Eight Million Ways to Die ms-5

by Lawrence Block

  The marijuana reek was much stronger inside. The apartment was a studio. One fairly large room with a pullman kitchen on one wall. The furniture consisted of a canvas sling chair, a pillow sofa, some plastic milk crates assembled as shelves for books and clothes, and a large waterbed covered with a fake-fur spread. A framed poster on one wall over the waterbed showed a room interior, with a railway locomotive emerging from the fireplace.

  I turned down a drink, accepted a can of diet soda. I sat with it on the pillow sofa, which turned out to be more comfortable than it looked. She took the sling chair, which must have been more comfortable than it looked.

  "Chance said you're investigating what happened to Kim," she said. "He said to tell you whatever you want to know."

  There was a breathless little-girl quality to her voice and I couldn't tell how much of it was deliberate. I asked her what she knew about Kim.

  "Not much. I met her a few times. Sometimes Chance'll take two girls at once out to dinner or a show. I guess I met everyone at one time or another. I just met Donna once, she's on her own trip, it's like she's lost in space. Have you met Donna?" I shook my head. "I like Sunny. I don't know if we're friends exactly, but she's the only one I'd call up to talk to. I'll call her once, twice a week, or she'll call me, you know, and we'll talk."

  "But you never called Kim?"

  "Oh, no. I never had her number, even." She thought for a moment. "She had beautiful eyes. I can close my eyes and picture the color of them."

  Her own eyes were large, somewhere between brown and green. Her eyelashes were unusually long, and it struck me that they were probably false. She was a short girl of the body type they call a pony in Las Vegas chorus lines. She was wearing faded Levi's with the cuffs turned up and a hot pink sweater that was stretched tight over her full breasts.

  She hadn't known that Kim had planned to leave Chance, and she found the information interesting. "Well, I can understand that," she said after some thought. "He didn't really care for her, you know, and you don't want to stay forever with a man who doesn't care for you."

  "What makes you say he didn't care for her?"

  "You pick these things up. I suppose he was glad to have her around, like she didn't make trouble and she brought in the bread, but he didn't have a feeling for her."

  "Does he have a feeling for the others?"

  "He has a feeling for me," she said.

  "And anybody else?"

  "He likes Sunny. Everybody likes Sunny, she's fun to be with. I don't know if he cares for her. Or Donna, I'm sure he doesn't care for Donna, but I don't think she cares for him either. I think that's strictly business on both sides. Donna, I don't think Donna cares for anybody. I don't think she knows there are people in the world."

  "How about Ruby?"

  "Have you met her?" I hadn't. "Well, she's like, you know, exotic. So he'd like that. And Mary Lou's very intelligent and they go to concerts and shit, like Lincoln Center, classical music, but that doesn't mean he has a feeling for her."

  She started to giggle. I asked her what was so funny. "Oh, I just flashed that I'm the typical dumb hooker, thinks she's the only one the pimp loves. But you know what it is? I'm the only one he can relax with. He can come up here and take his shoes off and let his mind roll out. Do you know what a karmic tie is?"

  "No."

  "Well, it has something to do with reincarnation. I don't know if you believe in that."

  "I never thought about it much."

  "Well, I don't know if I believe in it either, but sometimes I think Chance and I knew each other in another life. Not necessarily as lovers or man and wife or anything like that. Like we could have been brother and sister, or maybe he was my father or I was his mother. Or we could even have both been the same sex because that can change from one lifetime to another. I mean we could have been sisters or something. Anything, really."

  The telephone cut into her speculations. She crossed the room to answer it, standing with her back to me, one hand propped against her hip. I couldn't hear her conversation. She talked for a moment or two, then covered the mouthpiece and turned to me.

  "Matt," she said, "I don't want to hassle you, but do you have any idea how long we're gonna be?"

  "Not long."

  "Like could I tell somebody it would be cool to come over in an hour?"

  "No problem."

  She turned again, finished the conversation quietly, hung up. "That was one of my regulars," she said. "He's a real nice guy. I told him an hour."

