The Secret (11 page)

“Who’s it?”

“Me, Jerry.”

“C’mon in. It’s not locked.”

He was right; the door was ajar, so I walked into the parlor of his suite.

“In here, Jer’,” he said from the bedroom. “C’mon in.”

He was lying on his back on the bed, with his pants down around his ankles, and one of the Yale girls, the one who had modeled the maillot, was naked and lay with her face in his lap, her head vigorously pumping up and down as she worked on that ten-inch cock of his. She couldn’t get much more than half of it in, but she obviously wanted all of it.

“Siddown,” said Sal. “You can watch her finish me, and then I’ll watch her do you.”

“Giselle is waiting for me in the bar. I came to ask you to join us for a drink.”

“Oh.… Well, okay. Gimme five minutes. Will five minutes do it, Val?”

“Oom-hoom. Better had.”

When he came down to the bar, he brought her with him. Her name was Valerie, and she was in fact a Yale student, majoring in economics. She had a gorgeous figure, as I’ve said, but otherwise she was no raving beauty. She had absolutely no sense of embarrassment or shame. She saw that I was sitting with Giselle and could guess that I’d told Giselle about her, but that didn’t bother her either. She accepted a Scotch and soda and sat glancing around the room, as if judging her chances of finding another cock to suck, another hundred dollars to pocket.

When we got back to the room, I called Betty Logan and told her she was not to hire Valerie as a model again.

“What’s the problem?”

“She’s a hooker.”

“
That little girl?
My God!”

The fact was, Betty knew full well that Valerie was a hooker. So was the other girl who had modeled at the preview. Betty was a panderer. Her specialty was college girls, and New England colleges supplied her plenty of inventory for her trade. There were always college girls who were short of money or who longed for adventure. There were plenty of men, most of them well educated, secure, and prosperous, who were not interested in bar hookers but entertained fantasies of bedding a college girl. That she was not flashy-beautiful made her all the more attractive to these men. Betty had found a market. It was like Buddy said: sell something people want, maybe something they didn’t know they wanted.

Betty had a stable of four or five girls she could call on anytime, plus a list of maybe ten others she could call for occasions. They had to show up dressed like college girls: skirts, sweaters, subdued makeup; and they had to be able to talk like college girls, whether they really were or not.

When I hired her to manage my store, Betty was in the process of renewing her stable. If she was going to be in New Haven, Yale could be her prime source. Her clientele would be intrigued by the idea of bedding down with a coed. But there were other schools. I discovered eventually that she had two girls from Fairfield, two from Quinnipiac, one from Bridgeport, and one from the University of Connecticut—among others.

Except for the Yale ones, these girls had to have cars! Well … they charged a hundred dollars a visit. Betty took twenty. Sal had handed Valerie a hundred dollars. If I had let her suck me off while he watched, that would have cost
me
a hundred. This was no small-time trade. It was, as the old story went, the carriage trade. Like Buddy said, sell people what they want.…

The New Haven Cheeks store was to be Betty’s showroom. Her girls came to the store and hung around there, ostensibly as clerks. Sometimes they stimulated interest by modeling pieces of our merchandise.

Betty damn near ran us out of business.

22

She used our store as a showroom for her hookers. Then she did something more.

Generally, we didn’t go for this kind of thing, but in a few towns we did cooperate with a local restaurant to put on a weekly lunchtime lingerie show for businessmen. The restaurant had to be respectable, not just a bar, and it could not be a joint that offered strippers in the evening. We preferred a restaurant that had a separate room for our show, like the room where the local Rotarians or Kiwanians met for lunch or dinner. That way, only people who wanted to see a lingerie show with their lunch saw a lingerie show. And, finally, we allowed only our less daring merchandise to be shown.

It wasn’t a bad deal in the towns where it worked. The nighties, bikinis, and lingerie they modeled were for sale, and typically we sold several hundred dollars worth each show. Better yet, it was a perfect form of advertising for us.

It was also a perfect form of advertising for Betty’s business. She brought her hookers—some of them college girls—to model lingerie. With something less than subtlety, she let it be known that her models might be receptive to a profitable proposition.

