Madam of Maple Court (10 page)

Suddenly Pam felt like she was on trial and she unconsciously smoothed her skirt and folded her hands in her lap. They sat for a few minutes while the white-jacketed waiter served them ice-cold water and poured tea into tiny Oriental cups. Pam looked over the red ersatz-leather-covered menu, then put it down and played with the small gold tassel.

A jeans-clad woman hustled over to their table and slid in opposite them, dumping a huge purse on the seat beside her. "I'm so sorry I'm late. My sitter got the flu and I had to scramble to find a substitute." She extended her hand. "I'm Marcy." Pam noticed that she didn't give a last name. "And you must be Gary and Pam."

Gary shook her unmanicured hand. "Gary Jannson, and this is Pam DePalma."

"Nice to meet you both," she said as Pam reflexively shook her hand as well. "I hope this place isn't too ordinary, but the food is great and it's very convenient for me."

Nanny? Sitter? She has children
? Pam was totally nonplussed. This was the famous Marcy, the madam of Club Fantasy. How could this be? The woman looked like a typical young matron, with well-styled, brown wash-and-wear hair, a white short-sleeved shirt with a small stain on the sleeve, and nothing more than lipstick on her well-scrubbed face. She seemed rather tall but several pounds overweight. This ordinary-looking, motherly woman ran a brothel that supplied Vin with a two-thousand-dollar-a-night prostitute? She hoped Gary would fill the awkward silence because she was incapable of speech.

"We have a few things to discuss," he said, filling the breach, "but maybe you'd like to order first."

"I don't have to. They know what I'm having. At some places I'm adventurous, but here I stick to what I like. Wonton soup, chicken and trees, and an egg roll. I guess I always think of Chinese food as not too fattening, but my scale always says I'm wrong. You two decide what you're having, though."

Pam and Gary looked the menus but she found it difficult to fix on anything. She couldn't think about food. Thank heaven for Gary. "Why don't we just get some soup and egg rolls for now?" he suggested. "That okay with you, Pam?"

She could only nod.

The waiter took their order and placed small dishes of Chinese mustard and duck sauce on the table, then added two bowls of fried noodles. Marcy mumbled thanks, then grabbed a noodle, dipped it in the duck sauce, and shoved it into her mouth. "I'm sorry. The twins had me up at six and I'm starving." She dipped another noodle and munched. "They know me here, hence the two bowls of their fabulous noodles, one for me and one for the two of you."

Say something
, Pam told herself. "How old are your children?" she said, trying to calm her roiling nerves.

Marcy grinned with obvious pride. "The twins, boys, are almost five and my daughter is two. In spite of everything I'd like more kids, but my husband has absolutely put his foot down." She dipped yet another noodle, then gazed at Pam with a serious expression and said, "Pam, you didn't come here to talk about my children. What can I do for you?"

"You didn't tell her anything?" Pam asked.

"I just told Marcy this was business." He turned to her. "Does the name Vin DePalma mean anything to you?"

Marcy's eyes slitted with obvious wariness. "Should it?"

"We found credit card receipts for CF+Co in his effects."

Marcy's jaw dropped. "Effects? He's dead?" She looked totally taken aback. "Oh, I didn't know. I thought he'd merely moved on."

Pam spoke up. "He was killed almost five months ago in a car accident."

"Oh my God. Pam DePalma. Of course. I should have made the connection. I'm so sorry to learn of your loss." She looked genuinely saddened.

"It's gotten better," Pam said quickly. "I just wanted to know what connection there was between you and him."

Marcy took a moment to gather her thoughts, then took a deep breath, her eyes shuttered. "How much do you know?"

Gary answered. "As I told you on the phone, I do security work and I've told Pam about Club Fantasy. Pam wants to know what Vin's connection to it was."

Marcy let out a long breath. Softly she said, "He was a customer." She shook her head slowly. "I had wondered why I hadn't heard from him in so long. I guess I assumed he'd found something else, and I hoped it had been with his wife." Pam watched her process the news of Vin's death. She looked at Pam directly. "Sorry, that was thoughtless. Oh God. Liza will be really devastated. She is, was, very fond of him."