  She sat down again. I asked her if she'd had the apartment before she hooked up with Chance. She said she'd been with Chance for two years and eight months and no, before that she shared a bigger place in Chelsea with three other girls. Chance had had this apartment all ready for her. All she'd had to do was move into it.

  "I just moved my furniture in," she said. "Except the waterbed. That was already here. I had a single bed that I got rid of. And I bought the Magritte poster, and the masks were here." I hadn't noticed the masks and had to turn in my seat to see them, a grouping of three solemn ebony carvings on the wall behind me. "He knows about them," she said. "What tribe made them and everything. He knows things like that."

  I said that the apartment was an unlikely one for the use being made of it. She frowned, puzzled.

  "Most girls in the game live in doorman buildings," I said. "With elevators and all."

  "Oh, right. I didn't know what you meant. Yes, that's true." She grinned brightly. "This is something different," she said. "The johns who come here, they don't think they're johns."

  "How do you mean?"

  "They think they're friends of mine," she explained. "They think I'm this spacey Village chick, which I am, and that they're my friends, which they are. I mean, they come here to get laid, let's face it, but they could get laid quicker and easier in a massage parlor, no muss no fuss no bother, dig? But they can come up here and take off their shoes and smoke a joint, and it's a sort of a raunchy Village pad, I mean you have to climb three flights of stairs and then you roll around in a waterbed. I mean, I'm not a hooker. I'm a girlfriend. I don't get paid. They give me money because I got rent to pay and, you know, I'm a poor little Village chick who wants to make it as an actress and she's never going to. Which I'm not, and I don't care much, but I still take dancing lessons a couple mornings a week and I have an acting class with Ed Kovens every Thursday night, and I was in a showcase last May for three weekends in Tribeca. We did Ibsen, When We Dead Awake, and do you believe that three of my johns came?"

  She chatted about the play, then began telling me how her clients brought her presents in addition to the money they gave her. "I never have to buy any booze. In fact I have it to give away because I don't drink myself. And I haven't bought any grass in ages. You know who gets the best grass? Wall Street guys. They'll buy an ounce and we'll smoke a little and they'll leave me the ounce." She batted her long lashes at me. "I kind of like to smoke," she said.

  "I guessed that."

  "Why? Do I seem stoned?"

  "The smell."

  "Oh, right. I don't smell it because I'm here, but when I go out and then I come back in, whew! It's like a friend of mine has four cats and she swears they don't smell, but the smell could knock you down. It's just that she's used to it." She shifted in her seat. "Do you ever smoke, Matt?"

  "No."

  "You don't drink and you don't smoke, that's terrific. Can I get you another diet soda?"

  "No thanks."

  "Are you sure? Look, would it bother you if I smoked a quick joint? Just to unwind a little."

  "Go ahead."

  "Because I've got this fellow coming over and it'll help me be in the mood."

  I told her it was fine with me. She fetched a plastic baggie of marijuana from a shelf over the stove and hand-rolled a cigarette with evident expertise. "He'll probably want to smoke," she said, and manufactured two more cigarettes. She lit one, put everything else away, and returned to the sling chair. She smoked
the joint all the way down, chattering about her life between drags, finally stubbing the tiny roach and setting it aside for later. Her manner didn't change visibly for having smoked the thing. Perhaps she'd been smoking throughout the day and had been stoned when I arrived. Perhaps she just didn't show the effects of the drug, as some drinkers don't show their drinks.

  I asked if Chance smoked when he came to see her and she laughed at the idea. "He never drinks, never smokes. Same as you. Hey, is that where you know him from? Do you both hang out in a nonbar together? Or maybe you both have the same undealer."

  I managed to get the conversation back to Kim. If Chance didn't care for Kim, did Fran think she might have been seeing someone else?"

  "He didn't care for her," she said. "You know something? I'm the only one he loves."

  I could taste the grass in her speech now. Her voice was the same, but her mind made different connections, switching along paths of smoke.

