“Oh, I had a key. I’d given her a key to my apartment some months ago. I was going out of town and wanted her to water my plants, and shortly after I came back she gave me her key. I can’t remember why. Did she want me to feed Panther? I really can’t remember. Do you suppose I can change his name?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s just that I don’t much care for the cat’s name, but I don’t know if it’s proper to change it. I don’t believe he recognizes it. What he recognizes is the whirr of the electric can opener, announcing that dinner is served.” She smiled. “T. S. Eliot wrote that every cat has a secret name, known only to the cat himself. So I don’t suppose it really matters what name I call him.”

I turned the conversation to Kim, asked how close a friend she’d been.

“I don’t know if we were friends,” she said. “We were neighbors. We were good neighbors, I kept a key to her apartment, but I’m not sure we were friends.”

“You knew she was a prostitute?”

“I suppose I knew. At first I thought she was a model. She had the looks for it.”

“Yes.”

“But somewhere in the course of things I gathered what her actual profession was. She never mentioned it. I think it may have been her failure to discuss her work that made me guess what it was. And then there was that black man who visited her frequently. Somehow I found myself assuming he was her pimp.”

“Did she have a boyfriend, Mrs. Simkins?”

“Besides the black man?” She thought about it, and while she did so a black streak darted across the rug, leaped onto a couch, leaped again and was gone. “You see?” the woman said. “He’s not at all like a panther. I don’t know what he is like, but he’s nothing like a panther. You asked if she had a boyfriend.”

“Yes.”

“I just wonder. She must have had some sort of secret plan because she hinted at it the last time we talked—that she’d be moving away, that her life was going to take a turn for the better. I’m afraid I wrote it off as a pipe dream.”

“Why?”

“Because I assumed she meant she and her pimp were going to run off into the sunset and live happily ever after, only she wouldn’t say as much to me because she’d never come out and told me that she had a pimp, that she was a prostitute. I understand pimps will assure a girl that their other girls are unimportant, that as soon as enough money’s saved they’ll go off and buy a sheep station in Australia or something equally realistic.”