May 28, 2014
"Prayer for a lost soul, Sister?" he asked, brooding at her from beneath the hood of his jacket, the rain sluicing off his shoulders while he stood with the bedraggled crowd beside the cart where the nuns were passing out coffee and sandwiches.
"Of cou- Detective Stabler?"
He relaxed the second she recognized him, and would have hugged her, then, so grateful was he to see her kind face, had she not been a Sister.
"How's it going?" he asked, shooting her a toothy grin.
"I ought to be asking you that," Sister Peg answered wryly. "You look terrible."
"It's intentional," he said. "Listen, can we talk somewhere private?"
Sister Peg just nodded, flagged down one of her compatriots to take over her spot at the cart and then commandeered two cups of coffee, leading Elliot to the scant shelter of a cluster of trees at the edge of the park.
"Haven't seen you for a while," she said, passing him one of the cups, which he took gratefully.
A while was seven years, but nuns always seemed to reckon time differently than normal folks did. Elliot had learned that in Catholic school as a child.
"I been working a different beat."
"Good," Sister Peg said decisively. "Sex crimes was no good for you."
Elliot frowned. As near as it could figure it, the last time he'd been happy was working SVU. He looked back on those days now with a wistful sort of fondness; the work had made more sense, then, and justice had felt more tangible, and his family had been whole, and his wife had been alive. Sister Peg didn't need to know all that, though.
"Maybe," he said easily. "But listen, I've run into something, and I'm hoping maybe you can help me out."
For nearly a month now he'd been pondering the subject, scrolling through the mental Rolodex of contacts and informants every cop cultivated for themselves, wondering who would be best situated to shed some light on the question at hand. In the end he'd landed on Sister Peg, because she ministered to the working girls of Manhattan, because she was sworn not to lie, because she was a friend, and he longed to see a friendly face. He'd had to bide his time, wait until he had a chance to slip away from Kosta, wait for a day when he hadn't already promised to use his free time to check in with Bell, but now the time had come, and he'd schlepped down here, and found his mark.
"I can try."
Peg was a pragmatic woman. A woman of faith, and principle, who nonetheless understood the harsh reality of the world, and did not judge people for how they chose to reconcile themselves to that reality. An idealist, perhaps, but not so much of an idealist that she lost sight of the dangers that surrounded her. It was in her nature to want to help, but she wasn't going to get herself or anyone else killed in the process, and sometimes to do her work she chose to protect the women she looked after rather than help the cops. Elliot couldn't really blame her for that, but there was no such thing as nun-prostitute confidentiality, and it rankled, sometimes, the fact that she knew so much, and yet could sometimes offer so little.
"Wondering what you can tell me about Oak House."
Sister Peg laughed, and Elliot frowned.
"That place," she said, shaking her head. "The girls all think it's heaven."
For the first time Elliot had encountered someone besides himself or one of the customers who was even willing to admit that Oak House existed, someone who seemed to actually know something about it, and his blood sang in his veins, his investigative instincts going into overdrive. He felt himself close, so close, to the truth, and he wanted all of it, every last bit.
"Why's that?"
"She takes care of her girls," Sister Peg said with a shrug. Peg didn't elaborate on who she was, but she didn't need to. Elliot knew already. "Look, pimps on the street, they take most of the money the girls make. The traffickers take all of it. They say the girls owe them for a roof over their heads, or for food, or clothes, or drugs, or all of it, and the girls never make enough to get their feet under them and get out from under the pimps. The girls at Oak House, they get a bigger share of the profit. A girl works there a year or two, she can have enough money to get out of the life for good."
"So it's money?"
"It's not just money," Sister Peg disagreed at once. "She runs a clean house. If a girl comes in addicted to something, the madam gets her straight, and if the girl wants to make money she stays that way. I've heard stories about her getting girls into classes, job training, helping them find apartments. If one of her girls wants out, she helps them go."
"Gotta be a high rate of turnover," Elliot mused. There had to be; why would a girl stay in the job if she was clean, if she had money, if she had someone in her corner willing to help her start a different life for herself?
"Not as high as you'd think," Sister Peg said. "The girls are comfortable. The house is nice. Once they've been there for a while, they may only have to work one or two nights a week. They go to school, take their money and go shopping, whatever. One of them is a painter. She used to be out here on the corner and now she's going to have an exhibit at a gallery next month."
And probably, Elliot thought, the madam had used her connections to make that happen; every success came with a catch.
"They're still hooking," Elliot said bluntly. "You can't possibly be ok with that."
"I'd rather a girl work somewhere safe, and clean, where she has access to medical care and education if she wants it, than be out here trading blow jobs for drugs in an alley. I'm not saying it's good, Detective. I'm saying it's better."
