Eight Million Ways To Die

'For some years now.'

'And you lookin' to buy something? What do you want and what can you spend?'

'What are you selling?'

'Most anything.'

'Business still good with all these Colombians?'

'Shit,' he said, and one hand brushed the front of his pants. I suppose he had a gun in the waistband of the lime green pants. There were probably as many handguns as people in Kelvin Small's. 'Them Colombians be all right,' he said. 'You just don't ever want to cheat them is all. You didn't come up here to buy stuff.'

'No.'

'What you want, man?'

'I'm looking for a pimp.'

'Shit, you just walked past twenty of 'em. And six, seven hoes.'

'I'm looking for a pimp named Chance.'

'Chance.'

'You know him?'

'I might know who he is.'

I waited. A man in a long coat was walking along the block, stopping at each storefront. He might have been looking in the windows except that you couldn't; every shop had steel shutters that descended like garage doors at the close of business. The man stopped in front of each closed store and studied the shutters as if they held meaning for him.

'Window shopping,' Royal said.

A blue-and-white police car cruised by, slowed. The two uniformed officers within looked us over.

Royal wished them a good evening. I didn't say anything and neither did they. When the car drove off he said, 'Chance don't come here much.'

'Where would I find him?'

'Hard to say. He'll turn up anyplace but it might be the last place you would look. He don't hang out.'

'So they tell me.'

'Where you been lookin'?'

I'd been to a coffee shop onSixth Avenueand Forty-fifth Street , a piano bar in the Village, a pair of bars in the West Forties. Royal took all this in and nodded thoughtfully.

'He wouldn't be at Muffin-Burger,' he said, 'on account he don't run no girls on the street. That I know of. All the same, he might be there anyway, you dig? Just to be there. What I say, he'll turn up anywhere, but he don't hang out.'

'Where should I look for him, Royal?'

He named a couple of places. I'd been to one of them already and had forgotten to mention it. I made a note of the others. I said, 'What's he like, Royal?'

'Well, shit,' he said, 'He a pimp, man.'

'You don't like him.'

'He ain't to like or not like. My friends is business friends, Matthew, and Chance and I got no business with each other. We don't neither of us buy what the other be sellin'. He don't want to buy no stuff and I don't want to buy no pussy.' His teeth showed in a nasty little smile. 'When you the man with all the candy, you don't never have to pay for no pussy.'

One of the places Royal mentioned was inHarlem , onSt. Nicholas Avenue . I walked over to125th Street . It was wide and busy and well lit, but I was starting to feel the not entirely irrational paranoia of a white man on a black street.

I turned north at St. Nicholas and walked a couple of blocks to the Club Cameroon. It was a low-rent version of Kelvin Small's with a jukebox instead of live music. The men's room was filthy, and in the stall toilet someone was inhaling briskly. Snorting cocaine, I suppose.

I didn't recognize anyone at the bar. I stood there and drank a glass of club soda and looked at fifteen or

twenty black faces reflected in the mirrored back bar. It struck me, not for the first time that evening, that I could be looking at Chance and not knowing it. The description I had for him would fit a third of the men present and stretch to cover half of those remaining. I hadn't been able to see a picture of him. My cop contacts didn't recognize the name, and if it was his last name he didn't have a yellow sheet in the files.

The men on either side had turned away from me. I caught sight of myself in the mirror, a pale man in a colorless suit and a gray topcoat.

My suit could have stood pressing and my hat would have looked no worse if the wind had taken it, and here I stood, isolated between these two fashion plates with their wide shoulders and exaggerated lapels and fabric- covered buttons. The pimps used to line up at Phil Kronfeld's Broadway store for suits like that, but Kronfeld's was closed and I had no idea where they went these days. Maybe I should find out, maybe Chance had a charge account and I could trace him that way.

Except people in the life didn't have charges because they did everything with cash. They'd even buy cars with cash, bop into Potamkin's and count out hundred dollar bills and take home a Cadillac.

The man on my right crooked a finger at the bartender. 'Put it right in the same glass,' he said. 'Let it build up