Pam's stomach muscles tightened. Liza. That was the name of the other woman. At that moment Gary reached for her hand beneath the table cloth and squeezed. She'd let them do the talking.

"Pam was hoping you'd tell her exactly what went on between them?" Gary asked.

"I keep everything that goes on at the club strictly confidential and I have to be very careful, as I'm sure you can understand. I'll speak only in generalities and hypotheticals. I guess I need to know that you are who you say you are and why you want to know all this before I go any further."

"I assumed as much." Gary passed her his credentials, then took a folder from his briefcase, pulled out the
New York Times
obituary the firm had taken out after Vin's death, then passed it over to Marcy. Pam had seen it and knew there was a copy of Vin and Pam's wedding portrait. Beloved husband, yada yada yada. Marcy scanned it quickly, then looked up at Pam and nodded. "I see." She considered her next sentences, then looked Pam in the eye. "I don't now how much you knew, but suffice it to say he was a regular client of my escort service."

"I know this is really awkward," Gary said, "and we'd be grateful for whatever you can tell us. And to put your mind a little more at ease, I have Pam's promise that none of this will go any further." He looked over at her and Pam nodded.

At that moment the waiter arrived and put porcelain bowls filled with steaming soup in front of each of them and a plate of egg rolls in the middle of the table.

Marcy took a small spoonful, then said, "If there's a lawsuit here, we're pretty well insulated."

Pam jumped in. "No. No lawsuit." Nothing like that at all. Seeing Marcy as a normal woman had changed everything. She didn't want cops, just answers. "I merely want to know what he got from her that he couldn't get at home." She found sudden tears gathering in her eyes.

"Oh, Ms. DePalma, I don't quite know what to say. If you really want this, I'll be as honest with you as I can and still protect the club." Marcy took another spoonful of soup, then leaned back against the banquette. "Men come to us for lots of reasons. I know nothing about your marriage or about his relationship with Liza. I don't know whether they were more than just client and professional, but I tend to doubt it. Most of the men who come to us want very specific things, not new relationships. Just escorts."

"You say men come to you for lots of reasons. We had a good marriage and we loved each other." As she said it Pam wasn't sure she believed it anymore. Somehow, though, it was important to make that point, true or not, to Marcy.

"I'm sure you thought you did," Marcy said, again leaning forward and sipping her soup thoughtfully. "Married men visit the club because they want something from the ladies that they don't or can't get at home."

"You say that so matter-of-factly, as though it's okay. Don't you realize that your business breaks up perfectly good marriages?"

Marcy put her spoon down. "I hate to have to say this, but a good marriage doesn't break as easily as you'd like to believe. Your husband came to us for a service and we provided it. It's that simple."

Pam took a breath, her emotions climbing and falling like a roller coaster. She found herself about to yell, then toned it down. "He came to you for sex."

"I'll admit that it sometimes happens between an escort and her client. And?"

"Illegal sex," she hissed. "Prostitution."

"I'm not going to admit anything about anything, so let's play the hypothetical game. Everything we say from now on is based on assumptions that might or might not be true. However, if it were true that he came to the club for sex, it was his choice. The ladies who work for me don't ever coerce anyone into doing anything. Vin and his counterpart, if there were one, did something that people do a zillion times every day. They had sex, and I assume, since he kept returning, it was good sex."

"But it was for money."

"Again, hypothetically, if money changed hands it is illegal, but in my opinion and that of many, many others, it shouldn't be. Women have a right to do with their bodies what they wish. If they sell their services as waitresses or flight attendants, is that so very different?"

"It's totally different. This was sex for money."

"I'm afraid I don't see the difference. If we were in Nevada or Amsterdam, what the club is purported to do is perfectly legal. Here in New York it isn't. What's the difference, geography? Does that make a lot of sense to you? It doesn't to me." Pam was having a difficult time dealing with what she was hearing. Was this woman truly defending what she did? She ran a whorehouse but was calmly attempting to take the moral high ground.

