glass itself was darkened, but through it I could see the interior of a barroom. I opened the door and walked into a real bucket of blood.
A bar ran the length of a long narrow room. There were twelve or fifteen people standing or occupying backed stools, and a few heads turned at my entrance but no one took an undue interest. A dozen tables ranged across from the bar, and perhaps half of them were occupied. The lighting was dim, and the air was thick with smoke, most of it tobacco but some of it marijuana. At one of the tables a man and woman were sharing a joint, passing it back and forth, holding it in an elaborate roach clip. They didn't look in fear of arrest, and no wonder; busting someone in here for possession of marijuana would be like handing out jaywalking summonses in the middle of a race riot.
One woman sat alone at the bar, drinking something out of a stemmed glass. Her shoulder-length hair was chestnut, and the red highlights were like bloodstains in the subdued lighting. She wore red hot pants over black mesh tights.
I went over and stood at the bar, leaving an empty stool between us. When the bartender came over I turned and caught her eye. I asked her what she was drinking.
'A Rob Roy,' she said.
It was the voice I'd heard over the phone, low and throaty. I told the bartender to give her another, and ordered a Coke for myself. He brought the drinks and I took a sip of mine and made a face.
'The Coke's flat here,' she said. 'I should have said something.'
'It doesn't matter.'
'You must be Scudder.'
'You didn't tell me your name.'
She considered this and I took a moment to look at her. She was tall, with a broad forehead and a sharply defined widow's peak. She was wearing a short bolero jacket over a halter the same color as her hot pants. Her midriff was bare. She had a full-lipped mouth with bright red lipstick, and she had large hands with bright red polish on her nails.
She looked for all the world like a whore, and I didn't see how she could possibly be anything else. She also looked like a woman, unless you paid attention to the timbre of the voice, the size of the hands, the contour of the throat.
'You can call me Candy,' she said.
'All right.'
'If he finds out I called you—'
'He won't find out from me, Candy.'
'Because he'd kill me. He wouldn't have to think long and hard to do it, either.'
'Who else has he killed?'
She pursed her lips, blew out a soundless whistle. 'I'm not saying,'
she said.
'All right.'
'What I can do, I can take you around, show you where he's staying.'
'Is he there now?'
' 'Course not. He's somewhere uptown. Man, if he was anywheres this side of Fourteenth Street, I wouldn't be here talking to you.' She raised a hand to her mouth, blew on her fingernails as if they were freshly painted and she wanted to speed their drying. 'I ought to get something for this,' she said.
'What do you want?'
'I don't know. What's anybody always want? Money, I guess.
Afterward, when you get him.
Something.'
'There'll be something for you, Candy.'
'Money's not why I'm doing this,' she said. 'But you do something like this, you ought to get something for it.'
'You will.'
She nodded shortly, got to her feet. Her glass was still half-full, and she knocked it back and swallowed, her Adam's apple bobbing as she did so. She was a male, or at least she'd been born one.
In some parts of town a majority of the street girls are men in drag.
Most of them are getting hormones, and quite a few have had silicone breast implants; like Candy, they're equipped with more impressive chests than most of their genuinely female competitors. Some have had sex-change surgery, but most of the ones on the street aren't that far along yet, and they may have hit the pavement in order to save up for their operations. For some of them, the surgery will eventually include a procedure to shave the Adam's
apple. I don't think there's anything available yet to reduce the size of hands and feet, but there's probably a doctor somewhere working on it.
'Give me five minutes,' she said. 'Then come along to the corner of Stanton and Attorney. I'll be walking slow. Catch up with me as I get to the corner and we'll go from there.'
'Where will we be going?'
