I MET CALLIE HARDEN on her lunch break at the Copley Place Mall, on a bench in the open area across from the Tourneau watch store. The mall was attached to the Westin, and within walking distance of Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library. But if you set a mall exactly like this one in Omaha, or Scottsdale, or Eugene, Oregon, it would look almost exactly the same, with the same stores, the same music being played over the sound system.
I asked where she worked.
“Nearby,” she said.
I asked where she lived, and she said in a section of the Old Colony neighborhood in South Boston, now being gentrified the way so much of Southie had been over the past two decades or so.
She had brought a tall coffee from Starbucks with her. I knew if I had more coffee I’d be running laps around the mall before long, from Tourneau to Tiffany and back.
If people walking past had taken notice of us, they might have thought us a couple of suburban moms looking for post-Christmas bargains.
“I told Tony I don’t know where Lisa is,” Callie said.
“What did he say to that?”
“He said that I should meet with you anyway,” she said. “He said you’re better at asking questions than he is, and don’t have to threaten people when you want answers.”
“Might be the nicest thing he’s ever said about me,” I said.
“But I want to ask you something,” she said.
“Go ahead.”
“I had no choice when it came to working for him,” Callie said. “What’s your reason?”
I told her what I’d just told Darcy Gaines, that it was complicated and, since I hadn’t even taken as much as a retainer from him, I continued to view it as working on spec.
“Everybody always has reasons for taking Tony’s money,” she said.
Shots fired, I thought.
“It is highly unlikely that I will ever take a dime from him,” I said.
“Got it,” she said.
I hadn’t known what to expect of her, looks-wise. But she was quite lovely in an almost exotic way, perhaps with some Asian in the mix somewhere: dark hair, dark oval eyes. I understood that it was silly, even ridiculous, to think this way, but I did anyway: I couldn’t imagine why someone so beautiful had ever needed to support herself by selling her body.
She might have been my age, or slightly older or slightly younger. Her makeup had been so artfully applied it was almost undetectable. The only sign of aging was around her eyes. Or perhaps behind them.
“Tony said that you and Lisa were friends,” I said.
“Are friends,” she said.
“I meant nothing by the past tense,” I said. “If I honestly thought her dead, I wouldn’t be here.”
I asked where they had met. She said they had been working for one of Tony’s escort services at the time, at a town house not far from where Lisa now lived, over between Westland Ave and Symphony Road.
“It looks like a normal brownstone,” she said. “Tony’s got a handful of places like it in a few fairly nice neighborhoods all over town, and some less nice neighborhoods, usually where there’s enough foot traffic so that nobody sees anything out of the ordinary. And there’s an entrance to this one from the public alley in the back.”
“Real estate in that area isn’t cheap,” I said.
“Tony has always been willing to spend money to make money,” she said. “Just not on us, of course.”
Callie said she had been a runaway. I asked from where. “The Midwest,” she said. She said she had just finished high school and bought herself a train ticket away from an abusive stepfather as a graduation present. I asked why Boston. She said she’d read online that there were a lot of art schools here, and she liked to paint.
“I paint,” I said.
“I don’t,” she said. “At least not anymore.”
One of Tony’s men picked her out, and then picked her up, at South Station. Just like that, she was in that world. But she was pretty, and young. She wasn’t on the street for long. They briefly had her doing hotel work after that, then put her in a house that catered to men with tastes for younger women, in Cambridge. She finally ended up working for Lisa, who was just becoming a fast-tracker in Tony’s business. They became friends. Lisa was, she said, the first real woman friend she’d had since South Station.
“We both talked about putting together enough money to leave someday,” she said. “Lisa used to talk about how she was giving herself an education on how to eventually get out of the life.”
“You got out first,” I said.
“I met a man,” she said. “Not at the house. At yoga, of all places. A lawyer. This was about six months ago. He asked me out on a real date, and then another.”
“What did you tell him you did for a living?” I said.
“I told him I’d saved enough as a personal trainer to go back to art school,” she said. She shrugged. “One more lie. I even started taking some classes at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. And here’s the thing: I still loved painting, I was falling in love with Dan, and I made the decision I had to get out. So I finally screwed up my courage and went to that awful place of Tony’s in the South End and asked him if he’d let me go.”
“Buddy’s Fox,” I said.
She’d probably sat in the same chair across from Tony that I had.
