by Leigh Jones
“I’m not here to eat. I came to ask you for a favor.” A shiver of unease crawled up Kate’s neck. She suddenly realized she could be dragging her friend into a dangerous situation.
“Favor from me?” Slava put his hand over his heart, eyes wide and forehead crinkled with genuine surprise. In his starched white shirt and crisp black pants, the effect was comical. Kate couldn’t help but laugh.
“Yes, you. Remember what you told me last time we were here about the girls at the hotel where you’re staying?”
“Ah, yes. Girls. Men. All night.” Slava waved one hand in the air as though to say that told the whole story.
“I’d like to see them for myself. Do you think your friends would let me spend a few hours tomorrow night in their room? If I peek through the curtains I should be able to watch what’s going on without being seen, right?”
Slava clasped his hands together in front of him and took a few steps closer. His wide eyes now gleamed with conspiratorial anticipation.
“Like stakeout?” he asked in a hushed whisper. “You want to make stakeout and catch these men?”
“Well, yeah, like a stakeout. But all I want to do is watch, for now. Then I’ll have to figure out what to do once I have a better idea of what’s going on.”
“Okay, okay. Just watch now and write big story later.” Slava’s enthusiastic grin told Kate she had an ally.
“Something like that.”
“Come tomorrow. Meet me here after dinner. We can go to the hotel and I’ll introduce you to my friends.”
“Don’t you need to ask them first? Maybe they won’t like it.”
“I ask them. But they do it, because I ask. They’re good girls.”
“Thanks, Slava. I owe you, big time.”
“No big time, big tip!” Slava laughed as he held the door open for her and waved goodbye.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Close to midnight the next day, Slava ushered Kate around the end of The Clipper farthest from the seawall. His room was around back and faced the alley that ran behind the building. About seven of the less-than-desirable rooms housed students visiting the island for the summer. Slava nodded to a few as they walked past, but they didn’t stop to chat.
Four Ukrainian girls shared the only room occupied by students in the front of the hotel. Although they could see a slice of the pool and the beach beyond, the angle of the fence bordering the property cut off most of the view. That was probably why the manager set this room aside for the students. And while they had an obstructed view of the Gulf of Mexico, they had a full view of the rest of the hotel and the parking lot. Kate immediately understood why they noticed the unusual nighttime activity so easily.
The girl who opened the door had dark hair swept back into a ponytail and bright blue eyes accented with heavy black eyeliner. She motioned them inside and quickly shut the door to keep out the bugs swarming around the light outside. Three other girls sat or sprawled on the room’s two double beds. The TV was on low and the bathroom’s fluorescent light cast an institutional pall over the room. Empty yogurt cartons, soda cans, and pizza boxes littered the top of the dresser. Eyeshadow compacts, lipstick, brushes and perfume bottles covered the bathroom counter. Kate wondered what impressions of America the girls would take home with them after spending four months in a cramped and inhospitable hotel room.
“Anna, Iryna, Vira and Nataliya,” Slava said, pointing to each girl in turn. “Ladies, this is Kate.”
The girls smiled a little shyly and eyed Kate with open curiosity. She shifted uncomfortably and looked at Slava a little self-consciously.
“Good, okay. I leave you now. Anna take good care of you.”
After Slava shut the door behind him, Anna motioned Kate to a round table by the window. She picked up a trashcan and swept empty styrofoam plates, cups and plastic containers into it. With what Kate took for an apologetic smile, Anna pointed her to a chair on the far side, next to the heavy orange curtain covering the window.
“If you sit there, you can look behind curtain and see whole hotel.”
“Thanks. I really appreciate you letting me borrow your window,” Kate said, the awkward situation adding to her unease.
“No problem. Slava say you catch bad men. Good.”
“We’ll see,” Kate said, smiling at Slava’s assurance. “I just want to watch for tonight to see what’s going on.
“No problem. You watch. You see.”
Kate leaned to her right and rested her head against the wall, peering around the edge of the curtain to look along the length of the sidewalk fronting the long wing of the hotel. She had a clear view of both floors of the L-shaped building’s shorter wing, about 30 yards away. A halo of light edged almost all the windows. Nearly full occupancy on a weeknight, even in the summer, wasn’t bad. Of course, the hotel offered pretty cheap rates.
To her left, the girls picked up whatever they had been doing before Kate and Slava came in. Vira, who had a spiky crop of bleached blonde hair, turned up the volume on the TV and laid down on the bed closest to Kate, her head resting on a stack of pillows near the end. Iryna and Nataliya, perched on the other bed, picked up their interrupted conversation. Anna walked to the bathroom and started to wash her face.
While she kept most of her attention focused on the widow, Kate stole glances into the room every few minutes or so. No matter which way she looked, she was on the outside looking in on someone else’s life. The girls pretended she wasn’t there, not even bothering to retreat to the bathroom when they stripped off their work clothes and wiggled into shorts and T-shirts as they got ready for bed. Kate had never felt more invisible.
On the outside, she watched a couple ride up on a motorcycle, a six-pack of beer sandwiched between them. Kate couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she could guess at the gist, based on the way the woman pressed up against her companion and he slapped her wide butt. They disappeared into a room a few doors down. Another couple drove up about 15 minutes later. Judging by their stoney faces and the distance they kept between them, they weren’t having a good night.
