Like the mob that had ruled Vegas once, vice had gone corporate. Judith Rothenberg had an "office" as well as an agenda.

Molina was not impressed, but this time she was backed into a corner of her own making. If Matt Devine got painted into it by any unhappy conjunction of events, her career was history, like neon. And maybe in as blazing an inferno as the Mirage volcano.

NEW WOMAN, was the name above the door and window. Molina snorted. There was nothing new about the world's oldest profession but PR spin.

She gritted her teeth and went in, prepared to play the politician she loved to hate on most working days.

A young, anxious receptionist took her name. Molina did not give rank.

"It's been kinda ... rough around here lately," the girl confessed. A phone line on her machine blinked. "New Woman. Miss Rothenberg's not in. I'm sure she'd be happy to speak to you. May I take a message?"

She grimaced at Molina as she hung up, apologizing to a witness of an obvious lie, "You're here about-?"

"The death."

"Oh. From the media. I'm afraid you'll have to wait for Miss Rothenberg to get back to you-"

"From the Metropolitan Las Vegas Police," Molina was forced to admit. She had wanted to stay as low-profile as Rothenberg went for the high-profile.

"Oh! I'd better ... talk to her on this one. Just a minute."

She leaped up, revealing a skirt that suffered from an awesome fabric shortage, and skittered behind the bland door that led to an inner office.

A minute pa.s.sed, then two. When the girl emerged, she a.s.sumed an air of authority that went badly with her be-ringed facial features and deep teal metallic fingernail polish. In Molina's observation, the more piercings, the lower the self-esteem.

She thought of her daughter Mariah's pierced ears and hoped it would stop there, but there was no guarantee of restraint for the twelve-year-old aching to go on thirty-two, and physical p.u.b.erty hadn't even hit yet.

"She'll see you now."

Molina forbore comment and went into the office.

Madams certainly weren't what they used to be.

Judith Rothenberg looked more like a New Age guru, with her mane of coa.r.s.e, grayed long hair, makeup-free skin, frank sun-wrinkles, and Southwestern-style turquoise jewelry.

Molina showed her shield.

"A lieutenant. I'm impressed. I expected the usual tag team of male detectives. They always love to visit my shop."

Molina was well aware of the male fascination with ladies of the evening, which was why she'd come here instead. That, and the terrible fix she was in over Matt Devine.

"This a priority case," Molina said, not underestimating the habitual expression of skepticism Rothenberg employed with police officers of any rank or gender.

"One dead s.e.x-industry worker? Who would care? I'm grateful for the pull of your corporate masters, the hotels."

"You should be. You and your girls make a h.e.l.l of a lot of money off the hotel trade."

"We call them women."

"Whatever you call them, they're call girls. I am not working vice here. I am not interested in your cynicism. I am not interested in the shining career path of the victim. I'm interested in her death, and how it happened. Any insight?"

"Va.s.sar wasn't accident-p.r.o.ne, or suicidal."

"How do you know?"

"I know my employees. That's the point of them working for me instead of a pimp."

"So what was Va.s.sar's personal background?"

"It was all in her working handle. She was a Va.s.sar graduate who decided to freelance instead of struggling up a ladder with a gla.s.s ceiling in some corporation run by greedy white men."

"Hooking was an improvement?"

"When you work for me it is."

"What about her family? Where was she born?"

"I don't know any of that, and I don't keep records on my employees. It only provides ammunition for the police and the moral vigilantes."

"And you say you 'know' your employees?"

"Enough to do business. Their pasts are their property. I know their present state of mind. That's enough. I don't take on women with abuse or control issues."

"Aren't those the women who could most use a compa.s.sionate pimp?"

"I am not a pimp. I'm an office manager. My point is that ordinary, well-balanced, well-educated women should be free to pursue whatever line of work they find most rewarding. That corporate ladder-climber often finds she has to sleep her way up a rung anyway. For nothing."

"Somehow I thought you operated more like a dorm mother."

"No. We are all involved in a business enterprise. A business that should be legitimatized."

"Never happen in Las Vegas and the rest of the real world. A few Nevada counties that okay operating 'chicken ranches' don't make a trend."

"That doesn't mean I can't keep working at it. My employees are never coerced, they are drug- and diseasefree-that I make sure of-and they're not alcoholics. They are working women in the s.e.x industry. I pay them well, and it would be even more if I didn't have to maintain a legal fund to defend them from hara.s.sment by the puritanical authorities. Are you puritanical, Lieutenant?"

"Probably. By your standards." Molina couldn't help smiling. "You enjoy cop-baiting, don't you?"

"I enjoy hara.s.sing back a society that hara.s.ses women from the git-go, yes."

"I've read the print interviews with you. I know your position. Prost.i.tution should be legal, regulated, and an upstanding profession. Prost.i.tutes should either be free agents, or represented by a 'manager' like yourself, who provides a 'support system.' How you are not a parasite like any street pimp, I don't know."

"First, I'm the same gender as my workers. There's no male domination involved. Second, I do pay and protect my employees. To the wall."

"I know you've done jail time in support of your 'principles.' "

"Principles with quotes around them, Lieutenant? Your bias is showing."

"Not as much as your receptionist's thong."

"You are a puritan."

"No, I'm a working woman too, and women who flash their s.e.xuality make it harder for all of us." Molina waved her hand. "Your receptionist is a billboard for your business, I understand that. But you'll never convince me that anyone using their s.e.xuality for gain, money, or advancement isn't acting out personal issues."

"What issues is someone like me acting out?"

"Well-meant late sixties liberalism. You know, I rather agree with you. If there's going to be a s.e.x industry, and there always has been, better it be under the control of the workers, not the middlemen. But you are one."

"I'm not exploitive."

