The Secret Page 9

  “You like that nightie? Laura would be glad to model it for you at your office. There’s a scantier version, too, that we don’t show in these public appearances. In fact, we have a lot of merchandise that we don’t show publicly, that might interest a gentleman like you. Of course, the model doesn’t have to be Laura. We have several other models who’ll be glad to come to your office, or your home for that matter, to model for you.”

  Pimping was not our business. “Hell,” said Sal. “If we wanted to do that, we could organize it a whole lot better and make a hell of a lot more money.”

  It also had its hazards.

  Sal didn’t like to meet in the office. He preferred to sit down over a nice lunch or dinner to talk business. We met at Sparks. We had thick steaks and plenty of rich red wine.

  “That bitch in New Haven is giving us a problem,” he said when our steaks were in front of us.

  “I figured she would.”

  “Gonna have to do something about it,” he said.

  “Gimme the problem.”

  “Okay. Remember the little gal you saw blowin’ me? Valerie? You told Betty to get rid of her, but she didn’t. Valerie has been working for Betty right along. I mean, hey, you have to figure the little bitch is too good to just shove out the door.”

  “Well, Betty is not that good. Maybe we gotta shove her out the door.”

  “You don’t know what the problem is.”

  “Okay. What’s the problem?”

  “Well … Valerie specializes in … you know what she specializes in. So, okay, one night she’s givin’ it to a guy named Earhart, who’s president of one of the New Haven Rotary clubs. For some reason she starts to bite the guy. I don’t know what he did or said, but he swears she started bitin’ him. He couldn’t stand that, so he slugged her hard and broke her nose.”

  “It could happen,” I said. “A long time ago, in the thirties, I think, a professor at Ohio State University, by the name of Dr. Snook, had beaten coed Theora Hix to death with a ball-peen hammer, with the same justification, that she was biting him. Years later Robert Chambers claimed he killed Jennifer Chambers for the same reason, that she was causing him unbearable pain.”

  “Well, everybody in New Haven knows about it and attaches it to our store. It’s a great big joke in New Haven, and we’re part of it.”

  “So what do we do about it?” I asked.

  “Lemme finish telling you the problem. Valerie’s parents haven’t seen her yet. But they will, and when they do they’re gonna wanta know why the busted nose. Valerie’s threatening to sue Earhart. Betty is in a tizzy. Only thing I can think of to do is go up there and visit the parties.”

  “I’ll go,” I said. I was concerned about just what Sal might do.

  “We’ll both go.”

  I called Betty and had her arrange a meeting with Earhart and Valerie. Sal and I rented a hotel suite, had a bar stocked in it, and ordered a display of hors d’oeuvres to be displayed.

  Earhart arrived first. I had called him after Betty spoke with him and asked him to meet us earlier than she had specified. I wanted to talk with him before Betty and Valerie arrived.

  He was a small man, maybe fifty years old, afflicted with male-pattern baldness, so much that his head was shiny. He was a realtor. I think he had a sense that he was in the presence of the Mafia. He accepted a Scotch and soda and chose a few nibbles from the table.

  “Have you recovered, Mr. Earhart?” I asked.

  “Not entirely,” he said wryly. He sat on the couch, looked down at his lap, and frowned. “Painful…”

  “I can imagine,” I said. “How did you make the connection with Valerie?”

  “It was the third time. Betty had brought her to the restaurant where our Rotary Club meets. They were sitting at the bar when our meeting broke up, and I came out, and Betty introduced her, said she was majoring in economics at Yale. We talked awhile and—”

  “And Betty offered her for—”

  “We talked awhile, and Betty said Valerie knew how to make men feel good. She’d make me feel good for a hundred dollars. And that’s how it got started.”

  Sal, who was standing at the window looking down on the street, grinned.

  “I want you to understand something, Mr. Earhart,” I said. “Valerie doesn’t work for us. She doesn’t work for Cheeks.”

  “She’s around the store a lot.”

