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After I washed up and cleaned my tie, I retrieved Tim Lewis, who had slumped against the bedroom wall, silently watching my learning curve.
“Get up. We need to talk.”
“Have you been crying, dude?”
“No.”
“Thanks for the help.”
I said nothing.
A few minutes later, he was back on the sofa and I was sitting across from him on a dining chair.
He stared at me over an icepack that I had improvised for his traumatized nose. A nasty black left eye was also materializing. He started shaking.
“Are you going to kill me?”
That’s me: the diaper-changing, first-aid-giving hit man. I said, “I will kill you if you abuse that baby.”
“I take good care of him! I love him! AFP wouldn’t let me go back and change him. Since Grace left...”
He blinked and I knew he was hoping I hadn’t noticed his slip.
I said, “So who was this Scarlett?”
He cursed at himself. “That was Grace’s business name. Her brand.”
I pulled out the photo again, turned it toward him, and tapped my finger on the pretty face.
“Her name is Grace Hunter,” he said.
“Is that her baby?”
“It’s our baby.” Somewhere under the icepack, I heard a long sigh. “This has gone so wrong.”
“What, that you’re living with a prostitute?” I was careful to keep Grace in the present tense.
“She’s not a prostitute.” His face flushed with anger.
“Then what do you call it when a woman works for a pimp?”
I waited and he told it. It wasn’t easy telling.
They had started dating as freshmen at San Diego State. He was studying theater and she was a business major. She had wanted to be in theater, too, but her father demanded that she declare a more practical major. Specifically, business. If she wanted money, he said, she could start her own business the same way he had done. Grace moved in with Tim. They were poor and not happy, working part-time at restaurants, already facing big student loans. They broke up. It was a big campus, so he didn’t see her often. He dated some other girls but kept wishing he could get back with Grace.
Three years later, he saw her at Comic Con, the huge comic-book gathering at the convention center downtown. But she wasn’t dressed like a nerd. She was in a tight but very expensive-looking mini-dress and on the arm of a guy in a suit who was old enough to be her father. He later learned that the man was a producer in Hollywood. She smiled and waved at Tim, and a week later she emailed him to get together.
Tim learned how much had changed in the time they had been apart.
Grace Hunter’s entrepreneurial inspiration had come soon after their breakup. One night she went out and got drunk. An older man hit on her, she went back to his hotel room with him, and spent the night. When she woke up, he was gone but on the bedside table was a thousand dollars cash. Whatever weeks or hours of moral wrestling she did with herself, she realized that San Diego was full of male tourists and businessmen, almost all of them dreaming of a night with a California girl. And they would pay quite well.
She drew up a formal business plan on her laptop: her market was affluent, older married men, the startup costs consisted of the right clothes—bikini for the strand, nice dress or suit for a hotel—and her competitive advantage was that she didn’t look like a call girl. The tax exposure was zero. Her brand was Scarlett.
For more than two years, she succeeded brilliantly. The men were usually nice, often terribly lonely, some wanted only to talk, and all were willing to use protection. Not one beat her up or even made her feel creepy. Once a month, she had herself tested for STDs and was always clean. That checkup report would ensure top dollar. She gathered regular clients and her discretion gained referrals. Thanks to her patrons, she stayed at the best hotels and resorts in the area. A few times, men paid her to be with them on more lavish adventures.
“Did she do kink?” I interrupted. “Bondage?”
“No,” he said. “That doesn’t sound like her at all.”
