THE PIMP’S EYES NEVER MET MINE, HE WALKED TOWARD ME and past me and never looked directly at me. As he drew abreast of me he said, “Nice young girls, General.” His voice barely carried to my ears. I kept walking and so did he.
A few doors uptown from the Metropole a heavyset Negro girl flashed me a quick glance and a quicker smile. I started to slow down, then changed my mind and kept going.
It was a little past three o’clock in the morning. It was Friday night-or, more precisely, Saturday morning. Things start later on the weekend. I had taken a reconnaissance walk around midnight, and the streets were too full of tourists and teen-age couples fresh from the Broadway movie houses. Now the crowds had thinned way down. By four, when the bars closed, Seventh Avenue would be reduced to buyers and sellers and cops. Everyone would be there for a reason, and everyone else would know what it was.
I lit a cigarette. My fingers shook, and after I shook out the match. I watched the trembling fingers with clinical interest. I wondered what was shaking me up. It wasn’t the uniform. I had been walking around in it for enough hours to make me quite accustomed to it, if not entirely comfortable in it. My performance as Major Breakthrough (whose comrades in arms include Private Bath, Corporal Punishment and General Nuisance) had improved somewhat.
What had me on edge, I realized suddenly, was this scene and my role in it. It was something new for me, strangely enough. I had been here before, I had played the John before, but I had never done all of this without the superego well muffled by alcohol. I was now almost painfully sober. I had had nothing more exhilarating than coffee in perhaps twenty-four hours. And this was the first time I had ever attempted to pick up a hooker without having first picked up and knocked off a number of 86-proof hookers well in advance. I was bride-nervous, and all of it at the one time when my interest in the girls’ profession was purely academic. The discovery was as amusing as it was annoying.
I walked the street and so did they. The pimps mostly lurked in doorways, saying young girls, party girls, sporting girls in their soft voices. I avoided them. Many of them were likely to be Murphy men, con artists who would try to do unto me as I had done to the silly sailors in Greenwich Village. The legitimate ones might actually have girls stashed in apartments or hotel rooms, but those were not the girls I wanted to see. If they weren’t on the street now, they weren’t on the street when I picked up Robin, and they wouldn’t be able to tell me anything.
The hookers, in their turn, said nothing at all. Some glanced my way or smiled or winked, but most of them merely kept walking and gave no sign that they knew I existed. Some had the blank dead stares of addicts junked up to the eyes, and their boneless shuffle matched the stares. Others simply looked like women, dressed neither well nor poorly, inexpertly but not wildly made up. In other surroundings one would make no quick judgments about them, but in that neighborhood at that hour their calling was instantly obvious.
But they were not aggressive. They would not solicit, they would not beckon, they would not wiggle and mince and coax. They would wait until they were approached, and I, walking back and forth, pounding the pavement from Forty-sixth Street to Fifty-first and back again, looked at each one several times over and each time passed them by.
The cops didn’t worry me at all, oddly enough. The beat patrolmen were there to make sure that everything remained cool It was not their job to harass the hookers or intercede between them and their tricks. The vice squad bulls could do this if someone downtown told them to. The uniformed cops walked their rounds, ignoring the girls as steadfastly as the girls ignored them in turn. They looked my way now and then, as I walked past them, but they never really looked at me. Their eyes focused somewhere twenty-odd feet over my left shoulder. They saw an army officer looking for a girl, filed the image into the appropriate mental pigeonhole, and forgot me forever.
I walked, I watched, I waited. I saw other men pick up girls, though this did not happen as frequently as the girls may have wished. I bided my time, painstaking though impatient, sizing up the girls and trying to make a choice. I ruled out the Negro girls, who constituted perhaps sixty per cent of the available talent I did this for the same reason, in a sense, that I was masquerading as a soldier. Race is its own sort of uniform, and the colored hookers would be less apt to have known Robin well, less apt to have noticed when I picked her up, and less likely to have paid any attention to the man who followed us to the Maxfield. I felt, too, that they would be less willing to talk to me, but I was not so sure of this.
