212 LP: A Novel (21 page)

9:30 A.M.

I
t turned out that Jasmine was her actual, legal name. Jasmine Anne Harris, twenty-six years old. Her only appearances in the NYPD’s data system were ancient history: listed as a witness to a domestic assault against her mother when she was ten; as the complainant in a Rape II when she was thirteen by an assailant who shared the last name Harris; and then four runaway juvenile reports over the next two years. Jasmine’s home life had not been a happy one.

But she had managed to keep her own criminal record clean, even as she admitted to Max and Ellie that she’d been on and off drugs for the last eight years—from pot to coke to heroin to meth—periodically turning tricks as she needed to support first her habit and now her three-year-old son.

Currently she sat in a conference room of the district attorney’s office, wearing the Columbia Law School sweatshirt that Max had offered her when she’d arrived this morning in a low-cut spaghetti-strap top to detail everything she knew about Prestige Parties.

According to Jasmine, the head of the operation was an older man she knew only as Uncle Dave. According to the articles of incorporation that Prestige Parties had filed with the attorney general’s office, the company’s CEO and sole shareholder was named
David Taylor. Jasmine knew only a little more about the two sisters who helped Dave find girls and book dates. Their names were Corliss and Cadence LaMarche.

Jasmine suspected she wasn’t supposed to know their last names, but Corliss had let it slip once. She’d asked Jasmine if that was her real name, and Jasmine had confirmed that it was and then asked Corliss the same. “Yep. Corliss, Cadence, and our brother Caleb. I guess our mom figured that with the last name LaMarche we may as well double down on trying to sound like royalty.”

“She only mentioned it the once,” Jasmine said, “but I remember because I kept repeating it to myself. Corliss LaMarche. Really classy. A lot better than Jasmine Harris, you know?”

Jasmine paused intermittently to wonder aloud whether she was “shooting herself in the hip.” That was a phrase that Jasmine seemed to favor.

This time when she invoked the saying, it was after she took a big sip from the bottle of Mountain Dew that Ellie had fetched for her from the DA’s vending machine. “You know, I keep thinking that I’m shooting myself in the hip.” She let out a tiny burp of carbonation from the soda and then covered her mouth and giggled. “Even giving Prestige half the cash, I’ve been taking home between seven and twelve hundred bucks a night when I work for them. They only use me every couple of weeks, but combined with what I’m making at Vibrations, I’ve been doing pretty good. I can’t go back to hundred-dollar dates with the pricks I meet at the club.”

Someone at Prestige Parties had managed to persuade Jasmine that she had earned her way into that elite category of high-class, high-price call girls. They had sold her on the idea of a fantasy world in which smart, beautiful women earned financial independence and a kind of feminist empowerment by taking money from weak but adoring men for something as easy as sexual contact.

But working decoy operations on patrol, Ellie had gotten to know the girls on the corners, the ones with the callused feet, hardened eyes, and faded bruises. And she knew that the line that divided them from the Prestige Party girls of the world was nonexistent.
Just as a lawyer could use his skills to move from job to job and industry to industry—defending gas companies and then drug makers and then the latest indicted politician—sex workers moved from stripping to porn to dominatrix dungeons to street corners to three-thousand-dollar-a-night hotel penthouses.

“You’ll land on your feet,” Ellie assured her. “Think about it this way, Jasmine. Are you any prettier now than you were when you were getting a hundred dollars a date?”

“Hell, no,” she said, smiling. “I’m only getting older, and thanks to my kid, I’ve got stretch marks on my belly.”

“And are you doing anything drastically different for these men now that they’re paying a thousand dollars a night compared to what you were doing before?”

She shook her head. “No pervs. I strictly cover the basics.”

“So if you’re the same attractive woman, doing the same exact thing, why do you think these men are paying more?”

“Beats the shit out of me.”

“Because they’ve been told you’re worth it. Tell a guy that you’re worth a hundred bucks, and that’s how he’s going to treat you. But force them to pony up a couple grand, they’re already convinced you’re the most beautiful girl they’ve ever seen. They truly believe you have secret skills to rock their tedious worlds. When Prestige Parties is over and done with, all you’ll have to do is look the next guy in the eye and tell him what it costs, and that’s what you’re going to get.”

