Chapter 56: Sunlit Interrogation
The policewoman’s eyes glanced over our lowering hands, and I twisted in place to see a man emerging from the house, her folded business outfit in his arms. He handed it over without a word, eyes hard on us, then went to fetch a patio chair for her as she re-dressed.
Once she was sitting dressed before the two of us, still kneeling submissively on the grass at her feet, she stated, “We got a report that you two are offering sexual services for money.”
“From who?” I demanded hotly.
All of the nouns in that accusation were correct, but not all together at once.
“Never mind that,” she said imperiously.
I replied, “You’re a policewoman accusing us of a crime. You’re required to name our accuser!”
She raised an eyebrow, then said, “My my, we have an amateur lawyer, I see. I usually find those among the guilty.”
“Ma’am,” I said, striving for cool, “I’m a naturalized immigrant. I had to study this sort of thing to pass the citizenship exam. Besides which, you can’t have it both ways: y’all like to say that ignorance of the law is no excuse, yet now you accuse me of being guilty because I know the law?”
The lieutenant nodded her head a smidge toward me in respect, saying, “Fair point. All right, your accuser was a Mr. Edward Goetz. It seems he saw you parading around in the buff on the news at that bike ride thing up in Salt Lake, causing him to worry that you might be corrupting the local morals, so as a concerned citizen, he brought the problem to us.”
My wife spoke, “Oh, well, that’s easily dealt with then. Got a phone in that purse there between the pocket pistol and the badge wallet?”
“I do,” she said coolly as the man handed the collected bills to her. She stuffed them back into her purse, then brought out a small smartphone. “Who am I calling?”
“Your own Officer Poulsen. Ask him about Mr. Goetz’ conviction for criminal trespass last year on our property. Ask him why the judge upgraded the charge to criminal from the normal misdemeanor level. After that call, you can next call my boss, who will tell you why she fired his worthless perv ass.”
“You know Officer Poulsen?” the Lieutenant asked with surprise in her voice.
I smiled and said, “Ma’am, we’ve seen the man naked, more than once.”
“He’s a client?” the seated woman asked.
“And a good friend, yes,” I said.
My wife laughed and said, “Oh, we know him even more intimately than that, Davie.” In a dramatic-reveal sort of voice, she pronounced, “We actually know his first name!”
This clearly impressed the Lieutenant, who said, “Intimates indeed. All right, explain why this Mr. Goetz has accused you.”
Kaitlyn spoke, “Ma’am, that concerned citizen story is claptrap. What we did up there was a legitimate exercise of our First Amendment rights. Nudity as a form of speech has a long history in this country, particularly as a form of protest, going back to the Quakers. The WNBR’s a protest against unsustainable use of fossil fuels. No, ma’am, Ed sold you a line because he’s aggrieved about something else entirely, something he couldn’t tell you, so he made that story up. Y’see, last week we learned through a friend that Ed was harassing one of her friends, not previously known to us. Our friend brought the problem to us, and we had a word with him.”
The Lieutenant said, “I’m hearing three separate motives for him to be antagonistic towards you, but you have yet to explain the actual accusation.”
“Well,” my wife continued, “in her youth, this other young woman might have offered certain…specialized services to Ed, something she no longer does.”
“Ah. I see. Do go on.”
“Well, we’ve gone out of our way to get her out of that life, and then we stepped in when Ed started harassing her. You ask for my guess, here it is: it’s projection, pure and simple. Ed thinks we’re now acting as her controllers, refusing him access out of prior animosity.”
The lieutenant got a hard set to her mouth and accused harshly, “Are you her pimps?”
“Dammit, we got her out of that life!” my wife yelled. “I even got her a job at the hospital to ensure she stays out!”
“Most noble,” the veteran policewoman observed with a cynical air. “What’s her name?”
“I’d rather not tell you for fear you’ll prosecute her for her past sins. If the goal of prosecution is to get the transgressor to stop, then we’ve handled that for you already. She’s just a college kid trying to make her way through school in a world where even state schools are getting expensive. Give her a break, all right? Let it go.”
Our interrogator sighed, then said, “Don’t I know it. Got one in college myself.”
“You want to check up on us, ask Poulsen; he’ll vet us.”
