Scudder - Eight Million Ways To Die Part 37

' 'Get off your a.s.s and knock on doors.' I like that.'

EIGHTEEN.

Sat.u.r.day was a good day for knocking on doors. It usually is because more people are at home than during the week. This Sat.u.r.day the weather didn't invite them out. A fine rain was falling out of a dark sky and there was a stiff wind blowing, whipping the rain around.

Wind sometimes behaves curiously in New York. The tall buildings seem to break it up and put a spin on it, like English on a billiard ball, so that it takes odd bounces and blows in different directions on different blocks. That morning and afternoon it seemed to be always in my face. I would turn a corner and it would turn with me, always coming at me, always driving the spray of rain at me. There were moments when I found it invigorating, others when I hunched my shoulders and lowered my head and cursed the wind and the rain and myself for being out in them.

My first stop was Kim's building, where I nodded and walked past the doorman, key in hand. I hadn't seen him before and I doubt that I was any more familiar to him than he was to me, but he didn't challenge my right to be there. I rode upstairs and let myself into Kim's apartment.

Maybe I was making sure the cat was still missing. I had no other reason to go in. The apartment was as I had left it, as far as I could tell, and I couldn't find a kitten or a litter pan anywhere. While I thought of it I checked the kitchen. There were no cans or boxes of cat food in the cupboards, no bag of kitty litter, no nonspill bowl for a cat to eat out of. I couldn't detect any cat odor in the apartment, and I was beginning to wonder if my memory of the animal might have been a false one. Then, in the refrigerator, I found a half-full can of Puss 'n Boots topped with a plastic lid.

How about that, I thought. The great detective found a clue.

Not long after that the great detective found a cat. I walked up and down the hallway and knocked on doors. Not everyone was home, rainy Sat.u.r.day or no, and the first three people who were had no idea that Kim had ever owned a cat, let alone any information on its present whereabouts.

The fourth door that opened to my knock belonged to an Alice Simkins, a small woman in her fifties whose conversation was guarded until I mentioned Kim's cat.

'Oh, Panther,' she said. 'You've come for Panther. You know, I was afraid someone would. Come in, won't you?'

She led me to an upholstered chair, brought me a cup of coffee, and apologized for the excess of furniture in the room. She was a widow, she told me, and had moved to this small apartment from a suburban house, and while she'd rid herself of a great many things she'd made the mistake of keeping too much furniture.

'It's like an obstacle course in here,' she said, 'and it's not as if I just moved in yesterday. I've been here almost two years. But because there's no real urgency I seem to find it all too easy to put it off and put it off.'

She had heard about Kim's death from someone in the building. The following morning she was at her desk at the office when she thought of Kim's cat. Who would feed it? Who would take care of it?

'I made myself wait until lunch hour,' she said, 'because I decided I just wasn't crazy enough to run out of the office lest a kitten go an extra hour without food. I fed the kitten and cleaned out the litter pan and freshened its water, and I checked on it that evening when I came home from the office, and it was evident that no one had been in to care for it. I thought about the poor little thing that night, and the next morning when I went to feed it I decided it might as well live with me for the time being.' She smiled. 'It seems to have adjusted. Do you suppose it misses her?'

'I don't know.'

'I don't suppose it'll miss me, either, but I'll miss it. I never kept a cat before. We had dogs years ago. I don't think I'd want to keep a dog, not in the city, but a cat doesn't seem to be any trouble. Panther was declawed so there's no problem of furniture scratching, although I almost wish he'd scratched some of this furniture, it might move me to get rid of it.' She laughed softly. 'I'm afraid I took all his food from her apartment. I can get all of that together for you. And Panther's hiding somewhere, but I'm sure I can find him.'

I a.s.sured her I hadn't come for the cat, that she could keep the animal if she wanted. She was surprised, and obviously relieved. But if I hadn't come for the cat, what was I there for? I gave her an abbreviated explanation of my role. While she was digesting that I asked her how she'd gained access to Kim's apartment.

'Oh, I had a key. I'd given her a key to my apartment some months ago. I was going out of town and wanted her to water my plants, and shortly after I came back she gave me her key. I can't remember why. Did she want me to feed Panther? I really can't remember. Do you suppose I can change his name?'

'I beg your pardon?'

'It's just that I don't much care for the cat's name, but I don't know if it's proper to change it. I don't believe he recognizes it. What he recognizes is the whirr of the electric can opener, announcing that dinner is served.' She smiled. 'T. S. Eliot wrote that every cat has a secret name, known only to the cat himself. So I don't suppose it really matters what nameI call him.'

I turned the conversation to Kim, asked how close a friend she'd been.

