Tohono O'odham With Love

"The rez is dry, and he didn't have a car to drive to where he could buy beer," Soto relates. "Lysol has a high alcohol content, and it's easy to get in Sells. So it's the next best thing."

Soto drifted, working as an auto mechanic in Bisbee, then moving up north briefly for a stint as a janitor for Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He eventually ended up in Phoenix, where he drove a taxi for a couple of years, and then finally landed a job as a handyman for the exclusive Sanctuary Resort and Spa on Camelback Mountain. Maintenance staff there work 'round the clock, tending to any problem a guest may have in one of the mountainside "casitas," furnished condo-like dwellings with magnificent views that are the resort's "rooms." In early 2001, one of those casitas was occupied by none other than the buxom Texas beauty who'd just been awarded $450 million by a California judge in September 2000. That cash remained tantalizingly out of reach because of battles in a probate court in Houston and later legal wrangling that's reached all the way to the Supreme Court and drags on to this day. All the same, at that moment, Smith seemed to be on a roll, and she was treating herself to a break from the spotlight and the jealous eye of her lawyer and sometime companion Howard K. Stern.

Like many celebs, she had journeyed to the Valley for anonymity, and cabined at the resort under an assumed name. But everyone knew who she was.

"We were told to answer calls from her first, before any of the other guests," Soto remembers. "Anything she wanted she got. And before you knew it, she wanted me."

Soto kept getting maintenance orders for Smith's casita. First the room was too hot, then too cold. The thermostat was busted, Smith insisted, even though Soto could find nothing wrong with the unit. Then there were problems with a patio door, then the icebox. This continued for three days, and the calls only seemed to come on Soto's watch. Smith flirted with Soto brazenly, and Soto, for his part, was flattered.

"I was a little shy at first," he admits. "I'd never been so close to a woman that looked like her. I mean, I had seen a couple of Playboy issues she'd been in, and now here she was right in front of me. Sometimes she'd wear this thick terry-cloth robe, and sometimes she was just in panties and a wife-beater. She smelled like rose petals, her whole body. Every time I got near her, I felt like I was drunk. When she brushed against me, my skin was on fire. But I didn't know if she was just playing or not. I couldn't believe a Playboy Playmate was acting this way with me. I guess I didn't know her very well."

At last, Anna upped the ante. Soto received the latest of umpteen work orders for her room. Something to do with a light in the glamour gal's bedroom. When he arrived at her door, Anna yelled for him to come in, but when he opened it and walked in she was nowhere to be seen. Her voice called him to the bedroom, that Texas drawl of hers dripping with honey. When he entered, he found her lounging stark naked on the king-size mattress, a fire roaring in the fireplace next to it. Soto couldn't resist, and there began a three-week session of lovemaking, with Soto calling in sick and finally taking all of his vacation time so he could spend it satisfying Smith's ravenous appetite for sex.

They rarely left the townhouse-style dwelling, having room service bring them champagne, oysters, steak, anything they wanted. At one point, Smith had a yen for fried chicken, so she sent her limo driver in search of a KFC. He returned with five buckets of Extra Crispy, and container after container of mashed potatoes with gravy — a fave of Smith's. (At one point, she smeared potatoes and gravy all over Soto's privates and licked them off.) Soto noticed strains of racism in Smith's attraction to him, but he was having too good a time to refuse her demands.

"At first, it was all in fun," Soto details. "She'd call my you-know-what her 'tomahawk,' her 'wooden Indian,' or 'big wampum.' Sometimes she'd ask me to do a war dance naked with this feather from one of her dresses stuck in my baseball cap. I tried to tell her that the Tohono O'odham don't wear feathers, but she didn't care. She thought it was funny, and it turned her on, so I did it, though I have no idea if our people even have a war dance."

Smith gushed that she found him so exciting in bed, partly because what they were doing was taboo. Being from the South, race-mixing was a no-no for a white woman, but Smith secretly craved crossing the color barrier. She told Soto that sleeping with him was "almost like sleeping with a black man." She loved his skin color and the smell of his sweat, which she claimed tasted different from a white man's.