The cops and feds didn’t think I did it—“it” being called a “possible act of domestic terrorism” on the television crawler I saw while waiting in one of the fed’s offices. But they didn’t like that I was in San Diego as a private investigator and that my client was dead. I wondered if they’d force us to stay in town for further questions. Instead, it was a wonder that we weren’t escorted to the city limits. I thought momentarily of my unread George Kennan biography and how he had been declared persona non grata by Stalin, his ambassadorship to Moscow cut short. I was persona non grata in San Diego at the moment and for better reason.
An Amber Alert was issued for the missing baby. Detectives had called Tim’s parents in Riverside and assembled more information: a photograph of the now-orphaned infant and his name.
His name was David.
“I should have gone with you,” Peralta said.
“You couldn’t have moved as fast as I did.”
“I wouldn’t have mistaken a Claymore for a big bar of soap.”
He had me there. I went on and tried to tell him everything, step by step.
“Did you tell them about the pimp?”
I said yes.
“Did they believe you?”
“They did when I gave them the Glock I took off him.”
I had no doubt that America’s Finest Pimp was now sitting in one of America’s Finest Interrogation Rooms, but I didn’t make him for the killer. He had been too unnerved by my arrival and my assumed connection to the unnerving Edward to return to the apartment. Anyway, the pimp didn’t strike me as the throat-slashing kind and certainly not as a bomb maker. But I didn’t even know his name. The cops told me nothing. There was no pr
ofessional courtesy to give to a private investigator.
When the de-brief had exhausted me, I asked Peralta a question. Did it pass the smell test? The rich guy leaving a thousand dollars on the nightstand for Grace, and then her setting up a business based on that kind of sum? Not a twenty-five-dollar blowjob from a hooker on Van Buren, but hundreds, even thousands of dollars.
“Sex is big business,” he said. “Don’t forget Eliot Spitzer. Didn’t he pay four or five grand every time? I’ve seen plenty of investigations into high-end prostitution. We took down a county supervisor while you were away teaching, for putting hookers on his county credit card. The single-girl-on-her-own part of it is unusual, but she eventually got caught by a pimp. That sounds real.”
I put away the gun-cleaning kit, reloaded my revolver, and slid it back into my pocket.
“If you’d gotten gun oil on the carpet, I would have killed you,” he said.
I ignored him. “Why would a man pay for sex, especially when there’s so much free stuff around? Especially why would a rich man do it?”
“Tiger Woods spent something like four million bucks a year on prostitutes.”
“Your mind is an amazing thing,” I said, repeating a phrase he usually applied to me. Having my brain rocked like a Jell-O salad had addled my mind at the moment.
His big shoulders shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a golfer.”
“Do you spend four million…? Never mind.” I really did not want to know.
Even in my driest spell, in my twenties when young women weren’t drawn to a guy who read books and talked about history, I didn’t contemplate going to a prostitute.
“Sharon could tell you the psychology,” he said. “With a young woman and older man, it’s called the Lolita Complex, I think. Some men are drawn specifically to prostitutes. Rich men want the privacy that the right prostitute can provide. Most of these guys are married, remember, and they don’t want their wives to divorce them and take half of their wealth in a community property state. Politicians are willing to take the risk. A prostitute never says no, never has a headache, and she’ll do kinky stuff the missus might not do.”
“And it’s a huge human trafficking problem.”
“That, too.”
Back in El Centro and the heat, we went through the Wendy’s drive-thru and pulled to an empty part of the parking lot to eat.
“So,” Peralta said, “what didn’t you tell the police?”
He had parked the truck so we could see anybody coming into the lot and escape through two different driveways. His caution was good.
“Fuck!”