“He laughed and told me no, I was too good an earner for him,” she said. “I told him that maybe I’d just disappear. He laughed again and told me good luck with that, that he’d own me until he was tired of owning me. I didn’t know what else to do, so I went to Lisa. She had just stopped running the place over near Symphony Hall and had moved in with Tony. She said she’d talk to him. The next day, she called and told me I was out. I asked how. She said not to worry about it, maybe I could return the favor someday.”
“You didn’t press her?”
“Why? I was out, that was all that mattered.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that,” she said. “Only I wasn’t.”
I waited. I watched her sad, dark eyes with a faraway look in them. It made me wonder if she were staring at her past, or future.
“The last thing for me to do was to tell Dan what I’d really been doing for a living,” she said. “I had seen a therapist a few times, and she’d convinced me it was the only way for me to be truly free.”
There was nothing for me to do except sit here and wait for it. So I did, with an ending to the story I knew was as inevitable as shouting on cable news.
“You pay and pay and pay,” she said.
I had to let her get us to wherever we were going at her own pace, in her own way. I did not want to rush her, or seem disinterested. Because I was not.
“I thought he cared enough about me to understand,” she said. “Maybe it was some kind of insane Pretty Woman fantasy. But all he cared about was that somehow the friends he’d introduced me to would find out. Or someone at the law firm.” I could see that she was starting to cry. “In front of my eyes he turned into every mean john I’d ever met.”
I started to reach for a tissue. She simply wiped the tears away with the back of her sleeve.
“But you didn’t go back to work for Tony,” I said.
“I wasn’t running this time,” she said. “I have a good job now. I have friends.”
“Do the friends know?”
“Not yet,” she said.
“But you remained friends with Lisa?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I felt I owed her that. I kept sensing that she was moving toward the door, just more slowly than I did.”
“What kept her in?” I said.
“She was making real money for the first time in her life,” Callie said. “She said that even though Tony controlled her bank account and credit cards, she had managed to put a fair amount away.”
“Skimming from Tony, I imagine, would be more dangerous than your former life,” I said.
“Lisa,” she said, “has always had a good head for numbers. Even before it did her much good.”
“When was the last time the two of you spoke?”
“We were supposed to have dinner about a week ago,” she said. “She said she was closer than ever to getting to where she wanted to be. I said, ‘Getting out?’ She said, ‘Everybody comes up on a line they can’t cross. I can’t cross the line with children anymore.’ I asked her what that meant and she said she’d tell me all about it at dinner. But that afternoon she texted me and said that something had come up and she had to cancel, but she’d call in the morning. She never did.”
I felt my phone buzzing inside my purse and ignored it.
“Did she ever mention a man named Gabriel Jabari to you?” I said.
“The man who owns that new club?” Callie said. “Just that she’d met him one time.”
“Is there any chance that she could be involved with him in some way?”
“You mean sexually?”
“Or business,” I said. “Or perhaps both. Jabari says no.”
“If she was, she never mentioned it to me,” she said. “And as far as a relationship, she’d only been with Tony for a long time.”
“Did she have genuine feelings for him?” I said. “Because he seems to have had some for her.”
“She told me Tony had said that he loved her,” Callie said, “almost obsessively. I told her to remember that he was a pimp, and that pimps lie. About almost everything.”
“Are we being honest here?” I said.
“No reason not to.”
“Women of your former profession lie their asses off, too.”
She smiled. “So we do,” she said.
“You honestly don’t know where she might be?”
There was the slightest hesitation. She tried to cover it by acting as if she were looking past me at someone in the mall, or something. I wondered how much she might have already lied to me today.
“I don’t,” she said. “Do you think Lisa might be in danger?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I reached into my purse and took out one of my new business cards, which had my cell number on it, and the number for my landline at River Street Place.
“I have your number in my own phone,” Callie said.
“Just in case,” I said. “If Lisa calls you, please call me. Tell her I won’t give her up. I just want to talk.”
“If she still wanted to be with Tony, she’d be with Tony,” Callie said.
She studied the card and then tossed it into her own purse and stood up.
“I do have a life now, Ms. Randall,” she said. “It’s not much of one. But it’s mine. I owe Lisa because she helped me when no one else would. Whatever help she needs from me, I will freely give it to her.”
“Maybe we can both help her,” I said.
I shook her hand and said, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about the yoga guy.”
“So am I,” she said. “All the lies I’d told to men in my life. And this time I screwed myself over by telling the truth.”