Saturday was a good day for knocking on doors. It usually is because more people are at home than during the week. This Saturday the weather didn’t invite them out. A fine rain was falling out of a dark sky and there was a stiff wind blowing, whipping the rain around.
Wind sometimes behaves curiously in New York. The tall buildings seem to break it up and put a spin on it, like English on a billiard ball, so that it takes odd bounces and blows in different directions on different blocks. That morning and afternoon it seemed to be always in my face. I would turn a corner and it would turn with me, always coming at me, always driving the spray of rain at me. There were moments when I found it invigorating, others when I hunched my shoulders and lowered my head and cursed the wind and the rain and myself for being out in them.
My first stop was Kim’s building, where I nodded and walked past the doorman, key in hand. I hadn’t seen him before and I doubt that I was any more familiar to him than he was to me, but he didn’t challenge my right to be there. I rode upstairs and let myself into Kim’s apartment.
Maybe I was making sure the cat was still missing. I had no other reason to go in. The apartment was as I had left it, as far as I could tell, and I couldn’t find a kitten or a litter pan anywhere. While I thought of it I checked the kitchen. There were no cans or boxes of cat food in the cupboards, no bag of kitty litter, no nonspill bowl for a cat to eat out of. I couldn’t detect any cat odor in the apartment, and I was beginning to wonder if my memory of the animal might have been a false one. Then, in the refrigerator, I found a half-full can of Puss ‘n Boots topped with a plastic lid.
How about that, I thought. The great detective found a clue.
Not long after that the great detective found a cat. I walked up and down the hallway and knocked on doors. Not everyone was home, rainy Saturday or no, and the first three people who were had no idea that Kim had ever owned a cat, let alone any information on its present whereabouts.
The fourth door that opened to my knock belonged to an Alice Simkins, a small woman in her fifties whose conversation was guarded until I mentioned Kim’s cat.
“Oh, Panther,” she said. “You’ve come for Panther. You know, I was afraid someone would. Come in, won’t you?”
She led me to an upholstered chair, brought me a cup of coffee, and apologized for the excess of furniture in the room. She was a widow, she told me, and had moved to this small apartment from a suburban house, and while she’d rid herself of a great many things she’d made the mistake of keeping too much furniture.
“It’s like an obstacle course in here,” she said, “and it’s not as if I just moved in yesterday. I’ve been here almost two years. But because there’s no real urgency I seem to find it all too easy to put it off and put it off.”
She had heard about Kim’s death from someone in the building. The following morning she was at her desk at the office when she thought of Kim’s cat. Who would feed it? Who would take care of it?
“I made myself wait until lunch hour,” she said, “because I decided I just wasn’t crazy enough to run out of the office lest a kitten go an extra hour without food. I fed the kitten and cleaned out the litter pan and freshened its water, and I checked on it that evening when I came home from the office, and it was evident that no one had been in to care for it. I thought about the poor little thing that night, and the next morning when I went to feed it I decided it might as well live with me for the time being.” She smiled. “It seems to have adjusted. Do you suppose it misses her?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t suppose it’ll miss me, either, but I’ll miss it. I never kept a cat before. We had dogs years ago. I don’t think I’d want to keep a dog, not in the city, but a cat doesn’t seem to be any trouble. Panther was declawed so there’s no problem of furniture scratching, although I almost wish he’d scratched some of this furniture, it might move me to get rid of it.” She laughed softly. “I’m afraid I took all his food from her apartment. I can get all of that together for you. And Panther’s hiding somewhere, but I’m sure I can find him.”
I assured her I hadn’t come for the cat, that she could keep the animal if she wanted. She was surprised, and obviously relieved. But if I hadn’t come for the cat, what was I there for? I gave her an abbreviated explanation of my role. While she was digesting that I asked her how she’d gained access to Kim’s apartment.
“Oh, I had a key. I’d given her a key to my apartment some months ago. I was going out of town and wanted her to water my plants, and shortly after I came back she gave me her key. I can’t remember why. Did she want me to feed Panther? I really can’t remember. Do you suppose I can change his name?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s just that I don’t much care for the cat’s name, but I don’t know if it’s proper to change it. I don’t believe he recognizes it. What he recognizes is the whirr of the electric can opener, announcing that dinner is served.” She smiled. “T. S. Eliot wrote that every cat has a secret name, known only to the cat himself. So I don’t suppose it really matters what name I call him.”
I turned the conversation to Kim, asked how close a friend she’d been.
“I don’t know if we were friends,” she said. “We were neighbors. We were good neighbors, I kept a key to her apartment, but I’m not sure we were friends.”
“You knew she was a prostitute?”
“I suppose I knew. At first I thought she was a model. She had the looks for it.”
“Yes.”
“But somewhere in the course of things I gathered what her actual profession was. She never mentioned it. I think it may have been her failure to discuss her work that made me guess what it was. And then there was that black man who visited her frequently. Somehow I found myself assuming he was her pimp.”
