Conspiracy of Innocence

by Gene Grossman

  The phone rarely rang more than once each nite, but I never knew when that would happen. Every time I laid my head down for some sleep, I would glance over at the phone and look at it like it was a ticking bomb, ready to go off just as I fell asleep.

  Ever since then, I make it a habit to turn off the phone when I go to sleep. I’m not a medical doctor and can’t save lives, so I’m not worried that someone will die because they can’t reach me while I’m sleeping.

  Two days in the Desert is all I needed to remind me why I enjoy living on a boat. Instead of staying the extra day of my invitation, I tell my host as graciously as possible that I’d better be getting back to the boat for some important calls that might be coming in. During the two days my cell phone only had one message on it, but it was a telemarketer, so I didn’t miss anything except a wonderful opportunity to buy some swampland in Montana.

  Driving back to the Marina I’ve got one of my favorite CD’s playing, with Oscar Peterson and the Count Basie Orchestra. The windows are up, the air conditioning is on, and I’m bouncing around to the music like some kid driving a lowrider with boom-box speakers blaring some rapper’s latest hit. People driving near me on the freeway must think I’m an aging hipster. Maybe they’re right.

  I don’t think the kid will mind my coming back a day early, unless she gets mad at me for scaring Myra away. Just to play it safe, I call Myra to let her know I’m on the way back.

  “Hey, it’s me. Anything exciting going on?” “Peter, are you in the car?”

  “Yeah, I’m coming back a day early. Why?” “You’ll find out when you get here. It’s only

  two in the afternoon, so I’m taking off. Suzi’s busy preparing for her lecture tonight.”

  “Lecture?”

  “Yes, lecture. Stuart’s coming over this evening, and she’s going to teach him some principles of law. I think they’re doing the Palsgraf case tonight and re-hashing Cardozo’s opinion”

  “Okay, I just don’t want her left alone too long.”

  “My, my. Does this mean there’s a little bit of fatherly love in that hulk of yours?”

  Myra always did have a flair for words, but regardless of what she says, I’m the legal guardian of that kid and I want to make sure that she stays safe from harm until she reaches sixteen. After that it’ll probably be Harvard Law School’s responsibility.

  Driving back from the Palm Springs area is always a drag. About the only good thing about the trip is that Hadley’s Date Orchard and store is on the way, so I can stop there and pick up some honey, dates, nuts and granola. This place has become one of the most popular stops for people returning from Palm Springs. Paul and Peggy Hadley started the business in 1931, and in July of 1999, the Morongo Band of Mission Indians bought the Hadley Fruit Orchard stores and mail order operation, so it’s still in business.

  Between my first and second years of law school I had a job playing piano at one of the Palm Springs hotels. Unfortunately, it was a summer job. I had heard that it gets pretty hot there during the summer, but the drummer who hired me said, “don’t worry, pal, even on the hottest summer days the temperature goes down at night and you need a sweater to go outside.” Being even more of a gullible jerk in those days, I believed him.

  We pulled into town on the afternoon of July 3rd and were scheduled to start playing that evening. The temperature outside was 113 degrees that day, and people told us it was several degrees below normal for that time of year. Our little band started playing at seventhirty for the dinner crowd, and I purposely stayed inside the air-conditioned place until ten that evening, planning on then going outside and taking a deep breath of cool, fresh, desert air.

  True to my plan, we took our ten PM break and I walked outside of the hotel. It was dark, and I took my deep breath. At first I thought that I was probably standing too close to the building and the hot breeze I felt might actually be coming from the hotel’s air-conditioning exhaust fan. I was wrong. I wasn’t too close to the building and the hot blast of air was the coolest that the evening had to offer. The temperature outdoors had undergone a drastic plunge from 113 down to 93.

  After that summer I made a note never to return to the Palm Springs area during the months of May through September. I’m remembering that summer now as I continue my ride back to Los Angeles, snacking from a bag of Hadley’s raw, un-roasted, unsalted cashews. Come to think of it though, I did meet a very nice girl that summer and continued dating her all the way into the following year. I would drive back there every Friday afternoon, and stay for the weekend, so by now, my brain goes on autopilot during the drive back and forth. After you do it over fifty times it becomes second nature.

  The cashews are a good appetizer, but I know that because I’m coming back a day early there’ll be no dinner waiting for me, so I might as well stop for a snack. There’s an Indian place not far from the boat, so I go in, relax with a bottle of Indian Beer and order some Tandoori chicken, which is an elegant dish from the state of Punjab, where tandoori murgh is one of their most popular chicken dishes. This particular restaurant bakes it in an authentic tandoor clay oven, so the food really tastes delicious. The good thing is that it’s only got 4 grams of fat. The bad thing is that it’s got more than 66 mg of cholesterol.

  One Indian beer leads to another, and then another. After about an hour of stuffing myself, I’m feeling no pain and the god-awful screeching they’re playing on the speakers is starting to sound like music. Unlike our western world, with a twelve-tone musical scale, some of these Eastern civilizations have so many tones in their scale that it can sound more like a siren than music.

