“Seriously?”
“Ever since you announced that they were the heirs to your fortune.”
“Someone has to be. Besides, I’m not above buying affection from women.”
Shelby held up the snow globe. “I noticed.”
“I’ll see you later.” I kissed her cheek and made my way to the front door. She followed me. When I reached the door and opened it she was standing there, cupping the snow globe in her hands.
“Don’t be a stranger,” she said.
“Tell me something, Shel.” The words spilled out; I’m still not sure where they came from. “Just out of curiosity, if I had been the one who spilled the drink on your dress back when we were in school instead of Bobby, do you think you and I would have been the ones to get involved?”
“We are involved, Rushmore. Don’t you know that?”
A moment later I was in the Cherokee. She was still standing in the doorway. I waved to her. She waved back. I slipped the Jeep in gear and drove off even as I screamed at myself.
What’s wrong with you, asking a question like that? What were you thinking? She’s the wife of your best friend. What a jerk!
The e-mail from the Department of Motor Vehicles told me the same thing that Bobby had. The only Carlson, Jamie Anne, with a driver’s license in the state of Minnesota was a sixteen-year-old brunette living in Minneapolis. I put my four dollars down and requested another search, this time for the owner of a vanity plate with the initials JB.
Just as I hit the “send” button, the telephone rang.
“It’s me,” Shelby said.
“Hi.”
“I want you to know that you are my good friend and I love you, but you shouldn’t be asking questions like you asked and you shouldn’t be giving me gifts, even goofy little things like the snow globe, except on my birthday and at Christmas.”
“I know.”
“I’m married.”
She’s married, she’s married, she’s married—to your best friend, you moron!
“I know.”
“Well, then, I’ll be seeing you soon.”
“Sure.”
She hung up and I told myself:
Don’t ever do that again, you dumb schmuck.
If you believe the crime statistics—and we all know how reliable they are—there are about 150 full-time prostitutes in St. Paul and three times that many in Minneapolis. The bars, saunas, hotels, convention centers, and private parties—where a working girl can get shelter from the rain—belong to women with valid twenty-one-year-old IDs. The streets belong to the children. The average age of a street hooker in the
Twin Cities is sixteen. You see them waving at the cars that cruise Frog-town, a decidedly blue-collar community north of University Avenue and west of the State Capital, and in East St. Paul, especially in the Arcade-Payne Avenue neighborhood where Cheney’s is located.
“Are you looking to party?”
Maybe they’ll hop in the cars and find an alley somewhere, or take their customers to the hot-bed hotel up the street renting rooms at twenty bucks a half hour. Or maybe they’ll walk the john around back, kneeling on the asphalt, slipping the wallet out of the john’s sucker pocket while he’s slipping it in—what’s he going to do, call a cop? A few minutes later they’ll be back on the corner, looking for another willing customer with clean blood.
It’s a tough way to make a living. Yet while I can sympathize with prostitutes, johns are a mystery to me. I have no idea what motivates them. Especially those who buy young girls off the street, paying forty bucks to abuse a child. I only know that when it comes to prostitution, we usually arrest the wrong people.
It was still early evening when I arrived at the bar. Three hookers sat together at a square table in the back where they could see the comings and goings of all of Cheney’s patrons. When they saw me, one of the women said something to the other two and stood. Time to go to work.
The woman, wearing a short, tight, purple skirt and purple blouse with a plunging neckline, intercepted me at the bar.
“You looking to party?” she asked, exuding all the charm of an X-rated movie.
“Damn right,” I said, slapping the bar top with my hand. “Innkeeper! I just hit the Pick Three. Gimme the most expensive beer in the house.”
The bartender took a Heineken from the cooler and approached with a wary eye.
“Fine establishment you have here,” I told him nice and loud in case there was someone in the joint who hadn’t already noticed me.
“We like it,” he said, placing the bottle and an empty glass in front of me. I poured the beer myself.
“So, honey,” I said to the woman hugging my side. “What’s your name?”
“What name do you like?”
“Cloris,” I told her.
“You’re kiddin’ me.”
“Would I do a thing like that? So listen, Cloris, did you hear the one about the blind man who walks into a bar and starts swinging his dog over his head by its tail? The bartender asks, ‘What are you doing?’ And the blind man says, ‘Just looking around.’”
“Oh, brother.”
“I got a million of ’em.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. What’s your name?”
“What name do you like?”
“You’re a real peach, you know that?”
“Peach is good, you can call me ‘Peachy.’ What are you drinking, Cloris?”
“Rum and coke.”
“Innkeeper,” I shouted and pointed at the woman. He nodded and moved toward us. “Did you hear about the woman who calls this guy one night? The woman says, ‘This is Mary. Remember me? We met at a party two months ago and you said I was a good sport. Well, I’m pregnant and I’m going to jump off the Lake Street Bridge.’ And the guy says, ‘Gosh, Mary. You are a good sport.’”
It went on like that for a couple of hours, me buying drinks and telling completely tasteless jokes. After a while, the other two hookers joined us. Most of the prostitutes I’ve met have been very pleasant to talk to and these were no exception. I was actually enjoying myself and the women seemed to appreciate my company as well. Yet they did not let me interfere with business. They worked out a rotation and whenever
they spotted a likely looking customer, one of them would leave, do a bit of work, and return. A woman with a tired face that might have been pretty once tried to join the party, but the others chased her off. She was an amateur, one of those women who gave it away, using sex like a prescription drug. It might have been good for what ails her, but bad for a working girl’s business.