Jasmine took another sip of her soda. “Damn fucking straight I’m worth it. A thousand bucks a night isn’t even that much in the city. I’ve heard of girls who make as much as ten.” Her eyes gleamed at the thought.

“Now tell us again about the women who book the dates.”

The truth was, despite Ellie’s assurances that Jasmine would find some way to make the money up, she honestly didn’t care. Persuading Jasmine to cooperate was a necessary step to bringing down Prestige Parties, which was a necessary step to finding Katie Bat
tle’s murderer. If Jasmine wound up broke and desperate again, it wouldn’t be because of Ellie.

It took Jasmine another hour to tell them everything she knew. Uncle Dave. The two sisters, Corliss and Cadence. Six dates in the last three and a half months, all involving sex for money. And now she was in the district attorney’s fifteenth-floor conference room, eating a package of Hostess Cupcakes from yet another trip to the vending machine, while they conferred in the hallway.

“It’s still not enough,” Max announced.

“How is that possible?” Ellie asked. “That girl, despite all the old drugs and recent refined sugar flowing through her veins, has one of the best memories I’ve come across in a witness. She’s willing to let us use her name. She’s got no criminal history and no apparent motive to lie. Her word, plus what we already got from Stacy Schecter, has to be enough.”

“It’s the same problem you always have with these agencies. The entire purpose of an escort service is to look legit. She knows this guy as Uncle Dave, which is about as creepy a name as I can think of for a pimp. But on paper, according to the AG’s office, he’s David Taylor, the CEO and sole shareholder of a legitimate corporation that provides legal and luxurious entertainment. They dot their
i
’s and cross their
t
’s. They’re lawfully incorporated. They had Jasmine fill out a W-4 to pay taxes on that income. I’m sure he pays the LaMarche sisters with reported funds, too, as well as paying taxes on all the company’s earnings. These people aren’t stupid.”

“No, but they are guilty of promoting prostitution in the third degree. We get the arrest warrant, hook them up on the felony charge, seize all their assets, and then use the money and the criminal case against them to get some answers about Katie Battle and Tanya Abbott.”

“The problem is they’ve covered their asses. You heard Jasmine. They told her not to engage in sex with the client. They even had her sign a piece of paper acknowledging that any sexual contact with the client was automatic grounds for dismissal.”

“And she also said she knew when she signed that document that it was just for show. When Corliss first approached her at Vibrations, she even asked her if she ever dated.”

“You and I know that
dating
is code, but Uncle Dave will argue it means innocent companionship.”

“We don’t need a conviction. I just want the leverage. I want some answers.”

They heard the creak of the conference room door. Like most of the doors in any building with a Centre Street address, it could use some WD-40.

“Um, is everything okay?”

“Just fine, Jasmine. If you can wait a few more minutes, we can explain what we’re going to do next.”

“It sounds like you guys are fighting.” Jasmine looked at her with the worried eyes of a child, and Ellie realized that some part of Jasmine’s personality would always be frozen in adolescence, suspended in time at that first knock on her bedroom door, the knock that had finally led to the police report when she was thirteen years old.

Ellie assured her once more and waited for the conference room door to close before speaking again in a quieter voice.

“Let’s take it to Judge Bandon. He’ll do anything for us right now. He’ll sign the warrant.”

Max shook his head. “That’s not right, Ellie, and you know it. We need more evidence.”

This wasn’t the first time Ellie had butted heads with a prosecutor. Prosecutors were always worried about trying their cases before a jury, having every thread of every last detail knotted and tucked away to create a smooth, impenetrable layer of proof. Police needed enough evidence to know in their gut they had the right guy.

Usually, though, when Ellie didn’t see eye to eye with a prosecutor, the prosecutor wasn’t a man who shared her bed a couple times a week. That tiny little distinction had Ellie on better behavior than she otherwise might have been.

But she still wanted her answers.

“I’m sorry, Max, but I’ll go to Bandon for the warrant myself if you don’t have some other suggestion.”

Max swallowed and shook his head. She held his stare defiantly but felt one corner of her mouth move upward.

