'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
