A cop friend had introduced me a few years earlier to the Amble Inn at 18th Street Northeast and Rhode Island Avenue, maybe forty blocks and five thousand real-estate zones from Frank Beckman's Tuttle Place mansion. The inn was a sanctioned whorehouse, the only one in D.C. The girls rotated in and out, mostly from up and down the eastern seaboard. The police provided protection and laid down a little covering fire when things got nasty, and everyone did a little business and felt better or worse depending when they were through.
I wasn't in the market for what the ladies at the inn and their pimps were selling, and I hadn't exactly crept back into Washington unannounced, but I still needed to fly under the radar as much as I could, and I figured even the refrigerator was wired in my apartment. The Amble Inn was about as close to getting off the grid as D.C. offers.
Willie rolled his eyes when I gave him the address and offered to lend me some money.
"You do know what you're getting into?" he asked as we were nearing 18th Street. "Trust me, I can find you nicer at the same cost. A better chance of sleeping through the night."
Willie waited outside while I checked to see if they would give me a room.
The Indian desk clerk behind a Plexiglas window had equal doubts about my sophistication, especially when I told him I wanted a room for four nights and offered to pay in advance.
"Here?"
A sign just to the left of the clerk's window laid out the house rules: no swearing, loud noises, fighting, or spitting. Below that, another handwritten sign spelled out the rates: twenty-three dollars for two hours, forty dollars a night. Overhead, two cameras recorded my arrival at the Amble Inn for posterity.
"You're alone?"
I nodded.
"You're not planning on causing any trouble, are you?"
"No."
"Good," he said, pushing a key through the tray under the Plexiglas window. "Enjoy."
I stepped out onto the front stoop and put my forefinger to my ear and my thumb to my mouth to let Willie know I'd be calling.
Two cans of St. Ide's malt liquor sat open on top of the window air-conditioning unit. Across the street, a Baskins-Robbins outlet glowed in the night. Next to it, a dozen people trickled out of the International House of Prayer for All People. Their stooped shoulders and frantic smoking suggested an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Just below my own window, a single dim bulb barely illuminated a sign that read amble inn: rear parking.