“Damn, you’re sexy,” he said.

“I’m also right. We can’t be this close and just stop.”

He stepped toward her. She felt his breath whisper across her forehead. “You know I never stop when we’re close. I just might need to take a little detour.”

His body was so close to her now that she felt his hand move near his hip. She closed her eyes. Just when she thought he was reaching for her, she heard the creak of a door, followed by Max’s voice from the threshold of the conference room.

“Jasmine, sweetheart, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you for one more thing.”

Ellie pushed past him through the doorway. “You’re a tease.”

“You said you wanted a suggestion.”

The phone rang three times before a woman answered in a professional tone. “Prestige.”

“Hi, is this Corliss?”

“I’m sorry. Who’s speaking, please?”

Ellie gave an encouraging nod to Jasmine, who was clutching the handset of the conference room telephone so tightly that her knuckles were turning white. Ellie listened to the conversation through a headset plugged into a digital recorder, which was in turn attached to the base of the phone.

“It’s Jasmine Harris.”

“Oh, hey there, Jasmine.” The woman’s businesslike demeanor melted into the voice of a girlfriend. “We haven’t forgotten aboutcha. I’ll give ya a call as soon as we’ve got some work for ya.”

“It’s actually that, well, I guess I have work. Or at least a chance to work. One of my dates from last month saw me at Vibrations last
night and wants an appointment for tomorrow. Guess his wife is visiting her sister or something.”

“Well, I haven’t gotten any calls asking for you, babe. Sorry.”

“No, I mean, he’s just planning to come by the club tomorrow to meet me. I wasn’t thinking about it last night, but then it dawned on me that might not be cool with you guys. I don’t want to mess up what I’ve got going with you just for one trick, you know?”

“You mean an appointment, Jasmine.”

“Right, an appointment. Sorry.”

“It’s good you called. The models are definitely not allowed to date Prestige clients except through the company. Every once in a while, we’ll have a client get really close to one of the girls and want to see her on a regular basis, but we expect a buyout in exchange for making that initial introduction. Do you think it’s that kind of a situation?”

“Nah, he just happened to come in with some of his buddies. Who knows whether he’ll even show up tomorrow. If he does, I’ll tell him he’s got to talk to you guys.”

“It’s for the best, Jasmine. Uncle Dave’s a real stickler about that. If he finds out the models are booking privately, they’re gone. He puts the word out to other agencies, too.”

Ellie knew that last part was a bluff.

“No big loss,” Jasmine said. “Dude was kind of a freak anyway. It was the guy from Labor Day weekend. Kept trying to take the rubber off during oral. I was trying to go down on him and kept winding up with his little dick and his stubby fingers in my mouth. I couldn’t tell what was what.”

They’d rehearsed the line with Jasmine at least six times before placing the call, but she still managed to deliver it with that silly giggle of hers. It worked, because Corliss laughed and dropped her guard. “I’ll look up the name and make a note of it. We tell everyone to keep it safe, but some of the girls still accept bareback on oral. And, don’t forget, watch it on the phone, Jasmine, okay?”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“No problem. And I’ll try to find something for you this week to make up for tonight, all right?”

“Thanks, Corliss.”

Jasmine hung up the phone and worked the kinks out of her knuckles. “Was that okay?”

Ellie couldn’t help but grab the girl’s hands across the table. “That, Ms. Harris, was unbelievable.”

But it wasn’t Ellie’s approval that Jasmine yearned for. She looked up with wide eyes toward Max, who was sitting with one hip against the conference table. “Was that good? Did it sound good?”

“You were perfect, Jasmine.”

She removed her hands from Ellie’s and used them to pull Max’s sweatshirt up over her chin. Ellie knew that sweatshirt would smell good, like a blend of truffles and cedar and lavender and coffee. Like Max. Like home. It was the kind of smell that made a woman feel safe.

For a second, Jasmine looked happy.

12:35 P.M.

“I
don’t know how many times I need to explain this to you, Detectives. I’m a business owner.” David Taylor tugged at the lapels of his navy sports jacket as if the attire spoke for itself. “I spent what seemed like a lifetime owning a bar on the Upper East Side in the nineties. Check it out. No marks on my license. A good relationship with the boys in the Nineteenth. Call Ed Devlin up there. He might be retired by now, but he’ll tell you, I’m good people.”