  "Do you think Kim had a boyfriend?"

  "I have boyfriends. Kim had tricks. All of the others have tricks."

  "If Kim had someone special-"

  "Sure, I can dig it. Somebody who wasn't a john, and that's why she wanted to split with Chance. That what you mean?"

  "It's possible."

  "And then he killed her."

  "Chance?"

  "Are you crazy? Chance never cared enough about her to kill her. You know how long it'd take to replace her? Shit."

  "You mean the boyfriend killed her."

  "Sure."

  "Why?"

  " 'Cause he's on the spot. She leaves Chance, there she is, all ready for happily ever after, and what does he want with that? I mean he's got a wife, he's got a job, he's got a family, he's got a house in Scarsdale-"

  "How do you know all this?"

  She sighed. "I'm just speedballing, baby. I'm just throwing chalk at the blackboard. Can you dig it? He's a married guy, he digs Kim, it's kicky being in love with a hooker and having her in love with you, and that way you get it for free, but you don't want anybody turning your life around. She says, Hey, I'm free now, time to ditch your wife and we'll run into the sunset, and the sunset's something he watches from the terrace at the country club and he wants to keep it that way. Next thing you know, zip, she's dead and he's back in Larchmont."

  "It was Scarsdale a minute ago."

  "Whatever."

  "Who would he be, Fran?"

  "The boyfriend? I don't know. Anybody."

  "A john?"

  "You don't fall in love with a john."

  "Where would she meet a guy? And what kind of guy would she meet?"

  She struggled with the notion, shrugged and gave up. The conversation never got any further than that. I used her phone, talked for a moment, then wrote my name and number on a pad next to the phone.

  "In case you think of anything," I said.

  "I'll call you if I do. You going? You sure you don't want another soda?"

  "No thanks."

  "Well," she said. She came over to me, stifled a lazy yawn with the back of her hand, looked up at me through the long lashes. "Hey, I'm really glad you could come over," she said. "Anytime you feel like company, you know, give me a call, okay? Just to hang out and talk."

  "Sure."

  "I'd like that," she said softly, coming up onto her toes, planting an astonishing kiss on my cheek. "I'd really like that, Matt," she said.

  Halfway down the stairs I started laughing. How automatically she'd slipped into her whore's manner, warm and earnest at parting, and how good she was at it. No wonder those stockbrokers didn't mind climbing all those stairs. No wonder they turned out to watch her try to be an actress. The hell, she was an actress, and not a bad one, either.

  Two blocks away I could still feel the imprint of her kiss on my cheek.

  Chapter 16

  Donna Campion's apartment was on the tenth floor of the white brick building on East Seventeenth Street. The living-room window faced west, and the sun was making one of its intermittent appearances when I got there. Sunlight flooded the room. There were plants everywhere, all of them vividly green and thriving, plants on the floor and the windowsills, plants hanging in the window, plants on ledges and tables throughout the room. The sunlight streamed through the curtain of plants and cast intricate patterns on the dark parquet flooring.

  I sat in a wicker armchair and sipped a cup of black coffee. Donna was perched sideways on a backed oak bench about four feet wide. It had been a church pew, she'd told me, and it was English oak, Jacobite or possibly Elizabethan, dark with the passing years and worn smooth by three or four centuries of pious bottoms. Some vicar in rural Devon had decided to redecorate and in due course she'd bought the little pew at a University Place auction gallery.

  She had the face to go with it, a long face that tapered from a high broad forehead to a pointed chin. Her skin was very pale, as if the only sunlight she ever got was what passed through the screen of plants. She was wearing a crisp white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and a short pleated skirt of gray flannel over a pair of black tights. Her slippers were doeskin, with pointed toes.

  A long narrow nose, a small thin-lipped mouth. Dark brown hair, shoulder length, combed straight back from a well-defined widow's peak. Circles under her eyes, tobacco stains on two fingers of her right hand. No nail polish, no jewelry, no visible makeup. No prettiness, certainly, but a medieval quality that came quite close to beauty.

