The room was on the fourth floor, a shabby cubicle that looked like a cell at Castleview, bed against the wall, dusty Venetian blinds hanging crooked on the single window, scarred dresser against the other wall, open door leading to a toilet where somebody’s vomit had dried on the bowl. He closed the door to the toilet, and then parted the slats on the blinds and looked down to the street below. Everybody was walking like in a slow-motion movie, afraid to exert any energy in this goddamn heat. The room was stifling. He raised the blinds, and opened the window. When he turned, the girl was sitting on the bed.
“What’d you say your name was?” he asked.
“Kim.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Don’t you like that name?” she asked, smiling.
“Yeah, it’s fine,” he said.
“You think I look like Kim Novak?”
“Now that you mention it,” he said. She looked about as much like Kim Novak as he did.
“People say I look a lot like Kim Novak.”
“Yeah, you do. So what’s this gonna cost me?” he asked.
“How about fifty?” she said.
“How about we go back to the bar?” he said.
“Forty?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Okay,” she said. She was still smiling. She was thinking of all those bills she’d seen in his wallet. “But I have to take it now, okay? Before we start, I mean. That’s a general rule.”
“Sure,” he said. He took his wallet from his pocket, and handed her two tens and a five.
“Thanks,” she said.
“How old are you, anyway?” he asked.
“Seventeen,” she said. She was twenty-two, and she’d been hooking for seven years, and she had a heroin habit as long as her arm. “People say I look even younger, though.”
“Yeah, you do,” he said. Now that he was beginning to sober, he thought she looked twenty-eight or — nine.
“So what’ll it be?” she asked.
“Let’s talk a little first, okay?”
“Sure,” she said, “whatever you like.”
She was still thinking about the money in his wallet, and wondering whether she could talk him into sending down for a bottle. The room clerk would find somebody to go out for a bottle if you tipped him a couple of bucks. She didn’t like the way he seemed to be sobering up so fast. Only way she could get at that wallet was to have him as drunk as he’d been just a little while ago.
“Would you like me to get us something to drink while we talk?”
“I don’t drink,” he said.
“Oh-ho,” she said, “he doesn’t drink.”
“I mean it.”
“You don’t look like a man who doesn’t drink,” she said, “big man like you?” and allowed her glance to drop shyly to the front of his trousers.
“That was the first time in my life I ever had any hard liquor,” he said. “This afternoon. First time. Hit me like a ton of bricks.”
“I’ll bet,” she said.
“It’s the truth.”
“I never drink, either,” she said, figuring she’d give him a bit more of the Lily-White Virgin routine. “Back in Minnesota, drinking is considered a sin.”
“Yeah, Minnesota,” he said.
“Duluth,” she said.
“Where’s that?”
“In Minnesota,” she said.
“This is the first time I’ve been with a woman in twelve years,” he said.
“Really? Then I’ve got something good coming, huh?”
“First time I’ve even really talked to a woman in all that time.”
“How come? You been on the wagon or something?”
“No, I—”
“You give it up for Lent or something?” she said, and laughed the way she thought Kim Novak laughed, from way back in her throat, deep and husky.
“I’ve been in jail,” he said.
“Oh?” she said, and shrugged. Half the people she knew had spent at least some time behind bars. Even her old man, the one who’d first told her she looked like Kim Novak, had once done two years for Promoting Prostitution, a Class C felony.
“Up there at Castleview,” he said. “You know Castleview?”
“I heard of it. Listen, are you sure you wouldn’t like me to send out for a bottle? The room clerk—”
“No, I don’t want anything else to drink.”
“’Cause, you know, we could sort of take it easy, talk awhile, drink awhile, do whatever you’d like, you know?”
“What I don’t want to do is drink any more,” he said.
“Okay, whatever you say,” she said, and in that instant lost all interest. If she couldn’t get him drunk again, then all she wanted was to get it over with fast.
“So what’ll it be?” she said. There was a harder tone to her voice now, a business edge he missed entirely.
“Spent twelve years up there,” he said, “twelve long years.”
“Listen,” she said, “if you don’t mind, I’d really like to—”
“Went to see my daughter yesterday,” he said. “She’s eighteen now, married to a nigger. All I wanted to do was see her, you know? Talk to her a bit.” He shook his head. “Told me to get lost. Sent me on my way.”
“Yeah, kids,” she said, hoping that would be the end of it. “Mister, what is it you’d like? Because, you see I’m—”
“It’s not her I blame,” he said.
But neither could he blame himself for what he’d done twelve years ago, when he’d learned that Josie was having an affair with another man. Arguing in the living room of the Marien Street house, his two young sons asleep in the end bedroom, his daughter, Moira, in the room closest to where he and Josie were yelling at each other, Josie finally shouting that it was true, yes, she was seeing another man, she was in love with another man, and naming him, hurling the name at him, and then bursting into tears.
“—a working girl, you know?”
“What?” he said.
“I said I’m a working girl. So what do you say? What’ll it be?”
“You know what I did time for?”
“No, what?” she said, and sighed.
“Murder,” he said.
She looked at him.
“I killed my wife,” he said.
She kept looking at him.
“With a hatchet,” he said.
He used to keep the hatchet on a shelf just inside the basement door, above the steps, he remembered moving away from her wordlessly, and opening the basement door, and taking the hatchet from where it was resting on the shelf, and then going back into the living room and hitting her with it, hitting her repeatedly, opening her skull and her face, and continuing to hit her even after she was dead and gushing blood onto the pale-green living-room rug.
“It wasn’t my fault,” he said, and turned to look at the girl where she was still sitting on the bed, watching him.
She studied him silently, trying to figure out whether or not he was putting her on. Lots of guys tried to impress you with their big macho bullshit, tried to show you what men they were — some kind of men, all right, who had to pay to get laid. He was maybe six feet three inches tall, something like that, weighing more than two hundred, she guessed, bigger than her old man, broad shoulders and thick forearms and huge hands. He had black hair and dark-brown eyes and a big nose, and he was frowning now, his thick eyebrows pulled into a scowl. She had never in her life been afraid of any john. Hooking for seven years now, and never been afraid, even with the real weirdos who sometimes you got stuck with even though you tried to spot them in advance and steer clear of them. But all at once, when it sank in that she was in this room alone with a man who’d maybe really killed somebody, she was afraid.