And if anonymity was what she was seeking—Lily, Velda had said her name was—it wasn’t working. Everybody in the bar, which was half-full (as optimists like me would say) was looking at her. New Yorkers who won’t give you a glance on the street were happy to stare indoors.

But then Lily and Velda tucked themselves in across from me in the booth and the pretty if somewhat hard young hooker was forgotten.

“This is my boss,” Velda said, “Mike Hammer. You may have heard of him.”

“Sorry, no,” she said, in a little girl voice—the kind of Judy Holliday pipes that probably got some of her clients off. She tugged back the hood and revealed my prediction about a mass of curly permed white-blonde hair had been correct.

“Call me Mike,” I said.

“Call me Lily,” she said, with the tiniest smile.

“Thanks for talking to us, Lily. You were Jasmine’s roommate?”

“We lived together,” she said, with a nod. “I knew Ronnie since high school. That was her real name—or anyway Veronica was. Like the Ronettes? She was a couple years older than me. We both had bad family scenes and caught a bus together and got the hell out. We were a couple of runaways who got lucky.”

“How so?”

Do I have to say that two girls who fell into a life of prostitution hardly qualified as “lucky”?

She frowned above the big sunglasses and asked, “You don’t need the whole story, do you?”

“Just enough to get my feet under me, honey.”

“Okay.”

She sipped her drink, a Bloody Mary, and folded her hands; her nails were painted red, like Velda’s, their sole similarity beyond being lookers.

“Well,” she began, “a pimp approached us at the bus station and he took to both of us, right away. Thought we had potential. He trained us. For Ronnie, the S & M scene made a sweet setup—she didn’t even have to do the guys. Just punish them till they came. She worked out of various apartments over the past six or seven years.”

“How old are you, Lily?”

“Twenty-seven.”

She was good-looking, but you’d say thirty-seven.

“Ronnie had it better than me, because she worked at home,” she continued. “Working at home is really great. I went to the clients, hotels mostly. My specialty was costumes. I dressed up like little girls. You know, schoolgirls. Catholic girls are really popular.”

“I bet they are.”

“I have a Little Bo Peep costume one regular really likes. Most of these clients just pleasure themselves. I hardly ever do the deed. And if I do, it costs them.”

“Jasmine…Ronnie…never ‘did the deed’?”

“No. She hated men. That’s what was so cool about her being in that profession. No sex, and she mostly was the dominatrix.”

Velda asked, “Never the submissive?”