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What Happens in the Playboy Mansion…

May 6, 2020

“This is the place?” Claire asks me, looking at the battered wood door, the cigarette stains coating the edges of the doorframe, the bits of broken glass scattered around the ground.

“Number seventeen, that’s right,” I say.

I thumb the buzzer.

We wait for half a minute before I press it again.

“I was coming!” the voice through the intercom yells. Hard to tell who’s speaking, with the system’s audio quality. “Who is it?”

“We’re here to talk to Lucia,” I say.

“What, she in some kinda trouble?”

“Nothing like that,” I say. “We just wanted to ask her a few questions.”

“We don’t need any of that around here—” the voice starts to say, when Claire interjects.

“She could be a key witness in a criminal case,” Claire says. “We can do everything anonymously, make sure that no harm ever comes to her. We just need a few minutes of your time.”

The voice on the other end pauses, seems to think for a moment.

“Fine, come on up then,” the voice says, followed by a buzzing at the front door.

We climb up the tattered steps up to the third floor and knock on the door, waiting a few seconds for the door to open. A broad Latina woman eyes us—presumably the owner of the voice behind the intercom—and that gets confirmed when she yells: “Come out, Lucia, some people want to talk to you!”

We head into the cramped little living room/kitchen combined space, the set-up reminding me all too much of my old flat back in New York. Poor girl.

Lucia comes out of the room, a gangly girl sixteen years of age. Her dark hair spills everywhere, and she’s wearing a dark t-shirt that looks a size too large, her pants a stained pair of jeans.

“What,” she says. She leans against the door to her room, eyeing me and Claire suspiciously. “I haven’t seen anything. I don’t snitch.”

“This is about a party that took place last year,” I say.

“I told you, I don’t snitch.”

“May 24th, 2019,” I say. “A Friday night. The Playboy mansion.”

Her eyes widen momentarily.

“We would like your permission to record our conversation,” Claire says, bringing out her phone and setting it on the edge of the dining table. She taps into the voice recorder and taps the red record button. “You can tell us to stop at any point, and we’ll wrap up and leave, no questions asked, including now. Do we have your permission?”

“Who is going to hear about this?” Lucia whispers, looking at her mom.

“We’ll ask for your permission before sharing it with anyone else,” Claire says.

I trust Claire’s legal sensibilities on this, even if what she’s saying sounds painfully constricting for us.

Lucia looks at her mom. Her mom looks at us, mouthing something under her breath, but she says nothing, indicates nothing, only turns around and begins washing the dishes stacked up in the sink.

“Who are you two?” she asks.

“Friends of Tiffany Najbreit,” Claire replies. “There is a good chance that none of this ever gets used. But we want to be prepared.”

I see her mother stiffen by the sink, but Lucia only frowns slightly. She looks down at the ground.

“Okay, you can record,” Lucia says quietly.

“I imagine this will be tough for you, so let us know if we’re pushing you too much,” Claire says.

Lucia nods.

“I don’t know how much help I can be,” she shrugs. “But yea, I’ll say what I can.”

“First, we’d just like to confirm—you were at the Playboy Mansion on Friday, May 24th of 2019?” I ask.

“I think that was the day,” Lucia says. “It was definitely a Friday. And yea, I was there.”

“Could you state for the record how old you were on that day?” Claire asks.

“Fifteen.”

“And how did you end up at the Mansion on that day?” I ask.

“There was a man… his name was Lee, we’d met a couple times before at… some place…” Lucia’s voice trails off, and she gives us a look.

“Would you say you were fairly acquainted with him by the 24th of May?” Claire asks smoothly, understanding Lucia’s hesitation to elaborate and redirecting the conversation.

I, too, have my own guesses as to where she might have met him.

“Yeah, I guess,” she says. “I mean, we weren’t friends or anything, but a couple days before I went to the Mansion, he told me about an opportunity to meet some celebrities, earn some cash, have a good time… and I all I had to do was show up and look pretty.”

“So you told him yes,” I say.

“It was two thousand dollars,” she says, folding her arms. “What was I supposed to say?”

“You did fine,” Claire says soothingly. “Now, can you tell us what happened on the 24th? Try walking us through your day, from the time you woke up.”

