Eight Million Ways to Die

Chapter 30

Around mid-morning I went home to shower and shave and put on my best suit. I caught a noon meeting, ate a Sabrett hot dog on the street, and met Jan as arranged at the papaya stand at Seventy-second and Broadway. She was wearing a knit dress, dove gray with touches of black. I'd never seen her in anything that dressy.

We went around the corner to Cooke's, where a professionally sympathetic young man in black determined which set of bereaved we belonged to and ushered us through a hallway to Suite Three, where a card in a slot on the open door said hendryx. Inside, there were perhaps six rows of four chairs each on either side of a center aisle. In the front, to the left of the lectern on a raised platform, an open casket stood amid a glut of floral sprays. I'd sent flowers that morning but I needn't have bothered. Sunny had enough of them to see a Prohibition-era mobster on his way to the Promised Land.

Chance had the aisle seat in the front row on the right. Donna Campion was seated beside him, with Fran Schecter and Mary Lou Barcker filling out the row. Chance was wearing a black suit, a white shirt, and a narrow black silk tie. The women were all wearing black, and I wondered if he'd taken them shopping the previous afternoon.

He turned at our entrance, got to his feet. Jan and I walked over there and I managed the introductions. We stood awkwardly for a moment, and then Chance said, "You'll want to view the body," and gave a nod toward the casket.

Did anyone ever want to view a body? I walked over there and Jan walked beside me. Sunny was laid out in a brightly colored dress on a casket lining of cream-colored satin. Her hands, clasped upon her breast, held a single red rose. Her face might have been carved from a block of wax, and yet she certainly looked no worse than when I'd seen her last.

Chance was standing beside me. He said, "Talk to you a moment?"

"Sure."

Jan gave my hand a quick squeeze and slipped away. Chance and I stood side by side, looking down at Sunny.

I said, "I thought the body was still at the morgue."

"They called yesterday, said they were ready to release it. The people here worked late getting her ready. Did a pretty good job."

"Uh-huh."

"Doesn't look much like her. Didn't look like her when we found her, either, did it?"

"No."

"They'll cremate the body after. Simpler that way. The girls look right, don't they? The way they're dressed and all?"

"They look fine."

"Dignified," he said. After a pause he said, "Ruby didn't come."

"I noticed."

"She doesn't believe in funerals. Different cultures, different customs, you know? And she always kept to herself, hardly knew Sunny."

I didn't say anything.

"After this is over," he said, "I be taking the girls to their homes, you know. Then we ought to talk."

"All right."

"You know Parke Bernet? The auction gallery, the main place on Madison Avenue. There's a sale tomorrow and I wanted to look at a couple of lots I might bid on. You want to meet me there?"

"What time?"

"I don't know. This here won't be long. Be out of here by three. Say four-fifteen, four-thirty?"

"Fine."

"Say, Matt?" I turned. " 'Preciate your coming."

There were perhaps ten more mourners in attendance by the time the service got underway. A party of four blacks sat in the middle on the left-hand side, and among them I thought I recognized Kid Bascomb, the fighter I'd watched the one time I met Sunny. Two elderly women sat together in the rear, and another elderly man sat by himself near the front. There are lonely people who drop in on the funerals of strangers as a way of passing the time, and I suspected these three were of their number.

Just as the service started, Joe Durkin and another plain-clothes detective slipped into a pair of seats in the last row.

The minister looked like a kid. I don't know how thoroughly he'd been briefed, but he talked about the special tragedy of a life cut short in its prime, and about God's mysterious ways, and about the survivors being the true victims of such apparently senseless tragedy. He read passages from Emerson, Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, and the Book of Ecclesiastes. Then he suggested that any of Sunny's friends who wished to might come forward and say a few words.

Donna Campion read two short poems which I assumed she'd written herself. I learned later that they were by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, two poets who had themselves committed suicide. Fran Schecter followed her and said, "Sunny, I don't know if you can hear me but I want to tell you this anyway," and went on to say how she'd valued the dead girl's friendship and cheerfulness and zest for living. She started off light and bubbly herself and wound up breaking down in tears, and the minister had to help her off stage. Mary Lou Barcker spoke just two or three sentences, and those in a low monotone, saying that she wished she'd known Sunny better and hoped she was at peace now.