  “I know. She works for Betty Logan.”

  “And Betty Logan works for you.”

  “Not after today she doesn’t.”

  Betty arrived a few minutes later, with Valerie in tow. The girl had been no great beauty before, but now, with her nose flattened, she was anything but. She took a Scotch, drank it, and poured herself another.

  “What we have here is a nasty incident, followed by a nasty scandal,” I said. “It’s in everybody’s interest to settle it.”

  “I want my plastic surgery paid for,” said Valerie.

  “By me, you mean?” Earhart asked. “Forget it.”

  “Did you bite him, Valerie?” I asked.

  “Damn right I did.”

  “Why?”

  “He started to complain I wasn’t doing it right, wasn’t making him feel good the way I’d done before. That was his imagination. I was doing exactly what I’d done before.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “So he grabbed me by the hair, pulled my face up, and slapped me. Then he shoved my face down again. And I bit him. What’d he expect?”

  Now Sal intervened. “Would you want the details of this thing, which still is just a rumor, covered in the newspapers?” he asked.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Sal Nero.”

  “Who’s Sal Nero?”

  “Ask Al Patrioto.”

  Earhart drew a deep breath. “Uh … okay.” He turned to me. “You used the word ‘settle.’ What’s it take to settle this thing?”

  “Five thousand,” said Sal.

  Valerie shook her head. “Five thousand! No way!”

  “It’ll buy your new nose,” said Sal coldly. “With some left over for bent feelings. That’s the deal, Valerie. You wanta deal with me instead?”

  “I might have something to say about this,” Betty interjected.

  “You don’t have anything to say about anything,” Sal told her roughly. “You’re fired.”

  So that’s how it worked out. Earhart paid Valerie five thousand dollars in cash. Valerie’s parents accepted the story that she had broken her nose playing touch football, and the authorities heard nothing of the whole deal.

  Or did they? Of course they did. They just stood aside and waited to see how it would turn out.

  Firing Betty didn’t solve our problem. The word was around New Haven and Connecticut that the Cheeks store was where you went to arrange for a first-class piece of tail.

  An element of the problem was that Betty’s girls were first-class. Think of it. You’re a Bridgeport lawyer, a Hartford doctor, a New Haven realtor, a Groton engineer … you’ve got a failed marriage, or no marriage, and you’ve got the hots. What you might pick up in a bar risks mugging, to start with, and a multitude of other complications besides. So how about a cute little girl working her way through college? No great beauty maybe, but ready to earn her money and able to carry on an intelligent conversation, too, if that’s what you want. She doesn’t look like a hooker. She shows up in a pleated plaid skirt, a cardigan sweater, a single strand of pearls, wearing undies she didn’t get at Cheeks … and she does a job of play-acting that she enjoys what you do to her as much as you enjoy it yourself.

  But—hey!—how long can the cops and the district attorney let this go on in a town that prides itself on a degree of propriety?

  Which, in the end, was still not the problem.

  * * *

  I’m sitting in my office in Manhattan, only half aware of what was going on in New Haven, now absent Betty Logan, when I’m visited by a guy who introduces himself as Alberto Pa
trioto.

  I’d heard the name. The Five Families ran New York. The Patriotos ran New England.

  Oh, he was a caricature! Camel coat. Gray hat. Black suit. Paisley handkerchief carefully folded in his breast pocket. Cigar.

  He was direct. “I supposed,” he said, “that we did not intrude on each other’s territory.”

  “I am agreeable to that,” I said, though I had no idea what he might think my territory might be.

  “You agree that New Haven is not in your territory?”

  “It is not in my territory, Mr. Patrioto.”

  “Then why the hell you runnin’ a first-class whorehouse in my family’s territory?”

  I remember that I closed my eyes and nodded. I should have known. “Mr. Patrioto … All I’m trying to run in New Haven is a lingerie shop. Betty Logan turned it into a whorehouse entirely against my wishes and my instructions. When I found out about it, I fired her.”

