Eight Million Ways To Die

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

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."

"I'm not coming from anyplace and I'm not going anywhere. I did a piece of work and I was paid in full.

The client's dead and I didn't have anything to do with that and it doesn't have anything to do with me.

You say you had nothing to do with her death. Maybe that's true and maybe it isn't. I don't know and I don't have to know and I don't honestly give a damn. That's between you and the police. I'm not the police."

"You used to be."

"But I'm not anymore. I'm not the police and I'm not the dead girl's brother and I'm not some avenging angel with a flaming sword. You think it matters to me who killed Kim Dakkinen? You think I give a damn?"

"Yes."

I looked at him.

He said, "Yes, I think it matters to you. I think you care who killed her. That's why I'm here." He smiled gently. "See," he said, "what I want is to hire you, Mr. Matthew Scudder. I want you to find out who killed her."

I took a while before I believed he was serious. Then I did what I could to talk him out of it. If there was any kind of trail leading to Kim's killer, I told him, the police had the best chance of finding and following it. They had the authority and the manpower and the talent and the connections and the skills. I had none of the above.

"You're forgetting something," he said.

"Oh?"

"They won't be looking. Far as they're concerned, they already know who killed her. They got no evidence so they can't do anything with it, but that's their excuse not to kill themselves trying. They'll say,

'Well, we know Chance killed her but we can't prove it so let's work on something else.' God knows they got plenty other things to work on. And if they did work on it, all they'd be looking for is some way to hang it onto me. They wouldn't even look to see if there's somebody else on earth with a reason for wanting her dead."

"Like who?"

"That's what you would be looking to find out."

"Why?"

"For money," he said, and smiled again. "I wasn't asking you to work for free. I have a lot of money coming in, all of it cash. I can pay a good fee."

"That's not what I meant. Why would you want me on the case?

Why would you want the killer found, assuming I had any chance of finding him? It's not to get you off the hook because you're not on the hook. The cops haven't got a case against you and they're not likely to come up with one. What's it to you if the case stays on the books as unsolved?"

His gaze was calm, steady. "Maybe I'm concerned about my reputation," he suggested.

"How? It looks to me as though your reputation gets a boost. If the word on the street is that you killed her and got away with it, the next girl who wants to quit your string is going to have something else to think about. Even if you didn't have anything to do with her murder, I can see where you'd be just as happy to take the credit for it."