Ellie had been pacing behind Taylor in the interrogation room as he repeated his mantra that he was a legitimate businessman. Now she leaned one hip against the table in front of him. “You don’t own a bar anymore, Uncle Dave, and the boys in the Nineteenth don’t know bupkes about Prestige Parties. Or, if they do, they’re not exactly going to tell me, now are they?”

“The bar”—Taylor pronounced it “Bah,” with a northeast accent—“closed down almost ten years ago. Made a mistake not buying the building when I had the chance. Couldn’t keep up with the rents, you know. Turned out okay, though. All those hours keeping bar, I saw how things work. Hardworking men with a lot of money but not a lot of time just want someone pretty to spend an evening with. Classy, smart, attractive girls.”

“Prostitutes,” Ellie said. “And you’re their pimp.”

“No way, ma’am. I know better than that. I want no part of such a thing. I’m a Catholic, for God’s sake. Pretty sure the pope frowns on pimping. I even had a lawyer draw up documents for the girls to sign, just in case they got the wrong idea. No sex allowed. No way, no how, or they’re out the door.”

She’d had Taylor in this room for twenty minutes now, and his story wasn’t budging. Rogan was down the hall in another interrogation room with Corliss LaMarche. The last Ellie had heard, Cadence was rock solid, so Rogan had moved her to a holding cell so he could work on the weaker sister alone.

“We’ve got your employee Corliss on tape, Taylor.” She hit the play button on the digital recorder and heard Jasmine’s voice as clearly as if she were sitting in the room with them.

“
Just for one trick
,
you know?
” Taylor smiled with satisfaction as Corliss corrected her: “
You mean an appointment
,
Jasmine.
”

His face fell slightly when Corliss explained the buyout requirement for private dates. “
Uncle Dave’s a real stickler about that.
”

“Oh, wait,” Ellie said, “here comes my favorite part.” She caught a slight chuckle in Taylor’s breath as Jasmine described performing oral sex as her date attempted to remove the condom.

“
We tell everyone to keep it safe
,
but some of the girls still accept bareback on oral. And
,
don’t forget
,
watch it on the phone
,
Jasmine
,
okay?
”

Ellie hit the stop button, and Taylor shook his head. “I can’t believe Corliss would stand for such a thing. If she and some of the girls have been engaged in this kind of conduct, it was certainly not with my knowledge. I’ve been absolutely clear—”

“I know, I know,” Ellie said. “No sex. They signed the papers.”

“Exactly.”

She heard a knock on the door and cracked it open to find Rogan.

“Wait a second,” Taylor said. “Don’t tell me. This is the part where someone comes in and tells me that that airhead Corliss dimed me up as the big bad boss in charge of the whole operation. Well, guess what, Detectives? I’ve seen every single episode of
Law and Order
, and I’m not falling for it. Corliss did this on her own. I’m
a legitimate businessman, and if you don’t believe me, you can talk to my lawyer.”

Rogan opened the door ajar. “Actually, Mr. Taylor, I wasn’t here to speak with you at all. You have a guest here to see you.”

Behind Rogan stood a house of a woman, nearly six feet tall, an easy two hundred pounds, with bright orange hair and green eye-shadow that managed to clash with her multicolored floral silk shirt and thick gold cuff necklace. “God damn it, Dave. What the hell have you dragged my daughters into?”

“This is Mr. Taylor’s sister, Karen LaMarche. She’s Corliss and Cadence’s mother. She’d like to have a word with her brother.”

Apparently Uncle Dave was
literally
Uncle Dave.

Fifteen minutes after they left Karen LaMarche alone in the interrogation room with her brother, they heard a tap against the one-way window. Taylor wasn’t lying when he said he’d watched a lot of
Law and Order
.

By the time they opened the door, Taylor’s sister was already pressing her way past Ellie. “My son of a bitch brother will tell you whatever you need to hear,” she said. “But my girls, my daughters, they get a deal. They walk.”