Nobody else came forward. I had a brief fantasy of Joe Durkin mounting the platform and telling the crowd how the NYPD was going to get it together and win this one for the Gipper, but he stayed right where he was. The minister said a few more words- I wasn't paying attention- and then one of the attendants played a recording, Judy Collins singing "Amazing Grace."

Outside, Jan and I walked for a couple of blocks without saying anything. Then I said, "Thanks for coming."

"Thanks for asking me. God, that sounds foolish. Like a conversation after the Junior Prom. 'Thanks for asking me. I had a lovely time.' " She took a handkerchief from her purse, dabbed at her eyes, blew her nose. "I'm glad you didn't go to that alone," she said.

"So am I."

"And I'm glad I went. It was so sad and so beautiful. Who was that man who spoke to you on the way out?"

"That was Durkin."

"Oh, was it? What was he doing there?"

"Hoping to get lucky, I suppose. You never know who'll show up at a funeral."

"Not many people showed up at this one."

"Just a handful."

"I'm glad we were there."

"Uh-huh."

I bought her a cup of coffee, then put her in a cab. She insisted she could take the subway but I got her into a cab and made her take ten bucks for the fare.

A lobby attendant at Parke Bernet directed me to the second-floor gallery where Friday's African and Oceanic art was on display. I found Chance in front of a set of glassed-in shelves housing a collection of eighteen or twenty small gold figurines. Some represented animals while others depicted human beings and various household articles. One I recall showed a man sitting on his haunches and milking a goat. The largest would fit easily in a child's hand, and many of them had a droll quality about them.

"Ashanti gold weights," Chance explained. "From the land the British called the Gold Coast. It's Ghana now. You see plated reproductions in the shops. Fakes. These are the real thing."

"Are you planning to buy them?"

He shook his head. "They don't speak to me. I try to buy things that do. I'll show you something."

We crossed the room. A bronze head of a woman stood mounted on a four-foot pedestal. Her nose was broad and flattened, her cheekbones pronounced. Her throat was so thickly ringed by bronze necklaces that the overall appearance of the head was conical.

"A bronze sculpture of the lost Kingdom of Benin," he announced. "The head of a queen. You can tell her rank by the number of necklaces she's wearing. Does she speak to you, Matt? She does to me."

I read strength in the bronze features, cold strength and a merciless will.

"Know what she says? She says, 'Nigger, why you be lookin' at me dat way? You know you ain't got de money to take me home.' " He laughed. "The presale estimate is forty to sixty thousand dollars."

"You won't be bidding?"

"I don't know what I'll be doing. There are a few pieces I wouldn't mind owning. But sometimes I come to auctions the way some people go to the track even when they don't feel like betting. Just to sit in the sun and watch the horses run. I like the way an auction room feels. I like to hear the hammer drop. You seen enough? Let's go."

His car was parked at a garage on Seventy-eighth Street. We rode over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and through Long Island City. Here and there street prostitutes stood along the curb singly or in pairs.

"Not many out last night," he said. "I guess they feel safer in daylight."

"You were here last night?"

"Just driving around. He picked up Cookie around here, then drove out Queens Boulevard. Or did he take the expressway? I don't guess it matters."

"No."

We took Queens Boulevard. "Want to thank you for coming to the funeral," he said.

"I wanted to come."

"Fine-looking woman with you."

"Thank you."

"Jan, you say her name was?"

"That's right."

"You go with her or-"

"We're friends."

"Uh-huh." He braked for a light. "Ruby didn't come."

"I know."

"What I told you was a bunch of shit. I didn't want to contradict what I told the others. Ruby split, she packed up and went."

"When did this happen?"

"Sometime yesterday, I guess. Last night I had a message on my service. I was running around all yesterday, trying to get this funeral organized. I thought it went okay, didn't you?"

"It was a nice service."

"That's what I thought. Anyway, there's a message to call Ruby and a 415 area code. That's San Francisco. I thought, huh? And I called, and she said she had decided to move on. I thought it was some kind of a joke, you know? Then I went over there and checked her apartment, and all her things were gone. Her clothes. She left the furniture. That makes three empty apartments I got, man. Big housing shortage, nobody can find a place to live, and I'm sitting on three empty apartments. Something, huh?"