I also ruled out the girls who were very obviously junked up, the ones who moved over the pavement like walking death. And the very old ones, who, I felt, had less in common with Robin and would not be likely to have known her well.
It was some time before I realized just what it was that I was doing. I was shopping, just as I had shopped often enough in the past.
I was looking for my type. Young, slender, with a pretty face and sadness in her eyes. The sort that Evangeline Grant had been, that Robin had been, and that many others whose names I never knew, whom I sometimes remembered and sometimes forgot, had also been.
I wanted conversation, and help, and I was walking the blocks looking for a bedmate.
She was standing in the entrance to a darkened movie theater on Seventh between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh. She was a little shorter than medium height, slender, darkhaired. She wore a tight black skirt and a pale blue blouse. Her shoes were low heeled and badly scuffed. She had a black leather purse in her hand and a raincoat over one arm. She was smoking a filter cigarette.
I said, “Nice night.”
“Uh-huh. But a little cold.”
“You ought to put that coat on.”
“I know, but I hate the way I look in it.” Her eyes reached for mine, caught hold. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know. I think around three-thirty.”
“Pretty late.”
“Uh-huh.”
I lit a cigarette. I shifted stupidly from one foot to the other. I said, the words oddly spaced, “Do you want to go out?”
“Sure.”
“Okay.”
She tossed her own cigarette aside. “How much will you give me?”
I shrugged.
“Will you give me twenty?”
“All right.”
Her face, small and birdlike, suddenly lost its tension and relaxed into a quick smile. She moved forward from the shadows and took my arm. She asked if I had a room we could go to. I said that I didn’t Wasn’t I staying at a hotel? I said I was staying with a friend.
“There’s a hotel a few blocks from here where they know me,” she said. “We shouldn’t have any trouble getting in. The night man knows me. You mind walking a couple blocks?”
I had a sinking feeling that she was going to lead me to the Maxfield. I asked where the hotel was.
“Forty-fifth Street.”
The Maxfield was on Forty-ninth. I said it was okay, and we crossed Seventh and Broadway and headed downtown. We turned the comer of Forty-fifth Street and she made me wait in a doorway to make sure we were not being followed. I waited while she returned to the corner and checked. She was visibly relaxed again when she returned to me.
“If there are any police back there,” she said, “then they’re invisible. What’s your name?”
“Doug.”
“Mine’s Jackie.”
“Like Jackie Kennedy?”
“Yeah.” She squeezed my hand. “Jacqueline,” she said. “You figure she’ll sue me for having the same name?”
“I don’t think so.”
“People get on your back for all kinds of reasons. Like when I had to check for police, that they might be following us. I didn’t mean to leave you standing there like that.”
“Oh, that’s all right.”
“But it has been very warm here lately. A lot of arrests, you know. Ever since the killing.”
The angel had brought it up herself. “I read about it.”
“It’s a scary thing. You never know who you’re going with, you just go and hope it’ll be a nice guy. Like you seem like a nice guy to me. I like uniforms.”
“Even on cops?”
She laughed, delighted. “Except on cops,” she said. “What are you in, Doug, the Army or the Air Force?”
“Army.”
“I suppose I should be able to tell, but I don’t know the difference in the uniform. Were you overseas?”
I made up some fort that I was stationed at. I don’t. remember it She asked something else, and I passed the question and asked her if she had known Robin Canelli.
“I knew Robin very well,” she said.
“Were you out that night?”
“Yeah.” She sighed, and squeezed my arm tighter. “it’s just across Eighth Avenue on the right You see it? Hotel Claypool.”
“I see it.”
