Eight Million Ways to Die (22 page)

"Why not?"

"I'm not entirely sure. I was shocked but not surprised. I guess I expected her to come to a bad end. An abrupt end. Not necessarily as a murder victim, but as some sort of victim of the life. Suicide, for instance. Or one of those unholy combinations of pills and liquor. Not that she drank much, or took drugs as far as I know. I suppose I expected suicide, but murder would do as well, wouldn't it? To get her out of the life. Because I couldn't see her going on with it forever. Once that corn-fed innocence left her she wouldn't be able to handle it. And I couldn't see her finding her way out, either."

"She was getting out. She told Chance she wanted out."

"Do you know that for a fact?"

"Yes."

"And what did he do?"

"He told her it was her decision to make."

"Just like that?"

"Evidently."

"And then she got killed. Is there a connection?"

"I think there has to be. I think she had a boyfriend and I think the boyfriend's the connection. I think he's why she wanted to get away from Chance and I think he's also the reason she was killed."

"But you don't know who he was."

"No."

"Does anybody have a clue?"

"Not so far."

"Well, I'm not going to be able to change that. I can't remember the last time I saw her, but I don't remember her eyes being agleam with true love. It would fit, though. A man got her into this. She'd probably need another man to get her out."

And then she was telling me how she'd gotten into it. I hadn't thought to ask but I got to hear it anyway.

Someone had pointed Chance out to her at an opening in SoHo, one of the West Broadway galleries.

He was with Donna, and whoever pointed him out told Mary Lou he was a pimp. Fortified by an extra glass or two of the cheap wine they were pouring, she approached him, introduced herself, told him she'd like to write a story about him.

She wasn't exactly a writer. At the time she'd been living in the West Nineties with a man who did something incomprehensible on Wall Street. The man was divorced and still half in love with his ex-wife, and his bratty kids came over every weekend, and it wasn't working out.

Mary Lou did free-lance copyediting and had a part-time proofreading job, and she'd published a couple of articles in a feminist monthly newspaper.

Chance met with her, took her out to dinner, and turned the interview inside out. She realized over cocktails that she wanted to go to bed with him, and that the urge stemmed more from curiosity than sexual desire. Before dinner was over he was suggesting that she forget about some surface article and write something real, a genuine inside view of a prostitute's life. She was obviously fascinated, he told her.

Why not use that fascination, why not go with it, why not buy the whole package for a couple of months and see where she went with it?

She made a joke out of the suggestion. He took her home after dinner, didn't make a pass, and managed to remain oblivious to her sexual invitation. For the next week she couldn't get his proposal out of her mind. Everything about her own life seemed unsatisfactory. Her relationship was exhausted, and she sometimes felt she only stayed with her lover out of reluctance to hunt an apartment of her own. Her career was dead-ended and unsatisfying, and the money she earned wasn't enough to live on.

"And the book," she said, "the book was suddenly everything. De Maupassant obtained human flesh from a morgue and ate it so that he could describe its taste accurately. Couldn't I spend a month as a call girl in order to write the best book ever written on the subject?"

Once she accepted Chance's offer, everything was taken care of.

Chance moved her out of her place on West Ninety-fourth and installed her where she was now. He took her out, showed her off, took her to bed. In bed he told her precisely what to do, and she found this curiously exhilarating. Other men in her experience had always been reticent that way, expecting you to read their minds. Even johns, she said, had trouble telling you what they wanted.

For the first few months she still thought she was doing research for a book. She took notes every time a john left, writing down her impressions. She kept a diary. She detached herself from what she was doing and from who she was, using her journalistic objectivity as Donna used poetry and as Fran used marijuana.

When it dawned on her that whoring was an end in itself she went through an emotional crisis. She had

never considered suicide before, but for a week she hovered on its brink. Then she worked it out. The fact that she was whoring didn't mean she had to label herself a whore. This was something she was doing for a while. The book, just an excuse to get into the life, might someday turn out to be something she really wanted to do. It didn't really matter. Her individual days were pleasant enough, and the only thing that was unsettling was when she pictured herself living this way forever. But that wouldn't happen.

