I GRABBED the hotel diagram and spread it on the table. It took several sheets because I had drawn each floor separately so that I could see how many stairs I would have to run, how much ground I would have to cover.
“The prostitutes do not spend the night in the hotel,” I said. “No john can pay for an entire night. Apparently the mob has different hotels for different purposes. This isn’t a high-end hotel, but it’s not the bottom either.”
I almost told the women that there were other, specialty hotels, and then I decided that the less they knew the better. Besides, I didn’t want to go into detail if I could at all avoid it.
“The entire hotel is empty of clients and prostitutes by 5 a.m. By seven-fifteen, the first buses arrive in the back of the school. That’s a two-hour window. I planned to use the first hour, and have the second hour as my cushion.”
The women had gathered around me. They were leaning over the diagrams too, blocking what little light there was.
I hesitated for just a moment: I was going to confess to planning a major crime here. However, if I could believe Marvella, these women were committing crimes themselves,
mostly by providing illegal abortions. But Marvella had implied that they had done other things as well, things that would make them as unwilling to report me as I was to report them.
“First,” I said, “I would cut the phone lines.”
“You know how to do that?” the short woman asked.
“You’d get them all?” the woman named Kim asked at the same time.
“Yes,” I said to both of them. “I wouldn’t want any security in the hotel to call for backup, and I doubt they would be on the phone at that hour.”
“If there are no prostitutes in the hotel,” Paulette said, “why would there be security?”
“You forget the imprisoned girls,” I said. “Plus the man in the penthouse. Apparently he lives there.”
“You mean Eddie Turner,” the older woman said.
My gaze met hers across the table. Her eyes narrowed. “Yes, I know him,” she said. “I always thought he was a snake, but he has half of Bronzeville buffaloed. You’re after him.”
“He owns the hotel,” I said.
“And he lives above all of that sin,” another woman said.
I hated that word. I looked at her, but she didn’t look at me.
Her head was bowed. She was studying the diagrams.
“He knows what’s going on inside,” I said. “He profits from it.”
“Including girls like Lacey,” Marvella said softly.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure he knows exactly how those girls get brought into the life.”
I had switched to the euphemism midway through, and the gaunt woman shook her head just a little. She knew what I meant. I suspected they all did.
“There will be security for Eddie,” I said, “and I think the girls are locked in. I wanted to go into the hotel, yell Police Raid!, and then we would all split up. You ladies would go with someone to the sixth floor and get those girls out. Another group of men would start searching the hotel, rousting people out of the rooms, if, indeed, they were in rooms. Another small group would make sure the restaurant was empty.”
“Where would you be?” the short woman asked me.
“He’d be going after Turner, wouldn’t you?” Kim asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d deal with Turner. He also has favorites that he tends to keep for the night. I’d make sure there were no girls inside.”
“You’d take care of him,” Kim said.
I didn’t answer that.
“And then what?” she asked.
“I’d make sure you were all out,” I said. “And then I would burn down the hotel.”
Gasps all around me.
“Bill,” Marvella said. “You’re not serious.”
“I’m perfectly serious,” I said. “If we did all of that and left the building alone, they’d just set up with better security two nights later. The police would be looking for us, and so would the mob, and the operation would start all over again. Girls would get taken from the school, and nothing would have changed.”
They were all staring at me. No one was looking at the diagrams.
“But with hotel burned to the ground, they wouldn’t rebuild next to the school. That would be too expensive. The operation would be down too long, not to mention all the money to contractors and zoning officials and bribing all sorts of city government types. Plus there are Federal government employees on the South Side these days trying to see how Model Cities money gets spent, so they might see something untoward, and report it. They’re harder to bribe than Chicago officials.”
No one smiled. I half-thought that would get a grin or two. I think they were all still shocked that I wanted to burn down the hotel.
“The police would know it was arson,” Paulette said. The cousin of a cop, she knew how police methods worked. So did Marvella.
“They would know anyway,” I said. “We would have conducted a fake police raid, remember? Someone would have seen us. The girls would certainly know that we had gotten them out, and a few might be angry about it.”
“They wouldn’t,” the short woman said.
“Sure, they would,” the older woman said. “Sometimes people can get co-opted fast. You know that.”
“What were you going to use to burn it down?” the gaunt woman asked. “Gasoline?”
“Too dangerous,” I said. “I’d lose control of the fire. I was going to do something really simple. I was going to go through the hotel room by room. After I made sure no one was hiding in the room, I’d light two books of matches. I’d leave one under the curtains, and the other on the bed. Not every fire would catch, but enough would. The hotel would smolder. No one would return right away. Even if someone saw the smoke by seven thirty or so, and the hotel didn’t burn down all the way, the damage to the interior would be too much for them to rebuild. The mob would move to a different location.”
“Maybe only a block or two away,” Paulette said.
“Maybe,” I said. “But at least they can’t watch the school girls stand outside and gossip every day. At least they can’t spy on their targets and figure out how to wheedle their way into the girls’ lives. It would be harder to compromise girls from the school. And that’s all I was trying to do. I wanted to save the ones who could be saved, and get that damn hotel out of the neighborhood.”
They stared at me. My heart started pounding and my mouth was dry. Had I trusted the wrong people? Not even Marvella said anything.
Finally, the older woman stuck out her hand. “I’m Beatrice.”
I took it. “Bill.”
“Bill, I think we can do this with you.”
I shook my head. “I told you, I don’t have enough people.”
She grinned at me. She had to be in her fifties, maybe more. She had laugh lines around her eyes.
“You have plenty of people,” she said. “You just don’t have enough men to make you comfortable.”
My cheeks grew warm.
