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.'
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
