212

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

2:30 P.M.

Stacy Schecter blew her bangs out of her eyes and swirled a sip of pinot noir on her tongue as she contemplated the painted canvas in front of her. The splotches of muted color on the skin were about right, but there was something about the expression on the woman’s face that was still off.

This painting was something entirely new for Stacy. For the last two years, she’d worked on little other than the abstract yet soothing stretched canvases that could fetch her a couple hundred dollars on the street. She had hoped to be featured in solo exhibitions in Chelsea’s best galleries by now, but in reality, the only paintings she’d ever sold went to people who cared more about aesthetically pleasing wall decor than actual art.

Stacy hadn’t painted anything representational since college. Her parents had sent their troubled daughter to the West Coast believing that four years of open space and fresh air, away from her overly precocious New York friends, might somehow prove transformative. The hippie college in Washington to which they had steered her, just an hour’s drive from her older sister’s house in Seattle, was supposed to provide an outlet for her creativity and rebellious ways. Stacy figured she’d met all expectations by becoming an art major and had exceeded them by graduating in the top half of her class.

Apparently her parents had some other understanding of whatever transformation was supposed to have occurred during those four years. When she returned home with the same basic attitude and no employable skills, her parents had cut her off.

Stacy tried to be legit, and in the next four years she learned more than she’d ever picked up in college. She applied for design jobs, then marketing, then assistant positions, and then finally moved down to waitressing. But the money was never enough.

She might still be waiting tables if it hadn’t been for that night at the Bowery Ballroom. She and her friend Carmen had gone to see Morrisey two decades after a young Stacy first discovered the Smiths and declared to her mother that she was no longer a carnivore because Meat Is Murder. Three cocktails in, still waiting for the show to start, Carmen went off on a slurred rant about a girl she knew who was turning tricks for extra cash. Stacy found herself defending this woman she didn’t know and the choice that she had made for herself. And long after Morrisey finished his finale of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” she couldn’t put the idea to rest.

A little more than a year later, she could pay her bills and still have plenty of time left over to paint.

Stacy certainly didn’t boast about the way she earned her money, but she also didn’t see the problem. At any expensive club or restaurant, on any given night, countless girls were on first dates with hedge-fund assholes. They spent the night sipping from the bottle service in the VIP lounge or nibbling on a two-hundred-dollar tasting menu with the expectation that they’d put out for the night and never be spoken to again. What Stacy did was no different, but she skipped the bullshit conversation and got to spend the money as she saw fit. If anything, those gold-digging date-girls were bigger whores than she was.

She usually had no problem separating her primary income source from the rest of her life. As Stacy, she scrunched up her shagged hair with molding paste, piled on the eyeliner, sported a wardrobe of black, leather, and denim, and cursed more than a pissed-off ex-con. When she dated, she smoothed her hair with straightening gel, donned clothes that a Long Island housewife might call “classy,” and smiled a lot through a thin layer of age-appropriate makeup. And when she was done with the date, she stopped thinking about that part of her life entirely. It hadn’t been easy, but that’s what she’d trained herself to do.

But now the fake life was bleeding into the real one. And with real blood.

She looked again at the canvas. The facial expression. It wasn’t right.

Part of her wished those detectives hadn’t shown her the pictures. If she hadn’t come across as such a cunt at first, if they had trusted her to cooperate, maybe they wouldn’t have felt forced to place those photographs in front of her. Maybe she wouldn’t have seen what happened to Miranda. To Katie Battle.

But she had. And now, like those first thoughts after the Morrissey concert about Carmen’s friend, she could not stop thinking about those photographs.

She placed her half-full wineglass on the table next to her palette, plopped onto her bed, and opened her laptop. She clicked on her bookmarks menu and pulled up www.TheEroticReview.com. Within seconds, she was looking at her profile on the site. Shunning the faux-glamour pseudonyms so frequent in the trade—Angel, Destiny, Cherry, and the like—she went simply by Ess, short for Stacy, when forced to use any name at all. She scrolled her way down the page, past the description of her appearance, past the list of services offered, and saw that a new review had been posted. A user calling himself Carlo had given her a 9 for both appearance (“model material”) and performance (“I forgot it was a service”). She’d take it.