"You sure it was her you spoke to?"

"Positive."

"And she was in San Francisco?"

"Had to be. Or Berkeley or Oakland or some such place. I dialed the number, area code and all. She had to be out there to have that kind of number, didn't she?"

"Did she say why she left?"

"Said it was time to move on. Doing her inscrutable oriental number."

"You think she was afraid of getting killed?"

"Powhattan Motel," he said, pointing. "That's the place, isn't it?"

"That's the place."

"And you were out here to find the body."

"It had already been found. But I was out here before they moved it."

"Must have been some sight."

"It wasn't pretty."

"That Cookie worked alone. No pimp."

"That's what the police said."

"Well, she coulda had a pimp that they didn't know about. But I talked to some people. She worked alone, and if she ever knew Duffy Green, nobody ever heard tell of it." He turned right at the corner. "We'll head back to my house, okay?"

"All right."

"I'll make us some coffee. You liked that coffee I fixed last time, didn't you?"

"It was good."

"Well, I'll fix us some more."

His block in Greenpoint was almost as quiet by day as it had been by night. The garage door ascended at the touch of a button. He lowered it with a second touch of the button and we got out of the car and walked on into the house. "I want to work out some," he said. "Do a little lifting. You like to work out with weights?"

"I haven't in years."

"Want to go through the motions?"

"I think I'll pass."

My name is Matt and I pass.

"Be a minute," he said.

He went into a room, came out wearing a pair of scarlet gym shorts and carrying a hooded terry-cloth robe. We went to the room he'd fitted out as a gym, and for fifteen or twenty minutes he worked out with loose weights and on the Universal machine. His skin became glossy with perspiration as he worked and his heavy muscles rippled beneath it.

"Now I want ten minutes in the sauna," he said. "You didn't earn the sauna by pumping the iron, but we could grant a special dispensation in your case."

"No thanks."

"Want to wait downstairs then? Be more comfortable."

I waited while he took a sauna and shower. I studied some of his African sculpture, thumbed through a couple of magazines. He emerged in due course wearing light blue jeans and a navy pullover and rope sandals. He asked if I was ready for coffee. I told him I'd been ready for half an hour.

"Won't be long," he said. He started it brewing, then came back and perched on a leather hassock. He said, "You want to know something? I make a lousy pimp."

"I thought you were a class act. Restraint, dignity, all of that."

"I had six girls and I got three. And Mary Lou'll be leaving soon."

"You think so?"

"I know it. She's a tourist, man. You ever hear how I turned her out?"

"She told me."

"First tricks she did, she got to tell herself she was a reporter, a journalist, this was all research. Then she decided she was really into it. Now she's finding out a couple of things."

"Like what?"

"Like you can get killed, or kill yourself. Like when you die there's twelve people at your funeral. Not much of a turnout for Sunny, was there?"

"It was on the small side."

"You could say that. You know something? I could have filled that fucking room three times over."

"Probably."

"Not just probably. Definitely." He stood up, clasped his hands behind his back, paced the floor. "I thought about that. I could have taken their biggest suite and filled it. Uptown people, pimps and whores, and the ringside crowd. Could have mentioned it to people in her building. Might be she had some neighbors who would have wanted to come. But see, I didn't want too many people."

"I see."

"It was really for the girls. The four of them. I didn't know they'd be down to three when I organized the thing. Then I thought, shit, it might be pretty grim, just me and the four girls. So I told a couple of other people. It was nice of Kid Bascomb to come, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"I'll get that coffee."

He came back with two cups. I took a sip, nodded my approval.

"You'll take a couple pounds home with you."

"I told you last time. It's no good to me in a hotel room."

"So you give it to your lady friend. Let her make you a cup of the best."

"Thanks."

"You just drink coffee, right? You don't drink booze?"

"Not these days."

"But you used to."

And probably will again, I thought. But not today.

"Same as me," he said. "I don't drink, don't smoke dope, don't do any of that shit. Used to."

"Why'd you stop?"

"Didn't go with the image."

"Which image? The pimp image?"

"The connoisseur," he said. "The art collector."

"How'd you learn so much about African art?"