After that, no one stirred in the parking lot or along the open corridors for another hour. Kate’s mind wandered over the events of the last few months. So many unexplained, seemingly unconnected events. She traced a line between the murders of Julian Costa and the unidentified girl in Fish Village, Miss Kitty and the new prostitution ring. Over all hung the mystery of the mayor’s sudden cozy relationship with the police union. She ran over the details of each case again and again until they blurred into a single, nonsensical plot. Behind her, all of the girls except for Vira had climbed under the covers and settled in for the night.
By 1:30 a.m., Kate was about to give up and go home, concluding this new prostitution ring was a figment of several overactive imaginations, when a lone man emerged from the stairwell at the far end of the hotel’s second story and knocked at the first door. Almost immediately, it opened a crack. The visitor went inside and the door closed. A few minutes later, a different man emerged, closed the door behind him and wandered to the end of the walkway. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the railing.
A shot of adrenaline streaked through Kate’s chest. She sat up straight and pressed her cheek into the wall at the edge of the window. She put a hand over her mouth as though from that far away the man might hear her breathing.
“What is it?” she heard one of the girls whisper.
Glancing quickly inside the room, Kate saw Vira looking intently at her from the edge of the bed, her pale face framed by the glow of the TV. In a low voice, Kate briefly explained what she had seen, her eyes darting back every few seconds to the man with the steadily glowing cigarette. Vira nodded knowingly.
“That’s what we see too, almost every night.”
“Does it always start this late?”
Vira nodded, switched off the TV and came to stand behind Kate at the window.
“First customer of the night. Busy now, until dawn.”
&nb
sp; “How long has this been going on?”
Vira shrugged as she moved back around to her side of the bed and climbed under the covers.
“Three weeks.”
About 15 minutes after he arrived, the visitor came out of the room and walked up to the man at the railing. He handed him something and headed back down the stairs. As the first man took one last drag on his cigarette, he glanced at whatever was in his hand and stuffed it in his pocket. After dropping the cigarette butt and grinding it out with his foot, he stepped back into the room.
For the next four hours, the routine repeated with a dozen other men. The visitors never stayed outside for more than a few minutes, either coming or going. Some went into the first room. The pimp took others to one of three rooms down the landing. Each time a door opened, Kate tried to catch a glimpse of what was inside. But all she could see was the soft yellow glow of a muted light.
The last customer came at about 5:30 a.m. Kate wondered sleepily whether he was on his way to work or just getting off his shift. When no one else appeared, her heavy eyes slowly closed and she drifted into a dreamless sleep, her cheek still pressed against the wall.
She woke with a start 45 minutes later when the girls’ alarm clock erupted with an incessant beeping. Disoriented, Kate sat up and rubbed her eyes. It took her a minute to remember where she was. On the bed closest to her, Anna sat up and stretched, slapping the snooze button with annoyance.
“Busy night?” she asked, her voice still thick with sleep.
Kate nodded. “Thirteen men.”
“That’s bad. Very bad. Now you write story.”
“Now at least I know it’s really happening,” Kate said, smiling sleepily but with muted satisfaction. “I have to talk to my editor about a story.”
“He want story,” Anna insisted. “Is good story.”
“I hope so,” Kate said. Determination to convince Lewis drove away the last of her cloying sleepiness. “I really hope so.”
Chapter 19
The horizon glowed faintly when Kate left the girls and walked quickly to her car, parked in the back of the hotel near Slava’s room. She didn’t see anyone and hoped no one saw her. She had slowly begun to realize during the long hours of her night watch that she was dealing with a very dangerous situation. If Miss Kitty had been murdered because someone saw her talking to a reporter, knowing she could reveal at least some details about the prostitution ring, the person or people running the show would do anything to keep their operation a secret. Kate thought about Miss Kitty’s broken body crowning the granite boulders and the cigarette-smoking man who waited for the girls to turn their tricks so he could take the johns’ money. Was he at the top of the food chain or was someone else giving him orders? Either way, Kate wouldn’t want to run into him alone on some side street.
She managed to stay awake long enough to drive back to her building and trudge up the stairs to her apartment. But as soon as she collapsed into bed, she fell instantly asleep.
Three hours later, she groaned when the alarm beeped. She could use at least two more hours of sleep, but she needed to get to the office and tell Lewis what she’d discovered. She wished she could just run with a story for tomorrow’s paper, but she didn’t have enough information. The challenge would be finding out more without tipping off the pimp or his bosses that she knew what they were up to. She also had to consider how far she wanted to go before telling the police what she’d seen. If the chief decided to move forward with a sting and a bust, despite the mayor’s request, she would be left with another run-of-the-mill prostitution round-up story. As it stood, she had enough to say the police had ignored complaints about the operation. But could she prove the mayor was behind the curtailed prostitution investigations?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Kate stood in the doorway to Hunter Lewis’s office for almost a minute before the news editor stopped his frenetic typing and looked up at her over his laptop screen and his horn-rimmed glasses. He always spent Wednesday mornings working on his weekly editorial. He hated to be interrupted.
