First Class Killing (29 page)

“Where’s your computer?”

He couldn’t maintain eye contact but couldn’t keep his eyes off various other body parts. Of course, he did think I was a hooker, so maybe I was fair game. “It’s in the back. Where’s Monica?”

“She decided not to come. Let’s get to work. We have a lot to do.”

He shoved in front of me. “How do I know you won’t tell Angel I’ve been talking to you?”

“Because I work for the women in LA, and our goal is to put Angel out of business. Why would I want her to know we’re courting you?”

“Courting me?”

“Monica told you, didn’t she? I’m here to look over your system so we can decide if we want to hire you. According to everything we hear, we want you working for us.”

He stuck his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans but didn’t move out of the way.

“Stewart, have you ever considered living in California? Maybe a little bungalow on the beach? It’s warm out there all year round. I think you’d like it.”

“You’re a…you’re one of the hookers?” From the way he was checking me out again, it wasn’t hard to figure out what he was considering.

I tried to look sultry. “You can make all sorts of demands, Stewart, and have every reason to believe they will be fulfilled, beyond your wildest imagination.”

He shifted from one foot to the other and wiped the crumbs from his upper lip. He didn’t seem completely comfortable with the situation, but he was intrigued enough to go to the next step. “My stuff is back here.”

He led me down the hall to a depressingly dim room with a low ceiling and wood-grain blinds. There was an unmade twin bed shoved into a corner. One full wall was taken up by a glass étagère that displayed an octopus of a stereo system, a vast array of CDs, fancy camera and video equipment, more DVDs, and a vast and colorful collection of comic book heroes. There were statues large and small of Batman, the Green Lantern, Superman, the Incredible Hulk, and a bunch I couldn’t identify, certainly more than I ever knew existed.

Stewart’s work area included two large monitors, multiple CRTs and printers, and lots of modems and switches and drives. There was enough cable to wrap around the apartment complex twice, a sprinkling of crumbs on the desktop, and a trash can that smelled vaguely of fried rice. He had the space set up like a cockpit, with room for only one chair.

I looked at him. “Where do I sit?”

“Over there.” With a tight little smile meant to look wicked, I presumed, he nodded to the messy bed.

I didn’t want to sit on his bed, partly because it was his bed but mostly because it wasn’t close enough to see anything. “I need to watch what you’re doing.”

He snickered. “As if you’d even understand.”

“You want me to understand, Stewart, so I can appreciate the sophistication of your work and be duly impressed.”

With a blubbery sigh of acceptance, he left the room and came back dragging a stiff-backed chair behind him. He placed it well behind his own comfy swiveler, but I grabbed it and wedged it forward before he had a chance to plop down and completely freeze me out. That put our knees bumping together beneath his keyboard tray, something that I wasn’t crazy about but didn’t seem to bother him.

“So, you people are running hookers out of LA? That explains what’s been going on with the numbers.”

“Has her revenue declined?”

“Angel’s revenue never declines. It just hasn’t been going up as fast as before.”

Prostitution. An unlimited market driven by infinite demand. No wonder it was the oldest profession. Angel’s business was under heavy attack by a direct competitor, and she was still growing, only at a slower rate. I wondered what the depressed growth rate might be. Twenty percent? Fifty?

“We’ve heard about you in LA, Stewart.”

“You have?” He puffed up a little.

“We’ve heard that you’re the key to Angel’s success.”

He let out the long and lonely sigh of the unappreciated. “She couldn’t do anything without me. Until she found me, she was so small-time.”

“My only question is why put up with her?”

“What do you mean?”

“She takes all the credit for your work. She talks about you as if you’re some kind of trained monkey. You know what she calls you, right? Sluggo?”

His face clouded over, and his jaw jutted out. Stewart didn’t have much of a poker face. “Sometimes she pays me with sex.” He pouted. “That’s the only reason I stay with her is…is because she’s a great piece of ass.”

“Uh-huh.” I pulled back so that less of me touched less of him. He was lying about Angel, and I didn’t want him getting any ideas about me. At least none beyond the ones I wanted to give him.