  He stared at me for a moment, then nodded, to my relief. “I can believe it. The woman has always been a bitch. But she makes money. She’s always done that. What I got in mind is a little deal. You take her back and let her run her little business on the side. You hand us, say, twenty-five percent of the take from your store—and we’ll make sure that includes twenty-five percent of what Betty’s takin’ in. We’ll excuse you for hornin’ in on our territory. We’ll take care of a couple little problems that might be comin’ your way, like with the cops. And everybody’ll be happy.”

  “Everybody but me,” I said. “All I want to do is run a chain of lingerie shops. I didn’t check with you before I opened my store in New Haven because I didn’t think you would be interested in selling women’s underwear. If word gets around that my Cheeks store in New Haven is a whorehouse, that could ruin my whole chain. So, let me suggest a different deal. I’ll turn the store over to you, one hundred percent, the whole schmear. You can run it any way you want, with Betty and her girls or without. I’ll supply you with merchandise at my cost. And all I ask is that you take the name Cheeks off the store.”

  I didn’t tell him but would let him discover that the Cheeks label wouldn’t be in the merchandise I supplied him and that the international-orange maillot, which was the only item distinctly identified with our name, would not be supplied.

  Patrioto shook his head. “What my family has in mind is that we work together.”

  “Well … I’ll have to check it out with my partner and my business advisers.”

  “Okay. Who’s them?”

  “My partner is Sal Nero.”

  “Sal…?” He pinched up his face. “Of the Carlino family?”

  I nodded. “Right.”

  “And who’re your advisers?”

  “Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky.”

  “You’re shittin’ me,” he said, turning uglier than he already was.

  I shrugged. “Call ’em.”

  I did not advise my twenty-five-percent partner why I had sold the store in New Haven. I told him the town had become unfriendly and that we’d be lucky to get out of there without taking a beating. I mean, literally a beating.

  And we were.

  23

  LEN

  I realize that what I am telling of this story is set in a very different time frame from what my father is telling. I was as unconscious of the trials he and my mother endured to get their business going and expand it as I was of their experiences in World War II—until at last I prodded someone to tell me.

  Sue Ellen and I were married and moved to New Haven. We rented an apartment and enrolled at Yale. I was a law student. She studied Chinese. We lived comfortably but not luxuriously in a furnished apartment. Sue Ellen was confident in my father’s generosity and was never surprised when his monthly check arrived. Her family were generous with gifts that arrived irregularly, but we lived on my father’s subsidy.

  I was curious as to why there was no Cheeks store in New Haven. There was one in Hartford, one in Providence, three in Boston, but none in New Haven, which I would have thought an ideal market. I asked my father why, and he told me.

  I went to the location where the store had been. It was occupied by a pool hall. I made a few casual inquiries and learned that—

  —The store had changed its name and operated under new management for about a year, at which time it closed—which pleased me because it demonstrated that my father and mother had not just achieved something anyone could achieve but had used their brains and built a business others could not build.

  —Betty Logan, now a woman of sixty-five or so, was still a procuress. She worked under the dominion of the Patrioto family, which appreciated her expertise and took half her earnings. She made her living in a way that afforded her no Social Security, no medical insurance, no retirement benefits, and no future but to do what she could as best as she could as long as she could. Her girls were not terribly pretty, but they were skilled at what they did and were happy with the money. What was more, she had taught them her specialty: making a john believe he had a Yale or Quinnipiac girl in the sack and glad to do anything he might want of her. Betty Logan was a merchandising genius. If she had chosen to sell some other line, God knows what she could have been. I never met her, though later I would have a most indirect contact with her. I have not ceased to be curious about her and regret that my father so airily dismissed her when he was telling his story. She must have been a smart, brave woman.

  —Since his contact with my father, Alberto Patrioto had served a four-year term in the federal prison in Danbury, for tax evasion, but was now the Patrioto godfather, with authority over all New England. His term in prison had not diminished his authority. If anything, it had augmented it, and no one questioned him.

