Somebody's Daughter (21 page)

Leaving was also on the mind of Taunya Terriault and her young friends from Halifax and Montreal; they too were noticing the growing violence of Eddy, Slugger, and especially the Big Man, increasingly annoyed that he could not track down his former main girl. He knew Lynn once worked as an exotic dancer and favored a particular club in Toronto; so he took Taunya there to look for her—seeing him might scare Lynn away. On the way inside, Greer saw another Nova Scotia player; the young man, a seventeen-year-old who went by the street name Joystick. He had been in the bar watching the strippers but had not seen Lynn, so Taunya checked things out. She too found out nothing; back outside, her man was gone and she decided to wait for him in Joystick's car. They'd met at Teri's apartment in Halifax and could chat about home. When Greer got back, he demanded to know if she'd found anything about Lynn and, obviously suspicious, what she and Joystick had been talking about:

“Did he ask you how business was up here?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I said it's great here, busier than Montreal, but the dates aren't as nice.”

“Stupid fucking bitch. You never tell another man how my business is goin'. How the fuck do you know I don't owe him some money? Maybe I been tellin' him things are pretty slow and he's gotta wait for his money. Goddamn it, girl, you never talk about my business with anyone but me.” He reached over and slid open the compartment beneath Taunya's seat, revealing the gun she had seen Eddy brandishing on the stroll; beside it lay Greer's latest toy, which looked like an electric razor but was a stun gun, designed to deliver electric shocks that could disable an attacker. Police forces in some American cities use them, and Greer had gotten hold of one on a recent visit to Buffalo. He ordered Taunya to hold out her arm. “You're not going to use that on me, are you?”

“Yes, I am—and if you move away, I'll do it again and again until you learn to keep your arm there for five seconds. You understand? Now keep your arm there.” The fiery pain across her forearm was excruciating, and Taunya almost instantly pulled away; but she must have passed the test because Greer just glanced at the device and tossed it back in the drawer. “Now you get back in that car with him and tell him to drive you to the hotel,” he said curtly. “And you don't say one word to him, you understand? I'm gonna follow and watch, so you let him know who's woman you are. Now go!”

Taunya did as she was told, and it didn't take long for the young pimp to realize she was ignoring him. “What's up? Why aren't you answering me?” he asked. “Taunya, what's going on?” Taunya felt ridiculous, but she didn't want to look behind them and see if Greer was watching, nor could she turn towards Joystick, so she hissed quietly: “He says I can't talk to you.” Joystick was shocked. He wasn't in the Scotian inner circle, and he knew he was a minor player who spent as much time in the video arcades as on the stroll, but Joystick figured he was at least a nominal part of the family. He and the Big Man had even worked together on occasion and he figured Greer should know better that to think he would try to steal his main girl right out from under his nose.

“You've got to be kidding,” he finally said. “What the fuck is his game? Man, this is stupid—forget it, Taunya. I'm sorry if I got you in trouble.” She said nothing more for the rest of the drive. That night on the stroll, Taunya talked with Teri and Gizelle about running away, maybe to New York, where they could connect with Sweet Lou's family or maybe to Buffalo; they could freelance there. Around midnight, they returned to the hotel—only chumps kept their girls working all night, Greer had always insisted—and as Taunya and Teri took their regular nightly bath, they raised the issue again. They were too afraid of being overheard to flesh out a plan; like Stacey, they decided to play a waiting game—just try to avoid their pimps' unaccountable anger and see what ideas arose. Neither they nor Stacey once even entertained the notion of going home.

Approaching a date on the Scotian stroll. [Print from ATV video tape]

The night of September 14 was a particularly profitable one for Taunya, Teri, and Gizelle—twenty-five hundred dollars in total, including the three hundred Gizelle had charged for a “golden shower”—a bizarre procedure in which a client masturbates while the prostitute urinates on him. Taunya's theory was that men who wanted this and other services involving verbal or physical humiliation were managers, business owners, or other powerful people who needed to be abused to feel a sense of reality in their lives; she recalled one corporate executive in Montreal who paid her one hundred and fifty dollars an hour to scold him, then comfort him by holding him in her arms afterwards. As the three girls arrived at the hotel, still giggling over Taunya's story, they saw that Bullet was in the room—not a good sign—and their playful mood evaporated. Their pimps were grouped around one of the beds, and when Taunya peered past the Big Man's massive bulk she recognized Star Franklin, a prostitute of about fourteen who worked for a Toronto-based Jamaican pimp and thus was off-limits for even a conversation with one of the Scotian girls.

Eddy, seated in front of Star, was demanding that she answer him when he told her she had to choose him—or stop working. Infuriated at her stubborn silence, he barked: “You wanna call your man? Here, call the motherfucker! I'll deal with him!” With that, he snatched his cell phone from the bedside table and tossed it into Star's face, smashing her front teeth. Blood streamed from between her lips, and Eddy laughed hysterically as he wrenched the weeping girl's hands away from her mouth, then hauled her into the bathroom. The girls could hear him taunting his young victim, ordering her to look in the mirror and guess how much she'd be worth on the street now. Gizelle shook uncontrollably as she listened to the man who had flattered her into joining his “family business”; Taunya, patting the nervous girl's hand, warned her to keep quiet.

The next move was to take Star into the bedroom of the hotel suite, where Eddy, the Big Man, Slugger, and Bullet briefly conferred about how best to send a message to their rival that the Church Street stroll belonged to their family. Since she refused to join them, she would simply disappear: the sobbing teenager was thrown onto the bed, and Eddy shoved two large pillows against her head as she struggled wildly, terrified of being smothered. That was not the plan. Bullet drew his gun and slid it between the pillows to reduce the report, then prepared to fire. “Not here,” Slugger suddenly intervened. “Too many people around, man—that guy in the lobby saw her come in with us. This is not a good place.” The Big Man agreed. Star might have been destined to become a victim of his private turf war, but this would not be her night.

