First Class Killing

Chapter 14

HARVEY ’S HOUSE INBROOKLINE WAS LIKE THE suits he wore-formal for the rest of the world but comfortable for him. Also like his suits, if you looked closely, you could see the seams coming apart or the creases fraying from too much wear.

We were in his office, which was the only room in which I ever felt comfortable. That wasn’t because it was so cozy. Harvey ’s office was like an elegant reading room in a venerable old library-darkly paneled, highly burnished, and plush with an overstuffed wingback chair, a thickly upholstered couch, and a deep burgundy and blue rug. I always had the urge to whisper there. But I liked it better than his kitchen or his bath or bedroom, because that’s where he kept all the trappings of his illness-pill bottles, heating pads, and walking aids-that he didn’t want anyone to see.

The only personal item he seemed to want anyone to see was the lovingly framed picture in his office of the dark-eyed woman with the luxurious auburn hair. She sat on his desk with a sweet smile, looking like the loving wife who would come through the door any minute to fix his favorite dinner and tend to him in his illness.

She wouldn’t.

It was a picture of his ex-wife, Rachel, and though he might have thought of her often, he talked about her rarely. It took him a long time before he would tell me their story.

He’d met her years before when he traveled to Boston on an insurance fraud case. Rachel was his contact at the insurance company. He fell in love, they married, and she dumped him seven years later, because, he insisted, he snored and enjoyedDiagnosis Murder. She had moved out, leaving him in the duplex in Brookline they had shared. When I asked why he didn’t go home to his people, especially since he was bound to need more help at some point, he said he couldn’t bear to leave the city, the neighborhood, the very house where he’d passed his happiest years. But I knew the real reason he stayed. Rachel lived nearby, and on a good day, he caught a glimpse of her. On a very good day, he saw her without her new husband.

“This list is extraordinary.” He leaned back in his executive swivel chair. I had printed out a hard copy of the master list from LA and laid it out for him on his big desk. Even with a small font, it made for a thick stack of pages. “All of these men are patrons of prostitutes? Is that what you believe?”

“Patrons or potentials. According to the column headings, they’re either clients of Angel’s or clients and potential clients of the LA crew. Look, there are even notes showing which of Angel’s clients have already been converted.”

“Where did you get this?”

“The party was put on by the LA women. They were taking names at the door on a computer. It must have been one of theirs, because the lists were in it.”

“It is fascinating, but what value to us and the case? I know I need not remind you that these clients are no doubt passengers and therefore-”

“Off limits. No, you need not. I have a different idea. I want to use Angel’s adversity to our advantage.” I was pacing around Harvey ’s furniture, trying to burn off the nervous energy that comes from the birth of a bright new idea.

“How?”

“Angel was not at that party last night to expand her horizons. She was there protecting her interests. She wasn’t there to recruit. She was there to scope out the competition.”

“Please do not suggest to me that you want to open a new front on this investigation.”

“No, I want to finish this one. What I learned last night was that Angel has a business problem.”

“It would seem so.”

“People with business problems need business strategies to solve them.”

“Ideally.”

“Where do you get a strategy if you can’t think one up yourself?”

“Consultants.”

“Exactly.” I stopped and presented myself for inspection. “You’re looking at Angel’s new management consultant.”

“Oh.” He leaned all the way back in his chair. “Oh, my.”

I never seemed to get the reactions I expected from Harvey. This idea had rejuvenated my confidence about the case, but he seemed intent on being ambivalent. I came around the couch and sat in the chair in front of his desk. “That’s how I’ll get close to her. I’ll pitch myself as someone who can help save her business, and I’ll use these names as a teaser. She’ll want those names, Harvey.”

“Dare I ask, what do you know about her business?”

“All businesses are the same when it comes down to it. She’s losing market share to a start-up that is offering promotional rates and discount services to undercut her pricing structure. A problem,” it occurred to me, “not unlike one of the many currently roiling the airlines. That’s how I thought of my strategy.”

“You have a strategy?”

“A frequent fucker program.”

“Excuse me?”

“A frequent fucker program. That’s the solution to Angel’s problems and to ours. It will revolutionize her business.”

“I thought our goal was to destroy her business.”

“Yeah…well, it is. But I have to make her think I’m helping her. I’m a consultant. I have to come up with a strategy, which I have. I just need your help in fleshing out some of the details. I was hoping we could brainstorm. Also, we need to put it in a PowerPoint package so I can present it to her.”

“Oh, my word, you must be joking.”

“Let me explain it to you before you reject it outright. Angel needs a way to retain her women, especially the top earners, and a way to keep her clients loyal to her. The frequent fucker program solves both problems at once.”

“Could we perhaps refer to it as something else?”

“Okay, the FFP. We create a loyalty program with tiers, just like the airlines. Clients will earn points in the program by buying services. The more they buy, the more points they earn. The more points they earn, the more hooked in they are to the provider of those services. It’s like crack. Once you start, you’re in.”

“What are the points for?”

“Free stuff. Prizes. Same as any other program.”

“What sorts of prizes did you have in mind?”

“What do you think? Providers of air service offer free trips. Providers of sexual services offer free f-”

“What would keep the women in LA from just copying it?”

“That’s the genius of this plan, if I do say so myself. Angel has something they don’t have: history.”

“History?”

“She has records of all her clients’ activity to date. She can award points and status retroactively based on prior transactions. She’ll lock in the current customers so they won’t leave, and she might get back some who have left her. She can throw up a limited-time offer. Come back within the week, and get credit for all your prior activity. I love this plan.”

“The LA group could create history, could they not?”

