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.