But the subterfuge did have a certain amount of value. It kept any law enforcement personnel from gathering anything other than circumstantial evidence over the phone, and it kept undesirable clients from getting through to the girls. Besides, he thought cynically, the cloak-and-dagger aspect of it all lent a certain air of excitement to the whole routine.
Crawford finished the cigarette and put it out. He was looking forward to the arrival of the shipment. It had been almost two months since he’d had any woman other than his wife and that was a long time, especially in view of the fact that it was a rare night indeed when he and Selma shared the same bed. He wasn’t a chaser the way so many of his friends were, didn’t want a young thing to make him feel young again, didn’t make a habit of seducing his friends’ wives or chasing down the young flesh that worked around the office.
He was a man who believed in buying what he wanted, and when he wanted a woman he bought one. The fifty dollars or so that it set him back for a woman was inconsequential to him and, in the long run, far cheaper than wining and dining a girl for the doubtful joy of seducing her free of charge. This way seemed far cleaner to him — you dialed a number, said some crap about a shipment of paper goods, had a good dinner at a good restaurant, and then went to your apartment on East 38th Street.
The apartment, which cost him a little under two hundred dollars a month, was something which he had to have, anyway. There were enough nights when he had to work late legitimately, sometimes until two or three or even four in the morning before an important case, and at that hour it was a headache to look around for a hotel room and a pain in the ass to drive home to Dobbs Ferry. He’d had the apartment for better than five years now and it was a pleasure to have it, a pleasure to be able to run over there for a nap in the middle of the day if he was tired, and a pleasure to be able to have a girl there every once in a while.
He knocked off work a few minutes before five, had a pair of martinis in the bar across the street with Sid Lazarus, and had a good blood-rare steak and an after-dinner cigar at the steakhouse on the corner of 36th and Madison. One of the junior partners had recently managed to become a father and the cigar was the result of the occasion; it was a damned fine Havana and Crawford smoked it slowly and thoughtfully. He took a long time over dinner and a longer time with the cigar, and it was almost eight-thirty when he took the elevator to the third floor of the apartment house on East 38th Street.
The girl who arrived on the stroke of nine was young and lovely with chestnut hair and a full figure. They had a drink together and then they went to the bedroom where they took off their clothes and slipped into the comfortable double bed and made love all night long.
It had been better in Newport.
The thought was a disloyal one and Honour Mercy took a long look around her own apartment to get the thought out of her head. She and Richie had been sharing the apartment for almost two weeks now and it was a pleasure to look at it. It was easily the nicest place she had ever lived in her life.
Shortly after she and Marie had “gone to see a man about a whore,” Honour Mercy had learned that it was unnecessary to live in a rat-trap like the hotel on 47th Street where they had taken a room. The man Marie had taken her to see had decided that Honour Mercy was too damned good-looking to waste her time streetwalking and had put her on call. Since she didn’t have to take men to her apartment but went either to theirs, or to a hotel room rented for the occasion, she didn’t have to live in the type of hotel that would let her earn her living on the premises. She could live wherever she could afford to live, and after a few days on the job she saw that she could afford to live a good deal better than she was living.
She earned roughly two hundred dollars the first week on the job and close to three hundred the second. If a man wanted her for the afternoon or evening it cost him fifty dollars, if he wanted her for a quickee it cost twenty-five, and half of what she was paid was hers to keep. The organization which employed her took care of everything — she had a phone at the apartment and they called her periodically, telling her just where to go and exactly what to do.
One day she had seven quickees in the course of the afternoon and evening. Another day she was paid to entertain an out-of-town buyer from noon until the following morning, accompanying him and another couple to dinner and a night club. That time she was paid an even hundred dollars. Then, too, there were days when she earned nothing at all, but with her half of the take, plus whatever tip a client wanted to give her, her take-home pay added up to a healthy sum.
As a result, there was no reason in the world for her and Richie to be living on West 47th Street. It took her two days to decide this and a few more days to find the right apartment, but now she was settled in a first-floor three-room apartment in the West Eighties just a few doors from Central Park West. It might be pointed out irrelevantly that her apartment was right around the corner from the apartment in which Joshua and Selma Crawford had first set up housekeeping eighteen years ago.
And it was very nice apartment, she thought. Wall-to-wall carpeting on the floors, good furniture, a tile bathroom, a good-sized kitchen — all in all, it was a fine place to live.
Much better than the Casterbridge Hotel.
She shook her head angrily. Then why in the world did the thought keep creeping into her head that things were a lot better in Newport? It didn’t make sense, not with the nicer place she was living in and the nicer money she was earning.
The trouble was, things were so all-fired complicated. In Newport, things couldn’t be simpler. You got up and went to Madge’s house and went to work. You turned a certain amount of tricks and went home to Richie. You sat around, or maybe went to a movie or spent some time talking to Terri, and then you went to bed with Richie. In the morning you woke up and went to work, or in the evening you woke up and went to work, and either way it was the same every day, with the same place and the same people and the same thoughts in your head.
But not anymore. Now she was working in a different place every day, taking cabs to hotel rooms and apartments, working all different hours. And Richie wasn’t at the apartment all the time the way he was always at the hotel room in Newport. You’d think that with a nice apartment to stay in he’d be home all the time, but not Richie. She wondered where he was now, where he’d been spending all his time.
“You got a pimp?” Marie had asked her once. She had told her that she hadn’t, and then another time she had mentioned Richie.
“This the guy who’s your pimp?”
“No,” she said. “I told you I don’t have a pimp. He just lives with me.”
“He got a job?”
“No.”
“He lives on what you make?”
“That’s right.”
Marie laughed. “Honey,” she said, “I don’t know where the hell you’re from, or what the hell they call it in Newport, but you got a pimp, whether you know it or not.”
This sort of talk didn’t exactly bolster her morale. Honour Mercy knew what a pimp was, certainly. She knew that almost all the girls in the business had one. But she had never thought of Richie in just those terms. Oh, he fit the definition well enough. She supported him and he didn’t do any work at all, didn’t even look for work.
But...
Well, he couldn’t work. That was what she told herself, but it was harder to believe it in New York than it had been in Newport. He was about as safe in New York as a needle in a haystack, and no Air Police all the way from Scott Air Force Base were going to chase clear through to New York for him. But he still didn’t try to get a job.