“Did she have a boyfriend, Mrs. Simkins?”
“Besides the black man?” She thought about it, and while she did so a black streak darted across the rug, leaped onto a couch, leaped again and was gone. “You see?” the woman said. “He’s not at all like a panther. I don’t know what he is like, but he’s nothing like a panther. You asked if she had a boyfriend.”
“Yes.”
“I just wonder. She must have had some sort of secret plan because she hinted at it the last time we talked—that she’d be moving away, that her life was going to take a turn for the better. I’m afraid I wrote it off as a pipe dream.”
“Why?”
“Because I assumed she meant she and her pimp were going to run off into the sunset and live happily ever after, only she wouldn’t say as much to me because she’d never come out and told me that she had a pimp, that she was a prostitute. I understand pimps will assure a girl that their other girls are unimportant, that as soon as enough money’s saved they’ll go off and buy a sheep station in Australia or something equally realistic.”
I thought of Fran Schecter on Morton Street, convinced she and Chance were bound by karmic ties, with innumerable lifetimes ahead of them.
“She was planning on leaving her pimp,” I said.
“For another man?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
She’d never seen Kim with anyone in particular, never paid much attention to the men who visited Kim’s apartment. Such visitors were few at night, anyway, she explained, and she herself was at work during the day.
“I thought she’d bought the fur herself,” she said. “She was so proud of it, as if someone had bought it for her, but I thought she wanted to conceal her shame at having had to buy it for herself. I’ll bet she did have a boyfriend. She showed it off with that air, as if it had been a gift from a man, but she didn’t come out and say so.”
“Because the relationship was a secret.”
“Yes. She was proud of the fur, proud of the jewelry. You said she was leaving her pimp. Is that why she was killed?”
“I don’t know.”
“I try not to think about her having been killed, or how or why it happened. Did you ever read a book called Watership Down?” I hadn’t. “There’s one colony of rabbits in the book, a sort of semidomesticated colony. The food’s in good supply there because human beings leave food for the rabbits. It’s sort of rabbit heaven, except that the men who do this do so in order to set snares and provide themselves with a rabbit dinner from time to time. And the surviving rabbits, they never refer to the snare, they never mention any of their fellows who’ve been killed that way. They have an unspoken agreement to pretend that the snare does not exist, and that their dead companions never existed.” She’d been looking to one side as she spoke. Now her eyes found mine. “Do you know, I think New Yorkers are like those rabbits. We live here for whatever it is that the city provides—the culture, the job opportunities, whatever it is. And we look the other way when the city kills off our friends and neighbors. Oh, we read about it and we talk about it for a day or two days but then we blink it all away. Because otherwise we’d have to do something about it, and we can’t. Or we’d have to move, and we don’t want to move. We’re like those rabbits, aren’t we?”
I left my number, told her to call if she thought of anything. She said she would. I took the elevator to the lobby, but when it got there I stayed in the car and rode it back to twelve again. Just because I’d located the black kitten didn’t mean I’d be wasting my time knocking on a few more doors.
Except that’s what I did. I talked to half a dozen people and didn’t learn a thing, other than that they and Kim did a good job of keeping to themselves. One man had even managed to miss out on the knowledge that a neighbor of his had been murdered. The others knew that much, but not a great deal more.
When I’d run out of doors to knock on I found myself approaching Kim’s door, key in hand. Why? Because of the fifth of Wild Turkey in the front closet?
I put her key in my pocket and got out of there.
The meeting book led me to a noon meeting just a few blocks from Kim’s. The speaker was just finishing her qualification when I walked in. At first glance I thought she was Jan, but when I took another look I saw there was no real resemblance. I got a cup of coffee and took a seat at the back.
The room was crowded, thick with smoke. The discussion seemed to center itself on the spiritual side of the program, and I wasn’t too clear on what that was, nor did anything I hear clarify it for me.
One guy said something good, though, a big fellow with a voice like a load of gravel. “I came in here to save my ass,” he said, “and then I found out it was attached to my soul.”
If Saturday was a good day for knocking on doors, it was equally good for visiting hookers. While a Saturday-afternoon trick may not be unheard of, it’s the exception.
I ate some lunch, then rode uptown on the Lexington IRT. The car was uncrowded, and directly opposite me a black kid in a pea jacket and heavy-soled boots was smoking a cigarette. I remembered my conversation with Durkin and wanted to tell the kid to put out the cigarette.
Jesus, I thought, mind your own business. Leave it alone.
I got off at Sixty-eighth Street and walked a block north and two blocks east. Ruby Lee and Mary Lou Barcker lived in apartment buildings diagonally opposite one another. Ruby’s was on the southwest corner and I went there first because I came to it first. The doorman announced me over the intercom and I shared the elevator with a florist’s delivery boy. He had his arms full of roses and the car was heavy with their scent.