When the time was right, she would drift out of the life as effortlessly as she had drifted in.

"So that's how I keep my particular cool, Matt. I'm not a hooker.

I'm just 'into hooking.' You know, there are worse ways to spend a couple of years."

"I'm sure there are."

"Plenty of time, plenty of creature comforts. I read a lot, I get to movies and museums and Chance likes to take me to concerts. You know the bit about the blind men and the elephant? One grabs the tail and thinks the elephant is like a snake, another touches the side of the elephant and thinks it's like a wall?"

"So?"

"I think Chance is the elephant and his girls are the blind men. We each see a different person."

"And you all have some African sculpture on the premises."

Hers was a statue about thirty inches high, a little man holding a bundle of sticks in one hand. His face and hands were rendered in blue and red beadwork, while all the rest of him was covered with small seashells.

"My household god," she said. "That's a Batum ancestor figure from Cameroun. Those are cowry shells.

Primitive societies all over the world use the cowry shell as a medium of exchange, it's the Swiss franc of the tribal world. You see how it's shaped?"

I went and had a look.

"Like the female genitalia," she said. "So men automatically use it to buy and sell. Can I get you some more of that cheese?"

"No thanks."

"Another Coke?"

"No."

"Well," she said, "if there's anything you'd like, just let me know what it is."

Just as I was leaving her building, a cab pulled up in front to discharge a passenger. I got in and gave the address of my hotel.

The windshield wiper on the driver's side didn't work. The driver was white; the picture on the posted license showed a black man. A sign cautioned, no smoking/driver allergic. The cab's interior reeked of marijuana.

"Can't see a fucking thing," the driver said.

I sat back and enjoyed the ride.

I called Chance from the lobby, went up to my room. About fifteen minutes later he got back to me.

"Goyakod," he said. "I'll tell you, I like that word. Knock on many doors today?"

"A few."

"And?"

"She had a boyfriend. He bought her presents and she showed them off."

"To who? To my girls?"

"No, and that's what makes me sure it was something she wanted to keep secret. It was one of her neighbors who mentioned the gifts."

"Neighbor turn out to have the kitten?"

"That's right."

"Goyakod. Damn if it don't work. You start with a missing cat and you wind up with a clue. What presents?"

"A fur and some jewelry."

"Fur," he said. "You mean that rabbit coat?"

"She said it was ranch mink."

"Dyed rabbit," he said. "I bought her that coat, took her shopping and paid cash for it. Last winter, that was. The neighbor said it was mink, shit, I'd like to sell the neighbor a couple of minks just like it.

Give her a good price on 'em."

"Kim said it was mink."

"Said it to the neighbor?"

"Said it to me." I closed my eyes, pictured her at my table in Armstrong's. "Said she came to town in a denim jacket and now she was wearing ranch mink and she'd trade it for the denim jacket if she could have the years back."

His laughter rang through the phone wire. "Dyed rabbit," he said with certainty. "Worth more than the rag she got off the bus with, maybe, but no king's ransom. And no boyfriend bought it for her 'cause I bought it for her."

"Well--"

"Unless I was the boyfriend she was talking about."

"I suppose that's possible."

"You said jewelry. All she had was costume, man. You see the jewelry in her jewelry box? Wasn't nothing valuable there."

"I know."

"Fake pearls, a school ring. The one nice thing she had was somethin' else I got her. Maybe you saw it.

The bracelet?"

"Was it ivory, something like that?"

"Elephant tusk ivory, old ivory, and the fittings are gold. The hinge and the clasp. Not a lot of gold, but

gold's gold, you know?"

"You bought it for her?"

"Got it for a hundred dollar bill. Cost you three hundred in a shop, maybe a little more, if you were to find one that nice."

"It was stolen?"

