Chapter 18
Bad Day at Maxine’s
January 31, 1991, should have been a day just like any other for Michelle Michaud as she turned tricks at Maxine’s Studio in Sacramento. This establishment billed itself as a “relaxation business,” but there was a lot more than just relaxation going on behind its closed doors. The Sacramento Police Department was pretty sure that prostitution was taking place in the establishment and on that particular day they sent in one of their undercover vice officers to find out.
At exactly 1:26 P.M. a vice officer entered Maxine’s and was met by a pretty red-haired hostess, Michelle Michaud. Unaware of his real intent, she informed him that he could have forty minutes of massage for thirty dollars. The undercover officer answered that the price seemed fair and gave her forty dollars as payment. She escorted him to a room with a bed on the floor and told him to make himself comfortable and she would be right back with his change.
The officer proceeded to undress completely and was sitting on the bed when Michaud returned, giving him the ten dollars she owed him. With a smooth-talking routine he now went into his act. “My neck feels pretty stiff,” he told her, and she told him to lie down on the bed as she began to rub his neck, back and buttocks. While she massaged him, he said, “A friend of mine has been here and one of the girls treated him very nice, gave him a massage and took care of him.”
“What do you mean by ‘took care of him’?” Michaud asked, her natural wariness now alerted.
“Oh, you know. He got laid.” And then the officer quickly added, “I just won a football pool for two hundred fifty dollars. My wife doesn’t know about it and I want to spend it before she finds out.”
Perhaps it was this lure of easy money that now caused Michaud to disregard her normally suspicious nature. There was something not quite right about this guy. But she shook it off and instructed him to roll over on his back as she began to run her hands lightly over his chest and legs while she pulled her black skirt up. She wasn’t wearing any panties underneath.
The undercover cop reached over and pulled up her T-shirt, revealing her bare breasts. He said something to the effect of, “You have nice tits. I want you.” He began to fondle her breasts and kiss them; according to Michaud, he made more vulgar comments.
In one last clever ploy to mask a direct solicitation of money for sex, Michaud gazed up at a fan on the wall and asked, “How much would you pay for a fan like that?”
He answered, “Eighty dollars.”
“That’s a price we can ‘dicker with,’ ” she said.
The officer laughed. “Nice play on words. That’s exactly what I want to do with you. I’ll give you eighty dollars and a nice tip if everything is good.”
“All right,” Michaud agreed, and her last chance at escape slipped away. She reached over to her purse on a nearby nightstand and pulled a condom out. He then got off the bed and took eighty dollars from his wallet, saying, “I’ll give you the extra ten you gave me if everything turns out all right.” He started to hand the bills to Michaud, but she said, “Put it on the nightstand,” perhaps thinking that if he didn’t directly hand it to her, no prostitution could be charged.
She was wrong. As soon as she started to place the condom on his penis, he said, “I’m a police officer. You’re under arrest.”
Michaud was inwardly furious. How could she have been so stupid? She’d felt something was wrong with this guy from the very beginning. But she said with as much composure as she could muster, “Okay. I’ll cooperate and won’t cause any problems.”
He then looked in her purse and asked if thirty of the thirty-one dollars inside was from their first encounter at the door.
“Yes,” she answered.
Michaud was taken down to police headquarters and booked into the jail for less than twenty-four hours. The charges against her—647 (b), solicitation for prostitution—was only a misdemeanor. Her mug shot photo was in stark contrast to the happy teenager who beamed at the camera for her high school yearbook. Instead, it shows a Sacramento County placard propped up in front of her with the date 01/31/91 and the name “Michaud, Michelle” penned in. Her face is a mask of barely controlled hostility. One can catch signs of anger, frustration and outrage beneath her tightly clamped jaws. It’s the look of someone who intends to get even with her tormentors by any means possible.
If the city of Sacramento thought Michelle Michaud would take her arrest lying down, they were sadly mistaken. They didn’t know how fired up she could become when she felt she’d been wronged. And in her own estimation of this incident, she felt badly abused by the undercover cop. Michaud was a fighter at heart, and despite advice from her attorney, Bradley Wishek, to accept the misdemeanor charges, she fired him and took her case to trial.
On August 19, 1991, Michaud got her chance to argue her case before a jury in Judge Tani Cantil’s courtroom. The jury consisted of a legal secretary, elementary school teacher, real-estate broker and custodian. Some of them were quite willing to believe the story the now prim and proper Michelle Michaud presented of police entrapment. Not only had the undercover officer been crude, but in her own words, she said, “He was vulgar, acted way out of line and exceeded the professional boundaries of a police officer.” She was particularly upset that he had fondled her breasts, and according to her, had placed his fingers in her vagina, all while perpetrating the elaborate ruse.
Some of the jurors tended to agree that the sting operation smacked of entrapment, and as they deliberated, they asked to review comments the police officer had made. But in the end the assistant DA’s photo of the opened condom wrapper and the judge’s directions that “a police officer can provide opportunity for the commission of a crime, including reasonable, though restrained, steps to gain the confidence of suspects,” proved to be vital.
They found Michelle Michaud guilty of prostitution.
She was forced to take an AIDS test, pay a $120 fine, be on probation for three years, and told not to frequent known prostitution areas, such as lower Stockton Boulevard near her home. She complied with all of these, not raising a fuss, just as she had promised.
Terrible things were now bubbling to the surface in her mind. She felt used beyond endurance by society as a whole, and other people were going to be paid back in kind. Michaud was at an invisible crossroads where the delicate juggling act of high-class call girl and pious churchgoer could no longer be performed. She now hated men and used them as they used her. She even said to a friend, “I like to beat up on men. Literally. Wait until they’re drunk and then kick their ass. Dare them to get back up.”
Within this mixture of heat and anger a curious incident occurred between Michelle Michaud’s arrest in January 1991 and her trial in August of that same year. It happened in Lake Tahoe, a place that both she and James Daveggio knew well. Its ramifications would echo down the years and haunt them both in the waning days of 1997.