Eight Million Ways To Die

Man, we would do anything, we would go in anywhere, take any crazy goddamned chances. Because we were too drunk to know better."

It was such a goddamned puzzle. I'd been controlling my drinking and it had worked fine. Except when it didn't.

On the break I put a buck in the basket and went to the urn for still another cup of coffee. This time I managed to make myself eat an oatmeal cookie. I was back in my seat when the discussion started.

I kept losing the thread but it didn't seem to matter. I listened as well as I could and I stayed there as long as I could. At a quarter of ten I got up and slipped out the door as unobtrusively as possible. I had the feeling every eye in the place was on me and I wanted to assure them all that I wasn't going for a drink, that I had to meet somebody, that it was a business matter.

It struck me later that I could have stayed for the end. St. Paul's was only five minutes from my hotel.

Chance would have waited.

Maybe I wanted an excuse to leave before it was my turn to talk.

I was in the lobby at ten o'clock. I saw his car pull up and I went out the door and crossed the sidewalk to the curb. I opened the door, got in, swung it shut.

He looked at me.

"That job still open?"

He nodded. "If you want it."

"I want it."

He nodded again, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb.

Chapter 11

The circular drive in Central Park is almost exactly six miles around. We were on our fourth counterclockwise lap, the Cadillac cruising effortlessly. Chance did most of the talking. I had my notebook out, and now and then I wrote something in it.

At first he talked about Kim. Her parents were Finnish immigrants who had settled on a farm in western Wisconsin. The nearest city of any size was Eau Claire. Kim had been named Kiraa and grew up milking cows and weeding the vegetable garden. When she was nine years old her older brother began abusing her sexually, coming into her room every night, doing things to her, making her do things to him.

"Except one time she told the story and it was her uncle on her mother's side, and another time it was her father, so maybe it never happened at all outside of her mind. Or maybe it did and she changed it to keep it from being so real."

During her junior year in high school she had an affair with a middle-aged realtor. He told her he was going to leave his wife for her.

She packed a suitcase and they drove to Chicago, where they stayed for three days at the Palmer House, ordering all their meals from room service. The realtor got maudlin drunk the second day and kept telling her he was ruining her life. He was in better spirits the third day, but the following morning she awoke to find him gone. A note explained that he had returned to his wife, that the room was paid for four more days, and that he would never forget Kim. Along with the note he left six hundred dollars in a hotel envelope.

She stayed out the week, had a look at Chicago, and slept with several men. Two of them gave her money without being asked. She'd intended to ask the others but couldn't bring herself to do so. She thought about going back to the farm. Then, on her final night at the Palmer House, she picked up a fellow hotel guest, a Nigerian delegate to some sort of trade conference.

"That burned her bridges," Chance said. "Sleeping with a black man meant she couldn't go back to the farm. First thing the next morning she went and caught a bus for New York."

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."