His fingers hovered over the keys for half a second before he started pounding. His keyboard was dirty and his mouse stained dark from what must have been thousands of touches from his right palm, but the second he started typing, he became a different person. It was as if his hands on the keys completed a circuit, and the power that ran through the computer animated him as well. The slouch fell out of his shoulders, his breathing steadied, and everything about him was more grounded and confident.

“What do you want to see?”

“I want to see how your data are stored and organized, how you keep track of customers, activity, payments, schedules—”

“I’ll show you the tables and whatnot, but I’m blocking out all the data.”

“Without the data, I can’t get a good sense of how your system works.”

“There is no way I’m showing you anything about clients or hookers. No way. I don’t work for you, and I’m not giving up the goods until I see some green.”

Perhaps the whinier version of Stewart would have been preferable. I knew one thing: he was my last option, and I wasn’t leaving without that list of hookers.

I sat back in my chair and checked out my thumbnail. “You probably don’t have what we need, anyway. We have pretty advanced ideas of what we want to do.”

“Advanced?” He snorted. “What is it you think you need?”

“History. We’d like to keep a database of all of our clients’ activity to use for a loyalty program. Does Angel have that?”

“She doesn’t. I do. I know everything every one of her clients has done, where, when, and who with.”

“That’s sensitive information. We would want to make sure it’s totally inaccessible, for obvious reasons.”

“No one can get into my system. No one can hack me.”

“Why not?”

“Because”—big sigh, total exasperation—“I have firewalls on top of firewalls on top of firewalls. I designed and built them myself. If I ran Microsoft, they would never have any of those dumb security failures they have.”

“Can I see how you store the data?”

“Like I said—”

“I know, no names. Just the structure of the tables.”

He came into the program through a back door. There were no input boxes or other customer interface screens. Instead, he showed me a lot of tables and templates with rows and columns that had labels but no data. No names.

Stewart might have had the social skill of a sixteen-year-old, but he was clever about system design. I told him some of my ideas for the frequent fucker program, and he knew exactly how to implement them and, in some cases, improve on them.

“All we have to do,” he said, “is to assign an ID number to each customer, see? Some kind of a tag so that we can trace all their activity. Then we add a column to the customer tables.”

“Like the airlines’ frequent flier IDs.”

“The airlines’ programs are retarded. Mine would be a whole lot better.”

We worked our way into an uneasy truce based on his desire to strut his stuff and, I noticed, just how much contact our knees made. It was like flipping a switch. The more I rubbed up against him, the more forthcoming he was.

“We’re thinking of setting up a performance management system.”

“What’s that?”

“A way to evaluate the performance of the providers.”

“You mean the hookers? Like how many different ways they can do it?” He giggled and rubbed his shoulder against my upper arm. I got even closer, going with him on every subtle shift his body made.

“Sort of. Like how much revenue they generate and how many new customers they bring in. Some of the girls are really energetic. They work hard, generate lots of revenue, and bring in new customers. I would want to know who they are so I could reward them properly. Any ideas?”

“That’s easy. I’ll show you.” He stroked a few keys. “I can show you without giving you the names.”

He built a table with a column for standard rate, one for what he called average revenue per hooker, one for dates per hooker, and one for revenue earned to date for the year. Instead of names, he used numbered rows, from one to thirty-two.

“I can sort it any way you want. How do you want it?”

“Highest to lowest by rate.” I figured that way, the elites would be grouped right at the top, and they were. Only one woman made $2,500 per date. It had to be Angel. Several were just below her at $1,500 to $2,000, and on down the list in descending order.

“Now, can you put in a column that shows the date of each woman’s activity? And the city?”

“What for?”

“I want a way to tell who works how often and who travels the farthest.”

“Um…okay.” He whipped up a comment column that included the information. I checked for the date when I had taken the pictures of Angel and Sally. When I saw that the two hookers at the top had been in Pittsburgh on that night, I could barely contain my delight. This was exactly what I needed, data that could be matched to flight schedules and the surveillance photos we’d taken to tell a story that was compelling, traceable, and incriminating.