  Being only a block or so away from the Marina, I think it’s best that I walk from here to the boat. Those Indian beers come in the biggest bottles made, so the three that I had before, during, and after dinner, probably are equivalent to a six-pack, and I’m in no condition to drive. I’m not in such great condition to walk either, but it’ll be a lot safer.

  Just as I’m leaving the restaurant, the delivery boy is getting into his car. Five dollars later, he drops me off at the C-4200 dock gate, and I’m ready to negotiate the gangplank down to the boats. Most people think that when walking on the dock they’re still on land, but they’re not. The docks all float, and the angle of the ramp that leads down to the docks changes as the tide goes up and down. At high tide, it’s almost a level walk from land down to the dock, but at low tide, the water level may sink over six feet, so being low tide this evening, I’m holding on securely to the guard rail as I negotiate the steep incline down to the dock.

  It’s dark now, but a series of lights on our boat work off of a rheostat, so the low-voltage bulbs make an attractive guide for me to safely negotiate the boarding ladder and enter the wheelhouse. No doubt the kid’s already in bed, having finished her law symposium and Stuart’s nowhere to be seen, so I guess I’ve got the boat to myself, and I couldn’t be happier. I think I’ll just flop down on my king-sized bed and drop a little further into unconsciousness. As I approach my stateroom door it sounds like there’s a giggling noise coming from in there, but I know that’s impossible, so I ignore it and make a mental note to limit my future Indian beer consumption to only two bottles.

  I pull off my shirt and loosen my belt. Just as I push open my stateroom door my pants start to fall to the floor. No problem, the bed’s just a few feet in front of me and I’m all alone, so all I have to do is fall forward. The door will automatically close behind me and hopefully I’ll wake up some time tomorrow afternoon, with no headache.

  Part of the plan works. My pants are down at the floor and the door is swinging shut behind me, but as I start to fall forward I see that my bed isn’t empty. I try to stop my fall but instead wind up on me knees at the foot of the bed. The giggling I thought I heard before has now reached a high squeal pitch, and in the dim light I see that my bed is occupied by four, not just one, but four young Asian females, all holding the bedspread up to their chins and gawking at me in awe.

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  This is not the usual thing I see when entering my stateroom. Now I’m thinking that maybe I had more than three Indian beers tonight. A lamp is turned on and from my kneeling position at the foot of the bed I see that this isn’t a mirage. I am now attempting the impossible physical act of trying to pull my pants up while remaining down on my knees. This isn’t working and I eventually fall over onto my side, in which position it becomes possible to pull up my pants, stand up and run out of my own stateroom.

  Sitting down upstairs in the salon, I try to regain my composure. Through the closed stateroom door I can still hear the giggling, interspersed with high-pitched conversation in some foreign language. I feel in my heart that what I just saw and now hear is real, and definitely not a result of the Indian beers. As usual, I have absolutely no idea of what’s going on, but know one thing for sure: no explanation will be forthcoming from that quartet in my bed.

  This is too much to comprehend right now, so I flop down on the couch and am unconscious before my head hits the cushion.

  As I slowly come out of my daze I see that the sun is shining into the boat, four giggling Asian girls are sitting around jabbering at each other, and Stuart is sitting on a chair next to the couch apologizing profusely.

  At first I thought those four in my bed might be friends of Suzi’s, but in the bright light I can now see that these females are definitely not kids. On the contrary, they’re all attractive young women in their early twenties.

  “Honest to goodness, Pete, I didn’t know you were coming home last night. Both Suzi and Myra said you weren’t returning from the desert until tonight. By the way, nice job of saving those people out in the water the other day. I saw most of it on television, and I didn’t think…”

  “Stuart, forget about the rescue. What about those girls? Who are they and what were they doing in my bed last night?”

  “Oh, them? They’re my new inventory.”

  “Inventory? Did you say inventory? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Well, if you wouldn’t have had your phone turned off for the past couple of days I would’ve been able to explain it to you. We’re having our first IPO in a couple of days.”

  “IPO? That’s an acronym for Initial Public Offering. What’re you going to do, take your company public and raffle these girls off? And you never answered my question. Who are they, and where did they come from? No, wait a minute. Please get them out of here for a while. Take ‘em out on the aft deck for a few minutes. I need a half hour alone to get out of this sleeping bag, get into my stateroom, shave, and hit the shower. And then, my friend, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

  The transformation is complete and I’m now back to being Mister Jekyll, attorney at law. “Okay Stuart, start talking. What’s going on? Where are they?”

  “Suzi and the dog are walking them around the Marina so they can see the boats. Honest, I’m really sorry about last night. It’s just that I had no other place to put them for the evening, and since you weren’t going to be here, Suzi said that it would be okay….”

  There’s no need for him to apologize any more. Once the kid’s name is mentioned, I realize that whatever happened was out of my control. But I still have to interrupt him because there are just too many unanswered questions at this point. “Stuart, instead of babbling on, why don’t you just sit back, relax, and let me ask you some questions. First of all, what do you mean by ‘IPO?’ Please tell me you’re not selling these girls.”

  “Pete, you surprise me. These girls are all high class and from fine families. IPO stands for Introductions Provided by Olive. That’s the new business I wanted to explain to you.”

