“I SWEAR TO GOD, I don’t know anything.”
Jimmy Callaway was sweating, a lot. It was oven-hot in the Duluth PD’s interview room, where Donna McNaughton had taken the club manager while Stevens and Windermere tore Club Heat to pieces.
They’d found enough to validate Shannon Spenser’s assertions about the place. Jimmy Callaway had kept meticulous records for each of his dancers, everything from tips earned to clients entertained to the price he’d paid to purchase the girl in the first place.
Windermere had studied the manager’s logbook for a long time. “Goddamn it,” she told Stevens. “This guy has dates of delivery for each girl, starting a couple years back, one girl at a time. Paid thirty grand a head, until he started buying in bulk.”
“‘In bulk.’” Like buying steaks at Costco. Stevens felt his stomach turn.
“I guess he wanted to see how long it took for each girl to earn back her purchase price,” Windermere said. “Looks like a lot of lap dances.”
Shannon Spenser charged her clients two hundred dollars an hour, Stevens remembered. She’d have to work a hundred fifty hours to earn thirty grand. At Club Heat, though, Stevens figured the girls would be lucky to earn ten percent of what Shannon Spenser was making.
He’d left Windermere to the logbook and concentrated on cracking Jimmy Callaway’s safe. The thing was locked, but Stevens found a scrap of paper taped to the underside of Callaway’s bottom desk drawer, the one with the stack of Hustler magazines and the fifth of rum.
“Bingo,” Stevens said, examining the string of numbers on Callaway’s note.
Windermere looked up from the logbook. “‘Bingo’?”
Stevens worked the safe’s combination, felt the lock disengage. Swung the door open and laughed out loud. “Oh yeah,” he told Windermere. “Bingo.”
> > >
NOW STEVENS AND WINDERMERE stood in the Duluth PD interview room, watching Jimmy Callaway sweat and stammer his way through a clumsy alibi.
“I don’t know anything,” the club manager told them. “I thought they were just normal working girls. I’m as surprised as you are.”
“We have your logbook showing purchase prices, Jimmy,” Windermere said. “And Stevens here had a peek in your safe.”
Callaway blinked. His face went pale.
“That’s right,” Windermere said. “I gotta say, we’d be a lot more inclined to believe your bullshit if you didn’t have fifteen of your dancers’ passports stashed away in there.”
“Romanian, Bulgarian, Polish.” Stevens ticked off his fingers. “Hungarian, Croatian . . . Where’d you get all those passports, Jimmy?”
Callaway ran his hands through his hair. Stared down at the table. When he looked up again, his face was ashen. “He’ll kill me,” he said.
Windermere sat down across from him. “Not if you help us, he won’t.”
“I don’t even know that much,” Callaway said. “I just took delivery.”
“Who is this guy?” Stevens said. “What do you know about him? How’d you get involved in all this in the first place?”
Callaway gave himself a moment to resist. Then he seemed to deflate. “I was running girls,” he said. “Real girls. Streetwalkers, but legit.”
“You were a pimp,” Windermere said.
“Pretty much, yeah.” He shrugged. “I did okay at it, too. I mean, not great, but I was eating. So, one day this guy pulls my card, tells me he has a deal for me. Says he can set me up so I’m running my own show, making insane money. He showed me some figures, man, and it was unreal.”
“So you went for it.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Apparently Callaway thought the question was rhetorical. “Yeah, man, I went for it. The girls weren’t cheap, but they worked for it. Long as you kept them in line, anyway.”
Stevens felt his muscles tense, his fists clench at his sides. He cleared his throat. “You had, what, fifteen girls? Where’d you keep them?”
“Rented a couple townhouses a mile or so from the club. Three bedrooms each, three girls to a room,” Callaway said. “It worked fine. They never tried to escape. Hell, they were terrified, and where the fuck would they go? You saw how we kept their passports.”
“Uh-huh,” Windermere said. “And you got a delivery from where?”
“East Coast somewhere,” Callaway said. “Nobody told me anything. I called the number they gave me and told them I wanted a couple girls. A few weeks later a truck showed up with a couple girls in it.”
Windermere pushed him a pad of paper and a pen. “Write down that number, Jimmy.”
“They switch phones all the time, though,” Callaway said. “Sometimes I have to wait for them to call me, just so I know how to get in touch again.”
“Let us worry about that,” Windermere told him. “Just give us the last number they gave you and we’ll take it from there.”
Callaway looked a half second from puking, but he scribbled something down. Windermere passed the paper to Stevens, who couldn’t place the area code off the top of his head. “This guy who approached you, you dealt with him the whole time?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
“And he’s the guy bringing the girls into the country.”
“No.” Callaway swallowed. “That guy, he’s the main guy. The guys I was dealing with were some lower-level guys. I think they were just, like, the drivers.”
“Show him the sketches,” Windermere said.
Stevens brought out the sketches the FBI artist had made. Callaway sucked his teeth. “Fuck,” he said. “I fucking knew this thing was too good to be true.”
“The contact, Jimmy. Tell us what you know.”
Callaway studied the sketches. “Yeah,” he said. “These are the guys.” He pointed to the thug with the scar on his face. “I remember the scar. Like he’d face-fucked a screwdriver.”
Windermere looked at Stevens. “Same guys as killed the deputy.” She turned back to Callaway. “What are their names, Jimmy?”
“Names?” Callaway laughed, incredulous. “You think these assholes ever told me their names?”
“Okay,” said Stevens. “What the hell did you call them?”
“‘Hey, you,’ and ‘Yes, sir,’” Callaway said. “I didn’t need to know anything more than that.” He shrugged. “Sorry, guys. My line of work, you don’t ask too many questions you don’t need to know the answers to.”