She said she expected to be speaking to him soon and asked for my number. I gave it to her and went upstairs and stretched out on the bed.

A little less than an hour later the phone rang. “It’s Chance,” he said. “I want to thank you for returning my call.”

“I just got the message an hour or so ago. Both of the messages.”

“I’d like to speak with you,” he said. “Face to face, that is.”

“All right.”

“I’m downstairs, I’m in your lobby. I thought we could get a drink or a cup of coffee in the neighborhood. Could you come down?”

“All right.”

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

He said, “You still think I killed her, don’t you?”

“What does it matter what I think?”

“It matters to me.”

I borrowed Durkin’s line. “Nobody pays me to think.”

We were in the back booth of a coffee shop a few doors from Eighth Avenue. My coffee was black. His was just a shade lighter than his skin tone. I’d ordered a toasted English muffin, figuring that I probably ought to eat something, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to touch it.

He said, “I didn’t do it.”

“All right.”

“I have what you might call an alibi in depth. A whole roomful of people can account for my time that night. I wasn’t anywhere near that hotel.”

“That’s handy.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Whatever you want it to mean.”

“You’re saying I could have hired it done.”

I shrugged. I felt edgy, sitting across the table from him, but more than that I felt tired. I wasn’t afraid of him.

“Maybe I could have. But I didn’t.”

“If you say so.”

“God damn,” he said, and drank some of his coffee. “She anything more to you than you let on that night?”

“No.”

“Just a friend of a friend?”

“That’s right.”

He looked at me, and his gaze was like a too-bright light shining in my eyes. “You went to bed with her,” he said. Before I could respond he said, “Sure, that’s what you did. How else would she say thank you? The woman only spoke one language. I hope that wasn’t the only compensation you got, Scudder. I hope she didn’t pay the whole fee in whore’s coin.”

“My fees are my business,” I said. “Anything that happened between us is my business.”

He nodded. “I’m just getting a fix on where you’re coming from, that’s all.”