, I’ve heard you do it well, and I’m here to offer my services in dealing with the LA problem.”

“The LA problem?” She dropped her head back and laid the damp towel against her throat. “I don’t have a problem, and if I did, I wouldn’t need anyone’s help to fix it.”

I sat back on the love seat, trying to look confident. It didn’t help that my terry-cloth robe kept getting bunched up against the velvet seat cushions. “If I were starting a rival group to challenge you,” I said, “the first thing I would do is go after your top earners, the ones who probably generate the bulk of your revenue. I’m in LA, so I already have the advantage of sun, surf, and palm trees. I’d get them to transfer to my base. Then I would start paying them for their clients. I’d give them bonuses for every client they brought. Then I would run a promotion to reward clients for bringing their friends over. I would deprive you of that income and at the same time use it to get myself established quickly in LA. I would copy your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, move into your territory, and keep the pressure on until I wiped you out.”

She drifted around the small waiting room, touching things as she went-the armoire, the back of a chair, a tall potted fern, a picture on the wall. I assumed she was listening, because she hadn’t drifted out.

“I don’t have any weaknesses.”

“Every business has weaknesses. The more women I hired away, the more I would know about the ones you have.”

She stopped moving and took up a position next to a side table filled with crystals of all sizes and shapes. She found one she liked, a purple obelisk, and picked it up to study it. As she turned it this way and that, she pulled up one leg and braced it against the wall behind her. Her robe came open all the way up to her hip.

“What would keep me from sending someone out to break both your legs before you could get all that done?”

I shifted around on the couch. There was something about the brazen way she exposed herself that made a physical threat seem very realistic. Maybe it was her willingness to use her body in any way that was necessary. “As pimping strategies go,” I said, “breaking legs is not a bad one. A little unoriginal, perhaps.”

She dropped the crystal into her pocket and fixed me with a cold stare. “I’m not a pimp. Don’t you ever call me one.”

“Here’s the problem with that strategy,” I said, staring right back. “First of all, if you come at me, I come at you. A catfight like that would find its way into the papers and scare off the clients, not to mention put both our jobs at risk.”

As I talked, she moved toward my love seat.

“Second, I’m not some scared hooker who will pack up and quit at the first sign of push back. I’ll keep coming. Intimidation doesn’t work with me. If you want to beat me, you have to be smarter than I am.”

Now she was standing next to me. With great effort, I kept myself from leaning away as she lowered herself into the compact space next to me. It was a love seat, after all, not a full couch. Being that close was like sitting in the front row at the movies.

Leaving her slippers on the floor, she folded her legs up and tucked them underneath her. Her robe loosened across her thighs. Angel apparently didn’t know any unprovocative poses. She put one hand on her bare leg and used the other to play with a strand of hair that had come loose. “Let’s say you were me, doll. What would you do if you were me?”

“Mobilize an immediate response.”

“What would this response look like?” She edged a little closer. All I could figure was this was her effort to get the upper hand by distracting me. I focused on her eyes.

“I’d find out why my women were so willing to walk, and I would give them more reason to stay than to leave. That would be my first step. Next, I would find out which clients are leaving or thinking of leaving.”

I pulled the diskette from the pocket of my robe and held it up between us. “That’s why you need this.”

She didn’t even look at it. She kept her eyes on me. “I hate computers.”

“This disk contains the guest list from the recruiting party the other night in LA. There are two hundred names with contact numbers, mostly men.”

The left corner of her mouth tweaked up. “How did you happen to come by this list?”

“I stole it.”

She let out a little whoop and nudged my shoulder with hers. “Aren’t you the little spitfire?” Without the slightest hesitation, she snapped up the disk, and it disappeared into her own pocket, the one without the crystal she’d already swiped. “I can put that to good use.”

“That’s not all there is,” I said. “I have a master list from the same computer with another thirteen hundred names. It shows which of your clients are being targeted and which have already left you. It also includes the client list and the target list for your LA rivals.”

“Names with contacts?”

“Business e-mail addresses.”

She pushed her robe open a little more, leaned back, and brushed the towel across the swell of her breasts. “That is interesting.”

“I also have a strategy that will help you crush LA before they ever get off the ground. It’s a program that will help you keep your women from leaving and retain your clients. I think we can get all your clients back with this program.”

“What’s the program?”

“That’s what I’m selling. That and the rest of the names. Hire me, and you get the whole package.”

“Hire you as what?”

“Your management consultant.”

Another whooping cry. “You must have heard all the talk about me, about how I’m nothing but poor, dumb white trash from the wrong side of the trailer park. Is that it? Miss Dairy Queen?”

“If I thought you were dumb, I wouldn’t have approached you first.”

“What do you mean by first?”

“I just told you how I would put you out of business. Hire me, and I’ll tell you how to do it to them.”

She grabbed her lower lip with a couple of front teeth and considered that. “You were right about something, what you said the other night. I have checked you out. You were one straight arrow at Majestic. A big superstar flying up the corporate ladder, working your ass off, always spouting the party line. A company gal, that’s what you were. How the mighty have fallen.”

“I was a company gal…right up until the day they fired me. Now I can’t get work anywhere else, my income is a fraction of what it used to be, I’m schlepping drinks at thirty-five thousand feet and hawking stolen names of married men to you to make a living. I’m through doing the right thing.”

“Now you’re broke and bitter, and you want to run with the bad girls to prove what a bad-ass you are.”

“Right. I’m a real bad-ass.”

She sat back against the armrest and checked me out. She seemed to be taking my physical inventory. “You say you won’t do the nasty, right? Isn’t that what you told me? You’re not in the trade, and you don’t want to be.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not for me.”

“Yet you figure on making money off all the girls who are, including me. You want to have your cake and eat it, too. Or have my cake without letting anybody eat yours. That just ain’t gonna fly, sweetie. Not in my world.”

“Why not?” Here was the stickiest wicket of all, one I wasn’t sure I could get past. “You must have business arrangements with people who are not prostitutes. Accountants and programmers. Other support types.”