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 passing 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 passed 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 whore 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 coming to. 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.”