Strangers

call-girl owned an apartment. It was a fifteen-story white concrete monolith with bronze windows. Surrounded by undeveloped desert land, it appeared to be even taller than it was. And because it stood alone, it looked oddly like a monument, the world's largest, swankiest tombstone. The grounds were lushly planted with sprinkler-tended lawns and flowerbeds, but a few dry tumbleweeds had blown in from the bordering plots of sand and scrub. The chill and desolate wind which stirred the tumbleweeds also fluted hollowly under the condominium's portico.
        Two police cars and a morgue wagon stood in front of the building, but no cops were in the lobby: just a young woman on a mauve sofa near the elevators, forty feet away; and at a desk near the entrance, a man in gray slacks and blue blazer, who was security guard and doorman. The travertine marble floor, crystal chandeliers, oriental carpet, Henredon sofas and chairs, and brass elevator doors contributed to a decor that strained too hard to convey class - but conveyed it nonetheless.
        As Jorja asked the doorman to announce her, the young woman on the sofa rose and said, "Mrs. Rykoff, I'm Pepper Carrafield. Er… I think you use your maiden name now."
        "Monatella," Jorja said.
        Like the building in which she lived, Pepper strained for Fifth Avenue class, but her efforts were less successful than those of the interior designers who had worked on The Pinnacle. Her blond hair had been cut in an excessively shaggy carefree style that hookers preferred, perhaps because when you spent your workday in a series of beds, shaggy hair required less grooming. She wore a purple silk blouse that might have been a Halston, but she'd left too many buttons open, revealing a daring amount of cleavage. Her gray slacks were well tailored but too tight. She wore a Cartier watch encrusted with diamonds, but the elegant effect of the watch was spoiled by her indulgence in flashy diamond rings: She wore four of them.
        "I couldn't bear to stay upstairs in the apartment," Pepper said, motioning for Jorja to join her on the sofa. "I'm not going back up there until they've taken the body away." She shivered. "We can talk right here, just so we keep our voices low." She nodded toward the doorman at the desk. "But if there's going to be a scene, I'll just get up andwalk away. You understand? People here don't know what I do for a living. I intend to keep it that way. I never do business out of my home. I'm strictly out-call. " Her gray-green eyes were flat.
        Jorja stared coldly at her. "If you think I'm a scorned, suffering wife, you can relax, Miss Carrafield. Anything I ever felt for Alan is gone now. Even knowing he's dead, I feel nothing. Nothing much. I'm not proud of it. I was in love with him once, and we created a lovely child together. I should feel something, and I'm ashamed that I don't. But I'm definitely not going to cause a scene."
        "Great," Pepper said, genuinely pleased, so involved with herself and her own concerns that she was oblivious of the domestic tragedy Jorja had just described. "There're a lot of high-class people live here, you know. When they hear my boyfriend killed himself, they're going to be standoffish for a long time. These kind of people don't like messy scenes. And if they found out what I do for a living… well, there'd be no way I'd ever fit in here again. You know? I'd have to move, and I sure don't want to. No way, honey. I like it here a lot."
        Jorja looked at Pepper's ostentatiously diamond-encumbered hands, looked at her plunging neckline, looked into her avaricious eyes, and said, "What do you suppose they think you are - an heiress?"
        Astonishingly, missing the sarcasm, Pepper said, "Yeah. How'd you know? I paid for the condo with hundred-dollar bills, so no credit check was necessary, and I've let them all think my family has money."
        Jorja did not bother to explain that heiresses did not pay for condominiums with bundles of hundred-dollar bills. She simply said, "Could we talk about Alan? What happened? What went wrong? I would never have thought Alan was the type to… to kill himself."
        Glancing at the doorman to make sure he had not left his post and drifted nearer, Pepper said, "Me neither, honey. I'd never have pegged him as the type. He was so… macho. That's why I wanted him to move in and take care of me, manage me. He was strong, tough. Of course, a few months ago