Ellie had already called Max as she’d eavesdropped on the conversation between Taylor and his sister. He was prepared to grant immunity to Corliss and Cadence as long as they cooperated.

“Only if Dave here agrees,” Ellie said. “No deal for him. Just the girls. We need full access to every piece of information Prestige Parties has. All clients. All dates.”

“But Corliss and Cadence get a full walk, right?” Taylor asked. “No one can even know I got them into this. Their names can’t be on any single piece of paper. Nothing.”

“No problem.”

“Okay, then, yeah, whatever. I got all of it in the computer. Go to town on it.”

“Where?” Ellie asked.

“At home, whaddaya think? But welcome to the twenty-first century, sweetheart. Some tech dweeb—one of those guys who tells you his name is John but you know it’s really Sanji—hooked me up so me and the girls could all access the appointments whenever we wanted. Get me online and I can tell you what you need to know. Let’s get this over with, for my nieces’ sake.”

Karen LaMarche gave Ellie a satisfied smile.

“What got into him?” Ellie asked as the woman turned to walk away.

“Would you believe me if I said an uncle’s love for his family?”

“Nope.”

“Let’s just say I’ve got dirt on him that might not land him upstate, but would cost him big at home.”

“Bigger than serving three to five for running a prostitution ring?” Rogan asked.

“Don’t ask me why, but my sister-in-law, Carmen? She loves that fat slob. Worships the ground he walks on. She’ll visit him every week in prison and won’t give a damn whether you take every last nickel from their bank account. She’ll find it in herself to forgive him, but not if she knows he brought my girls into it. She loves them like they’re her own. It would break her heart. And even though my brother’s a pig, he just couldn’t live with himself.” She stopped and called out to her brother. “You hear me, Dave? You be nice to these detectives, or I’ll be here with my cell phone calling Carmen right in front of you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving her to leave him in the relative peace of the run-down interrogation room.

They were interrupted by a knock on the door, followed by the tentative peek of the civilian aide who monitored the front desk. “Detective Hatcher. There’s a woman here to see you. She was very persistent but won’t give me her name.”

Rogan waved her to go. “I think Dave and I are just fine now. Let’s see if we can’t get a laptop in here.”

The woman was waiting in the rickety wooden chair next to Ellie’s desk. Her perfectly tailored jade green suit and freshly set hair looked out of place among the dinge and dishevel of the squad room.

“Mrs. Bandon.” Ellie offering her outstretched hand, Laura Bandon gave it a limp shake.

“Thank you for making time for me, Detective. I hope you’ll understand why I didn’t want to give my name to the young man up front.”

Ellie took a seat across from her at the desk. “I’m not sure that I do, actually.”

“I’m aware of the subject of your visit to my apartment yesterday morning. I thought as a woman, I might implore you to treat this as a private matter between me and my husband.”

“It’s not just a matter of privacy. There are crimes involved. And your husband is a judge. He used to be a prosecutor. I’m sure at some point he has sent someone to jail for doing what he did here.”

Laura crossed her manicured hands in her lap. “Paul has plenty of failings as a man, and I suppose being a hypocrite is one of them. But we have a son, and a family, and, if you must know, a certain understanding.” She held Ellie’s gaze. “I was aware of this woman—not her specifically, but of her existence—if it makes any difference to you.”

“It doesn’t make any difference as far as the law is concerned.”

“Well, it probably should. I’ll spare you the details of my own shortcomings, but the truth is, we’re both happier if he has his outside activities. He’s still very much devoted to me and our son. And if this becomes public, my husband won’t be the only one harmed by it. My son will enter Harvard Law School a laughingstock. I will become that woman with the stoic stare during her Stand By My Man moment. You saw what happened to Eliot Spitzer’s wife. Here was a woman who had been a successful lawyer in her own right at one of the best law firms in the nation. And just because of a private decision she made with her husband, she’s mocked now by the entire city as some brainwashed, antifeminist Stepford Wife.”

Ellie had Googled Laura Bandon just yesterday and could understand why the woman empathized with New York’s former first lady. Like her, Laura had graduated from the country’s top schools, had worked several years at a big law firm, and then served on numerous charitable boards even after she stopped practicing law.