She’d first learned of the site more than a year earlier. When she saw its description of a “community of escorts, hobbyists, and service providers,” she was certain it was a sting, some kind of trap by law enforcement. But then some of the other girls vouched for it. “The amazon-dot-com of the sex trade,” one girl had called the site. Even Stacy had found herself flinching at the rawness of the language as she clicked yes or no to the various services one could offer. But eventually the site had enabled her to leave the escort services behind and go out on her own. Between the hardcore hobbyists who found her on this site, and the more casual clients who used Craig’s List, she had more than enough business.

Next she checked her Hotmail account, the one that was untraceable, the one she used for her Craig’s List postings.

She saw her ads as a form of creative writing—not a particularly challenging form, but a form nevertheless. Like dirty little greeting cards, her online listings all followed the same clichéd storylines—bored housewife looking for adventure, pent-up sales executive needs to indulge her fantasy life, graduate student available for private modeling. In the norms of the sex industry, potential johns saw these ads for what they were—a thinly veiled cover for an illegal offer of sex for money.

The one strain of continuity through all of her ads was the description of herself as an “honest and attractive brunette.” Stacy didn’t let her dates have her phone number. Being untraceable minimized the chances of getting caught.

But she didn’t mind regulars. If someone wanted to date her again, and she wanted to accept, she told them all they had to do was peruse the Craig’s List postings. Women Seeking Men. Look for the “honest and attractive brunette.”

She scrolled through her in-box on Hotmail, past the inevitable Viagra and diet-related spam, searching for any mention of Craig’s List in the subject lines of the new messages. She found one toward the bottom of the page and clicked on it.

Someone had responded to the ad she’d placed that morning.

I am an honest and attractive brunette. I came to New York for adventure but am having difficulty finding a place to stay for the night and hopefully will find a good man to take care of me. This is for real. Please write back with your phone number if you are interested.

She opened the reply and immediately noticed the return address: GoodMan@hotmail.com. Someone had apparently created an account specifically for this message. Probably had a suspicious wife who snuck too many peeks at his BlackBerry.

I’m sorry to hear that your search for adventure has left you stranded. I think I can help you out if you can meet with me tomorrow night. I’m very generous towards the right kind of woman under the right terms. No phone number to offer, but e-mail me back with a photograph and a place where you’d feel comfortable meeting, and we’ll work out the details in person.

Stacy was accustomed to discovering that she was not the only half of the transaction who required anonymity. She could tell this guy was a repeat player. There were no explicit references to sex for money, lest she be a decoy working a police sting. But all of the not-so-subtle hints were there: veiled references to generosity, terms, details. He knew the drill.

She clicked on the reply button but found herself hesitating as she began to type the text that would finalize the particulars of the date. She rose from the bed and stood again in front of her easel.

This time, she realized what had been bothering her about the woman’s face. It was her mouth. It was too relaxed. Too tranquil. Even more than the strangling marks on her neck, what had been so disturbing about those pictures of Miranda had been her lips—twisted unnaturally, the kind of bizarre facial expression sometimes captured in the awkward timing of a bad snapshot. Stacy still could not believe that Miranda had died with her mouth frozen in that state.

She painted over the mouth in putty gray, using the tip of her brush to sketch more angular lines that she would eventually trace over with color.

That blond detective had lectured her about the dangers of what she was doing. She had tried to manipulate her into “changing her lifestyle,” as she put it. And she’d used the horrible things that had been done to Miranda in an attempt to persuade her. She could still hear that tough and somehow slightly condescending tone in the detective’s voice when she’d told her, “The next time, it could be you.” The detective even forced Stacy to add her cell number to her phone so she’d have it any time she needed—“even just to talk, Stacy.”

Using her name with her, like they were friends. Ironically, it was a move Stacy used with her dates—or at least the ones who seemed to want some semblance of intimacy.

Well, the detective was wrong. Miranda didn’t deserve what happened to her. No one did. But Miranda had never been street-smart. She didn’t have that intuition that could tell her right away if a guy was a problem or not. Stacy did. She was a good judge of character. And she was smarter than Miranda.

And she knew the police were full of shit because they also warned her to stay away from Heather. Maybe Heather—or Tanya from Baltimore—had bolted. But there was no way she had anything to do with those heinous things that had been done to Miranda. She probably just got scared when she saw Miranda’s picture on the news after she was killed. She probably decided to give up the life and get the hell out of Dodge—sort of like what that blond detective wanted for Stacy.

She walked back to her bed and typed the reply e-mail. She attached a photograph of herself, the one in a bikini and a cowboy hat.

She hit the send key. Easy money.