“Oh, as long as they are numerous, serve me up a young blonde chicken of about seventeen summers, one that will go the limit and not try to put mucilage on her fingers to stick to the long green. I’ll pay her right for her trouble.”
Then he makes his first flesh payment at that moment to the mistress of a dozen women’s bodies. He strolls down to the lobby and waits. A few moments later he is “paged” by a bellboy and a note is given him. If we should follow him we would find that the note named the rendezvous and that the purchased woman waited for him there to do his bidding during the night of shame.
This is not fiction but shuddering fact.
In a Jackson boulevard hotel, there is a “Miss Harris,” who is the procuress of girls of every description, character, temperament and physical type, for men of wealth.
There are a dozen of such women with headquarters in Chicago’s big hotels. They are the fashionable panderers for the rich human beasts, who live or stop at the hotels or who go there to find their victims.
These places in the criminal world have a name. They are named “Houses of Call.” They are employment agencies for young and old prostitutes. If a man is willing to pay the price demanded, the woman, “Miss Harris,” or other such women, will produce for his pleasure, a young virgin and turn her over to the merciless, insane lust of human Satan.
These places are the fashionable flesh-markets, the slave blocks where women are sold to men of wealth.
That is another phase of the great Vice Trust, for those women panderers, and those girl slaves pay tribute to carry on their traffic to the great kings of the underworld. Of the relation of these classes of criminals to their protectors we shall speak later.
“Miss Harris”—we shall use her as a type—has a secret directory to the covert, hidden but expensive haunts of vice.
After Mr. Edwards departs, we might see another caller on a similar mission. He is not a new customer. He is an old one. He makes his demand without hesitation. He wants a young girl of innocence. He wants a girl in the first flush of maturity, a girl who fears the things of sin, but who, paradoxically, craves for the cloying sweet things of life.