It wasn’t half the hassle it might have been. I didn’t know either of the cops who came out from the Twentieth, but it couldn’t have gone much smoother if I had. We answered questions on the scene and went back to the station house on West Eighty-second to give our statements. The on-scene medical evidence all seemed to be consistent with what we’d reported. The cops were quick to point out that Chance should have called in as soon as he found the dead girl, but they didn’t really jump on him for taking his time. Walking in on an unexpected corpse is a shock, even if you’re a pimp and she’s a whore, and this, after all, was New York, the city of the uninvolved, and what was remarkable was not that he’d called it in late but that he’d called it in at all.

I was at ease by the time we got to the station house. I’d only been anxious early on when it occurred to me that it might occur to them to frisk us. My coat was a small-time arsenal, still holding the gun and the two knives I’d taken from the kid in the alley. The knives were both illegal weapons. The gun was that and possibly more; God only knew what kind of a provenance it had. But we’d done nothing to rate a frisk, and, happily, we didn’t get one.

* * *

“Whores’ll kill themselves,” Joe Durkin said. “It’s something they do, and this one had a history. You saw the wrist scars? Those were a few years old, according to the report. What you might not know is she tried the pill route a little less than a year ago. A girlfriend took her over to St. Clare’s to get her stomach pumped.”

“There was something in the note. She hoped she had enough this time, something like that.”

“Well, she got her wish.”

We were at the Slate, a Tenth Avenue steak house that draws a lot of cops from John Jay College and Midtown North. I’d been back at my hotel, changing my clothes, finding places to stow the weapons and some of the money I’d been carrying, when he called to suggest I buy him a dinner. “I thought I’d hit you up for a meal now,” he said, “before all your client’s girls are dead and your expense account gets trimmed.”