Not everyone approved of me. Two overweight women and an undernourished man sitting in a booth looked on with genuine disgust. You could bet that if they had hit the number they wouldn’t be wasting their winnings on a bunch of barroom layabouts, no siree. As it was, they were busy pulling tabs and discarding the losers in a plastic laundry basket. They had built up a sizable pile. Whenever they ran out of money, one of them would use the cash machine next to the rest rooms—it’s illegal in Minnesota to purchase pull tabs or lottery tickets with a personal check, so some joints install ATMs.
All the while, I watched the door, waiting for Merci Cole.
“A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar and the bartender says, ‘What is this? A joke?’”
I had reached the subbasement of my joke collection and was rooting around for a trap door when Merci arrived. I recognized her by Molly Carlson’s description—tall, blond, with green eyes. She had gone to high school with Jamie which made her about twenty-five. But she seemed so much older than that, her cheeks puffy, her eyes flat and lifeless. Still, she was considerably more attractive than the usual prostitute. If you don’t believe me, punch up the St. Paul Police Department’s Web site. The SPPD regularly posts photographs of the hookers they arrest and you’ll never find a less enticing group of women—which is another reason prostitution baffles me. If hookers all looked like Julia Roberts and Laura San Giacomo, that I could understand. But why pay money to have sex with an ugly woman?
I gestured toward Merci. “I want to meet her.”
“Are you serious?” Cloris replied. “You would turn me down for her? I was ready to give it up for free.”
“Cloris,” I said with mock indignation. “I do believe you have misunderstood my intentions.”
“Screw you.”
“That’s what I mean. Where would you get an idea like that?”
Merci Cole sat at the end of the bar, chatting with the bartender. The bartender whispered something to her as I approached.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi, yourself.”
“Busy?”
“Depends,” she answered in a professional voice, waiting for the magic words that proved I wasn’t a cop.
“I’m not a cop.”
“If you say so, officer.”
I set a fifty-dollar bill on the bar in front of her, a very uncoplike thing to do.
“What do I get for that?”
Satisfied, she went down the menu. “I get ten dollars for a hand job, twenty for a BJ, and forty if you want the motherlode. Anything else is negotiable.”
“How ’bout conversation?”
“You want conversation, dial a nine hundred number, two-fifty a minute.”
I pushed the fifty closer to her.
“Are you serious?”
“Let’s take a walk.”
“Why not?” She snapped the bill off the bar.
“Wait.”
“What the hell … ,” she said to my back as I juked and jived to the table where the three hookers sat scanning the crowd. I peeled off three one-hundred-dollar bills and dropped them on the table.
“Ladies, it’s been a pleasure,” I announced and waved bye-bye. I was about to become a part of hooker folklore. “Did you hear the one about the trick who paid three girls a hundred bucks each just for listening to bad jokes?”
Merci Cole waited at the door, posing more than standing, a puzzled expression on her face. A few moments later we were walking.
“What do you want to talk about?” Merci asked.
“Why did you become a prostitute?”
“What are you, a social worker?”
“No.” I held up a second fifty. “But I have another one of these.”
Merci reached for it, but I pulled it back.
“You’re Merci Cole.”
“What about it?”
“I’m looking for Jamie Carlson.”
“Who?”
“Right, you never heard of her.”
“I haven’t seen Jamie in seven years,” she told me. If it wasn’t for the description given to me by the brother with the Lady Thumper, I might have believed her.
“Then who was the woman who drove you to the apartment on Avon so you could get your stuff?”
“That was someone else.”
Calling Merci a liar wasn’t going to get me anything, so I decided to cut to the chase. “I need to find Jamie Carlson and I’ll pay you to tell me where she is.”
“My friends aren’t for sale.”
“A hooker with a heart of gold.”
She went for my face but I grabbed her hands before she could dig her nails into me.
“Let me go,” she snarled.
I stepped back, waiting for her to resume the attack. She didn’t. Instead she stared at me with eyes wide with hate.
“Merci.” I spoke soft and low, trying to sound sincere. What is it they say? Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you have it made. “Jamie’s parents asked me to bring her home.”
“Yeah? Well screw ’em. Like they really care after all these years.”
“Stacy is sick. She might die.”
“Little Stacy?”
I was astonished by how suddenly her manner changed from contempt to genuine concern. It was like she had flipped a light switch.
“She has leukemia.”
“Little Stacy?”
“Her parents want Jamie to come home. They need her to donate her bone marrow. Otherwise, Stacy will probably die.”
“Oh, I get it. They want to use her. Yeah, that sounds familiar.”
“I don’t know why you’re angry about this and I don’t care. Just tell me where Jamie is.”
“No way. I’m not going to tell you about her. I might tell her about you, though, next time I see her.”
“Fine, do that.” I was getting nowhere fast and arguing would only make it worse. “You don’t have to tell me where she is. Just give her this.” I gave Merci my card. “Tell her about Stacy. Tell her to call me and I’ll explain. No problem. No hassle for anyone.”
Merci read the card slowly.
“Will you do that? There’s another fifty in it. Make it a hundred.”
Merci smiled. And to prove just how concerned she was for Stacy’s well-being, she tore the card in half.