"Maybe not, but that's an individual thing. Who's to say your successor wouldn't be? Wherever money exchanges hands for things people are forbidden to do, by civil law or social mores, corruption, brutality, and exploitation creep in."

"So you give up individual freedom to avoid the misuse of it? We're all screwed then."

Molina shrugged. "Life's a struggle. So tell me about Va.s.sar."

"Tell me how you found out her name."

"Easy. The hotel staff. She wasn't exactly a stranger at the Goliath. Did she really attend Va.s.sar College?"

"Attend? She graduated. s.e.x-industry workers aren't the dumb bunnies they're stigmatized as."

"So why did she come West and start hooking?"

Rothenberg leaned back in her chair, the usual low-backed clerk's model that gave her office a proletariat air. "I don't cross-examine my employees. I would guess that she was sufficiently good-looking that she was going to enter some field where her looks would be an advantage. Maybe she wasn't thin enough for modeling, or talented enough to dance or act. That's how I get a lot of my employees."

"She seemed plenty thin to me, except it looked like she'd had silicone and collagen enhancements. Before or after she worked for you?"

"I don't know. I don't subject these women to physical examinations."

"But their looks play a big factor in whether you . represent them, or not."

Rothenberg shook her head and smiled. "The employee suits the venue. For the big hotels, yes; looks are paramount. But I have employees in less elevated outlets. Some are successful, if not as highly paid as the five-star hotel workers, because they're kind and sympathetic. Many of my employees function as much as counselors as s.e.x partners. Wealthy men, for obvious reasons, require less shoring up of their egos."

"Counselors? Please!"

"It's true. A lot of people are very screwed up about s.e.x."

"I see the results of that every day. The lethal results. Back to Va.s.sar. How'd she become your employee?"

"Heard about me. I've become a little notorious."

Molina grimaced at the understatement. Through the years Judith Rothenberg had tormented the law enforcement personnel and governing bodies of three cities, even enduring long jail terms on behalf of her "principles," but she was always set free by some judge. Police had learned to lay off her. She had a doctoral degree and excellent lawyers and wasn't about to be pushed around as easily as street-side madams.

And, too, the police recognized that Rothenberg hookers were less likely to be drawn into the violent eddy of street crime. The woman did protect her own, and her business did operate more as a legitimate enterprise. Which drove the Moral Majority crowd nuts, because it did seem to prove that prost.i.tution could be a "clean" business.

"She could have fallen," Rothenberg said out of the blue. "I don't see Va.s.sar getting into any tacky situation. She was extremely savvy. She would 'phone home' instantly if anything seedy seemed to be happening."

"Phone home. That's just it. We didn't find a beeper or cell phone anywhere near the body."

Rothenberg leaned forward, her modest chair squeaking in protest. "No phone? All our workers have phones, and every one of them has an emergency number programmed in. All they have to do is press a b.u.t.ton, and we know who and where, if not why."

"And then the Hooker Police go rushing to the rescue."

"Something like that. I do have my own security."

Molina had seen the bodyguards accompanying Rothenberg to court on the TV news. She favored high-profile muscle, like retired wrestlers. She knew how to direct a media circus.

"So Va.s.sar didn't sound any alarms that night." At Rothenberg's shaking head, she went on. "Maybe the phone is still lost in that neon jungle at the Goliath. One of her shoes almost came off in the fall."

Rothenberg nodded.

Molina suddenly realized that her fears were not valid. Rothenberg would not cry murder, because everything was invested in her belief that s.e.x for sale could be safe and civilized.

"Frankly," Molina went on, "the evidence is pretty overwhelming that no foul play was involved. There isn't an inappropriate mark on the body that couldn't be explained by a fall. The Goliath is the only Vegas hotel that has that dangerous central atrium design. She would have had to be leaning over the edge, but that neon ceiling is pretty fascinating from above. Still, I find it hard to believe that the woman was simply admiring the view and plunged to her death."

"We've never had an untoward incident at the Goliath," Rothenberg said. "Admit it, Lieutenant. Accidents can happen. Even to s.e.x companions."

Molina allowed the sick, troubled feeling that had taken up residence on her insides to show on the outside. Judith Rothenberg took it for officialdom hating to admit that Va.s.sar's chosen line of work was healthy, safe, and subject to ordinary worker accidents now and again.

"I won't let you sensationalize Va.s.sar's death to make a moral point," Rothenberg added more sternly. "I won't let you use her to undermine everything she believed in, including herself."

So now the police were the stigmatizing villains, Molina thought.

Amazing how circ.u.mstances and everyone she talked to were making it so easy for her to hide the embarra.s.sing truth and save her own and Matt Devine's skin.

As a mother and the woman who had advised Devine to take the course that had ended in Va.s.sar's death, she knew ma.s.sive relief. He would be safe. She would be safe. Mariah's future would be safe.

As a cop, she was seriously unhappy. It had been too easy to bury this fatal "mistake" to be honest or true or decent.

Her job was to do something about that, even if it hurt.

Chapter 12.

All in a Night's Work: The Midnight Hour .. .

Only one other person besides Molina knew the why and wherefore of Matt's desperate rendezvous with a call girl, and she was on the air solid from 7:00 to 11:58 P.M.

Matt called her at four in the afternoon, and they agreed to meet at the black bar named Buff Daddy's, one place Kathleen O'Connor couldn't slip into without standing out like a hitchhiking Caucasian thumb.

Matt, being anxious, got there first. The repainted Probe was the only white car in the parking lot, he noted, antic.i.p.ating his entry into the club.

There were many ways one could feel an outsider. Being a priest had been one. Being an ex-priest had, surprisingly, been another. Being the only one of your race in a particular place was more external, even more obvious and alienating.