'I don't know if we were friends,' she said. 'We were neighbors. We were good neighbors, I kept a key to her apartment, but I'm not sure we were friends.'

'You knew she was a prost.i.tute?'

'I suppose I knew. At first I thought she was a model. She had the looks for it.'

'Yes.'

'But somewhere in the course of things I gathered what her actual profession was. She never mentioned it. I think it may have been her failure to discuss her work that made me guess what it was. And then there was that black man who visited her frequently. Somehow I found myself a.s.suming he was her pimp.'

'Did she have a boyfriend, Mrs. Simkins?'

'Besides the black man?' She thought about it, and while she did so a black streak darted across the rug, leaped onto a couch, leaped again and was gone. 'You see?' the woman said. 'He's not at all like a panther. I don't know what he is like, but he's nothing like a panther. You asked if she had a boyfriend.'

'Yes.'

'I just wonder. She must have had some sort of secret plan because she hinted at it the last time we talked - that she'd be moving away, that her life was going to take a turn for the better. I'm afraid I wrote it off as a pipe dream.'

'Why?'

'Because I a.s.sumed she meant she and her pimp were going to run off into the sunset and live happily ever after, only she wouldn't say as much to me because she'd never come out and told me that she had a pimp, that she was a prost.i.tute. I understand pimps will a.s.sure a girl that their other girls are unimportant, that as soon as enough money's saved they'll go off and buy a sheep station in Australia or something equally realistic.'

I thought of Fran Schecter on Morton Street, convinced she and Chance were bound by karmic ties, with innumerable lifetimes ahead of them.

'She was planning on leaving her pimp,' I said.

'For another man?'

'That's what I'm trying to find out.'

She'd never seen Kim with anyone in particular, never paid much attention to the men who visited Kim's apartment. Such visitors were few at night, anyway, she explained, and she herself was at work during the day.

'I thought she'd bought the fur herself,' she said. 'She was so proud of it, as if someone had bought it for her, but I thought she wanted to conceal her shame at having had to buy it for herself. I'll bet she did have a boyfriend. She showed it off with that air, as if it had been a gift from a man, but she didn't come out and say so.'

'Because the relations.h.i.+p was a secret.'

'Yes. She was proud of the fur, proud of the jewelry. You said she was leaving her pimp. Is that why she was killed?'

'I don't know.'

'I try not to think about her having been killed, or how or why it happened. Did you ever read a book called Waters.h.i.+p Down? ' I hadn't. 'There's one colony of rabbits in the book, a sort of semidomesticated colony. The food's in good supply there because human beings leave food for the rabbits. It's sort of rabbit heaven, except that the men who do this do so in order to set snares and provide themselves with a rabbit dinner from time to time. And the surviving rabbits, they never refer to the snare, they never mention any of their fellows who've been killed that way. They have an unspoken agreement to pretend that the snare does not exist, and that their dead companions never existed.' She'd been looking to one side as she spoke. Now her eyes found mine. 'Do you know, I think New Yorkers are like those rabbits. We live here for whatever it is that the city provides - the culture, the job opportunities, whatever it is. And we look the other way when the city kills off our friends and neighbors. Oh, we read about it and we talk about it for a day or two days but then we blink it all away. Because otherwise we'd have to do something about it, and we can't. Or we'd have to move, and we don't want to move. We're like those rabbits, aren't we?'

I left my number, told her to call if she thought of anything. She said she would. I took the elevator to the lobby, but when it got there I stayed in the car and rode it back to twelve again. Just because I'd located the black kitten didn't mean I'd be wasting my time knocking on a few more doors.

Except that's what I did. I talked to half a dozen people and didn't learn a thing, other than that they and Kim did a good job of keeping to themselves. One man had even managed to miss out on the knowledge that a neighbor of his had been murdered. The others knew that much, but not a great deal more.

When I'd run out of doors to knock on I found myself approaching Kim's door, key in hand. Why? Because of the fifth of Wild Turkey in the front closet?

I put her key in my pocket and got out of there.

The meeting book led me to a noon meeting just a few blocks from Kim's. The speaker was just finis.h.i.+ng her qualification when I walked in. At first glance I thought she was Jan, but when I took another look I saw there was no real resemblance. I got a cup of coffee and took a seat at the back.

The room was crowded, thick with smoke. The discussion seemed to center itself on the spiritual side of the program, and I wasn't too clear on what that was, nor did anything I hear clarify it for me.

One guy said something good, though, a big fellow with a voice like a load of gravel. 'I came in here to save my a.s.s,' he said, 'and then I found out it was attached to my soul.'

If Sat.u.r.day was a good day for knocking on doors, it was equally good for visiting hookers. While a Sat.u.r.day-afternoon trick may not be unheard of, it's the exception.