“Well, I mean, I woke up and I went to school, and then, I ditched an hour or two early to buy myself a new dress…”

“Lee gave you some of the cash up front?” I ask.

“Five hundred,” she says.

“What did Lee look like? What can you tell us about him?” Claire asks.

“He was tall, a white guy, usually dressed in a suit… um… he never told me his last name, but he liked smoking cigars… He was definitely rich, dressed like it, had the golden credit card… I think he worked some professional job, but he didn’t really ever talk about it.”

He sounds more like a mobster to me than a professional, but I keep quiet.

“So you think you can identify him if we had a photograph?” Claire asks.

Lucia nods.

We don’t have a photograph, though. We hadn’t even known there was a guy called Lee before walking in the door. Nothing but the hazy memories Tiffany had to share.

“Thank you, that’s helpful,” Claire says. “So you went out and bought yourself a new dress?”

“Yes, I got myself one, and then went home to put on make-up, I knew that mama wouldn’t be home and I know where all her expensive stuff is—” she throws a guilty look at her mom, who is scrubbing at a pristinely clean plate. There’s not even soap suds anymore. “—and then I met up with Lee.”

“Where did you meet him?” Claire asks.

“I can’t say,” she says. “But um… the same place I usually do.”

“Why can’t you say?” I ask.

“They’ll kill me!” Lucia says. “I really can’t say! I shouldn’t even be saying this much…”

Claire shoots me a glare, as if I’ve slipped up hard.

I bite my tongue. Fuck.

“It’s alright. We’ll make sure that this recording never falls into the wrong hands, that the wrong people never find out about this,” Claire says. “We can make guarantees for your safety.”

Lucia slowly nods.

“So, you met up with Lee?” I ask.

“Uh… yeah. And there were a bunch of other girls there too. None that I’d met before.”

“Girls close to your age, you would say? As in, within a year or two of your age?” Claire clarifies.

“Yeah, I think so. I didn’t really get to talk to them much,” Lucia says. “Lee gave us a few instructions, like smile, be nice, you’re all looking very pretty, and then he took our phones away and told us to get into a big limo, and gave us drinks…”

“****?” I ask.

“Yeah, something hard,” Lucia nods, “and I know I shouldn’t have drank it, but then, it was like a party in the limo, you know, loud music, lots of us pretty girls, and we knew we were about to meet some real celebs, and I didn’t want to look like a pussy, so I drank. I remember getting to the Playboy Mansion, we were told to go into these various rooms, there were a bunch of guys, and then… it starts getting hazy…”

“It’s alright, tell us as much as you can remember,” Claire says.

“That’s the thing,” Lucia says. “I don’t remember anything that happened that night.”

“Nothing at all,” Claire repeats slowly. “No faces, no famous people that you can say were definitely there?”

Lucia shakes her head.

“No recollection of any rooms you were in, things you might have done?”

Lucia shakes her head.

“No memories of anything.”

“Nothing.”

I lean back and exhale, looking over at Claire. She looks unperturbed, if not sympathetic.

“What about the next day? What do you remember about that?”

“I mean, I woke up at home, but I don’t know how I got there… and I got paid, I had the money on my nightstand, but I wasn’t in my dress anymore, it was just some weird clothes, like way too big for me…”

“Men’s clothes?” I ask.

“No, I think they were new, for girls, just, not my size…”

I glance at Claire, and she meets my eye, mouth tightening a fraction. We’re on the same wavelength. These people went to lengths to ensure that there would be no evidence that anybody could use after the fact.

“Have you ever seen Lee since then?” I ask.

Lucia shakes her head.

“He stopped visiting…”

Her voice trails off again.

“Is there anything else you’d like to add to your story?” Claire asks. “Any details you might have forgotten or omitted?”

“There’s nothing else to say,” Lucia says. “But… just… please don’t tell this to anyone…”

“We won’t share the audio without your permission,” Claire reiterates. “Thank you so much for your time today. You’ve been a great help.”

“Thank you,” I say, the words sticking to the back of my throat.

Everybody in the room knows that we didn’t get what we came for.

“Could I get your number, in case I need to reach out to you again?” Claire asks Lucia. “I promise we’ll only use it if it’s absolutely necessary.”

“Okay,” she says, and she taps a number into Claire’s phone.

“Take care, Lucia, and you too, mama,” Claire says, getting up from her seat.