He drove me home. We took a different route back, over the Pulaski Bridge into Queens and through the tunnel to Manhattan. Neither of us talked much, and somewhere along the way I must have dozed off because he had to put a hand on my shoulder to waken me.

I blinked, straightened up in my seat. We were at the curb in front of my hotel.

“Door-to-door delivery service,” he said.

I got out and stood on the curb. He waited for a couple of cabs to pass, then made his U-turn. I watched until the Cadillac was out of sight.

Thoughts struggled in my brain like exhausted swimmers. I was far too tired to think. I went up to bed.

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

“I didn’t know her all that well. I met her a year or so ago at the beauty parlor and we had a cup of coffee together, and reading between the lines of her conversation I figured out she wasn’t the Avon lady. We exchanged numbers and we would talk now and then over the phone, but we never got close. Then whenever it was, a couple weeks ago, she called and wanted to get together. I was surprised. We’d been out of touch for months.”

We were in Elaine Mardell’s apartment on Fifty-first between First and Second. White shag carpet on the floor, bold abstract oils on the walls, something inoffensive on the stereo. I had a cup of coffee. Elaine was drinking a diet soda.

“What did she want?”

“She told me she was leaving her pimp. She wanted to make the break without getting hurt. Which is where you came in, remember?”

I nodded. “Why’d she come to you?”

“I don’t know. I had the feeling she didn’t have too many friends. It wasn’t the sort of thing she could talk over with one of Chance’s other girls, and she probably wouldn’t have wanted to discuss it with someone who was out of the life altogether. And she was young, you know, compared to me. She may have seen me as a sort of wise old aunt.”

“That’s you, all right.”

“Isn’t it just? What was she, about twenty-five?”

“She said twenty-three. I think it said twenty-four in the papers.”

“Jesus, that’s young.”

“I know.”

“More coffee, Matt?”

“I’m fine.”

“You know why I think she picked me to have that little conversation with? I think it’s because I don’t have a pimp.” She settled herself in her seat, uncrossed and recrossed her legs. I remembered other times in this apartment, one of us on the couch, the other on the Eames chair, the same sort of unobtrusive music softening the room’s hard edges.

I said, “You never had one, did you?”

“No.”

“Do most girls?”