“Sorry, but I need to run something past you. It can’t wait.”
“Five minutes,” Lewis said, pulling off his glasses, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head.
As briefly as she could, Kate told him what she had discovered, starting with the claims made by the mamasan Johnson’s team busted a month ago and ending with what she’d seen early that morning. By the time she got to Slava’s claims about the police ignoring his reports, Lewis was leaning forward over his desk, staring at her intently.
“Why not just take this to the police?” he asked when she was done. “Just ask Johnson why they haven’t done anything about it.”
“Well, that’s the thing. I know why they haven’t done anything about it, but I don’t have it verified on the record. After the mayor inked his new pay-raise deal with the police union, Johnson told me he met with the police chief, who then called the detectives in for a private pow-wow. The mayor asked them to put any more prostitution stings on hold until after the summer and fall festival seasons are over. He told them all the news about recent criminal activity, even if it involved getting offenders off the streets, didn’t make Galveston look like the safest place to visit.”
Lewis leaned back in his chair again and let out a low whistle. “So, what we’ve got here is a scheme to gloss over criminal activity just to please the Convention and Visitors Bureau.”
“At the very least, yes,” Kate nodded. “But there’s something else. I rode my bike past The Clipper on Sunday afternoon, just to get a sense of the place, and I bumped into that homeless woman who died later that night. She said the same thing about the prostitution ring. Anyone could have seen her talking to me. The police say they have no evidence she didn’t jump, or fall, off the seawall. But what if she was pushed? What if someone didn’t want her talking to a newspaper reporter?”
Lewis crossed his arms on the desk and chewed on his bottom lip before answering. “Did you mention that to Johnson?”
“Yeah, but he thought it was a little far-fetched. Both he and the coroner said they found no evidence of foul play. And with two unsolved murders already on the books, Johnson’s not eager to take on a third. Without any evidence, there’s no reason to suspect it wasn’t just a coincidence that she talked to me that afternoon. I just have a hard time believing that.”
“Well, we can’t print something just because you believe it’s true. Once all this comes out, you can ask about it again, but if we still don’t have any evidence that points to a murder, that’s not part of this story. You’ll just have to drop it.”
Kate shifted uncomfortably in her chair and let her eyes wander over the journalism award plaques covering the wall behind Lewis’ desk. He was right, but letting it go amounted to saying she didn’t care about what happened to someone who didn’t deserve to die, whether by her own hand or otherwise.
“So, what do I do now?” she finally asked when Lewis didn’t say anything else.
“First, you need to talk to your buddy Johnson and see if you can persuade him to go on the record about that meeting with the chief and the mayor.”
Kate cringed when she thought about her last exchange with Johnson on Sunday night. She wasn’t even sure he would want to talk to her, let alone cooperate for a story that might get him in trouble.
“Then, you’ve got a city council meeting to cover tomorrow, right? Why don’t you just ask the mayor whether he’s heard any complaints about a prostitution ring running out of a seawall hotel. See how he reacts and what he says. And go back and talk to those girls at the hotel. Get them to tell you what they’ve seen and how long it’s been going on. That, combined with your own observations will be enough to tie the story together.”
“Don’t we need to give the chief a chance to comment?”
“Yes, but I want that to be the last thing you do. Let’s see if we can prove he’s not doing his job at the mayor’s request. Then w
e’ll see what he says about that. If you show your hand too soon, he could just order a bust. That would leave you with no story at all.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Kate spent the rest of the day writing a piece for the next day’s paper previewing the council meeting. The budget vote wasn’t scheduled for another week, so the only interesting thing on the agenda involved a discussion about where to spend the reduced infrastructure improvement funds. Neighborhood groups were vying for money to fix their potholes and leaky water lines. It would make for good public theater, the kind of thing Kate normally reveled in covering. But nothing except the prostitution story could hold her attention now.
She called and left messages for Johnson twice that afternoon. When he didn’t call her back, she began to lose some of her nerve. He obviously didn’t want to talk to her. She’d never convince him to risk his job to give up the police chief and the mayor. She thought about sending him an email apology and begging him to see her, but she knew he would instantly see her apology wasn’t sincere. She refused to grovel just to get information, even though she knew her parting jab on Sunday had been a low blow. And probably unfair. But she wasn’t sorry for pleading a dead woman’s case.
In the end, she decided to appeal to Johnson’s sense of justice.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The next afternoon, about an hour before the city council meeting, she called the police department receptionist to make sure Johnson was at the station. When she walked through the front door, her co-conspirator behind the front desk buzzed her back without asking any questions. Johnson was sitting at this desk reading through reports. She sat down in one of the chairs across from him before he had a chance to tell her not to.
“Look, I know you don’t want to see me, but I have something you need to hear.”
Johnson didn’t stop her when she paused to take a breath, so she plunged ahead.
“Someone I know who’s staying at The Clipper told me about some suspicious nighttime activity that matches what we’ve already heard about. I went there the other night to see for myself. Thirteen men stopped by four rooms between 1:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. for about 15 minutes each. They weren’t delivering pizza.”