  I didn’t press my father on why he didn’t open a new store in New Haven. He had a personal distaste for the town. He disliked New Haven for reasons beyond his Betty Logan experience. I never have learned what they were.

  * * *

  I had to warn Sue Ellen about Betty. My wife’s conspicuous boobs and taut, bouncy butt, plus the fact that she was genuinely a Yale graduate student and could talk about what she was studying, made her a prime target for Betty Logan. She would fetch a premium price.

  I didn’t have to worry about Sue Ellen going into the trade. She had firm ideas about that. Happy to give and receive much and varied sex herself, she obsessively condemned merchandising it. In fact, she reserved—but I knew it was there—a nagging doubt about the Cheeks merchandising operation. Clearly Sue Ellen would never go into the trade. And I mean never.

  On the other hand …

  Betty Logan paid her girls to recruit others. “I’ve always got more trade than I can serve,” she assured them, “so earn the pay for a trick you didn’t turn by bringing me a new girl.”

  When Sue Ellen first told me she had been talked to very solemnly by a girl who suggested she think about making a whole lot of money by doing something that was not difficult at all, she laughed about it. Then suddenly the crusader in her reared its head.

  “How could she?”

  She meant, how could her new friend—like herself, a student of Chinese—sell her body? It was unthinkable! The whole idea was abhorrent to Sue Ellen.

  She decided to save Mollie from Mollie—actually, from Betty Logan, though she had not yet heard of her.

  When I met Mollie, I judged that what she looked for from the men who bought her was not so much the money but acceptance and approval, even admiration. She was a graduate student, as was Sue Ellen, and she had come to Yale from Mount Holyoke, to there from Sacred Heart in Greenwich. You could see when you looked at her that she had never attracted dates.

  If two words could describe Mollie, those words would have to be small and square. Her little face was square, framed by carelessly cut, dishwater-blond hair. Her eyes behind her little, round steel-rimmed spectacles were blue, her nose short and flat, her mouth wide and thin. She wore blue jeans stretched tight over her broad hips and generous ass,
with sweatshirts draped over her round breasts.

  She had a pleasant personality. That she was anxious to please came across from the moment you met her. It was an appealing anxiety, and it would have been difficult not to like her. It was difficult to think that this innocent-looking, small, square girl turned tricks. That it was difficult to imagine was part of her appeal. A john could fantasize that he was seducing a horny, adventuresome virgin.

  Sue Ellen and I had our apartment. So did Mollie, sharing hers with another woman graduate student. Sue Ellen took to inviting Mollie for dinner one evening a week, usually Friday. Mollie would bring wine and a dessert, and Sue Ellen, typically, would prepare a platter of one or another type of pasta. Sue Ellen had made herself a close friend to Mollie and was trying with some degree of subtlety to lure her out of prostitution.

  Mollie was no fool. She knew what Sue Ellen was trying to do and was amused by it.

  I came in from the law library early one Friday evening to find my wife and her new best friend bare-breasted. Sue Ellen’s nipple clips were on Mollie’s nipples, and her emerald pendant hung between Mollie’s melonlike boobs.

  “When I told her about them, she asked if she could try them.”

  Mollie was not embarrassed. She had no sense of modesty whatever. We were friends, and she knew that I knew she played for pay. If she was flustered, it was not because I was staring at her naked tits but because she was wearing Sue Ellen’s clips, chain, and pendant, which she knew were a gift from my father.

  For myself, I was dumbfounded, not just to see my wife’s jeweled clips hanging between another woman’s tits but to see both of them with their hooters naked.

  She started to take one of the clips off, but I shook my head and said, “No. Leave them on awhile. It looks almost as good on you as it does on Sue Ellen.”

  I reached down and gave a short, gentle tug on the chain. Her nipple stretched, but the clip did not come off, as I had known it wouldn’t.