At the corner she said, “Yeah, I was out that very night. It was Saturday night, I was out. It could of been me. The next few days after I heard what happened I couldn’t eat I couldn’t go out nothing. All I could think of was it could of been me. You just never know what you’re getting.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And, you know, you’re all alone in the room with a man, and what are you going to do? I never had anybody like that. Of course I didn’t otherwise I wouldn’t be here. But some strange men. A lot of them who want to slap a person around and other things like that Strange. I wonder what makes a person that way?”
The desk clerk at the Claypool looked like that actor who always plays the terrified bank teller in holdup movies. His eyes bulged behind huge glasses. I gave him $5.25 for the room and the tax and signed the card Major & Mrs. Douglas MacEwan. He gave me the key and left us to find the room on our own.
It was a flight up. There was an elevator but we took the stairs. The room was small, with a bed and a dresser and a sink and a chair, nothing else. A card on the dresser advised that television sets were available. I wondered if anybody ever wanted one.
It’s a clean place,” Jackie said. It did seem better than most of the hooker hotels. She switched on the overhead light a dangling bare bulb, and closed and latched the door. She turned to me, and I looked at her face and tried to guess how old she might be. She had old eyes, and the skin around them was drawn and sallow, but her mouth looked young and her face unlined. Late twenties, early thirties.
“I’ll have to ask you for the twenty dollars now,” she said.
I found a twenty dollar bill and gave it to her. I was running low on money. The sailors and Doug had provided me with operating capital, but it wouldn’t last forever. At twenty dollars an interview, I wouldn’t be able to ask very many whores what they knew about Robin Canelli.
“Thank you,” she said.
She put the bill in her purse, put the purse on the chair, draped the raincoat over the purse, and turned to smile at me. Her fingers, trained by frequent practice, worked the buttons of her blouse. “You can get undressed now, honey.”
I sat down on the bed and took a lot of time unlacing my shoes. I kept a careful eye on her to make sure she was undressing. Sometimes a hooker will wait until a John is undressed, then bolt with his money, figuring he can’t chase her without any clothes on. But she was playing the game honestly. She took off blouse and bra and skirt She was not wearing a slip, just a pair of white nylon panties, torn on the side. She took these off, too, and I looked at her.
Very slender. Thin in the wrists and ankles. Fragile. A good trim bottom, and breasts that were small but nicely shaped and firm. Economical breasts, an economical body. All things in moderation, nothing to excess.
I wanted her.
Which was absurd, but undeniable. I had both shoes off now. She leaned against the dresser, lit a cigarette, watched me patiently.
I said, “I don’t suppose you actually saw this Robin girl get picked up by the killer, did you?”
“Why?”
“I just wondered.”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t even like to think about it. It gives me the shakes.”
“I can imagine. Then you did see him?”
“Who?”
“The killer.”
“No, I didn’t I think I was with somebody at the time.”
“Oh.”
She moved closer to me. I was on my feet now, unbuttoning my shirt. I suppose in the army they call it a blouse or a tunic. I was unbuttoning my shirt, and trying not to notice the closeness of her, the pale skin, the needle marks on the upper arms.
“The way you talk, you sound more interested in Robin than me.”
“Oh, I was just interested.”
“Uh-huh. Aren’t you gonna take your hat off?”
She reached out a hand, took off the dress cap. I started to smile, and then I saw the change in her eyes and my own smile died. She took a step backward, looked at me, looked past me at the closed door.
I said, “Take it easy, Jackie.”
“You’re him.”
“Jackie-”
“Oh Jesus God.”
“I’m not going to-”
“You cut your hair but it’s you. Oh Jesus God in Heaven. Oh my God.”
One hand was at her side, the other at her throat, as if to ward off the knife I did not have. Her face was absolutely bloodless. I have never seen anyone so profoundly naked.
“I won’t hurt you.”
If she heard me she gave no sign of it. She stood, quite frozen, and then after a moment her little hand fell in slow motion from her throat to her side. She drew a deep breath and closed her eyes.
She said, “You want to kill me, do it now. I could stand it now, I don’t care, I’m not afraid. You want to kill me, do it now.”