Marcy looked at the woman sitting opposite her. She'd never had an experience like this and it was bizarre at best. She wanted to trust the woman, but the man sitting beside her had such an unreadable face that she worried about revealing too much information. He could be a cop with a tape recorder in his breast pocket. Although she doubted she'd get into much trouble, what with the laws about entrapment and her connections, she didn't want this kind of publicity for the club.

Her sister and a friend had started the fantasy fulfillment business years before and they'd never had any real trouble. She didn't want to start now. However, she felt sorry for the diminutive, well-dressed wife mourning her husband and trying to understand why he'd found it necessary to seek something outside his marriage.

Marcy interviewed almost all the club's clients before allowing them to use its services and, although she remembered Vin DePalma only vaguely, she knew she always thoroughly discussed a man's reasons for wanting to hire an escort. Either he'd denied being married or he'd listened to her "take it home and try it out there" speech and ignored it, as most men did. Most men had no idea what their wives might be interested in, so she always tried to send them away with a suggestion and even a bit of opening dialogue to see whether their itches could be scratched in their own bedrooms. Several times she'd received phone calls from men saying that they were delighted at how much their wives or girlfriends were eager to share and that they'd changed their minds about her services.

She knew from her billing records that Vin hadn't done that. Quite the contrary. Vin's credit card information turned up on her computer each week and she dutifully credited part of his payments to Liza's account.

She looked Pam straight in the eye and Pam's gaze didn't drop. Marcy found, to her surprise, that she sympathized and even respected the other woman. Pam didn't shrink from what she thought was important. She was direct despite her obvious anger and confusion. She was well put together and actually quite attractive. "In many other countries," Marcy continued, "and in many other centuries, prostitution was looked on favorably. The word 'hooker' comes from the name of a Civil War general who took women with him on campaigns to keep the men happy, and there wasn't any stigma about it at the time."

"You really think that what you do is okay," Pam said, her shock fading.

"I really do." Marcy listened to her stomach grumble and picked up her spoon. She really had to get in the habit of having breakfast. She scooped up a wonton and popped the entire thing in her mouth.

"Gould I meet with Liza?" Pam asked.

Marcy wasn't sure that Pam or Liza was ready for such a confrontation, so she hedged. "This whole thing is pretty unusual, and I've never encountered a situation like this before. Let me think about it."

The three at the table were silent while they sipped their soup. She watched Pam take tiny bits of hot liquid onto her spoon but then put most of it back into her bowl. The poor woman was a wreck, Marcy thought, but tough. She wondered about Pam and Vin's marriage. What had it really been like? Many men did indeed have viable marriages but wanted something from her ladies they couldn't get at home. Rather than have an affair with their secretary, they paid for it. No strings, no hurt feelings if and when the guy changed his mind, and no recriminations. Just a straight business transaction.

Pam's face told Marcy that their marriage hadn't been as good as Pam might had wanted it to be. "Let me talk to Liza," Marcy said finally. "I'll leave it up to her. Is that okay?"

"It will have to be," Pam said, putting her spoon back into her bowl and picking up her purse. "I think I'd like to leave now."

When Gary got up and reached for his wallet Marcy said, "I'll get this. You two haven't eaten a thing."

Pam pulled a small notepad from her purse and wrote her name and cell phone number on it for Marcy. "Please call me. Meeting with Liza is more important to me than you can realize, now more than before. For lots of reasons." With a flash of what Marcy felt was true honesty, she continued, "There's a lot I need to find out, about Vin and about myself. Please."

"Of course. I'll be in touch, one way or another."

As Gary and Pam walked toward the door, Marcy wondered about the games Vin and Liza had played. It could be anything, from a staged burglary with a little light bondage to a cheerleader with a football hero. He might have been a sheik or a pirate, a milktoast or a prison guard. Club Fantasy catered to all kinds.