Ruby opened the door to my knock, smiled coolly, led me inside. The apartment was sparsely if tastefully furnished. The furniture was contemporary and neutral, but there were other items to give the place an oriental cast—a Chinese rug, a group of Japanese prints in black lacquered frames, a bamboo screen. They weren’t enough to render the apartment exotic, but Ruby managed that all by herself.
She was tall, though not so tall as Kim, and her figure was lithe and willowy. She showed it off in a black sheath dress with a skirt slit to show a flash of thigh when she walked. She put me in a chair and offered me a drink, and I heard myself ask for tea. She smiled and came back with tea for both of us. It was Lipton’s, I noted. God knows what I expected.
Her father was half French and half Senegalese, her mother Chinese. She’d been born in Hong Kong, lived for a time in Macao, then came to America via Paris and London. She didn’t tell me her age and I didn’t ask, nor could I have possibly guessed it. She might have been twenty or forty-five or almost anything in between.
She had met Kim once. She didn’t really know anything about her, didn’t know much about any of the girls. She herself had been with Chance for a time and found their arrangement comfortable.
She didn’t know if Kim had had a boyfriend. Why, she wondered, would a woman want two men in her life? Then she would have to give money to both of them.
I suggested that Kim might have had a different sort of relationship with her boyfriend, that he might have given her gifts. She seemed to find the idea baffling. Did I mean a customer? I said that was possible. But a customer was not a boyfriend, she said. A customer was just another man in a long line of men. How could one feel anything for a customer?
Across the street, Mary Lou Barcker poured me a Coke and set out a plate of cheese and crackers. “So you met the Dragon Lady,” she said. “Striking, isn’t she?”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“Three races blended into one absolutely stunning woman. Then the shock comes. You open the door and nobody’s home. Come here a minute.”
I joined her at the window, looked where she was pointing.
“That’s her window,” she said. “You can see her apartment from mine. You’d think we’d be great friends, wouldn’t you? Dropping in at odd hours to borrow a cup of sugar or complain about premenstrual tension. Figures, doesn’t it?”
“And it hasn’t worked out that way?”
“She’s always polite. But she’s just not there. The woman doesn’t relate. I’ve known a lot of johns who’ve gone over there. I’ve steered some business her way, as far as that goes. A guy’ll say he’s had fantasies about oriental girls, for example. Or I might just tell a guy that I know a girl he might like. You know something? It’s the safest thing in the world. They’re grateful because she is beautiful, she is exotic, and I gather she knows her way around a mattress, but they almost never go back. They go once and they’re glad they went, but they don’t go back. They’ll pass her number on to their buddies instead of ringing it again themselves. I’m sure she keeps busy but I’ll bet she doesn’t know what a steady trick is, I’ll bet she’s never had one.”
She was a slender woman, dark haired, a little taller than average, with precise features and small even teeth. She had her hair pulled back and done in a chignon, I think they call it, and she was wearing aviator glasses, the lenses tinted a pale amber. The hair and the glasses combined to give her a rather severe look, an effect of which she was by no means unaware. “When I take off the glasses and let my hair down,” she said at one point, “I look a whole lot softer, a good deal less threatening. Of course some johns want a woman to look threatening.”
Of Kim she said, “I didn’t know her well. I don’t know any of them really well. What a crew they are! Sunny’s the good-time party girl, she thinks she’s made a huge leap in status by becoming a prostitute. Ruby’s a sort of autistic adult, untouched by human minds. I’m sure she’s socking away the dollars, and one of these days she’ll go back to Macao or Port Said and open up an opium den. Chance probably knows she’s holding out and has the good sense to let her.”
She put a slice of cheese on a biscuit, handed it to me, took some for herself, sipped her red wine. “Fran’s a charming kook out of Wonderful Town. I call her the Village Idiot. She’s raised self-deception to the level of an art form. She must have to smoke a ton of grass to support the structure of illusion she’s created. More Coke?”
“No thanks.”
“You sure you wouldn’t rather have a glass of wine? Or something stronger?”
I shook my head. A radio played unobstrusively in the background, tuned to one of the classical music stations. Mary Lou took off her glasses, breathed on them, wiped them with a napkin.
“And Donna,” she said. “Whoredom’s answer to Edna St. Vincent Millay. I think the poetry does for her what the grass does for Fran. She’s a good poet, you know.”
I had Donna’s poem with me and showed it to Mary Lou. Vertical frown lines appeared in her forehead as she scanned the lines.
“It’s not finished,” I said. “She still has work to do on it.”
“I don’t know how poets know when they’re finished. Or painters. How do they know when to stop? It baffles me. This is supposed to be about Kim?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what it means, but there’s something, she’s onto something here.” She thought for a moment, her head cocked like a bird’s. She said, “I guess I thought of Kim as the archetypical whore. A spectacular ice blonde from the northern Midwest, the kind that was just plain born to walk through life on a black pimp’s arm. I’ll tell you something. I wasn’t surprised when she was murdered.”
“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.”