Ruby opened the door to my knock, smiled coolly, led me inside. The apartment was sparsely if tastefully furnished. The furniture was contemporary and neutral, but there were other items to give the place an oriental cast—a Chinese rug, a group of Japanese prints in black lacquered frames, a bamboo screen. They weren’t enough to render the apartment exotic, but Ruby managed that all by herself.

She was tall, though not so tall as Kim, and her figure was lithe and willowy. She showed it off in a black sheath dress with a skirt slit to show a flash of thigh when she walked. She put me in a chair and offered me a drink, and I heard myself ask for tea. She smiled and came back with tea for both of us. It was Lipton’s, I noted. God knows what I expected.

Her father was half French and half Senegalese, her mother Chinese. She’d been born in Hong Kong, lived for a time in Macao, then came to America via Paris and London. She didn’t tell me her age and I didn’t ask, nor could I have possibly guessed it. She might have been twenty or forty-five or almost anything in between.

She had met Kim once. She didn’t really know anything about her, didn’t know much about any of the girls. She herself had been with Chance for a time and found their arrangement comfortable.

She didn’t know if Kim had had a boyfriend. Why, she wondered, would a woman want two men in her life? Then she would have to give money to both of them.

I suggested that Kim might have had a different sort of relationship with her boyfriend, that he might have given her gifts. She seemed to find the idea baffling. Did I mean a customer? I said that was possible. But a customer was not a boyfriend, she said. A customer was just another man in a long line of men. How could one feel anything for a customer?

Across the street, Mary Lou Barcker poured me a Coke and set out a plate of cheese and crackers. “So you met the Dragon Lady,” she said. “Striking, isn’t she?”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“Three races blended into one absolutely stunning woman. Then the shock comes. You open the door and nobody’s home. Come here a minute.”

I joined her at the window, looked where she was pointing.

“That’s her window,” she said. “You can see her apartment from mine. You’d think we’d be great friends, wouldn’t you? Dropping in at odd hours to borrow a cup of sugar or complain about premenstrual tension. Figures, doesn’t it?”

“And it hasn’t worked out that way?”