“You like that nightie? Laura would be glad to model it for you at your office. There’s a scantier version, too, that we don’t show in these public appearances. In fact, we have a lot of merchandise that we don’t show publicly, that might interest a gentleman like you. Of course, the model doesn’t have to be Laura. We have several other models who’ll be glad to come to your office, or your home for that matter, to model for you.”

Pimping was not our business. “Hell,” said Sal. “If we wanted to do that, we could organize it a whole lot better and make a hell of a lot more money.”

It also had its hazards.

Sal didn’t like to meet in the office. He preferred to sit down over a nice lunch or dinner to talk business. We met at Sparks. We had thick steaks and plenty of rich red wine.

“That bitch in New Haven is giving us a problem,” he said when our steaks were in front of us.

“I figured she would.”

“Gonna have to do something about it,” he said.

“Gimme the problem.”

“Okay. Remember the little gal you saw blowin’ me? Valerie? You told Betty to get rid of her, but she didn’t. Valerie has been working for Betty right along. I mean, hey, you have to figure the little bitch is too good to just shove out the door.”

“Well, Betty is not that good. Maybe we gotta shove
her
out the door.”

“You don’t know what the problem is.”

“Okay. What’s the problem?”

“Well … Valerie specializes in … you know what she specializes in. So, okay, one night she’s givin’ it to a guy named Earhart, who’s president of one of the New Haven Rotary clubs. For some reason she starts to
bite
the guy. I don’t know what he did or said, but he swears she started bitin’ him. He couldn’t stand that, so he slugged her hard and broke her nose.”

“It could happen,” I said. “A long time ago, in the thirties, I think, a professor at Ohio State University, by the name of Dr. Snook, had beaten coed Theora Hix to death with a ball-peen hammer, with the same justification, that she was biting him. Years later Robert Chambers claimed he killed Jennifer Chambers for the same reason, that she was causing him unbearable pain.”

“Well, everybody in New Haven knows about it and attaches it to our store. It’s a great big joke in New Haven, and we’re part of it.”

“So what do we do about it?” I asked.

“Lemme finish telling you the problem. Valerie’s parents haven’t seen her yet. But they will, and when they do they’re gonna wanta know why the busted nose. Valerie’s threatening to sue Earhart. Betty is in a tizzy. Only thing I can think of to do is go up there and visit the parties.”

“I’ll go,” I said. I was concerned about just what Sal might do.

“We’ll both go.”

I called Betty and had her arrange a meeting with Earhart and Valerie. Sal and I rented a hotel suite, had a bar stocked in it, and ordered a display of hors d’oeuvres to be displayed.

Earhart arrived first. I had called him after Betty spoke with him and asked him to meet us earlier than she had specified. I wanted to talk with him before Betty and Valerie arrived.

He was a small man, maybe fifty years old, afflicted with male-pattern baldness, so much that his head was shiny. He was a realtor. I think he had a sense that he was in the presence of the Mafia. He accepted a Scotch and soda and chose a few nibbles from the table.

“Have you recovered, Mr. Earhart?” I asked.

“Not entirely,” he said wryly. He sat on the couch, looked down at his lap, and frowned. “Painful…”

“I can imagine,” I said. “How did you make the connection with Valerie?”

“It was the third time. Betty had brought her to the restaurant where our Rotary Club meets. They were sitting at the bar when our meeting broke up, and I came out, and Betty introduced her, said she was majoring in economics at Yale. We talked awhile and—”

“And Betty offered her for—”

“We talked awhile, and Betty said Valerie knew how to make men feel good. She’d make
me
feel good for a hundred dollars. And that’s how it got started.”

Sal, who was standing at the window looking down on the street, grinned.

“I want you to understand something, Mr. Earhart,” I said. “Valerie doesn’t work for us. She doesn’t work for Cheeks.”

“She’s around the store a lot.”

“I know. She works for Betty Logan.”

“And Betty Logan works for you.”

“Not after today she doesn’t.”

Betty arrived a few minutes later, with Valerie in tow. The girl had been no great beauty before, but now, with her nose flattened, she was anything but. She took a Scotch, drank it, and poured herself another.

“What we have here is a nasty incident, followed by a nasty scandal,” I said. “It’s in everybody’s interest to settle it.”

“I want my plastic surgery paid for,” said Valerie.

“By
me,
you mean?” Earhart asked. “Forget it.”

“Did you bite him, Valerie?” I asked.

“Damn right I did.”

