The black book

The newspaper reporter was young. So young that her father would tease her that she still had baby fat.

The black book came to her in her New York office from a Hungarian immigrant. He said his daughter had "died like a dog" and he wasn't exaggerating. The young prostitute was taken to a rural backwoods road by... someone. Struck by a car and killed, hopefully instantly.

The car hit the woman so hard that it knocked her out of her shoes, which were found several feet away.

The father gave the reporter some of his daughter's possessions, including her black book. Just names and numbers, mostly. Some notes, which the reporter kept private. The newspaperwoman, now in possession of the black book, had two choices: She could write a straight-forward news story on the mysterious and unsolved killing of a prostitute.

Or she could call everyone in the book and ask them what they knew about the victim and maybe the killing itself.

There was plenty of information available; the young woman had been arrested several times. The local police at the time filled in fields on their official forms on "occupation." But there was no code for prostitution, even though that's what the woman had been charged with. So for her, and all the other prostitutes in town, the police would quaintly name them "housewives."

Then, years later, the reporter (now a mother herself) would encounter women who would brag about their husbands' successful careers, saying it allowed them to be housewives instead of working moms. The job title always gave her pause.

The tough part of tracking the victim's life and death was that the local paper and sometimes the police would spell her name wrong. Decades later, as the reporter carefully and methodically wrote her own mother's obituary when she died of COVID, the reporter thought with great sadness that people didn't even bother to get the victim's name spelled correctly.

The reporter decided to do the uncomfortable thing. She called every man in that black book. Not one was a suspect; he had already been arrested but the District Attorney said there wasn't enough evidence to take it to trial. As far as the reporter knows, he's still just roaming around in that shitty little town where she lived in her 20s.

The young reporter reached men who hung up on her. Men who whispered so their wives and their families wouldn't hear them. Men who yelled at her and threatened her with violence and even death.

And some who said, yes. They "dated" the victim (those are their words. They "dated" the victim.) Stories about her that were sometimes kind and sometimes damning. They said she was witty and funny and easy to be around. She was pretty; she looked much older than her years. The prostitute had stolen money from some of them, had a friend die on a couch from an overdose, and didn't help.

When men didn't pay her or pay her correctly, she was known to break into their apartments and steal whatever she could carry.

The reporter found a prostitute who had worked the streets with the victim. The prostitute was friendly and helpful until she turned on a dime and said none of her information could be used. The reporter had her life threatened that day, in person and not on the phone which was decidedly unnerving. The woman threatened to call their pimp and have him come beat up the reporter. But then the pimp — he called himself a "manager" — called the reporter's editor and apologized, saying the prostitute had anger management problems and was off her medication.

The reporter wrote her story. It won a prize or something, she cannot remember. She does remember this:

The Hungarian immigrant father of the prostitute loved the story. He felt like he and his daughter had been heard, not necessarily by the District Attorney or the people that mattered, but by the tens of thousands of readers who saw it on the front page. He no longer told the reporter that his daughter had "died like a dog," although she had. He said this instead: "She was so young and had so much promise. She was so young she still had some of her baby fat."