“Do you know how many girls have been reported missing this year?” Jay asked.
Johnson shook his head. “Not my department,” he said promptly. “You want the Missing People’s Bureau.
You lost someone?”
Jay shook his head. “I was wonderin’, Johnson, if there’s anythin’ in this White Slave rumour I’ve heard about.”
Johnson laughed. “Not a word,” he said. “You think about it for a moment and you’ll see that there can’t be anythin’ in it.”
“You tell me. It’ll save my energies.”
Johnson spread himself over his desk and folded his arms on his blotter. “It’s like these rape cases we get,” he explained. “It ain’t possible to rape a woman against her will. In the same way, it ain’t possible to keep a woman in prostitution against her will in a big city like this. Sooner or later we should hear complaints. Guys that go to these houses would report that a woman was being held against her will. But we never hear of them.
Obviously, the women are in the game for what they get out of it, and the stories we hear about Slaving is so much junk.”
Jay considered this. “Suppose these women were terrorized?” he said. “How about that?”
Johnson shook his head. “Too risky,” he said. “We’d give them protection if they wanted to squawk. All they have to do is to walk in here, lodge a complaint, and we’d look after them until an investigation’s been made.”