"Let's just say I didn't get no bill of sale. Fellow who sold it to me, he never said it was stolen. All he said was he'd take a hundred dollars for it. I should have picked that up when I got the photograph. See, I bought it 'cause I liked it, and then I gave it to her because I wasn't about to wear it, see, and I thought it'd look good on her wrist. Which it did.

You still think she had a boyfriend?"

"I think so."

"You don't sound so sure no more. Or maybe you just sound tired.

You tired?"

"Yes."

"Knockin' on too many doors. Wha'd this boyfriend of hers do besides buy her all these presents that don't exist?"

"He was going to take care of her."

"Well, shit," he said. "That's what I did, man. What else did I do for that girl but take care of her?"

I stretched out on the bed and fell asleep with my clothes on. I'd knocked on too many doors and talked to too many people. I was supposed to see Sunny Hendryx, I'd called and told her I would be coming

over, but I took a nap instead. I dreamed of blood and a woman screaming, and I woke up bathed in sweat and with a metallic taste in the back of my mouth.

I showered and changed my clothes. I checked Sunny's number in my notebook, dialed it from the lobby. No answer.

I was relieved. I looked at my watch, headed over to St. Paul's.

* * *

The speaker was a soft-spoken fellow with receding light brown hair and a boyish face. At first I thought he might be a clergyman.

He turned out to be a murderer. He was homosexual, and one night in a blackout he had stabbed his lover thirty or forty times with a kitchen knife. He had, he said quietly, faint memories of the incident, because he'd kept going in and out of blackout, coming to with the knife in his hand, being struck by the horror of it, and then slipping back into the darkness. He'd served seven years at Attica and had been sober three years now on the outside.

It was disturbing, listening to him. I couldn't decide how I felt about him. I didn't know whether to be glad or sorry that he was alive, that he was out of prison.

On the break I got to talking with Jim. Maybe I was reacting to the qualification, maybe I was carrying Kim's death around with me, but I started talking about all the violence, all the crime, all the killings. "It gets to me," I said. "I pick up the paper and I read some damn thing or other and it gets to me."

"You know that vaudeville routine? 'Doctor, it hurts when I do this.' 'So don't do this!' "

"So?"

"So maybe you should stop picking up the paper." I gave him a look. "I'm serious," he said. "Those stories bother me, too. So do the stories about the world situation.

If the news was good they wouldn't put it in the paper. But one day it struck me, or maybe I got the idea from somebody else, but it came to me that there was no law saying I had to read that crap."

"Just ignore it."

"Why not?"

"That's the ostrich approach, isn't it? What I don't look at can't hurt me?"

"Maybe, but I see it a little differently. I figure I don't have to make myself crazy with things I can't do anything about anyway."

"I can't see myself overlooking that sort of thing."

"Why not?"

I thought of Donna. "Maybe I'm involved with mankind."

"Me too," he said. "I come here, I listen, I talk. I stay sober. That's how I'm involved in mankind."

I got some more coffee and a couple of cookies. During the discussion people kept telling the speaker how much they appreciated his honesty.

I thought, Jesus, I never did anything like that. And my eyes went to the wall. They hang these slogans on the wall, gems of wisdom like Keep It Simple and Easy Does It, and the sign my eyes went to as if magnetized read There But For The Grace Of God.

I thought, no, screw that. I don't turn murderous in blackouts. Don't tell me about the grace of God.

When it was my turn I passed.

Danny Boy held his glass of Russian vodka aloft so that he could look at the light shine through it.

"Purity. Clarity. Precision," he said, rolling the words, pronouncing them with elaborate care, "The best vodka is a razor, Matthew. A sharp scalpel in the hand of a skilled surgeon. It leaves no ragged edges."

He tipped back the glass and swallowed an ounce or so of purity and clarity. We were at Poogan's and he was wearing a navy suit with a red stripe that barely showed in the bar's halflight. I was drinking club soda with lime. At another stop along the way a freckled-faced waitress had informed me that my drink was called a Lime Rickey. I had a feeling I'd never ask for it by that name.