'And a couple of days after that, your big blonde had her picture in the papers. You were looking for her pimp, and now she's dead, and here you are looking for her boyfriend.'
'So?'
He drank the rest of his vodka. 'Chance know what you're doing?'
'He knows.'
'You talk to him about it?'
'I've talked to him.'
'Interesting.' He raised his empty glass to the light, squinted through it. Checking it, no doubt, for purity
and clarity and precision. He said, 'Who's your client?'
'That's confidential.'
'Funny how people looking for information are never looking to furnish it. No problem. I can ask around, put the word out in certain quarters. That's what you want?'
'That's what I want.'
'Do you know anything about this boyfriend?'
'Like what?'
'Like is he old or young, wise or straight, married or single? Does he walk to school or take his lunch?'
'He may have given her presents.'
'That narrows the field.'
'I know.'
'Well,' he said, 'all we can do is try.'
It was certainly all I could do. I'd gone back to the hotel after the meeting and found a message waiting for me. Call Sunny, it said, and included the number which I'd called earlier. I rang her from the booth in the lobby and got no answer. Didn't she have a machine? Didn't they all have machines nowadays?
I went to my room but I couldn't stay in it. I wasn't tired, the nap had taken the edge off my tiredness, and all the coffee I'd drunk at the meeting had me restless and edgy. I went through my notebook and reread Donna's poem and it struck me that I was very likely looking for an answer someone else already knew.
That's very often the case in police work. The easiest way to find out something is to ask someone who knows. The hard part is figuring out who that person is, the one with the answer.
Who might Kim have confided in? Not the girls I'd talked to so far.
Not her neighbor on Thirty-seventh Street. Who, then?
Sunny? Maybe. But Sunny wasn't answering her phone. I tried her again, placing the call through the hotel switchboard.
No answer. Just as well. I didn't much feel like spending the next hour drinking ginger ale with yet another hooker.
What had they done, Kim and her faceless friend? If they'd spent all their time behind closed doors, rolling together on a mattress and swearing eternal love, never saying a word to anyone else, then I might be up against it. But maybe they'd gone out, maybe he'd shown her off in some circle or other. Maybe he talked to somebody who talked to somebody else, maybe—
I wouldn't learn the answers in my hotel room. The hell, it wasn't such a bad night. The rain had quit sometime during the meeting and the wind had died down some. Time to get off my ass, time to take a few taxis and spend a little money. I didn't seem to be putting it in the bank or stuffing it into poor boxes or shipping it home to Syosset. Might as well spread it around.
And so I'd been doing that. Poogan's Pub was perhaps the ninth place I'd hit and Danny Boy Bell perhaps the fifteenth person I'd talked to. Some of the places were ones I'd visited while looking for Chance, but others were not. I tried saloons in the Village, gin joints in Murray Hill and Turtle Bay, singles bars on First Avenue. I kept doing this after I left Poogan's, spending frequent small sums on cabs and drink orders, having the same conversation over and over again.
No one knew anything. You live in hope when you run that sort of fool's errand. There's always the chance that you'll deliver your spiel and the person you're talking to will turn and point and say, 'That's him, that's her boyfriend, that big guy in the corner over there.'
It almost never happens that way. What does happen, if you're lucky, is that the word gets around.
There may be eight million people in the goddamned city but it's amazing how they all talk to each other.
If I did this right, it wouldn't be long before a fair share of those eight million knew that a dead whore had a boyfriend and a guy named Scudder was looking for him.
Two cabbies in a row refused to go to Harlem. There's a law that says they have to. If an orderly fare requests a destination anywhere in the five boroughs of New York City, the driver has to take him there.
I didn't bother citing the relevant statute. It was easier to walk a block and catch a subway.
The station was a local stop, the platform deserted. The attendant sat in the bulletproof token booth, locked in. I wondered if she felt secure in there. New York taxis have thick Plexiglas partitions to protect the drivers, but the cabbies I'd hailed weren't willing to go uptown, partition or no.
Not long ago an attendant had had a heart attack in one of those token booths. The CPR team couldn't get into the locked booth to revive him and so the poor bastard had died in there. Still, I suppose they protect more people than they kill.
