“You mean, like, a house of pleasure and pain.”

“I offer pain. But some people do find that pleasing.”

“Where do you think he heard about it?”

Trixie shrugged. “Any number of people know. Clients. Former neighbors.” She gave me a look.

“Not guilty,” I said.

“He did a piece on Roger Carpington. He’s already out, you know. Maybe he told him something off the record, like, ‘Hey, you know what goes on in your supposedly respectable neighborhood?’”

Carpington was a former Oakwood town councillor who’d lost his position after being convicted of accepting money to vote the right way on a housing development. Carpington had never been a client of Trixie’s, as far as I knew, but the man who’d been paying him off had been. He might have told Carpington about his recreational activities before having the life squeezed out of him by a python. (Hey, it’s a long story.)

“But the thing is,” Trixie went on, “it doesn’t fucking much matter where he found out. The fact is, he suspects something.”

“Okay, so how do you know that?”

“He called me, says he wants to interview me. I say, what about? He says he’s doing a column about Oakwood’s kinkier side, thinks I might be able to help him out with that.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to write about you. Maybe he just wants a freebie.”

“Yeah, well, if I thought strapping him down and giving him forty whacks would keep him quiet, I’d do it. But I think he’s the real deal. He wants to do a story.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said I had no idea what he was talking about and hung up.”

I had some more latte-thingy. “So did that take care of it?”

Trixie shook her head. “He calls again, says he’d like to do the story even if I remained anonymous. So he can still do his story about kinky suburbanites. So I tell him again, I’ve got nothing to say. Then, 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.