Every girl has a favorite

Jack seemed like the perfect client, until we started getting those creepy phone calls. Second in a series.

Jul 13, 2001 |

Wednesday, 2/2/00

Every girl has a favorite customer. Plus, a john whom she barely tolerates in order to meet her weekly quota. In between the two extremes are bread-and-butter guys -- the mainstay of a call girl's business. You plan for bread-and-butter guys, cultivate them, seek them out. But you never plan to have a favorite john.

Allison's favorite was Jack.

Last summer, he practically went into mourning when she decided (for the umpteenth time) to quit the business. Jack didn't want Allison to know he was seeing other girls, and he mostly saw her friends so he could mope about how much he missed her. To have a regular who's so easy -- a quick blow-job-with-a-condom -- and so devoted! We all sort of envied her. Who wouldn't? Jack seemed like the perfect client.

Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl

By Tracy Quan
Crown Publishers
271 pages

Buy this book

Until he got a call from Tom Winters, a twisted IRS agent who was auditing Allison and calling everyone she knew. Winters wanted to prove that she had vast reserves of hidden wealth; he couldn't believe that she simply had no savings or real assets after more than five years in the Life. Winters was curious about Allison's lifestyle -- her apartment, her prices, even her body. (He asked one girl if Allison had had a lot of expensive plastic surgery. Yes, paying cash for major cosmetic work leaves a major trail, if you're being audited for undeclared income.)

Jack told the IRS how much he paid Allie and how often. He described the furniture in her living room. Never mind that these antiques came from her grandmother. Winters was convinced he could "prove" that Allie spent gobs of undeclared income at big-ticket antique shops. Auditing call girls was more than a job for Tom Winters: It was a hobby, an obsession, a calling.

And Jack didn't just tell him about Allison. He told the IRS how they had been introduced -- about the other girls she worked with, like me and Eileen, and he ended up providing Tom Winters with a list of private call girls on the East Side. Allison lost many of her best clients -- along with the best part of her mind -- all because of Jack, the weak link.

One night last fall, Allison woke me with a drunken hysterical call: "You're the only person who had this information! I should have known!"

I sat up fast and moved away from Matt, hoping he couldn't hear her.

"I'm not as stupid as you think!" she cried. "You won't get away with this. I've got stuff on you, too!"

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