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after that, there’s a car hanging around the street, a little Corolla or something, the sort of car a guy working for a paper like the
Suburban
could afford. I see it enough times that I start to get suspicious, so I decide to go out there, see who it is, ask him what he’s doing. As I get close to the car, I recognize him from his picture in the paper.”
    She displayed the clipping, pointed to Benson’s face.
    “I’m about to ask him what the fuck he’s up to, and he starts to hold up his phone, and I’m sure it’s one of those goddamn camera phones, so I put my hands up over my face and run back inside the house.”
    “Well,” I said, “I’m sure that didn’t look suspicious.”
    “So I’ve had to cancel all my appointments. I can’t have clients coming to the house, having their picture taken, running the risk of it showing up in the paper. I haven’t spanked a guy in over a week.” She spoke like someone who’d recently given up smoking.
    I shook my head. “So just lay low for a while, then. He can’t spend all his time parked out front of your house. He’ll give up after a while, go on to something else.”
    “I’m not so sure. I wish I knew someone who could scare the shit out of him, but you never know with journalists.” She looked at me and smiled. “Sometimes, when they’re threatened, they’re more determined than ever to write their story. It’s like the only way to stop them is to kill them.”
    I guess I was supposed to laugh at that, but when I didn’t, Trixie said, “That was a joke.”
    “I know. It’s just, I don’t really know what you want me to do, Trixie. Maybe you’ll actually have to make a respectable living for a while as an accountant. I mean, you are good at it. You know everything there is to know about balancing the books.”
    “Or making them appear to balance even if they don’t,” Trixie said, like she was remembering something that happened a long time ago. “And by the way,” she said, “thanks for not judging.”
    “Huh?”
    “‘A respectable living,’ I believe you said. That I might want to consider one, for a while.”
    “Trixie, don’t try to guilt-trip me. You operate outside the law. Like most places, Oakwood has laws against prostitu—”
    Trixie jabbed a finger at me. “I am not a hooker, Zack. I do not fuck these men. They don’t get so much as a handjob from me.” She became very serious. “I do not cross that line. I provide them an entertaining, fantasy-like environment.”
    “Okay, but you might have a difficult time persuading the authorities of that.”
    Trixie shook her head in frustration, then leaned forward in her leather chair, which drew me in as well.
    “What I was thinking,” she said, “was that you could talk to him.”
    “What?”
    “Just, you know, have a little conversation with him. You’re a reporter with a big city newspaper. He probably wants to get on at a place like the
Metropolitan
. You could tell him no one gives a shit about two-bit stories like this, that if he really wants to make the jump to the big time, he needs to go after city hall. Politicians on the take, bad cops, that kind of thing. Not some woman trying to make a living.”
    “Trixie,” I said. “Look, you’re my friend. I’d help you any way I can. But you can’t ask me to do this. I can’t, as a reporter for one paper, try to talk a reporter for another paper out of doing his job. I can’t begin to count the number of ethical violations. There’s just no way, I can’t, I’m sorry, I really am.”
    She looked into my eyes. “I thought you’d be willing to help me.”
    “I don’t want you to be in trouble, but what you’re asking me to do could get me in trouble at the
Metropolitan
, where, evidently, the boss already has it in for me. Imagine if he heard I was trying to persuade some community newspaper columnist not to write about a dominatrix.”
    Trixie said nothing. Something caught her eye, and she looked to