“Oh, no. I never had her number, even.” She thought for a moment. “She had beautiful eyes. I can close my eyes and picture the color of them.”

Her own eyes were large, somewhere between brown and green. Her eyelashes were unusually long, and it struck me that they were probably false. She was a short girl of the body type they call a pony in Las Vegas chorus lines. She was wearing faded Levi’s with the cuffs turned up and a hot pink sweater that was stretched tight over her full breasts.

She hadn’t known that Kim had planned to leave Chance, and she found the information interesting. “Well, I can understand that,” she said after some thought. “He didn’t really care for her, you know, and you don’t want to stay forever with a man who doesn’t care for you.”

“What makes you say he didn’t care for her?”

“You pick these things up. I suppose he was glad to have her around, like she didn’t make trouble and she brought in the bread, but he didn’t have a feeling for her.”

“Does he have a feeling for the others?”

“He has a feeling for me,” she said.

“And anybody else?”

“He likes Sunny. Everybody likes Sunny, she’s fun to be with. I don’t know if he cares for her. Or Donna, I’m sure he doesn’t care for Donna, but I don’t think she cares for him either. I think that’s strictly business on both sides. Donna, I don’t think Donna cares for anybody. I don’t think she knows there are people in the world.”

“How about Ruby?”

“Have you met her?” I hadn’t. “Well, she’s like, you know, exotic. So he’d like that. And Mary Lou’s very intelligent and they go to concerts and shit, like Lincoln Center, classical music, but that doesn’t mean he has a feeling for her.”

She started to giggle. I asked her what was so funny. “Oh, I just flashed that I’m the typical dumb hooker, thinks she’s the only one the pimp loves. But you know what it is? I’m the only one he can relax with. He can come up here and take his shoes off and let his mind roll out. Do you know what a karmic tie is?”

“No.”

“Well, it has something to do with reincarnation. I don’t know if you believe in that.”

“I never thought about it much.”