First Class Killing

by Lynne Heitman

  “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.”

  Chapter

  15

  FELIXMELENDEZ, JR., PICKED UP IN THE MIDDLEof the first ring.

  “Majestic-Airlines-Passenger-Services-this-is-Felix-how-can-I-help-you?”

  He sounded the same, his voice as bright and sparkling as the morning sun streaming through my window. I wondered if he looked the same, tall and lanky, all joints and hinges, like the kid he still was. I also wondered if Majestic had let him keep his spiky hair with the frosted tips.

  “Hello, Felix.”

  After the slightest pause, there came a gusher of excitement that flowed over the phone lines and practically lifted me off my stool, where I sat enjoying breakfast at home and not in some hotel coffee shop on the road.

  “MissSha nahan? Is that you? Wow. This is so cool to hear from you. How did you find me…I mean…of course, you could find me. How are you? How have you been? I can’t believe it. Are you in Miami?”

  “I’m in Boston. How is life at the airport? Do you love it?”

  “Way cool, Miss S. Way,way cool. I love it so much here. The people are so nice to me. It’s exactly what I wanted.”

  Same old Felix. He lived in a world without skepticism, irony, or sarcasm. He was delighted by life, all parts of it, even something as dispiriting as the airline business. I loved talking to him.

  “Listen, Felix. Do you have time to do some work for me? I’ll pay you this time.”

  “Really? Are youse rious? That would be, like, so awesome to work for you again. But you can’t pay me.”

  “Why not?” I finished my last spoonful of oatmeal, went to the refrigerator for an orange, swung by the sink for a paper towel, and sat back down to start peeling. “I don’t want you working for free.”

  “It’s a rule. I’m employed full-time for Majestic Airlines, which means no way I can have any other jobs.”

  “It wouldn’t be a job. It’s more like a…a…”

  “I read the regs, Miss S. It says it in there.”

  “You read the regs?” A staggering thought. The rules and regulations of Majestic Airlines were collected in three thick volumes written in the driest prose this side of the phone book.

  “Yes, ma’am. All three volumes.”

  I hadn’t even considered the conflict of interest. But I needed his help, and I did not want to take advantage of him. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  He batted the suggestion aside, which, having said it, I realized he would. Felix was an honest fellow. “I’ll do it as a favor to you, for getting me this job. I love this job.”

  “No, Felix. Remember, I got you this job to repay you for the last bit of work you did for me for free.”

  “Miss Shanahan, please. It would be my pleasure. I insist.”

  It was too tempting an offer to turn down. Felix was masterful with a computer and was just plain fun to have in my life. I would figure out some other way to pay him. “I don’t want to interfere with your work schedule there.”

  “Whoa, cool…I mean, that’s not a problem. I make my own schedule.”

  “You make your own schedule?” There was no making of your own work schedule at an airport that operated around a real schedule—departures and arrivals.

  “They made up a new job for me. I’m in charge of all the computer equipment. Do you know how often the baggage system goes down?”

  I finished peeling my orange and pulled apart the sections as he rattled on. It was good and sweet and sticky, and the juice got all over my fingers. “Are you having fun?”

  “This is so much better than working at the hotel. I’m going to owe you for the rest of my life. What do you need? Do you need me to come up there? Because I can be on an airplane tomorrow—”

  “No, Felix. I think you can do this from the comfort of your own home. I need you to track down the origination of a Web site.” I gave him the Web site address from Tony the Actor and his sign-in name. “I have no password.”

  “I don’t need a password.”

  “Right. Sorry.” I’d forgotten that offering a password to Felix was like offering a key to a locksmith. “What I need you to do is try to find a way into this site so I can see the screens and the customer interfaces. Also, if you can track back and get any information on who pays for the domain and/or who maintains it, that would all be useful. Best-case scenario is we can find the person who runs it, track back to his computer, and suck out all the data it collects.”

  “Do I need to know what to look for?”

  “Good point. I’m investigating a prostitution ring run by flight attendants. This is supposed to be the scheduling site, but don’t be alarmed if any skin shows up.”

  “Skin? Oh.Ohhhhhh. Ohmygosh. Wow. Okay, then. Like I said, I’ll get going on it. And Miss Shanahan?”

  “I wish you would call me Alex.”

  “I’m really, really glad you called me. Thank you so much for letting me do this for you.”

  It was the same as last time. I had Felix thanking me for letting him do me a huge favor.

  “Call me if you get anything.”

  “I will.”

  I hung up with the sure knowledge that no matter what Felix ended up doing with his life, he would always be underemployed.

  I took my bowl, now filled with orange peel, to the sink to dump down the disposal. While it was grinding and the water was running, the phone rang again. The message in the spy window announced a private number. Not helpful. I turned everything off and answered.

  “Hello.”

  “How are you doing this morning, doll?” The sound of Angel’s voice was like a rocket booster kicking in to redirect the planned trajectory of my day.

  “I’m doing well. Are you ready to listen to a proposal? I can offer you something I know you will find interesting.”

  “We’ll see. Meet me at the Saffron Spa at ten-thirty. Do you know where that is?”

  “On Arlington?”

  “They’ll be expecting you.”

  Chapter

  16

  IT WAS AMAZINGLY BUSY AT THE SPA FOR Aworkday. I never knew things like this went on while I was working a real job. The two women staffing the reception desk both had the same hairstyle. It looked as if it had been cut with a meat cleaver yet was still strangely trendy.

  The one who wasn’t on the phone greeted me when I walked in. “May I help you?”

  “I’m Alex Shanahan.”

  “Oh, yes. You’re the guest of Miss Velesco. Go right on up the stair
s, and Siobhan will help you.” She pointed to a spiral staircase.

  Siobhan guarded the checkpoint at the top of the stairs. She was slightly older, but no less hip, than her colleagues downstairs. Like all of the spa’s employees, she wore a pink lab coat and a flowery fragrance.

  “Follow me,” she said, after she’d checked me in. “I’ll show you to the locker room.”

  She took me to the changing area, where the only thing locker room–like about it was the neat row of lockers. Otherwise, it looked like the master bathroom at Versailles. I stashed my street clothes, pulled on my robe, and managed to walk in my paper slippers to the waiting room, where the air was filled with Enya and the scent of heavily spiced candles. I poured a glass of lemon water and looked around for where to sit.

  Something odd caught my eye, something so completely out of place it took me a second to register what it was. My long-sleeved sweater, the one I had last seen flying over the dance floor in LA, was lying like a throw blanket across the back of the velvet love seat. About then, I felt a growing sense of unease that turned into an inkling that turned into the certainty that I was not alone.

  The chaise longue in the far corner was draped with cranberry-colored mosquito netting that hung from the ceiling. It was just sheer enough that I could see someone lounging behind it, and I realized where the sweater had come from.

  The drape billowed, and a voice emerged. “Y’all naked under there, sweetheart?”

  “Naked as the day I was born. Spa rules.” I went over to the love seat, pulled off the sweater, folded it, and sat down with it in my lap. “Thanks for returning my sweater.”

  The curtains parted, and Angel came out. Her size made the terry-cloth robe seem skimpy on her. Her hair was piled and pinned on top of her head, and she wore little or no makeup. Women as young as Angel tended to look even younger without makeup. Angel looked harder, and I flashed on Tristan’s warning that she was someone to stay away from.