“As I see it,” she said, before I could defend myself, “your plan requires a lot of stealth, a lot of room-searching, and very little muscle. If you run into security, then you do something, but first you try to chase them all out of the hotel.”
“By telling them it’s a police raid.” I tried to keep my tone level. I didn’t want her to think I was patronizing her, although part of me felt like I was patronizing her. “They’re not going to believe a police force filled with women.”
“They don’t have to,” Beatrice said. “Because you send in someone—me, for example—to warn them there’s a police raid coming.”
I shook my head. “They wouldn’t believe a woman like you would want to warn them.”
Her grin widened. “Then you warn them. Marvella’s told us you already made some deal with the gangs to protect your kids. The people in the hotel would trust you to tell them the truth. You get them out, and you’ll still be someone they trust, because they won’t know you were the one to torch the hotel.”
The word “torch” sounded odd coming from her.
“You run through the entire place, yelling it’s a raid, then we go in. We split into the same groups you were talking about, and most of us get the girls out—”
“And what will you do if there are guards upstairs?”
“We can take care of them,” the gaunt woman said. “My name is Sam, by the way. I’d be happy to hurt one of those goons.”
“They won’t expect it,” Kim said, “any more than you did.”
“No,” I said. “It’s still not enough. Most of you will be getting the girls out, and that hotel has a lot of rooms.”
“We know a few other women,” Paulette said. “People we can trust.”
“You shouldn’t go at all, Paulette,” I said. “You have a family.”
“So do you, William,” she said. “Who’ll take care of that little boy if something happens to you?”
“And something will,” I said. “We don’t have the right team for this.”
“I figure we need about twenty people,” Beatrice said. “I can get us that. Many of the women are good shots. Several of us are strong enough to carry the girls out if we have to. We can do this.”
I let out sigh. “I know it sounds like a grand adventure, but it’s not. Let’s ignore the fact that we’re breaking and entering, we’re taking girls off the premises without permission. Let’s think about this: that place has police protection. If we get arrested, we’ll all get charged with arson. It’s a felony. And
they’ll bring other charges as well. And that’s if we survive this.”
“Your plan is good,” Beatrice said. “If we’re going to rescue the girls, we do it your way.”
“We could kill someone,” I said. “Accidentally. We might miss someone. They might be hiding. There’s a lot that can go wrong.”
“It’s a risk,” Kim said. “We take risks all the time. I don’t see much choice here.”
“Me, either,” Sam said.
“What we need,” Paulette said, “is a backup. If something goes wrong, we need a way to get a signal to everyone to vacate the hotel. Even if we only manage to get a few girls out, that’s a start. Then maybe we can go to the Defender or something and put the story out there.”
“It won’t matter if the story’s in the Defender,” I said. “The city doesn’t care about the South Side. It’ll be a rumor, and it won’t stop the hotel.”
“But we’d save some girls,” Paulette said. “Even in the worst-case scenario, we’d save some and maybe get some outraged parents to put the right kind of pressure on the school board.”
“It’s that kind of naiveté that would hurt this mission,” I said. “I’m sorry, Paulette, but it just doesn’t work that way.”
“Well, I don’t like your other solution. If we wait until spring and it gets light earlier and it’s not cold and they might change their habits and they might take more girls, and suddenly we’ve missed an opportunity to do something. I
don’t like missed opportunities, Bill. I’ve learned that if we wait, things get worse.”
Paulette was referring to the loss of her cousin’s family. She had seen police corruption up close and she knew how damaging it could all be.
“We have lawyers,” Sam said.
“We have good lawyers,” Kim said.
“You do too, Bill,” Marvella said. “Your girlfriend can afford an entire army of lawyers. If we’re careful, they’re not going to be able to prove anything except that we went in to rescue the girls. Since you don’t want to use an accelerant, they can’t even prove arson or that we put the matches on the beds.”
“I would do that,” I said.
“We need a team. And there are too many rooms to search in that hour-long window without a group of us doing it. We can do this, Bill. The only thing that’s preventing us is your chauvinism.”
I frowned. I wasn’t a chauvinist. I respected women. I had encouraged Laura to take over her father’s business. I worked for her, for heaven’s sake.
“I keep telling you,” Marvella said into my silence.
“Women are a lot tougher than you think.”
Beatrice kept watching me. She could tell that I was unmoved by those arguments. So she shrugged.
“It’s pretty simple, Bill,” she said. “We have your diagrams. We know your plan. We’re going to do it, with or
without you. I think you might be helpful. After all, you’ve been in the hotel and we haven’t. But we can do it alone. We’ve done worse, just not on as big a scale.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
She leaned back and crossed her arms. “Our acquaintance is short. I’m not going to tell you everything we’ve done, just like I’m sure you don’t want to tell me everything you’ve done.”
Touché, I thought, but didn’t say. She won the argument right there.
“We go in, it’s my plan,” I said. “I’m in charge.”
“Of course you are.” She said it with a straight face. She didn’t sound patronizing, but I had the sense she was. What was it my adopted mother used to say? It’s a wise woman who lets her husband believe he’s in charge.
I had a feeling I had just been subjected to the same treatment.
“If we go tonight,” Beatrice said, “we don’t have to worry about school. No one will be there that early on a Saturday morning, even if there are Saturday activities.”
“But the customers will stay later at the hotel,” I said.
“Not that much later,” said a young woman who hadn’t spoken until now. “The girls and the security will want to close down for the night. They won’t care if it’s Friday or Monday. They want out.”
She sounded like she knew what she was talking about. I frowned at her. Her gaze held mine, then skittered away.
“It’s personal for some of us,” she said softly.
“It’s personal for all of us,” I said, and with that, I knew I had given in.