Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

“We call them women.”

“Whatever you call them, they’re call girls. I am not working vice here. I am not interested in your cynicism. I am not interested in the shining career path of the victim. I’m interested in her death, and how it happened. Any insight?”

“Vassar wasn’t accident-prone, or suicidal.”

“How do you know?”

“I know my employees. That’s the point of them working for me instead of a pimp.”

“So what was Vassar’s personal background?”

“It was all in her working handle. She was a Vassar graduate who decided to freelance instead of struggling up a ladder with a glass ceiling in some corporation run by greedy white men.”

“Hooking was an improvement?”

“When you work for me it is.”

“What about her family? Where was she born?”

“I don’t know any of that, and I don’t keep records on my employees. It only provides ammunition for the police and the moral vigilantes.”

“And you say you ‘know’ your employees?”

“Enough to do business. Their pasts are their property. I know their present state of mind. That’s enough. I don’t take on women with abuse or control issues.”

“Aren’t those the women who could most use a compassionate pimp?”

“I am not a pimp. I’m an office manager. My point is that ordinary, well-balanced, well-educated women should be free to pursue whatever line of work they find most rewarding. That corporate ladder-climber often finds she has to sleep her way up a rung anyway. For nothing.”

“Somehow I thought you operated more like a dorm mother.”

“No. We are all involved in a business enterprise. A business that should be legitimatized.”

“Never happen in Las Vegas and the rest of the real world. A few Nevada counties that okay operating `chicken ranches’ don’t make a trend.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t keep working at it. My employees are never coerced, they are drug-and diseasefree—that I make sure of—and they’re not alcoholics. They are working women in the sex industry. I pay them well, and it would be even more if I didn’t have to maintain a legal fund to defend them from harassment by the puritanical authorities. Are you puritanical, Lieutenant?”

“Probably. By your standards.” Molina couldn’t help smiling. “You enjoy cop-baiting, don’t you?”

“I enjoy harassing back a society that harasses women from the git-go, yes.”

“I’ve read the print interviews with you. I know your position. Prostitution should be legal, regulated, and an upstanding profession. Prostitutes should either be free agents, or represented by a ‘manager’ like yourself, who provides a ‘support system.’ How you are not a parasite like any street pimp, I don’t know.”

“First, I’m the same gender as my workers. There’s no male domination involved. Second, I do pay and protect my employees. To the wall.”

“I know you’ve done jail time in support of your ‘principles.’ “

“Principles with quotes around them, Lieutenant? Your bias is showing.”

“Not as much as your receptionist’s thong.”

“You are a puritan.”

“No, I’m a working woman too, and women who flash their sexuality make it harder for all of us.” Molina waved her hand. “Your receptionist is a billboard for your business, I understand that. But you’ll never convince me that anyone using their sexuality for gain, money, or advancement isn’t acting out personal issues.”

“What issues is someone like me acting out?”

“Well-meant late sixties liberalism. You know, I rather agree with you. If there’s going to be a sex industry, and there always has been, better it be under the control of the workers, not the middlemen. But you are one.”

“I’m not exploitive.”

“Maybe not, but that’s an individual thing. Who’s to say your successor wouldn’t be? Wherever money exchanges hands for things people are forbidden to do, by civil law or social mores, corruption, brutality, and exploitation creep in.”

“So you give up individual freedom to avoid the misuse of it? We’re all screwed then.”

Molina shrugged. “Life’s a struggle. So tell me about Vassar.”

“Tell me how you found out her name.”

“Easy. The hotel staff. She wasn’t exactly a stranger at the Goliath. Did she really attend Vassar College?”

“Attend? She graduated. Sex-industry workers aren’t the dumb bunnies they’re stigmatized as.”

“So why did she come West and start hooking?”

Rothenberg leaned back in her chair, the usual low-backed clerk’s model that gave her office a proletariat air. “I don’t cross-examine my employees. I would guess that she was sufficiently good-looking that she was going to enter some field where her looks would be an advantage. Maybe she wasn’t thin enough for modeling, or talented enough to dance or act. That’s how I get a lot of my employees.”

“She seemed plenty thin to me, except it looked like she’d had silicone and collagen enhancements. Before or after she worked for you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t subject these women to physical examinations.”

“But their looks play a big factor in whether you . represent them, or not.”

Rothenberg shook her head and smiled. “The employee suits the venue. For the big hotels, yes; looks are paramount. But I have employees in less elevated outlets. Some are successful, if not as highly paid as the five-star hotel workers, because they’re kind and sympathetic. Many of my employees function as much as counselors as sex partners. Wealthy men, for obvious reasons, require less shoring up of their egos.”

“Counselors? Please!”

“It’s true. A lot of people are very screwed up about sex.”

“I see the results of that every day. The lethal results. Back to Vassar. How’d she become your employee?”

“Heard about me. I’ve become a little notorious.”

Molina grimaced at the understatement. Through the years Judith Rothenberg had tormented the law enforcement personnel and governing bodies of three cities, even enduring long jail terms on behalf of her “principles,” but she was always set free by some judge. Police had learned to lay off her. She had a doctoral degree and excellent lawyers and wasn’t about to be pushed around as easily as street-side madams.

And, too, the police recognized that Rothenberg hookers were less likely to be drawn into the violent eddy of street crime. The woman did protect her own, and her business did operate more as a legitimate enterprise. Which drove the Moral Majority crowd nuts, because it did seem to prove that prostitution could be a “clean” business.

“She could have fallen,” Rothenberg said out of the blue. “I don’t see Vassar getting into any tacky situation. She was extremely savvy. She would ‘phone home’ instantly if anything seedy seemed to be happening.”

“Phone home. That’s just it. We didn’t find a beeper or cell phone anywhere near the body.”

Rothenberg leaned forward, her modest chair squeaking in protest. “No phone? All our workers have phones, and every one of them has an emergency number programmed in. All they have to do is press a button, and we know who and where, if not why.”

“And then the Hooker Police go rushing to the rescue.”

“Something like that. I do have my own security.”

Molina had seen the bodyguards accompanying Rothenberg to court on the TV news. She favored high-profile muscle, like retired wrestlers. She knew how to direct a media circus.

“So Vassar didn’t sound any alarms that night.” At Rothenberg’s shaking head, she went on. “Maybe the phone is still lost in that neon jungle at the Goliath. One of her shoes almost came off in the fall.”