I drove us down to Adams, piecing together and rehearsing the right things to tell the workers to convince them I was doing the right thing. We parked right in front of the hotel and went to pay the meter only to find that it already had 23 minutes on it, and, with guarded hopes, approached Yesenia.
“What’s up, Dippy? Any luck in finding Alex?”
“Hey, Yesenia, I—” My confidence collapsed without warning. “I—” I trembled and my mouth ran dry.
Her head flopped sideways. “Oh, no… Please don’t tell me you have bad news.”
“One sec,” interjected Judy as she turned me around, laid her hands on my shoulders and squeezed. “You can do this.”
I shook my head, and kept my gaze away from hers to hide my fear, but she took me by the chin and drew my eyes into her own. “It was just a hunch,” I mumbled. “A hunch is just a thought. A thought without evidence.”
“Even if it goes tits-up, it’ll be worth the attempt. The alternative is guaranteed failure. The best outcome is only possible if you trust your gut and go all-in.”
Her reassurance helped… a little. Not a lot—but enough. I turned around. “Yesenia… I have some news that—well, it’s good news, but it’s also bad news. I’ve deliberated, I’ve discussed it with Judy, I’ve considered the resources available to me… and I’ve determined that I only have one option if I’m going to solve Alex’s kidnapping.”
Her eyes grew several sizes. “Kidnapped?”
“I—forgot that I hadn’t notified anyone here…”
“We hafta spread the news!” She grabbed me by the hand and tugged gently. “Come on!”
“We can’t! We need to keep it under wraps for the time being. I’m going to make the news public as soon as I’m—as soon as I’m in position.”
“And what ‘position’ would that be?” She asked this with an air of naïveté, which made sense considering she should have had no clue that I was planning the most ethically dubious scheme anyone claiming to be an anti-fascist had ever cooked up, and yet… I could swear that she knew, somehow, that I was dead-set on going back to the force. But… but there was no way for her to know our plan—only Judith knew that I was becoming a cop again. The only explanation for my eerie hunch was that she had never given up her suspicion that I had lied about being fired—so if my hunch had any basis in reality, there was no way she was going to trust me once I had spoken so much as half a sentence of my plan. I was about to completely obliterate all of her trust in me, as well as the trust of every sex worker in the city.
My face contorted; I tried to speak but only choking noises came out. I felt a squeeze on my shoulder, reminding me that Judy was with me, then one around my hand—Shosh was there, too. I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to remember what I was going to tell Yesenia, but my plan was a blur. I couldn’t stand in silence all night, though, I had to say something. So I said… something. And I decided that that something would be what she needed to know in order to cut ties with this traitor she had trusted and mentored in spite of her instincts. “I’ve… been… offered… a position… as… a detective…” Her lips turned down and her brow furrowed suspiciously. “…within this precinct’s… Crimes Against Persons Squad.”
Her brow was no longer furrowed in suspicion but in deep disapproval, and her lips slowly bunched up into a scowl. “And you…” She struggled to suppress her ire. “You thought you could just turn a trick to prove that you were one of us, so that you could pump us for info then stab us in the back?”
I shook my head vigorously. “N-n-no, that’s not at all what I’m trying to do!”
My answer failed to improve her mood, but she contained her feelings. “Is this about the dough?”
“The woman who hired me last night offered me 500 dollars every time I gave her an hour, or a thousand if I do a good job, every week, and who knows how much I could be making on top of that from my other johns. I’m going to be receiving retirement money at some point, so with these two income sources combined I would live better than I was as a meter maid or even as I would as a detective, and I’d prefer not to go back to the place that told me I sucked at my job and shat me out the second they realized I wasn’t going to play their games. I know I can do sex work, I know I have the potential to be good at it, and I sincerely enjoy it—unlike being a cop, which always took more of me than I had to give. I couldn’t handle being a meter maid from the beginning and it only became more of a struggle the longer I did it. Being a detective will be a thousand times more taxing than my old job was, so I might crash and burn even harder when I try to solve this mystery from behind a badge.” (Being an amateur sleuth had thus far required only a tiny fraction of the effort sucked out of me by meter maid duty, and it seemed reasonable to expect that being a police detective would be a cinch, too. She did not need to know this.)
My reassurance that it wasn’t a money thing did not sooth her sore throat, nor did it carry her away from the brink of tears. “I’m trying—real hard, cuz I—thought you might actually be a good person, a woman who only used to be a bastard, once upon a time, all water under the bridge—I’m—I’m trying with all my heart to understand your motives, Andrea. But I’m having a hard time. A very hard time.”
“I need the crime scene dusted for prints to find and convict the kidnapper, I need to grab video footage from the dash cams in the vans and the body cams of the jackboots who raided the hotel. I need to find out whether someone bought the hotel and who it was. And… I need to infiltrate the SVPD to find out if anybody there was involved. If I don’t have all of this, I don’t have a case, and Alex stays missing forever.”