  She didn't look like any whore I'd ever met. She did look like a poet, though, or what I thought a poet ought to look like.

  She said, "Chance said to give you my complete cooperation. He said you're trying to find out who killed the Dairy Queen."

  "The Dairy Queen?"

  "She looked like a beauty queen, and then I learned she was from Wisconsin, and I thought of all that robust milk-fed innocence. She was a sort of regal milkmaid." She smiled softly. "That's my imagination talking. I didn't really know her."

  "Did you ever meet her boyfriend?"

  "I didn't know she had one."

  Nor had she known that Kim had been planning to leave Chance, and she seemed to find the information interesting. "I wonder," she said. "Was she an emigrant or an immigrant?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Was she going from or to? It's a matter of emphasis. When I first came to New York I was coming to. I'd also just made a break with my family and the town I grew up in, but that was secondary. Later on, when I split with my husband, I was running from. The act of leaving was more important than the destination."

  "You were married?"

  "For three years. Well, together for three years. Lived together for one year, married for two."

  "How long ago was that?"

  "Four years?" She worked it out. "Five years this coming spring. Although I'm still married, technically. I never bothered to get a divorce. Do you think I should?"

  "I don't know."

  "I probably ought to. Just to tie off a loose end."

  "How long have you been with Chance?"

  "Going on three years. Why?"

  "You don't seem the type."

  "Is there a type? I don't suppose I'm much like Kim. Neither regal nor a milkmaid." She laughed. "I don't know which is which, but we're like the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady."

  "Sisters under the skin?"

  She looked surprised that I'd recognized the quotation. She said, "After I left my husband I was living on the Lower East Side. Do you know Norfolk Street? Between Stanton and Rivington?"

  "Not specifically."

  "I knew it very specifically. I lived there and I had these little jobs in the neighborhood. I worked in a Laundromat, I waited tables. I clerked in shops. I would quit the jobs or the jobs would quit me and there was never enough money and I hated where I was living and I was starting to hate my life. I was going to call my husband and ask him to take me back just so he would take care of me. I kept thinking about it. One time I dialed his number but the line was busy."<
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  And so she'd drifted almost accidentally into selling herself. There was a store owner down the block who kept coming on to her. One day without preplanning it she heard herself say, "Look, if you really want to ball me, would you give me twenty dollars?" He'd been flustered, blurting that he hadn't known she was a hooker. "I'm not," she told him, "but I need the money. And I'm supposed to be a pretty good fuck."

  She started turning a few tricks a week. She moved from Norfolk Street to a better block in the same neighborhood, then moved again to Ninth Street just east of Tompkins Square. She didn't have to work now but there were other hassles to contend with. She was beaten up once, robbed several times. Again she found herself thinking of calling her ex-husband.

  Then she met a girl in the neighborhood who worked in a midtown massage parlor. Donna tried out there and liked the security of it. There was a man in front to deal with anyone who tried to cause trouble, and the work itself was mechanical, almost clinical in its detachment. Virtually all her tricks were manual or oral. Her own flesh was uninvaded, and there was no illusion of intimacy beyond the pure fact of physical intimacy.

  At first she welcomed this. She saw herself as a sexual technician, a kind of physiotherapist. Then it turned on her.

  "The place had Mafia vibes," she said, "and you could smell death in the drapes and carpets. And it got like a job, I worked regular hours, I took the subway back and forth. It sucked- I love that word- it sucked the poetry right out of me."

  And so she'd quit and resumed freelancing, and somewhere along the way Chance found her and everything fell into place. He'd installed her in this apartment, the first decent place she ever had in New York, and he got her phone number circulating and took all the hassles away. Her bills got paid, her apartment got cleaned, everything got done for her, and all she had to do was work on her poems and mail them off to magazines and be nice and charming whenever the telephone rang.

  "Chance takes all the money you earn," I said. "Doesn't that bother you?"