“Excuse me?”

“Her girls know that when they knock on some hotel door, they’re not going to find some weirdo inside, or a cop, and that they’ll get their money. They even take one of those credit card machines with them, in case-and you’d be surprised how often this happens-the john can put the girl on his expense account as secretarial services, or a rental car, or something like that.”

“I didn’t know they could use credit cards,” Officer Crater confessed.

“There’s a lot you don’t know,” Lieutenant Meyer said. “You got any idea how much money is involved here?”

“Not really. You said a hundred an hour.”

“Right. Sometimes they stay more than an hour. Sometimes the john wants something more than a straight fuck. That costs more, of course. But the low side would be that a girl would work three johns a night. Let’s say Harriet has twenty girls working. That’s three times a hundred bucks times twenty girls.”

“Six thousand dollars,” Officer Crater said wonderingly.

“Right. Times seven nights a week. That’s forty-two thousand gross. Harriet’s share of that would come to almost seventeen thousand a week. It’s a money machine. Now out of that, she has to pay her expenses. Three, four telephones. The rent on a little apartment she has on Cherry Street where the phones are. She has a couple of lawyers on retainer, and a couple of doctors who make sure the girls are clean, and she takes care of the people in the hotels who could make trouble for her. And then I’m sure she has some arrangement with the mob. Usually that’s ten percent.”

“With the mob? What for?”

“To be left alone. Years ago, the mob ran whorehouses. The Chinese still have a couple running. We keep shutting them down and they keep opening them up, but the mob found out that whorehouses are really more trouble than they’re worth, so they went out of that business. Why the hell not, if they can take, like I said, ten percent of Harriet’s forty-two thousand a week for doing nothing more than putting the word out on the street that Harriet is a friend of theirs? A freelance hooker can almost expect to get robbed, but even a really dumb sleazeball thug knows better than to mess with anyone who is a friend of the mob.”

Officer Crater grunted.

“OK. So let’s talk about where we fit in here,” Meyer said. “The first thing you have to understand is that prostitution has been around a long time-they don’t call it ‘the oldest profession’ for nothing-and there’s absolutely no way to stop it. All we can do is control it. What the citizens don’t want is hookers approaching people on the street, or in a bar. The citizens don’t want disease. They don’t want to see young girls-or, for that matter, young boys-involved. For the obvious reasons. And I think we do a pretty job of giving the citizens what they want.

“What the citizens also want, and I don’t think most people understand this, or if they do, don’t want to admit it, is somebody like Harriet Osadchy. The johns pay their money, they get what they want, they don’t get a disease, they don’t get robbed, nobody gets hurt, and nobody finds out that they’re not getting what they should be getting at home.”

“Yeah,” Officer Crater said. “I see what you mean.”

“And the Harriet Osadchys of this world don’t give the police any trouble, either. They do their thing, and they do it clean, and we have the time to do what we’re hired to do, protect the people. We close down the whorehouses, we keep the hookers from working the streets and the bars, we keep the people from getting a disease or robbed, or black-mailed, all those things.”

“I see what you mean.”

“So now we get back to you, and your friend Marianne. You did the right thing by her and the guy who beat her up. I mean, what good would it have done if you had run him in? Your friend Marianne would not have testified against him anyway, and he made it right by her by giving her a lot of money, right?”

“I think she would have really lost her job if the PSFS heard about that,” Officer Crater said.

“Sure she would have,” Lieutenant Meyer agreed. “And her john would have gotten in trouble with his wife, a lot of people would have been hurt, and you solved the problem all around. I would have done exactly the same thing myself.”

“I thought it was the right thing to do,” Officer Crater said.

“OK. So what happened next? Marianne told Harriet what happened, and Harriet knew that it would have been a real pain in the ass, really hurt her business, if you had gone strictly by the book and hauled either one of them in. So she was grateful, right, and she told Marianne to slip you a couple of hundred bucks right off, and a hundred a week regular after that. A little two-hundred-dollar present to say thank you for not running Marianne in, and a regular little hundred-dollar-a-week present just to remind you that being a good guy, doing what’s right, sometimes gets you a little extra money. Nothing wrong with that, right?”

“Not the way you put it,” Officer Crater said. “It bothered-”

“Wrong, you stupid shit!” Lieutenant Meyer snarled.

“Excuse me?”

“I explained to you, Crater, that Harriet Osadchy is personally pocketing at least seventeen thousand, seventeen thousand tax-free, by the way, each and every week, and you really pull her fucking chestnuts out of the fire, really save her ass, really save her big bucks, and she throws a lousy two hundred bucks at you? And figures she’s buying you for a hundred a week? That’s fucking insulting, Crater, can’t you see that?”

Officer Crater did not reply.

“She’s paying, as her cost of doing business, and happy to do it, some lawyer maybe a thousand a week, and some doctor another thousand , and slipping the mob probably ten percent of however the fuck much she takes in, and she slips you a lousy, what, a total of maybe five hundred, and you’re not insulted?”

“I guess I never really thought about it,” Officer Crater confessed.

“Right. You’re goddamned right you didn’t think about it,” Meyer said.

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Lieutenant,” Crater said.

“You don’t say anything, that’s what I want you to say. We’ll all be better off if you never open your mouth again. I will tell you what’s going to happen, Crater. Your friend Marianne, the next time you see her, is going to give you another envelope. This one will have a thousand dollars in it. You will take two hundred for your trouble and give the rest to Bill. And every week the same goddamned thing. Am I getting through to you?”

“What do I have to do?”

“I already told you. Keep your mouth shut. That’s all. And remember, if you’re as stupid as I’m beginning to think you are, that if you start thinking about maybe going to Internal Affairs or something, it’d be your word against mine and Bill’s. Not only would we deny this conversation ever took place, but Internal Affairs would have your ass for not coming to them the first time your friend Marianne gave you money.”

Lieutenant Meyer took his arm off the back of the seat and faced forward and turned the ignition.

“Tell whatsisname he’d better get out of the car now, Bill,” he said. “Unless he wants to go with us.”

Staff Inspector Mike Weisbach turned off Frankford Avenue onto Castor and then drove into the parking lot of the Special Operations Division. He saw a parking slot against the wall of the turn-of-the-century school building marked RESERVED FOR INSPECTORS and steered his unmarked Plymouth into it.

I usually go on the job looking forward to what the day will bring , he thought as he got out of the car, but today is different; today, I suspect, I am not going to like at all what the day will bring, and I don’t mean because I’m not used to getting up before seven o’clock to go to work.

He entered the building through the nearest door, above which “BOYS” had been carved in the granite, and found himself in what had been, and was now, a locker room. The difference was that the boys were now all uniformed officers, mostly Highway Patrolmen, and the room was liberally decorated with photographs of young women torn from Playboy, Hustler, and other literary magazines.