My explanation troubled her—which was just what I was aiming for—and as I went on, I saw my argument erode her pain.
“And even if I did manage to gather all of that evidence as a private investigator… the DA isn’t going to file a criminal complaint based on the word of a civilian, they only listen to cops. Justice for Alexander Brookvale is impractical without a trustworthy detective working from within the system—unless you want me to give vigilantism a try.”
With each argument her distress softened; as I told her I wouldn’t have the power to bring charges except as a pig, the last of her disdain evaporated. “Shit. Alright.” I sighed in relief. “The rest of us, though… I doubt you’ll convince them to see things your way.”
“I’ll be lucky if just one of them tells me so much as the time of day after tonight.”
“It’s wise of you to bate your hopes. Come along.” She gathered up our colleagues on the street, warning them, “Sex Cop has bad news, I’m calling an emergency assembly on the steps of the Torrey Pines.” Once everyone was gathered before the steps of the hotel, Yesenia called, “Hear ye, hear ye! The ex-cop known as Serendipity has distressing news.” The workers chattered as she turned to me. “Lead with the kidnapping, then the practical considerations—by which I mean the collection of evidence and bringing of charges—and then tell them what you have planned.” She gave me a dissatisfied smile—that still somehow managed (or so I can’t help but intuit in hindsight) to contradict itself with just a curl of satisfaction. “May God have mercy on your soul.”
I nodded nervously. “My fellow workers,” I called out from the steps of the hotel, “assuming you’re willing to count me as your fellow after I tell you what I have planned. First, you deserve to know the status of my investigation, which I ask all of you to keep under wraps until I make my findings public.”
I breathed for a few seconds as I tried to remember the words I needed to speak.
They didn’t come.
“Esti.” She gave my hand a gentle tug. “‘He was kidnapped on Wednesday.’”
“Al—Alexander Brookvale was abducted on Wednesday—” The crowd became overwhelmingly fretful. I waited a few seconds, then pleaded, “I need you to listen, all of you! Please, listen.” They wouldn’t. “I’m trying to tell you something important!” I screamed. A few at a time, they quieted. “He was taken around the time of the Vice raid on Wednesday, probably in the half hour following its conclusion. He was bound with rope and carried into a hotel room, where he was injured. Please don’t go up there, I would prefer to have the crime scene undisturbed until I can arrange for a more thorough investigation.
“Next, my rationale for the decision I’m going to warn you about momentarily. First of all, I need certain kinds of evidence that I don’t currently have the ability or legal authority to gather. I need experts with the right tools to investigate a crime scene, I need to run fingerprints against databases, I need footage from all the police vehicles and body cams from the raid in case they can give me some insight into what happened. I need to pull aside the blue shield and find out when and why Vice planned this raid and whether it may have been a diversion, I need to find out who purchased the Torrey Pines—” The crowd whispered to itself in quiet shock.
Yesenia sent tingling waves across my scalp by whispering into my ear, “(That wasn’t common knowledge among the masses, Dippy.)”
“(Hah…) Um. Well, it is now.”
She shrugged. “What’s done is done. Keep going while you still have their attention.”
I continued, “—and—and I also need to investigate any possible connections to the perpetrators, their reasons for closing the hotel, what they intend to do with it—”
Then Yesenia gave me yet another piece of news: “I forgot to tell you, there’s a permit to demolish the hotel.”
((Oh, God, no.)) “(What? When is it scheduled?)” I hissed, panic audible in my voice.
“Tomorrow morning—I found out just this afternoon.”
“Christ. Fuck. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get my CSI team in before they level it.”
“Hence why I’m telling you. I’ve been sitting on this news for eight hours trying to think of a way to avert a panic, but… they need to know. I can no longer hold back the flood. Please, inform them.”
I turned back to the crowd, and with sudden doubt about my plan, announced, “The new owners are demolishing the Torrey Pines tomorrow morning.”
The crowd erupted into worried discussion.
“We need to protect that evidence, we need to—” My mind worked at a mile a minute. “We need to organize something to stall the demolition until I can start the next phase of my investigation.”
“We can form a human chain,” suggested Lola.
“And we could file a complaint about asbestos,” suggested Paulo.
“Yes! Good ideas! I want all of you to work on more strategies after I’m done telling you what I need to tell you. My job is investigating a kidnapping, your job is saving the hotel.”
“What is it you need to tell us?” asked Eduardo.