"Self-taught," he said. "I read everything I could find, went around to the dealers and talked to them. And I had a feel for it." He smiled at something. "Long time ago I went to college."

"Where was that?"

"Hofstra. I grew up in Hempstead. Born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, but my folks bought a house when I was two, three years old. I don't even remember Bed-Stuy." He had returned to the hassock and he was leaning back, his hands clasped around his knees for balance. "Middle-class house, lawn to mow and leaves to rake and a driveway to shovel. I can slip in and out of the ghetto talk, but it's mostly a shuck. We weren't rich but we lived decent. And there was enough money to send me to Hofstra."

"What did you study?"

"Majored in art history. And didn't learn shit about African art there, incidentally. Just that dudes like Braque and Picasso got a lot of inspiration from African masks, same as the Impressionists got turned on by Japanese prints. But I never took a look at an African carving until I got back from Nam."

"When were you over there?"

"After my third year of college. My father died, see. I could have finished all the same but, I don't know, I was crazy enough to drop out of school and enlist." His head was back and his eyes were closed. "Did a ton of drugs over there. We had everything. Reefer, hash, acid. What I liked, I liked heroin. They did it different there. You used to get it in cigarettes, used to smoke it."

"I never heard of that."

"Well, it's wasteful," he said. "But it was so cheap over there. They grew the opium in those countries and it was cheap. You get a real muzzy high that way, smoking skag in a cigarette. I was stoned that way when I got the news that my mother died. Her pressure was always high, you know, and she had a stroke and died. I wasn't nodding or anything but I was high from a skag joint and I got the news and I didn't feel anything, you know? And when it wore off and I was straight again I still didn't feel anything. First time I felt it was this afternoon, sitting there listening to some hired preacher reading Ralph Waldo Emerson over a dead whore." He straightened up and looked at me. "I sat there and wanted to cry for my mama," he said, "but I didn't. I don't guess I'll ever cry for her."

He broke the mood by getting us both more coffee. When he came back he said, "I don't know why I pick you to tell things to. Like with a shrink, I suppose. You took my money and now you have to listen."

"All part of the service. How did you decide to be a pimp?"

"How did a nice boy like me get into a business like this?" He chuckled, then stopped and thought for a moment. "I had this friend," he said. "A white boy from Oak Park, Illinois. That's outside of Chicago."

"I've heard of it."

"I had this act for him, that I was from the ghetto, that I'd done it all, you know? Then he got killed. It was stupid, we weren't near the line, he got drunk and a jeep ran over him. But he was dead and I wasn't telling those stories anymore, and my mama was dead and I knew when I got home I wasn't going back to college."

He walked over to the window. "And I had this girl over there," he said, his back to me. "Little bit of a thing, and I'd go over to her place and smoke skag and lay around. I'd give her money, and, you know, I found out she was taking my money and giving it to her boyfriend, and here I was having fantasies of marrying this woman, bringing her back Stateside. I wouldn't have done it, but I was thinking about it, and then I found out she wasn't but a whore. I don't know why I ever thought she was anything else, but a man'll do that, you know.

"I thought about killing her, but shit, I didn't want to do that. I wasn't even that angry. What I did, I stopped smoking, I stopped drinking, I stopped all kinds of getting high."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that. And I asked myself, Okay, what do you want to be? And the picture filled in, you know, a few lines here and a few lines there. I was a good little soldier for the rest of my hitch. Then I came back and went into business."

"You just taught yourself?"

"Shit, I invented myself. Gave myself the name Chance. I started out in life with a first name and a middle name and a last name, and wasn't any of them Chance. I gave myself a name and created a style and the rest just fell into place. Pimping's easy to learn. The whole thing is power. You just act like you already got it and the women come and give it to you. That's all it really is."

"Don't you have to have a purple hat?"

"It's probably easiest if you look and dress the part. But if you go and play against the stereotype they think you're something special."

"Were you?"

"I was always fair with them. Never knocked them around, never threatened them. Kim wanted to quit me and what did I do? Told her to go ahead and God bless."

"The pimp with the heart of gold."

"You think you're joking. But I cared for them. And I had a heavenly dream for a life, man. I really did."

"You still do."

He shook his head. "No," he said. "It's slipping away. Whole thing's slipping away and I can't hold onto it."