It was a thin distinction, but one Elliot understood. Sometimes good was too much to hope for. Sometimes better was all a person got, and better was a step up from bad.
"Where does she get the girls?"
"Oh, they come to her," Sister Peg said. "Everybody knows about that place, and everybody knows when one of her girls leaves. They line up for the chance."
"Pimps can't be happy about her poaching their best girls." That kind of thing, in Elliot's experience, led to bloodshed.
"Of course they aren't. But she's untouchable. Especially after what happened with Johnny D last year."
"Who's Johnny D?"
For every question Peg answered, a dozen more sprang up to take its place, and Elliot's head was spinning, just a little.
"The worst of the worst," Sister Peg said darkly. "He was a trafficker. Brutal to his girls. One of them broke away, went to Oak House, and Johnny D had her killed. The madam at Oak House…retaliated. SVU busted him, and he ended up dead at the courthouse. He killed a cop and took her gun and the rest of them put him down like a dog. And everybody knows who put him there in the first place. The madam's too connected. No one is gonna be stupid enough to pick a fight with her. She always wins."
That figured, Elliot thought, because Olivia's clients were a who's who of New York power players, and her pockets were deep, and her security was top-notch. A rueful sort of appreciation for her was growing in his heart; she wasn't a killer - it wasn't her fault Johnny D had ended up dead, she'd just tried to send the guy to prison and his own aggression had taken him down - and she did seem to actually care for the young women under her wing. She was not good - as long as she was selling girls for profit he could not call her good - but then he'd done things that made him feel like he wasn't too good, either. Maybe better was all either of them could hope to be, and maybe they'd found it, albeit using very different methods.
"Where did she come from, anyway?" he asked. That was what he really wanted to know. With money, and connections, and a heart in the right place, he couldn't see why Olivia was doing this work, how she'd ended up there, why she hadn't left, when surely she'd had plenty of opportunities to do so. If she really wanted to help the girls, wouldn't she turn her house into a shelter, run a charity to help the girls get themselves straight without selling their bodies on the side?
"That," Sister Peg said, "is a long, sad story. Why do you care, anyway? Are you going to bust her?"
"Not me," Elliot said. It was not exactly a lie, but it was not the whole truth; when the time finally came he was going to bring Oak House down and its madam with it, but Elliot Stabler was not the cop who'd receive the accolades for that work. Still, though. A lie by omission was still a lie, and he was talking to a nun. It didn't sit well with him. Another sin to atone for later, perhaps.
"I'm working Organized Crime," he explained. "I'm looking at mob bosses, that sort of thing. It's her clients I want, not her. I'm not gonna bust 'em for paying for sex. They've got bigger crimes to answer for."
"Then why all the questions about her?"
Sister Peg was too smart; he should have remembered that. She always seemed to see straight through him.
"I've talked to her a few times," Elliot confessed. "I'm just…I'm just trying to figure out who I'm dealing with here."
"She's a survivor," Peg said. "That's the one thing you need to know about her. She came up under the old madam. That's a little before my time but I've heard stories. Oak House used to be a lot…harder than it is now. Everything I've told you, that's how she's been running things since she's been in charge, but when she was working, she had it tough. But she survived that. She was attacked last year, and she survived that, too. Whatever you think you're gonna get out of her, you gotta remember her goal is always going to be saving her own skin. You can't trust her, Elliot."
"What do you mean attacked?"
"Thought you were the police," Sister Peg raised her eyebrow at him. "You haven't even looked her up?"
Elliot hung his head, feeling a little sheepish. No, he hadn't pulled the file, firstly because he didn't even know Olivia's last name, and secondly because records requests were public. There was no way for him to look at her rap sheet without somebody somewhere taking notice, and he didn't want word to get around. What if she had a plant with the NYPD? What if she found out a cop she'd never heard of was looking into her? If she got suspicious, if she discovered that Elliot Stabler and Eddie Wagner were the same person, he'd be fucked.
"Why do I get the feeling there's something you're not telling me?"
"Nun's intuition," Elliot muttered. "Listen, just one more question. You know her last name?"
"Yeah. It's Benson."
That was enough, Elliot thought. Maybe it was too soon to pull her official records, but he could google her, at least. As private as she seemed, as much as her business relied on discretion, there probably wouldn't be a lot to find on the internet, but he could look, at least, and see what might be out there.
"Thanks," he said. "Listen, I owe you, Sister."
"I'll remember that, Detective. Now, enjoy your coffee. I gotta get back to work."
"May the Lord be with you," Elliot murmured.
"And with your spirit," Sister Peg answered, and then she walked away, left him slightly damp and nursing his rapidly cooling cup of coffee, thinking hard about everything she'd told him, about right and wrong, and all the shades of grey in between.