'Why?'

' 'Cause he's on the spot. She leaves Chance, there she is, all ready for happily ever after, and what does he want with that? I mean he's got a wife, he's got a job, he's got a family, he's got a house in Scarsdale - '

'How do you know all this?'

She sighed. 'I'm just speedballing, baby. I'm just throwing chalk at the blackboard. Can you dig it? He's a married guy, he digs Kim, it's kicky being in love with a hooker and having her in love with you, and that way you get it for free, but you don't want anybody turning your life around. She says, Hey, I'm free now, time to ditch your wife and we'll run into the sunset, and the sunset's something he watches from the terrace at the country club and he wants to keep it that way. Next thing you know, zip, she's dead and he's back in Larchmont.'

'It was Scarsdale a minute ago.'

'Whatever.'

'Who would he be, Fran?'

'The boyfriend? I don't know. Anybody.'

'A john?'

'You don't fall in love with a john.'

'Where would she meet a guy? And what kind of guy would she meet?'

She struggled with the notion, shrugged and gave up. The conversation never got any further than that. I used her phone, talked for a moment, then wrote my name and number on a pad next to the phone.

'In case you think of anything,' I said.

'I'll call you if I do. You going? You sure you don't want another soda?'

'No thanks.'

'Well,' she said. She came over to me, stifled a lazy yawn with the back of her hand, looked up at me through the long lashes. 'Hey, I'm really glad you could come over,' she said. 'Anytime you feel like company, you know, give me a call, okay? Just to hang out and talk.'

'Sure.'

'I'd like that,' she said softly, coming up onto her toes, planting an astonishing kiss on my cheek. 'I'd really like that, Matt,' she said.

Halfway down the stairs I started laughing. How automatically she'd slipped into her wh.o.r.e's manner, warm and earnest at parting, and how good she was at it. No wonder those stockbrokers didn't mind climbing all those stairs. No wonder they turned out to watch her try to be an actress. The h.e.l.l, she was an actress, and not a bad one, either.

Two blocks away I could still feel the imprint of her kiss on my cheek.

SIXTEEN.

Donna Campion's apartment was on the tenth floor of the white brick building on East Seventeenth Street. The 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 wh.o.r.e 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 comingto. 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 fl.u.s.tered, 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 f.u.c.k.'