  It’s not going to work my way. If I’m going to have any chance of finding out what’s going on it’ll be to just let him go on with his usual spiel. This happens every time he starts a new business venture, and since he’s does so well financially with every crazy new business that he starts, I’m going to let him ramble on. With a wave of my hand, I indicate that he should continue. I surrender. The floor is his.

  “Remember when I went to Thailand to see my fiancée, and when we drove to La Verne you explained all about the K-1 Visa? Well I kept thinking: there are a bunch of those mail order bride places that show you pictures of girls in a catalog, and a prospective customer is supposed to fall in love with a picture and then spend months of his time and thousands of his dollars flying half way around the world to meet some girl that he might not like at all, and who definitely is not interested in him.”

  “I get the picture, Stu. Keep talking.” “Okay, well my philosophy is the same as it’s always been, when it comes to marketing. And that is, ‘you can’t sell what you don’t have.’ Why make guys take off of work and endure eighteenhour flights to Thailand when I can bring the girls here, protect them, act as their chaperone, and let their prospective husbands meet them right here in town.”

  I’m sitting here silent. I hear everything he’s said, but the computer in my brain is failing to sort the information properly. He takes the blank expression on my face as his cue to go on.

  “Peter, Peter, I don’t think you see it yet. I’m starting the first international marriage brokerage that has an inventory of prospective brides right here in the states. The guys don’t have to fly anywhere. And it’s all on the up-and-up. There’s absolutely no hanky-panky allowed, no sampling of the merchandise. Olive and Vinnie chaperone the meetings, and it all takes place in a fancy restaurant. We rent a small banquet room and hire a DJ to play some slow music. About a dozen guys will come in, six at a time, and sit around and talk to the girls. After a while, they dance, to try each other out for size. When the guys leave, they take pictures of the girls with them, and we have pictures of the guys, for the girls to look at.

  “We wait until the next day, because by then, all the guys will know which girl they’re mainly interested in. Once they tell us their choice, we show the girls the pictures of the guys who are interested, and then arrange for a second get-together, but this time on a couples only basis.

  “In the beginning, after the guys get a look at the pictures, we charge them two hundred dollars each for admission to the first gettogether. After that, and the pictures are exchanged and some couple are formed, we charge the guys five hundred to come back for a second call. This time there are only four couples, and each one is seated at a separate table for two. Olive and Vinnie are watching at all times, and the guys are not allowed to take the girls out of the place.

  “Then, we wait another few days for the guys and the girls to decide if they think there’s a possibility of getting serious. The girls are all pretty anxious to get married and move to the States, so if any guy really wants to go to the next level, we charge him another two hundred, and with his permission, a licensed private investigator does a thorough background check to make sure that he doesn’t have a criminal record. If our investigation doesn’t reveal any charges of abuse, his financial matters all look kosher, he can afford to provide a wife with a nice lifestyle, and that his HIV test comes back negative, then we’re happy.

  “We really have all the bases covered, so that no girl getting married through our service winds up in bad situation.”

  “That sounds pretty thorough, Stu, but what happens next? If a couple wants to get together, are they supposed to get married the next day?”

  “No, no. Each one of the girls is in this country on a tourist visa, so they’ve only got a couple of months. A regular courtship goes on for a while, and if they get serious, we make plans for the guy to go back to Thailand and meet her family. If they approve of him, then he can arrange to have her come back here on one of those fiancée visas, and then they have another ninety days to either get married or call the whole thing off. So, whatta ya think? Have I got it together, or haven’t I?”

  I sit and nod for a time while I try to compose my thoughts. Every time Stuart comes up with something, it’s usually so unique, that there’s no prior exp
erience to compare it to.

  “Well, Stu, I’ve got to hand it to you. You’ve really put a good package together, and it looks like the girls are being protected quite nicely.”

  “Oh, yeah. And if they get married, we even have a pre-nuptial agreement that they sign, so that a guy won’t lose everything if things don’t go as well as planned.”

  “That’s nice, but you know there have been some nasty stories about women who come over here with an agenda that can be destructive.”

  I can tell by the look on his face that now it’s his turn to sit there and not fully grasp what’s just been said.

  “Stuart, you should do some research into this stuff. When you first told me about your fiancée, I did some checking, and there are a lot of horror stories out there. I don’t know if any of them originated with girls from Thailand, but there sure are plenty that have to do with Russian girls, and others from Europe.

  “There are some foreign organized crime groups that have gotten into the mail order bride business and from what I hear, it can be more profitable then selling drugs or arms, but with less danger of getting caught or punished.

  “Organizations in this country, like the Global Survival Network, have been very interested in protecting girls who come over her to get married, and they really do need protection, because not everyone over here does the background check and is as thorough as you are. As a result, our government has passed a law called the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994. They felt it was necessary because there were too many cases of women brought over here and being treated like slaves, abused, forced to work long hours and used for prostitution. They had no legitimate way to complain, because their passports were taken away from them and they were threatened with deportation and jail.

  “Under the provisions of the new law, which is a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, abused spousal immigrants are allowed to petition for permanent legal residency status for themselves, without needing the sponsorship of their abusing spouse.