“She was in that sort of spotlight for a moment,” Ellie said. “But who knows? She could be secretary of state in a few years.”

“It’s not worth the humiliation. Please, I’m begging you, Detective. All I’m asking is that, before you decide, please give some thought to the other lives you’ll be affecting. This isn’t just about Paul.”

She rose and walked away without waiting for a response.

“Yeah, here it is. Friday night.” On the laptop screen in front of him, David Taylor pointed to a spreadsheet entry for the night of Katie Battle’s murder. “She had an initial meet-up at six o’clock at the bar of the Royalton Hotel. She called in safe. That’s a nice joint. Went there once in the nineties and saw Bryan Adams, standing right there in the lobby. He was a good guy. Let me take a picture—”

Rogan tapped Taylor on the back.

“Yo, watch it.” Maybe it was more than a tap.

“Enough with the reminiscing,” Rogan said. “Who was the date, Uncle Dave? Who met Katie at the Royalton that night?”

“Doesn’t say.”

“What do you mean, it doesn’t say? You’ve got to have a phone number or a credit card or something.”

“Well, we usually do.”

“So why don’t you have it this time?” Rogan asked.

“’Cause apparently Cadence booked it anonymously.”

“I didn’t think you did that,” Ellie said. “Isn’t that the whole reason these girls give you half the money? They figure if the johns are giving you their names and phone numbers, there’s a layer of accountability built into the process. They assume they’re safe.”

Taylor shrugged. “Yeah, well, that’s the ideal, but it ain’t always realistic. It’s like that pregnant girl said about abstinence—”

Ellie shook her head. “Bad analogy, Dave.”

“Look, all I can tell you is Cadence booked the date the day before. We usually get some kind of contact information, but some guys are nervous. They got girlfriends, wives. They’re afraid of cops. Whatever. So we use our, you know, our
discretion
. My nieces have good judgment. If they sent Miranda out with someone, he presented good over the phone. Rich. Classy. And, like I said, she called in safe.”

“Just because someone
sounds
safe, you assume he is? You never heard of a guy named Ted Bundy?”

“Baah, Ted Bundy. If that guy had walked into my bar, I would’ve known he was wrong. You’re a detective. You gotta know what I mean. It’s instinct. I probably shouldn’t tell you how long we’ve been doing this, but we go on our guts, and we’ve never had a problem.”

“Sure, until now. I think what happened to Katie Battle qualifies as a problem.” Ellie made a mental note to put Katie’s mother in touch with a lawyer. With any luck, David Taylor would wind up paying for the care her daughter couldn’t quite afford.

“I know, you’re trying to make me feel guilty. You don’t think I’ve spent the last day and a half wondering if I could have done something more to protect that girl? I’m not a monster. But you know what? She’s the one who made that choice for herself. I don’t force anyone to do nothing they don’t want to do. Plus, take a look at this. This checkmark right here? That means the guy specifically asked for Miranda. We keep track of that sort of thing in case she can’t make it, you know? You can’t just send some other girl if he asked for a certain one. And, speaking for Cadence, I gotta think that she figured anyone who already knew the girl had to be one of her former customers. She figured he was all right.”

Rogan leaned over to get a better look at the laptop. “If the guy already knew her as Miranda, he might’ve known her through your service.”

“Could be. She’d been working for us for about a year.”

“Can you pull up a list of all the clients you ever booked for her?”

“Yeah, no problem,” Taylor said.

If they were lucky, they’d find someone whose background overlapped with Tanya Abbott’s. Maybe someone from Baltimore.

Taylor laughed and shook his head as he examined the list of calendar entries he’d pulled up on the screen. “Now that one there could’ve been worth a mint. If I’d really been smart, I should have closed up shop and gotten into the blackmail business before this shower of crap came pouring down on me.”

“What are you talking about?” Rogan asked.

Taylor pointed to a charge on a credit card belonging to the SDS Group. “Let’s just say the person behind that corporation is someone we’ve all heard of.”

“Names, Taylor.”

The glint in Taylor’s beady eyes might as well have been dollar signs. He was working through the blackmail angle, wondering whether he might raise some cash for a legal defense fund.