Eve got another hug, a buss on the cheek.
“Good, welcome. Now give me a couple minutes with Charles. If you see Summerset, he’ll stow that for you.”
“I can build an outfit around this bag and scarf.”
When she left them alone, Charles gestured to the ice bucket. “Mind?”
“No, go ahead. It’s a party. I just wanted a couple minutes to pick your brain—exploit your two careers, if it’s okay?”
“It’s always okay. So you’re picking for sex?”
“You could say. When you were an LC—and I guess now, too, in your sex therapist job, did/do you run into many people who trade sex for money? Unlicensed. Who just make a sideline out of it?”
“Sure. Not always money, but compensation. Clothes, jewelry, a favor, a trip. Some live their lives trading sex for money or things. You’d know that.”
“Yeah.” But this was different, she thought. “I mean someone who pursues it as a serious sideline, even keeps books.”
“Well, that would be less common.” He sat, a vid-star handsome man who might have been born with a flute of champagne in his hand. “I haven’t worked with anyone in therapy who has that issue, but I knew a few in my LC days.”
“And what sort of clientele are we talking? What drives the bargain, on both sides?”
“For the provider? Sex is a commodity or a power or so confused with their self-worth they can’t separate the two. For the receiver, it’s most usually romantic confusion. They can tell themselves it’s not business, which in this case it is, just not legal business or structured business. Or, often if there’s an age or monetary gap, the receiver feels they’re simply taking care of the giver. Simply providing them with little gifts or advantages. This gives them the power, or at least the illusion of it, in the relationship.”
“Why not just go to an LC, keep it . . .”
“Inside the lines? For some it might be more exciting, or more intimate, or it could be the relationship devolved into pay for play. Who was killed?” he asked. “The provider or the receiver?”
“Provider. I also suspect him of blackmail. And I know in several cases it wasn’t a receiver in the sense they agreed. He dosed them.”
&nb
sp; His eyes changed, hardened. “That changes quite a bit. Do you know if he’d attempted to get a license?”
“Not as far as I can tell. He kept a spreadsheet, kept his money off the books, but kept a personal record. Women only for the sex. And some were fine with paying him. Others, generally younger than the willing ones, some of them married, he lured in, dosed, raped, then blackmailed.”
“He’d never have gotten through the training or the psych tests to get a license, not in New York. Not even street level if he’d been screened. What you’re describing, to me, is someone who felt no real connection to the receiver. It’s a business transaction, of course, but an intimate one that requires, at least on the higher levels, some finesse, some care and considerable training to handle various needs and situations. Above all, there has to be trust in the provider. A man like this would never have been able to gain real trust. You’ve spoken with Mira?”
“Yeah, and this is all running along her lines and my own. But you’ve been in the life, and now you treat people for sex stuff.”
Nodding, Charles sipped the frothy wine. “Do you suspect one of the women he used?”
“Maybe. Maybe. It feels like, if that’s the case, okay, you bash him in the head a couple times on impulse. That’s how he bought it. But then if you’re going to add a flourish, and the killer added one, wouldn’t you cut off his balls, or jab the knife in his groin—something that relates?”
“First, let me say: Ouch. They stabbed him after—so you’re thinking it might have been a jealous partner of one of the women, or one of the people—male or female—he blackmailed?”
“Maybe. Likely. I’m gathering information.”
“What sort of flourish, if you can tell me?”
“Stabbed. His own kitchen knife.”
“I meant where was he stabbed?”
“In the chest.”
“The heart?”
“Not exactly. It was more . . . oh. The heart? Symbolically, you’re thinking.”