I jumped in, saying, “Also his sister Miki down at the hospital. She’s the head of the PT department. We work for her on a part-time basis.”
“All right, we’ll do that.” She looked hard at us for a few more seconds, then shook her head to reject some internal thought. My guess is that she decided not to press us for Amanda’s name and new job, because what she said aloud was, “You two can go now.” She stood, then walked back inside the house with the man, who hadn’t spoken a word the whole time.
Considering him, I wondered, «Undercover cop?»
That must have escaped into our rapport state, because my wife replied, «Husband, I think. It was all in the body language. Besides, you think she’d have stripped bare in front of an underling like that?»
«You’re the social sensitive,» I acknowledged as I was pouring the contents of the brass warming bowl back into the bottle. Then I sent, «That was a close thing.»
«Yeah,» she replied. «And I don’t think it’s over.»
Kaitlyn was right: it wasn’t.
A few days later, I got another call from the first person to pull a gun on me.
Hopefully the last, too!
“Lieutenant Carlisle?” I asked upon answering the phone, having created a contact for her after our last encounter.
“Mr. Bhat,” she replied formally. “I’m calling to say we’ve done the investigation you and your wife suggested, and we’re dropping all charges. The Poulsens were strong character witnesses for you, and I trust my officer’s judgement in particular.”
“Glad to hear it, ma’am. Is that all?” I asked in a neutral tone.
I heard her sigh, then say, “Mr. Bhat, you and your wife did very good work on me before things turned ugly. Can I make this up to you by scheduling another massage? This time at your house?”
I was still thinking when she asked plaintively, “Please?”
“All right,” I said, “but can we avoid the gunplay this time?”
The Lieutenant laughed and said, “I’ll leave it at home.”
Quickly, I said, “Oh, you don’t have to do that. I support the 2nd Amendment and the police: you’re welcome to be armed on our property as long as you’re being civil.”
“I’ll keep it in my purse in that case, nice and out of sight,” she assured me.
I sighed in relief and said, “Sure, okay then. When would you like to do this?”
“As soon as we can get you both, only not four-handed this time. My husband insists on coming, too, telling me I haven’t shut up about it since the incident, so he wants to see what I’m babbling about, as he put it.”
“Couples massage is one of our specialties,” I said. “Another is a sand massage, though we can only do that one while the client is fully nude.”
“You want to see me naked again?” she challenged.
“Ma’am, that kind of misses the point. Tell you what: give naked sand massage a try, and I promise you’ll go home wondering why you thought wearing underwear in a massage ever made sense to you, all right?”
“What guarantee is this?”
“The massage is free if you genuinely dislike it.”
She was silent on the line for a while, then said, “All right, you’re on.”
A few nights later, the Lieutenant not only let us keep our fee, she and her husband left a nice tip in the jar.
Before the couple left, the husband slipped out of the dressing area ahead of his wife, clearly having thrown his clothes on with the purpose of getting me alone. “You know, she had me videoing the first massage. My wife I mean,” he said in a whisper from well inside my comfort zone.
I looked a question at him, and he went on, “I was up in one of the kids’ rooms with a video camera. Got the whole thing on tape. My wife stripping on the lawn in the middle of the day is one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen her do, and we’ve been married for twenty-five years! That tape obviously never went back to the police evidence locker. I’ll be watching that again and again, I assure you!”
I was a bit annoyed at being surveilled like that, but since I couldn’t see any harm in it, I gave a quiet, rueful snorting sort of chuckle, saying, “Thank you for telling me. May it bring you much joy!”
“Oh, it will,” he confided quietly. Then as his wife was rounding the dressing screen, much more neatly dressed than her husband, he quickly added with a laugh, speaking plenty loud to ensure that she heard, “And Mr. Ellis from up the hill says Phoebe can be naked in her own damn back yard any time she wants!” Then ducking a swipe from his wife, he threw another comment over his shoulder as he began running toward the entrance of our juniper maze, “He just asked me to call and tell him when he should have the camera out next time!”
Lieutenant Carlisle chased him, yelling in mock outrage, putting on a show for us.
I wasn’t fooled, y’see: she was grinning widely as she rounded the corner.