“Why?”

“He started to complain I wasn’t doing it right, wasn’t making him feel good the way I’d done before. That was his imagination. I was doing exactly what I’d done before.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“So he grabbed me by the hair, pulled my face up, and slapped me. Then he shoved my face down again. And I bit him. What’d he expect?”

Now Sal intervened. “Would you want the details of this thing, which still is just a rumor, covered in the newspapers?” he asked.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Sal Nero.”

“Who’s Sal Nero?”

“Ask Al Patrioto.”

Earhart drew a deep breath. “Uh … okay.” He turned to me. “You used the word ‘settle.’ What’s it take to settle this thing?”

“Five thousand,” said Sal.

Valerie shook her head. “
Five thousand!
No way!”

“It’ll buy your new nose,” said Sal coldly. “With some left over for bent feelings. That’s the deal, Valerie. You wanta deal with
me
instead?”

“
I
might have something to say about this,” Betty interjected.

“You don’t have anything to say about anything,” Sal told her roughly. “You’re fired.”

So that’s how it worked out. Earhart paid Valerie five thousand dollars in cash. Valerie’s parents accepted the story that she had broken her nose playing touch football, and the authorities heard nothing of the whole deal.

Or did they? Of course they did. They just stood aside and waited to see how it would turn out.

Firing Betty didn’t solve our problem. The word was around New Haven and Connecticut that the Cheeks store was where you went to arrange for a first-class piece of tail.

An element of the problem was that Betty’s girls
were
first-class. Think of it. You’re a Bridgeport lawyer, a Hartford doctor, a New Haven realtor, a Groton engineer … you’ve got a failed marriage, or no marriage, and you’ve got the hots. What you might pick up in a bar risks mugging, to start with, and a multitude of other complications besides. So how about a cute little girl working her way through college? No great beauty maybe, but ready to earn her money and able to carry on an intelligent conversation, too, if that’s what you want. She doesn’t look like a hooker. She shows up in a pleated plaid skirt, a cardigan sweater, a single strand of pearls, wearing undies she didn’t get at Cheeks … and she does a job of play-acting that she enjoys what you do to her as much as you enjoy it yourself.

But—hey!—how long can the cops and the district attorney let this go on in a town that prides itself on a
degree
of propriety?

Which, in the end, was still not the problem.

*   *   *

I’m sitting in my office in Manhattan, only half aware of what was going on in New Haven, now absent Betty Logan, when I’m visited by a guy who introduces himself as Alberto Patrioto.

I’d heard the name. The Five Families ran New York. The Patriotos ran New England.

Oh, he was a caricature! Camel coat. Gray hat. Black suit. Paisley handkerchief carefully folded in his breast pocket. Cigar.

He was direct. “I supposed,” he said, “that we did not intrude on each other’s territory.”

“I am agreeable to that,” I said, though I had no idea what he might think
my
territory might be.

“You agree that New Haven is not in your territory?”

“It is not in my territory, Mr. Patrioto.”

“Then why the hell you runnin’ a first-class whorehouse in my family’s territory?”

I remember that I closed my eyes and nodded. I should have known. “Mr. Patrioto … All I’m trying to run in New Haven is a lingerie shop. Betty Logan turned it into a whorehouse entirely against my wishes and my instructions. When I found out about it, I fired her.”

He stared at me for a moment, then nodded, to my relief. “I can believe it. The woman has always been a bitch. But she makes money. She’s always done that. What I got in mind is a little deal. You take her back and let her run her little business on the side. You hand us, say, twenty-five percent of the take from your store—and we’ll make sure that includes twenty-five percent of what Betty’s takin’ in. We’ll excuse you for hornin’ in on our territory. We’ll take care of a couple little problems that might be comin’ your way, like with the cops. And everybody’ll be happy.”

“Everybody but me,” I said. “All I want to do is run a chain of lingerie shops. I didn’t check with you before I opened my store in New Haven because I didn’t think you would be interested in selling women’s underwear. If word gets around that my Cheeks store in New Haven is a whorehouse, that could ruin my whole chain. So, let me suggest a different deal. I’ll turn the store over to you, one hundred percent, the whole schmear. You can run it any way you want, with Betty and her girls or without. I’ll supply you with merchandise at my cost. And all I ask is that you take the name Cheeks off the store.”