She’d been all wrong for the life until he took her away from Duffy and put her in her own apartment. She had the looks and the bearing for the carriage trade, and that was good because she hadn’t had the hustle to make it on the street.

“She was lazy,” he said, and thought for a moment. “Whores are lazy.”

He’d had six women working for him. Now, with Kim dead, he had five. He talked about them for a few moments in general terms, then got down to cases, supplying names and addresses and phone numbers and personal data. I made a lot of notes. We finished our fourth circuit of the park and he pulled off to the right, exited at West Seventy-second Street, drove two blocks and pulled over to the curb.

“Be a minute,” he said.

I stayed where I was while he made a call from a booth on the corner. He’d left the motor idling. I looked at my notes and tried to see a pattern in the wisps and fragments I’d been given.

Chance returned to the car, checked the mirror, swung us around in a deft if illegal U-turn. “Just checking with my service,” he said. “Just keeping in touch.”

“You ought to have a phone in the car.”

“Too complicated.”

He drove downtown and east, pulling up next to a fire hydrant in front of a white brick apartment house on Seventeenth between Second and Third. “Collection time,” he told me. Once again he left the motor idling, but this time fifteen minutes elapsed before he reappeared, striding jauntily past the liveried doorman, sliding nimbly behind the wheel.

“That’s Donna’s place,” he said. “I told you about Donna.”

“The poet.”

“She’s all excited. She got two poems accepted by this magazine in San Francisco. She’ll get six free copies of the issue the poems appear in. That’s as much pay as she’ll get, just copies of the magazine.”

A light turned red in front of us. He braked for it, looked left and right, then coasted through the light.

“Couple times,” he said, “she’s had poems in magazines that pay you for them. Once she got twenty-five dollars. That’s the best she ever did.”

“It sounds like a hard way to make a living.”