Eight Million Ways to Die

She put a slice of cheese on a biscuit, handed it to me, took some for herself, sipped her red wine. "Fran's a charming kook out of Wonderful Town. I call her the Village Idiot. She's raised self-deception to the level of an art form. She must have to smoke a ton of grass to support the structure of illusion she's created. More Coke?"



"No thanks."



"You sure you wouldn't rather have a glass of wine? Or something stronger?"



I shook my head. A radio played unobstrusively in the background, tuned to one of the classical music stations. Mary Lou took off her glasses, breathed on them, wiped them with a napkin.



"And Donna," she said. "Whoredom's answer to Edna St. Vincent Millay. I think the poetry does for her what the grass does for Fran. She's a good poet, you know."



I had Donna's poem with me and showed it to Mary Lou. Vertical frown lines appeared in her forehead as she scanned the lines.



"It's not finished," I said. "She still has work to do on it."



"I don't know how poets know when they're finished. Or painters. How do they know when to stop? It baffles me. This is supposed to be about Kim?"



"Yes."



"I don't know what it means, but there's something, she's onto something here." She thought for a moment, her head cocked like a bird's. She said, "I guess I thought of Kim as the archetypical whore. A spectacular ice blonde from the northern Midwest, the kind that was just plain born to walk through life on a black pimp's arm. I'll tell you something. I wasn't surprised when she was murdered."



"Why not?"



"I'm not entirely sure. I was shocked but not surprised. I guess I expected her to come to a bad end. An abrupt end. Not necessarily as a murder victim, but as some sort of victim of the life. Suicide, for instance. Or one of those unholy combinations of pills and liquor. Not that she drank much, or took drugs as far as I know. I suppose I expected suicide, but murder would do as well, wouldn't it? To get her out of the life. Because I couldn't see her going on with it forever. Once that corn-fed innocence left her she wouldn't be able to handle it. And I couldn't see her finding her way out, either."



"She was getting out. She told Chance she wanted out."



"Do you know that for a fact?"



"Yes."



"And what did he do?"



"He told her it was her decision to make."



"Just like that?"



"Evidently."



"And then she got killed. Is there a connection?"



"I think there has to be. I think she had a boyfriend and I think the boyfriend's the connection. I think he's why she wanted to get away from Chance and I think he's also the reason she was killed."



"But you don't know who he was."



"No."



"Does anybody have a clue?"



"Not so far."



"Well, I'm not going to be able to change that. I can't remember the last time I saw her, but I don't remember her eyes being agleam with true love. It would fit, though. A man got her into this. She'd probably need another man to get her out."



And then she was telling me how she'd gotten into it. I hadn't thought to ask but I got to hear it anyway.



Someone had pointed Chance out to her at an opening in SoHo, one of the West Broadway galleries. He was with Donna, and whoever pointed him out told Mary Lou he was a pimp. Fortified by an extra glass or two of the cheap wine they were pouring, she approached him, introduced herself, told him she'd like to write a story about him.



She wasn't exactly a writer. At the time she'd been living in the West Nineties with a man who did something incomprehensible on Wall Street. The man was divorced and still half in love with his ex-wife, and his bratty kids came over every weekend, and it wasn't working out. Mary Lou did free-lance copyediting and had a part-time proofreading job, and she'd published a couple of articles in a feminist monthly newspaper.



Chance met with her, took her out to dinner, and turned the interview inside out. She realized over cocktails that she wanted to go to bed with him, and that the urge stemmed more from curiosity than sexual desire. Before dinner was over he was suggesting that she forget about some surface article and write something real, a genuine inside view of a prostitute's life. She was obviously fascinated, he told her. Why not use that fascination, why not go with it, why not buy the whole package for a couple of months and see where she went with it?



She made a joke out of the suggestion. He took her home after dinner, didn't make a pass, and managed to remain oblivious to her sexual invitation. For the next week she couldn't get his proposal out of her mind. Everything about her own life seemed unsatisfactory. Her relationship was exhausted, and she sometimes felt she only stayed with her lover out of reluctance to hunt an apartment of her own. Her career was dead-ended and unsatisfying, and the money she earned wasn't enough to live on.



"And the book," she said, "the book was suddenly everything. De Maupassant obtained human flesh from a morgue and ate it so that he could describe its taste accurately. Couldn't I spend a month as a call girl in order to write the best book ever written on the subject?"



Once she accepted Chance's offer, everything was taken care of. Chance moved her out of her place on West Ninety-fourth and installed her where she was now. He took her out, showed her off, took her to bed. In bed he told her precisely what to do, and she found this curiously exhilarating. Other men in her experience had always been reticent that way, expecting you to read their minds. Even johns, she said, had trouble telling you what they wanted.