But only if it included the names of the women.

The clock in the lower right-hand corner of his screen read twelve forty-five
A.M.
I’d been there for two hours already, and I had taken him as far as he would go on the promise of a bungalow on the beach and a couple of cheap feels. To get the good stuff, I knew I would have to offer him something he really wanted, something for which he had no good defense.

I leaned over the arm of my chair to look at the screen and put myself well into his personal space. He took a deep breath, his face inches from my hair.

“Would you print all those out for me? I want to take them back to my people to show them what you can do.”

As the pages began to roll off the printer, I pulled one off and set it on his lap. “You know what would be really helpful for us? To see the names of these women, so we know who to recruit to our side.”

“I can’t do that.”

I pressed on the rows at the top with my finger. That was about mid-thigh for him. “We would be interested in these women.” I ran my finger down the page, which happened to be up his thigh. “But not these.”

He sucked in a breath that caught in his throat. I turned my upper body toward him. “Come on, Stewart. Let me see our competition. Angel doesn’t have to know.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t…” I put my hand full on his thigh, and he jumped. “Or won’t?” He held perfectly still. He didn’t even look as if he were breathing.

“You said she sometimes paid you with sex. I know that’s not true, Stewart. She won’t let you near her women.”

“So?”

“So, maybe we can work out a side deal. An exchange of services, so to speak.” I let my fingers begin that slow climb again, up the inside of his thigh, moving steadily until I was close enough to feel his response. I’d never done anything like this with someone to whom I didn’t have at least a passing attraction. I had to be careful not to push too far too fast. He was pretty excitable. “You’re the one with all the power, Stewart. She needs you”—I gave him a little tweak—“as much as you need this.”

As his desire surged, so did my own sense of confidence, and for the first time, I started to understand what Angel knew. Sex was power, but power was the aphrodisiac. There was nothing about Stewart to get hot about, but making Stewart do what he didn’t want to do, that was hot, and when he reached for the keyboard and started typing, I felt almost as flushed as he looked.

I tried to get hold of myself by mentally mapping out the exhibits I would spin for Harvey out of this solid gold information. Angel was about to get slam-dunked, another thought that was nearly orgasmic, yet another indication that I had to get off this case, and fast.

Stewart finished and leaned back. I looked at the screen, and they were all there. Angel’s name was right at the top. Below were Sally’s and Charlotte’s and Ava’s and the rest. I slipped my hand off his leg, and he gasped again. I moved it up and laid it on his soft chest, a touch that elicited a low, ragged groan from him. “Print those out for me, baby, and make me a diskette.”

He couldn’t move fast enough. He typed in the commands, copied the files, and handed me the diskette. Then he got up and left, which made more room for me. As the pages rolled from the printer, I pulled them off one by one and tried to think if I dared ask for anything more. It was too late. I had to get going.

Where was…I turned around to find where Stewart had gone. He was on the edge of his bed peeling his clothes off. Uh-oh.

“Stewart, stop.”

“Why?”

I slipped the printouts into a file folder, dropped the disk into my pocket, and gathered everything together. I stood up and faced him, faced the result of my deception. He was already naked from the waist up, which was highly distracting, considering the way he was shaped.

“I misled you, and I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“I’m leaving now.”

“You’re—” He reached up and scratched his left shoulder with his right hand. “Aren’t we going to fuck?”

“Not tonight. I need to get this stuff to my clients. The faster they see it, the faster you get your offer. Think of it that way, and…” I inched toward the door. “Thanks for your help. You’ll be hearing from us soon.”

Chapter

33

T
HE LAST EXHIBIT SHOT OFF TO
H
ARVEY VIA
e-mail around three in the morning, East Coast time. He was so nervous I decided to stay up in case he called with more questions. I did, in fact, stay up, but not awake, and when I heard the neighbor’s door slam and opened my eyes, it was six-thirty. The last time I remembered checking the clock was at three twenty-five.