“Okay. Second-to-last, I don’t trust anyone but myself and Judy to handle this investigation, and we currently don’t have the resources we need. And I know of only one way to get what we need.” I took a breath, exhaled, and braced myself emotionally for the storm I expected to follow. “I’m about to tell you something you won’t like, but please have open minds and hear me out. I’m… going to become a Crimes Against Persons Detective at the pol—”
The crowd broke into an uproar. Voices spoke over each other, all discord and discontent. I decided it would be best to let them hammer things out and come to an agreement—even as I overheard such utterances as ‘Cop doesn’t know shit about how cops work,’ and ‘Is she really this naïve?’ and ‘Does she think we’re naïve?’ I reminded myself that unanimous rejection was the expected outcome, and ordered myself, unsuccessfully, not to be disappointed.
The arguments grew a little louder, and the accusations sharper— ‘backstabber’ and ‘pig all along’ and ‘probably working undercover the whole time’. I accepted them the way someone in stockades might accept rotten vegetables to the face—with eyes shut tight and a prayer that they would stop any second now. Shosh squeezed my hand, and I focused on that to the exclusion of the voices arguing over which indictment of my character was the most succinct. “Don’t listen to them,” said both of my best friends in unison.
Then Yoly emerged from the crowd and, ascending the steps, approached me—followed by Lisa, Paulo, and Ronnie—and reminded me, “You promised you would try to avoid roping me into the legal system.”
“And that’s still the case.”
“I can’t trust a cop.”
I nodded in solemn agreement. “And you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t trust me. There’s nothing preventing me from breaking my promise. I need your trust, but you don’t owe it to me. That’s my reality. All I can do is beg you to help me and hope that you take pity on me. If you can help me in any way that doesn’t give me leverage over you, I will get down on my knees and kiss your feet. I will kiss every foot on this street, no matter how little you have to offer—because every detail is vital to my mission.”
“I don’t want your groveling.”
I averted my eyes. ((Shit. What can I do? I have her real name, she isn’t happy about that. She’s pissed that I have the ability to screw her over.))
((Wait.)) I dug around in my purse and retrieved the two most important cards in my possession. I thrust them towards her. “Here.”
“Is that a… Social Security Card?”
“And my driver’s license.”
“Why are you showing them to us?”
“Take pictures. If I betray you, post them on Trollchan. The villainous scum that inhabit that website will burn my life down.”
She shook her head. “I don’t… want these.”
“I want you to have leverage over me. If I screw you, you screw me. This is insurance against me lying to you or breaking my promises.”
“No.”
“Please. I want you to have a reason to trust me. I want you to be able to punish me. I want you to have the power to ruin my life, so that you can be absolutely certain that I won’t ruin yours.”
“I’m not—”
“Yoly. Listen. This is the only way I can think of to assure you that I’m worthy of your trust. I need your trust, I need everyone’s trust. Please. Take pictures of them. Pass them around to everybody here—to every sex worker in this city—so they can, too. If I break any of my promises, if I betray even one of you, every one of you will have the ability to make me regret it.”
“I’m not doing this,” she told me forcefully.
“Me neither,” said Paulo, and Lisa echoed him.
“This isn’t right,” opined Ronnie.
“I don’t want to have control over you,” explained Yoly. “It isn’t the way to gain our trust. Stop trying to give us your personal information. We don’t want it.”
My eyes dropped to my feet. “Alright. I guess you’ll never trust me.” I retrieved my notepad and tore out the page on which I’d recorded her testimony and offered it. “I’ll remember your name and what you shared, but without a written record of it I would have a slightly harder time getting you subpoenaed. That’s the best I can do.”
She shook her head. “Keep it. Maybe I can’t trust you, but I can still… help. Other than becoming a pig again, you haven’t done anything to lead me to believe you actually intend to hurt me. And… you offered me the ability to ruin your life, so maybe—maybe I can afford to give you some leeway.”
I smiled. “Thanks. That’s all I should have asked for in the first place. Excuse me, I have to convince everybody else not to exile me from this street.” I went from sex worker to sex worker, showing them the cards, offering them the opportunity to destroy me, but none accepted. Every time they refused, I asked them, ‘Will you give me another chance?’ Most of them nodded silently, and a few replied, ‘Alright.’ Once they were all sated that I probably meant well, I returned to my team on the steps.
“Serendipity is planning to become a good cop,” announced Yesenia, “and as we all know there are no good cops. But she’s trying to do what’s best for Alex and for all the people who love him or look up to him, and she seems convinced that doing so will require a certain amount of ideological flexibility. I’m willing to consider what she’s trying to say from a pragmatic perspective. I hope she’s proven to all of you that such consideration is worth your while, but in case you’re still undecided, she has a few more words.” She nodded to me.
The sex workers listened as I said my piece. “The prosecutor is only going to charge someone with a crime if the police ask for it. That means the Santa Virginia Sheriff, the FBI, or the SVPD. Neither you nor I trust any of them, but the SVPD are the only ones with jurisdiction anyway, so only a CAP detective from the SVPD can bring justice for Alex—and as far as I can tell, none of the CAP detectives currently on the force give a shit about him. The only person I trust to put an honest effort into the case… is me. Now you get to decide whether you should expect me to go back to being a cop without drinking the blue Kool-Aid this time around.”