“It’s not the same. Harvey, you have no idea how much people like the concept of a loyalty program. It’s like Dan said: don’t fuck with market forces. Use them.”

“This was Dan’s idea?”

“Sort of. He started me thinking about it.”

He offered one of his stingy smiles. “Why does that not surprise me?”

“The best part is, it works not only for Angel but for us, too.”

“How?”

“I’ll insist on meeting her Web master to develop the specs for the program. I think the Web master is the key to getting Angel.”

“Web master? She has one of those?”

“She has aWeb site. That means someone built it and maintains it. I suppose it’s possible she does it herself, but Irene and Tristan seem to think she’s borderline illiterate. My guess is she has someone who does it for her. If the scheduling is done through the Web site, then probably payments are as well, which is the jackpot for us. That’s how we prove that there is payment for sex. All that information would reside right there with the Web master.”

He shoved out his lower lip and tapped on the temple of his glasses. “Do you really think she will hire you?”

“We’ll see. I planted the seed with her last night. The fact that she was out there with her crew tells me she knows she has a problem.”

“I am hesitant to implement a change like this so close to the end of the case.”

“ Harvey, we are nowhere near the end of this case, and I have already wasted a lot of time trying to fit in with a group of women who will never accept me. I don’t have the goods to be a hooker. I don’t look like them, I don’t think like them, I don’t dress like them, and I’m too old. But this-” I reached over and drilled the stack of pages with my index finger. “This is the kind of stuff I’m good at. I have years of business experience, and so do you. This we can do on our terms.”

“Very well. If you think you can do it.”

“I know I can do it. I got some stuff at the party, new intelligence.” I pulled my backpack up off the floor, unzipped it, and started digging for my notes. “Have you been able to do the top swapper analysis?”

“I am still waiting for the schedules. Apparently, they are quite large.”

“What about the Robin Sevitch murder?”

“I have done a bit of research, which I can give you. Her death was quite violent. She was beaten to death by a homeless man. One of the detectives who worked on the case is supposed to call me.”

“Here they are.” I pulled out my notes-four pages from my small notebook and two cocktail napkins, all wrinkled and some stained. My notebook hadn’t fit into my little skirt, so I’d ripped out some pages and stuck them in my waistband. When I ran out, I had apparently switched to cocktail napkins. I spread everything across the desk and smoothed them flat. It was the first time I had looked at them since I’d written them, and it was deeply disconcerting to see words and phrases written in my hand to which I felt not even the barest cognitive connection.

“What are those?”

“I did an interview at the party.”

What was even more disturbing was to follow the change in my handwriting, the slow loss of function, the slowsurrendering of function from early to late in the evening. I stared at the completely illegible scratches on the last napkin. How had I become the person who had written that?

“Tony” was written on the first loose page. I saw his name, and I remembered his seedy smell. I shivered all over again at the feel of his cold, fumbling hands through the thin knit tank top. But I felt something else, too, as I looked over the notes-a stirring of anticipation, because Tony, a client of the ring, had given me the name of the Web site he accessed to schedule dates, along with his sign-in name.

“ Harvey, type this Web address into your computer.”

He swiveled around to face the typewriter stand on which he had replaced his IBM Selectric with an old and slow desktop PC. He used his index fingers to tap himself into his browser. I read the address, and he typed that in. I walked around to see just as the error message popped up on the screen.

“It does not work.”

“Try it with ‘dot org’ and ‘dot net.’ ”

He did. “Nothing.”

I went back to the source documents and studied them again. Tony the Actor’s information had come earlier in the evening, so it was perfectly legible. The Web address was there, but so was something else that caught my eye.

“He said something about pool girls.”

“Who?”

“This guy I was talking to. He thought I was a hooker. He mentioned pool girls.”

“Pool girls? Such as cabana girls?”

“I don’t know. I wonder if it was something about the pool at the party?” I tried to think back to my conversation with Tony. There was so much about it I didn’t want to remember; it was hard to pick out the wheat from the chaff.

“Do you have the Web site?”

I found the address and read it off again, this time assuming thei was anl.

“That one works,” he said, leaning in to study the results.

I went over and insinuated myself in front of his keyboard. “Scoot over.”

The two of us stared, Harvey sitting and me crouching next to him, at a screen that was blank except for a sign-in box and a password box, just as Dan’s contact had said it would be.

“I have the sign-in name.” I found it on one of my wrinkled pages. “It’s TonyThesp001. But that doesn’t help us much without the password, and this guy had no password. That’s why he was talking to me.”

We stared for a few more seconds. I knew very little when it came to what was behind the slick surface of the Internet. Harvey knew less. But I knew someone who could help.

“ Harvey, would you be averse to me bringing someone in who might be able to help us on this Web stuff?”

“Help how?”

“He’s a hacker. We worked on that case down in Miami earlier this year. He’s phenomenal. He helped me break it.”

“What can he do for us?”

“First of all, he can get us past this screen. That would be a snap. Maybe he can track it all back to the Web master. If he can, he might be able to suck everything we need right out of there without anyone ever knowing.”

“Can we afford him? Our margins at this point are razor-thin.”

“He worked for free last time. I don’t want to ask him to do that again. I’ll pay him out of my end.”

“If you think he can help, call him, by all means. You do not have to pay from your share, but keep in mind that we are time-constrained.”

“I know. That’s one reason we need him. He’s fast.” I checked my watch. It was after eleven, which must have been the reason Harvey was in a robe and slippers. My internal clock was wacky from traversing time zones. All I knew was this one day had already seemed two days long. I had to go home to bed. “I’ll call him tomorrow.”