suddenly hated her as deeply as he hated anything, but then he pushed away from the wall and went to his computer.
He said, "Come over here. I want you to see."
He dropped into the club chair and used a mouse to open what appeared to be a calendar on his computer. He went to each of the three dates and copied the names of the women he had sent to the Home Away Suites, then opened an address book to show me their entries: Janice L., Dana M., and Victoria.
"You see? I have the pagers and the phones, but I don't have their addresses. I can page them, but I can't say when they'll get back to me. We're not talking about the most stable people. Sometimes these girls disappear and I never hear back."
"Aren't they on call?"
Marsha said, "People have lives, you know? Stephen isn't the only person they work with."
With. Not for.
Now Golden looked impatient.
"Look, you want me to page them right now, I'll page them."
He stalked back to the phone and punched in a number. When he heard the pager's squeal, he held out the phone as if I could hear it from across the room.
"See? A tone. I'm paging."
He tapped in his phone number, then hung up and tossed his headset onto the club chair.
"She's paged. You guys wanna have dinner? We can page the other girls, then sit here all night waiting for them to call back while they're out sucking dick."
I looked at Pike, but Pike was immobile. Pike would sit with Golden for weeks if we had to; maybe even forever. Pike would also put a gun to Golden's head and pull the trigger if Golden didn't come through.
I didn't like not knowing where to find them, and I liked it less because any one of them might have been involved in Faustina's murder. If one of them was linked with the homicide, they weren't likely to call back, and certainly wouldn't cooperate, but Golden seemed like my only way to reach them.
"What about their last names?"
"If they gave me a last name, it would be bullshit. You think I file W-2s for these people?"
He spread his hands again, the universal sign of the man caught in the middle.
"Look, I'm trying to cooperate here, but all I can do is what I can do. When they call, I'll tell them to talk to you. If you want to page them yourself, go ahead, but all you're going to do is scare them."
Golden was right. I felt half-assed and caught short. I had blundered into his house exactly like the cowboy Pardy accused me of being, and now I didn't have anything to show for it. I tried to think of something smart to ask, and felt even more half-assed because thinking was hard.
"Did Faustina pay with a credit card?"
"No, he paid cash."
"Which girl saw him last night?"
"I wrote the names in the order they saw him. That was Victoria. She saw him last."
"Did Victoria or the other girls tell you about him, like something he said or did?"
"They don't tell me anything and I never ask. I don't want to know. You probably won't want to know, either."
"But you spoke with Faustina when he called?"
"Yeah."
"What did he say?"
"You wanna know what he wanted, like did he want a blow job or anal?"
Pike shoved Golden in the back of the head.
Marsha said, "Don't be smart, Stephen. You make it worse when you're smart."
"Did he say where he was from or what he was doing in L.A.?"
Golden was still rubbing his head.
"I don't make conversation with these people. I tried to feel him out about what he wanted from the girl-some things cost more than others, and some girls won't do certain things. All he said was she had to be a nice person. Understanding, he said. He just wanted someone he could talk to. That's all he said."
"Did the girls tell you what he talked about?"
"I don't give a shit. We agree on a price, and I get my cut. One hour for two hundred bucks. I don't care what they do."
I thought about Faustina wanting only to talk, and wondered if it was true. Six hundred dollars for three hours of talking was a lot of talking.
"The man called you three times in less than two weeks. I can see the first call being all business, but you must have developed a familiarity with him, maybe joked about what a good customer he