With Bullet back in town, the quarters were cramped and the Big Man had taken to sleeping with Taunya on a mattress on the floor—and, tonight, Star as well! One on the left, one on the right; within moments he was sound asleep. Not Taunya, though: appalled at the brutality, disgusted by Slugger's forced attentions on the loudly protesting Teri; frightened by the blank stare of the girl on the opposite side of the mattress, she waited until everyone else in the room was clearly asleep. Then she tilted her head towards the door to let Star know it was safe for her to slip away; at least, if she and her friends couldn't get away that night, she could help this girl escape—otherwise, Taunya was certain the teenager would lose her life come morning. Star seemed frozen on the other side of the mattress. Finally, she realized Star would not move because she was afraid Taunya was watching her. The young Nova Scotian pretended to fall asleep and listened as the rustling sounds proved her theory. Star quietly left the room when she believed Taunya was sleeping.

In the morning, the Big Man strode around the room, raging like a caged beast and accusing Taunya of letting Star escape; Taunya retorted that she'd simply slept right through the night, “just like you did.” Greer apparently didn't care for her tone, because he lashed out with a backhand to her head, then glared at her while he got dressed, as if daring her to say anything more. Taunya stayed silent until he left with his three sidekicks; when they were gone, she heaved a sigh of relief and expressed the fervent hope that all four of them would be killed in a car accident or a gun battle. She and Teri then sat down to a game of cards and listened to their portable tape player, while Gizelle brooded in a corner, contemplating the nightmare her life had become. Eddy never hit her hard and only yelled at her occasionally, but after last night's terrorization of Star, she realized what he was capable of. She had to get away, somehow; and as they dealt each other hand after hand, Taunya and Teri were silently telling themselves the same. Soon enough, Teri articulated what they had all suspected from the scraps of conversation they'd overheard the night before: the four men had been planning to kill Star—Slugger had bragged about it to her while they were having sex; that's why she had objected so strenuously. Escape was no longer a late-night fantasy, they knew; it was a matter of life and death. Each of the girls realized, too, that they needed each other to flee these monsters who called themselves men.

On the morning after she had spoken to the RCMP's Brad Sullivan, the one parent of the Scotian girls who had become involved in the nightmare herself was determined to take further action. She'd heard nothing from the police, and her frustration level was mounting. Debbie decided to go to North Preston where Gordon had told her many of the pimps lived.

Once she had reached the small community on the outskirts of Dartmouth, Mrs. Howard parked her car and began going door-to-door, asking anyone and everyone who would talk to her if they knew anything about Stacey. Debbie Howard believed that just about every young man from North Preston was a parasite preying on teenage girls like her Stacey: had she known how small that minority was, she might have been initially relieved, but her worst fears—and more—would have been realized if she learned how very dangerous, and brutal, the Scotian minority was. As it turned out, the visit to North Preston was an eye-opener, not that Mrs. Howard found out anything about Stacey, but because she discovered that the community, like any other, contained more solid families leading average lives than it did gangs of monstrous pimps—that, indeed, the pimps themselves often came from good, hard-working families who had an equally negative view of her and other parents of young prostitutes as she did of them. As one woman bluntly and revealingly told her, “If more of you mothers would come out here and get your daughters, they wouldn't be getting the boys from here into all this foolishness,” she said.

Debbie Howard was no further ahead in her search for Stacey, however, and she had no option but to go home and wait for word from the police. She couldn't sit still for long; again and again she tried to get a name—just a name—of one of the people her daughter might be with. Finally she returned to Rachel who told her Stacey was not with Kenny but with Peanut and Smit. With this new information, Debbie Howard formally filed a missing persons report at the Cole Harbour detachment of the RCMP; there, the constable who opened a file on Stacey decided to talk to one of the detachment's investigators—none other than John Elliott, the officer who had worked with Brad Sullivan on the 1990 fact-finding study of pimping in Halifax.

Elliott quickly contacted some of his informants on the Hollis Street stroll and began gathering some data on the two Scotian players; and he called his friend Sullivan, who had asked Debbie Howard on the night before to find out, if she could, who Stacey was with. Sullivan called Dave Perry again, passing on the valuable new information. The net was beginning to close around the Scotians: Perry did not know who Peanut and Smit were but he passed the information on to other members of his task force. For his part, Dave Perry was busy working with another worried mother of a teen who had disappeared in Halifax. Meanwhile, officers at the Cole Harbour RCMP promised Debbie Howard they would call when they had any news for her, and urged her to phone them if she heard from her daughter.

If Debbie Howard had seen her daughter through the afternoon of September 16, she would have had to agree that Stacey seemed as taken with the life as she was trapped in it—or perhaps it was that the excitement and occasional pleasures kept her trapped in it. That afternoon, Peanut and Smit decided to give their girls the carrot instead of the stick: two hundred dollars each for “some nice new 'ho clothes and maybe something to eat.” As they browsed in clothing and record shops on Yonge Street south of College, Stacey and Annie Mae, in jeans and T-shirts with just a touch of make-up, looked more like kids from the suburbs than street-hardened prostitutes, but the image vanished when they headed for the seedier sex shops just off Yonge. There, they expertly picked through flashy fishnet stockings, body-hugging bustiers, and thigh-high vinyl boots; and if Stacey laughed a little too loudly or flaunted her tawdry finery a little too obviously while checking it out in the mirror, she certainly looked the part. “Can't wait to show these off for Smit,” she confided to Annie Mae, who smiled knowingly in agreement. “Yeah, Stace, they really like the look of this kind of outfit—and a man that's turned on is a happy man, so flaunt it, girl!”