For the first few months she still thought she was doing research for a book. She took notes every time a john left, writing down her impressions. She kept a diary. She detached herself from what she was doing and from who she was, using her journalistic objectivity as Donna used poetry and as Fran used marijuana.



When it dawned on her that whoring was an end in itself she went through an emotional crisis. She had never considered suicide before, but for a week she hovered on its brink. Then she worked it out. The fact that she was whoring didn't mean she had to label herself a whore. This was something she was doing for a while. The book, just an excuse to get into the life, might someday turn out to be something she really wanted to do. It didn't really matter. Her individual days were pleasant enough, and the only thing that was unsettling was when she pictured herself living this way forever. But that wouldn't happen. When the time was right, she would drift out of the life as effortlessly as she had drifted in.



"So that's how I keep my particular cool, Matt. I'm not a hooker. I'm just 'into hooking.' You know, there are worse ways to spend a couple of years."



"I'm sure there are."



"Plenty of time, plenty of creature comforts. I read a lot, I get to movies and museums and Chance likes to take me to concerts. You know the bit about the blind men and the elephant? One grabs the tail and thinks the elephant is like a snake, another touches the side of the elephant and thinks it's like a wall?"



"So?"



"I think Chance is the elephant and his girls are the blind men. We each see a different person."



"And you all have some African sculpture on the premises."



Hers was a statue about thirty inches high, a little man holding a bundle of sticks in one hand. His face and hands were rendered in blue and red beadwork, while all the rest of him was covered with small seashells.



"My household god," she said. "That's a Batum ancestor figure from Cameroun. Those are cowry shells. Primitive societies all over the world use the cowry shell as a medium of exchange, it's the Swiss franc of the tribal world. You see how it's shaped?"



I went and had a look.



"Like the female genitalia," she said. "So men automatically use it to buy and sell. Can I get you some more of that cheese?"



"No thanks."



"Another Coke?"



"No."



"Well," she said, "if there's anything you'd like, just let me know what it is."



Chapter 19



Just as I was leaving her building, a cab pulled up in front to discharge a passenger. I got in and gave the address of my hotel.



The windshield wiper on the driver's side didn't work. The driver was white; the picture on the posted license showed a black man. A sign cautioned, no smoking/driver allergic. The cab's interior reeked of marijuana.



"Can't see a fucking thing," the driver said.



I sat back and enjoyed the ride.



I called Chance from the lobby, went up to my room. About fifteen minutes later he got back to me. "Goyakod," he said. "I'll tell you, I like that word. Knock on many doors today?"



"A few."



"And?"



"She had a boyfriend. He bought her presents and she showed them off."



"To who? To my girls?"



"No, and that's what makes me sure it was something she wanted to keep secret. It was one of her neighbors who mentioned the gifts."



"Neighbor turn out to have the kitten?"



"That's right."



"Goyakod. Damn if it don't work. You start with a missing cat and you wind up with a clue. What presents?"



"A fur and some jewelry."



"Fur," he said. "You mean that rabbit coat?"



"She said it was ranch mink."



"Dyed rabbit," he said. "I bought her that coat, took her shopping and paid cash for it. Last winter, that was. The neighbor said it was mink, shit, I'd like to sell the neighbor a couple of minks just like it. Give her a good price on 'em."



"Kim said it was mink."



"Said it to the neighbor?"



"Said it to me." I closed my eyes, pictured her at my table in Armstrong's. "Said she came to town in a denim jacket and now she was wearing ranch mink and she'd trade it for the denim jacket if she could have the years back."



His laughter rang through the phone wire. "Dyed rabbit," he said with certainty. "Worth more than the rag she got off the bus with, maybe, but no king's ransom. And no boyfriend bought it for her 'cause I bought it for her."



"Well-"



"Unless I was the boyfriend she was talking about."



"I suppose that's possible."



"You said jewelry. All she had was costume, man. You see the jewelry in her jewelry box? Wasn't nothing valuable there."



"I know."



"Fake pearls, a school ring. The one nice thing she had was somethin' else I got her. Maybe you saw it. The bracelet?"



"Was it ivory, something like that?"



"Elephant tusk ivory, old ivory, and the fittings are gold. The hinge and the clasp. Not a lot of gold, but gold's gold, you know?"



"You bought it for her?"



"Got it for a hundred dollar bill. Cost you three hundred in a shop, maybe a little more, if you were to find one that nice."



"It was stolen?"



"Let's just say I didn't get no bill of sale. Fellow who sold it to me, he never said it was stolen. All he said was he'd take a hundred dollars for it. I should have picked that up when I got the photograph. See, I bought it 'cause I liked it, and then I gave it to her because I wasn't about to wear it, see, and I thought it'd look good on her wrist. Which it did. You still think she had a boyfriend?"