"I've got an old air conditioner at home," Sue said. "Not too pretty but it works. If you want it I can probably get some of the guys to haul it up here." "That would be nice," Kirstin said.
She was, Janek observed, deeply depressed. Although pale, she didn't look ill, but it was clear she wasn't functioning well.
As Sue and Kirstin continued to talk, Janek glanced around the room.
There was a linoleum-topped table sporting a small TV, and two aluminum-framed porch chairs with green webbed plastic seats. On one wall was an old Pan Am calendar showing a view of the Eiffel Tower. On another wall he spotted a pair of cheaply framed reproductions of large-eyed waifs with cats. Most of the furniture looked like it had been collected off the street. Janek wondered how much Kirstin had tipped the super to carry the corduroy couch-bed up the stairs.
When there was a break in the conversation, he decided to ease himself in. He turned to Sue. "Why don't you show her the sketch?"
Sue nodded, pulled out the sketch of the redhead and handed it to Kirstin. Janek watched her closely. He was certain she recognized the girl. There was a small glimmer of excitement, barely noticeable, followed by a denial that was a little too vehement. After that Kirstin set the sketch facedown. There was no reason for her to do that.
"Are you sure you don't know her?" Sue asked.
Kirstin shook her head, then stared at the floor. Her lie was so transparent, Janek wondered whether she even expected to be believed.
Sue exhaled. "Why don't you tell the lieutenant about what you used to do?"
Kirstin turned and engaged Janek's eyes. It was the first time she'd looked straight at him. Her eyes, he noted again, were a ghostly shade of blue and astonishingly beautiful.
"What do you want to know?"
"Whatever you want to tell me," he said. In the pause that followed he decided not to elicit information. I need to open her somehow. "Did you enjoy the work?" he asked.
She smiled slightly. "Why wouldn't I? I made a lot of money."
"Still living on some of it," Sue added.
Kirstin laughed, a short, cutting private laugh meant only for herself.
Then she turned back to Janek. "Why'd you ask me that?"
"Whether you enjoyed it?" He shrugged. "I imagined there might be a certain amount of pleasure in the work."
"Yeah! Sure! It was really great!" The intensity of her bitterness told him he was getting through.
"You hated it, didn't you?"
"Sure"-she smiled-"that, too."
He could tell he'd awakened her. How long has it been, he wondered, since someone's shown interest in her feelings?
"What was the worst part of it?"
"The risk. I was scared the whole fucking time."
"Anything else?"
She shrugged. "Sometimes I felt sorry for the guys." She paused a moment, then undercut her small display of compassion with a tight, mean smile and a tough-girl remark: "But a girl's gotta make a living, right?"
They stared at her. There was nothing to say. A girl's certainly gotta make a living. But a girl didn't have to do it by drugging and robbing men. It took a special type to choose to make it that way, girls who didn't like men, who had it in for them, who wanted to humiliate them-perhaps to pay them back for violations suffered at their hands.
"Writing on their chests-whose idea was that?" he asked.
"Diana's."
"She was the boss?"
Kirstin nodded.
"How many were you?"
"Four or five. Girls'd come and go." Kirstin shrugged. "You know how it is."
More tough-girl talk, but Janek ignored it. He had roused Kirstin to the extent that she was no longer bothering to play a role. That was all he had wanted to do. It was time now to get some facts.
"Why did Diana want you to write on them?" "To freak them out," Kirstin said. " ' mark him afterward." She said marking made them embarrassed to go to the cops and kept them busy thinking how to hide the writing from their wives."
Janek glanced at Sue. She nodded back, her acknowledgment that Stiegel, mediocre as he was, seemed at least to have gotten that right.
"What's Diana like?" Sue asked. The bitter laugh again. "Not a nice person."
"Why don't you tell us a little about her?" Kirstin shrugged. "Sure, why not?"
Janek sat back.
"She started the business. She used to go after marks herself-in Texas, Houston, places like that. She was good at it, she told us.
Really cleaned up. ' ' all clean down there." She invested her money.
''m rich, girls. You will be, too, if you stick close." She told us there were good livings to be made by girls who knew how to interest men, then put them to sleep. No one got hurt. No one got AIDS. No violence. Everything neat and clean. Oh, she could go on and on about what a neat, clean game it was." Kirstin paused. "Another thing she used to say: ''t give me any excuses. I've been there. I know every wrinkle."
Like anyone would dare give her an excuse! We were all afraid of her.
Terrified."
Listening to her, not just to what she was saying but to the way she was saying it, Janek was struck by an idea. It was nothing he could justify, and he knew that if he brought it up and was wrong, he risked losing Kirstin's confidence. But he also knew that if he was right, he might be able to create a bond.
"Diana was the one who cut you, wasn't she?" he asked softly.
Kirstin's eyes glowed. "How did-!" She brought her fist up to her mouth.
"I never said that. I-" Then she began to cry.
Janek nodded to Sue, who moved closer, offered her a handkerchief.
"Take it easy," Sue said. "We're not going to hurt you. No one's going to hurt you now."