“Did you ever know Andre to be physically abusive to any of the women he managed?”
She snickered.
“You mean like a real pimp?”
I nodded.
“No. When he wants to get rough, he knows people who can do the rough stuff for him.”
“Like who?”
“I don’t know any names. I just know he’s not that physical. And there were a few times when some guy was trying to chip off his deal and he had to put a stop to it. At least that’s what he told me.”
“You mean guys trying to take over the online stuff?”
“Yeah, like that.”
“You know who they were?”
“No, I don’t know names or anything. Just what Andre told me.”
“What about the guys who do the rough stuff for him? You ever see those guys?”
“I saw them once when I needed them. Some guy wouldn’t pay and I called Andre when the john was in the shower. His guys showed up like that.”
She snapped her fingers.
“They made him pay, all right. The guy thought that because he was on some show on cable that nobody ever heard of he didn’t have to pay. Everybody pays.”
The waitress finally came back to the table. Stacey ordered a BLT on what else?—toast—and a Diet Coke. I went with chicken salad on a croissant and switched from coffee to iced tea.
“Who was Glenda hiding from?” I asked as soon as we were alone again.
Stacey handled the jump cut in direction pretty casually.
“Isn’t everybody hiding from somebody or something?”
“I don’t know. Was she?”
“She never talked about it, but she looked over her shoulder a lot, if you know what I mean. Especially when she came back here.”
This wasn’t getting anywhere.
“What did she tell you about me?”
“She said that when she lived out here before, you were her lawyer, but she could never call you again if she took a bust.”
The waitress put down our drinks and I waited until she was gone.
“Why couldn’t she call me?”
“I don’t know. Because it would all unravel, I guess.”
That wasn’t the answer I expected. I thought that she would say that Glenda could never call me because it would expose her betrayal.
“Unravel? Was that her word?”
“That’s what she said, yeah.”
“What did she mean by that?”
“I don’t know, she just said things. She said it could unravel. I don’t know what it meant and she didn’t say any more about it.”
Stacey was starting to act put out by the questioning. I leaned back and thought about things. Besides offering a few tantalizing words with no further explanation, she wasn’t much help. I guess I had been foolish to think Gloria Dayton—if that was even her real name—had confided in another prostitute about her distant past.
All I knew now was that the whole thing depressed me. Gloria-Glenda-Giselle had been inextricably bound to the life. Unable to leave it, and it eventually took everything away from her. It was an old story and in a year’s time it would be forgotten or replaced by the next one.
Our food came but I had lost my appetite. I watched Starry-Eyed Stacey put globs of mayonnaise on her BLT and eat it like a little girl, licking her fingers after the first bite. And that didn’t lift my spirits either.