Amid quiet discussion I waited for someone to say something directed at me or my moral crookedness—but the only thing louder than the murmur of deliberation was a cough. I watched their expressions evolve through multiple emotions, until I could see that their apprehensive civility had for the most part been replaced with something more complex.
The lack of engagement was killing me, so I told them how to help me violate the Fourth Amendment rights of the hotel owners: “I can’t report the crime scene myself without raising legal questions that could compromise the case. I need one of you to file a report stating that you saw a pool of blood on the carpet in hotel room 410 when you were retrieving things you had left behind during the raid. If you’re worried about trespassing charges, report it anonymously. Can someone volunteer to do that for me?”
Yesenia declared, “We’ll all do it.”
Few-by-few, certainty emerged from doubt, and the crowd nodded and discussed how best to word their anonymous tips.
“Great. Thank you. I have to go home now and get some sleep. Don’t stay up too late.” The assembly got the joke, and a few even found it amusing, and with a tiny amount of levity to boost their spirits after such a stressful dilemma, they returned to their spots with feelings towards me that were clearly mixed but possibly leaning towards renewed acceptance. “Good night, stay safe, get laid, get paid.”
I watched them return to their spots in little clumps, still discussing strategies for saving the hotel. I turned around to ask Judy if she thought it went well and, based on her beaming smile, inferred that she was enthused and hopeful. She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed. “Andy, I think your hunch might have come true!”
“Maybe, partially… this time. I’m bound to have a bad one eventually.”
“Yes, and I’ll be there to cheer you up and remind you that it was merely an exception to the rule.”
I desperately wanted to kiss her, but not in front of the parting crowd. She must have seen it in my eyes, though, because she suddenly hunched over and planted one on my mouth. I swooned, and after the kiss was over, I had a fairly strong urge to rip off her clothes and go down on her—but I restrained myself.
“I’ll be damned.” Yesenia scoffed and shook her head. “From forth the fatal loins of vice and law / a pair of star-crossed whores seek Brookvale lost. / I should have known the two of them were close / but it was hard enough imagining / my buddy J befriending pigs, much less / romancing girls intending to work forces.” To my relief, she chuckled warmly.
“(Yeeeeah…)” I replied sheepishly. “Um… I need your cell so I can let you know when all of you can start sending in those tips.”
“I… trust you, Dip. In spite of what your plan involves, in spite of my experience with cops, in spite of the advice my own soul is whispering to me, I really do trust you, but I still hafta be careful with my private information. I won’t give a cop my phone number if there’s any possibility that her boss might search her phone. And it’s probably in your best interest not to keep records on any other people living less-than-legal lifestyles. Cough, J, cough.”
“Oh, I don’t bother with writing down contact info, I just memorize it. And I delete conversations unless they’re potential blackmail material.”
Her eyes yelled, [What?]
“Yeah, I memorize all my text messages, DMs, and email—not verbatim, but accurately enough that I can keep my phone nice and clean and empty.”
“Don’t you ever forget?”
“I have every desk phone in the department’s directory memorized, I remember my teachers’ numbers from college, I remember the numbers for the few classmates who bothered to share them with me all the way back to kindergarten. Email and street addresses, too.”
“That—and you must agree—is incredible.”
“I don’t usually tell people about it, because whenever I have told them they started asking me to summon things from the past like it’s a party trick.”
“I won’t do that.” She recited her cell number, I memorized it, and we parted with fare-thee-wells.
I drove us home, and when we got to my door, I told Judy, “So we’ve, uh, done it once in my bed…” Shosh disappeared without comment.
“Yes. And there’s plenty of other unclaimed territory remaining, as well.”
“I guess that’s true. But I was wondering if we could—maybe—have some sex that isn’t out in the open where a rando can just stumble in on us while I’m dry humping you, maybe? For once?”
“I’m awfully tired…”
“You can sit back and relax while I take care of everything. I’d like to try… (eating pussy.)”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“So far, you’ve never given me the chance to—”
“Okay, Andy, listen. I will sleep with you tonight on two conditions.”
“I’m listening.”
“First: you let me eat you out.”
“Okay. I’m looking forward to that.”
“Second: you don’t try to get me to show you my bottom half.”
“(Oh.)” I was frustrated by her secrecy, but I had begun to crave her touch. I powered through the disappointment. “(Oh…)” I acquiesced impatiently. “(Fine…)”
“I’m glad we were able to come to an agreement.”
Disappointed—but not defeated—I let us into my apartment so that I could be eaten out by my fuckbuddy—the first domino in the chain of mistakes that led to me losing her.