“And tell her she has no reason to fear me.” He sighed. “They think they’re irreplaceable. If she had any notion how easily she can be replaced she’d most likely hang herself. The buses bring them, Scudder. Every hour of every day they stream into Port Authority ready to sell themselves. And every day a whole slew of others decide there must be a better way than waiting tables or punching a cash register. I could open an office, Scudder, and take applications, and there’d be a line halfway around the block.”

I opened the door. He said, “I enjoyed this. Especially earlier. You have a good eye for boxing. Please tell that silly blonde whore that nobody’s going to kill her.”

“I’ll do that.”

“And if you need to talk to me, just call my service. I’ll return your calls now that I know you.”

I got out, closed the door. He waited for an opening, made a U-turn, turned again at Eighth Avenue and headed uptown. The U-turn was illegal and he ran the light making his left turn on Eighth, but I don’t suppose it worried him much. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen a cop ticket anyone for a moving violation in the city of New York. Sometimes you’ll see five cars go on through after a light turns red. Even the buses do it these days.

After he made his turn I took out my notebook, made an entry. Across the street, near Polly’s Cage, a man and woman were having a loud argument. “You call yourself a man?” she demanded. He slapped her. She cursed him and he slapped her again.

Maybe he’d beat her senseless. Maybe this was a game they played five nights out of seven. Try to break up that sort of thing and as likely as not they’ll both turn on you. When I was a rookie cop, my first partner would do anything to avoid interfering in a domestic argument. Once, facing down a drunken husband, he’d been assaulted from behind by the wife. The husband had knocked out four of her teeth but she leaped to his defense, breaking a bottle over her savior’s head. He wound up with fifteen stitches and a concussion, and he used to run his forefinger over the scar when he told me the story. You couldn’t see the scar, his hair covered it, but his finger went right to the spot.

“I say let ’em kill each other,” he used to say. “It don’t matter if she phoned in the complaint herself, she’ll still turn on you. Let ’em fucking kill each other.”