Strangers

he started acting a little weird, and lately he was downright creepy. Weird and creepy enough that I was thinking about maybe finding someone else to look after me. But I didn't expect he'd screw things up for me by killing himself. Christ, you just never know, do you?"
        "Some people have no consideration," Jorja said. She saw Pepper's eyes narrow, but before the hooker could say anything, Jorja said, "Am I to understand that Alan was pimping for you?"
        Pepper scowled. "Listen, I don't need a pimp. Whores need pimps. I'm no whore. Whores give fifty-dollar blow-jobs, screw eight or ten johns a day for whatever they can get, spend half their lives with the clap, and wind up broke. That's not me, sister. I'm an escort for gentlemen of means. I'm on the approved escort lists of the finest hotels, and last year I made two hundred thousand bucks. What do you think of that? I got investments. Whores don't have investments, honey. Alan wasn't my pimp. He was my manager. In fact, he managed a couple of my girlfriends, too. I fixed him up with them because, at first, before he started getting strange, he was the best."
        Dazzled by the woman's self-delusion, Jorja said, "And Alan took a managerial fee for handling your career-and theirs?"
        Her scowl fading, somewhat placated by Jorja's willingness to use euphemisms, Pepper said, "No. That was one of the best things about our arrangement with him. He was still a blackjack dealer, see; that's where he made his money. He had all the contacts needed to manage us, but all he wanted for his trouble was free trade. I never knew a man who needed so much pussy. He couldn't get enough. In fact, the last couple of months, he seemed obsessed with pussy. Was he like that with you, honey?" Repulsed by this sudden intimacy, Jorja tried to stop the woman, but Pepper would not be quiet. "In fact, the last few weeks he was so horny all the time that I started to think maybe I should dump him. I mean, there was something a little crazy about it. He'd do it and do it and do it until he just couldn't get his pecker up to do it any more, and then he'd want to watch X-rated videotapes."
        Jorja was suddenly angry that Alan had made her executor, forcing her to witness the moral squalor in which he had passed the last year of his life. And she was angry because she would have to find a way to explain his death to Marcie, who was already treading a psychological tightrope. But she was not really angry with Pepper Carrafield; not angry but appalled, yes, because even Alan deserved a little mourning and respect from his live-in lover, more than this shark could ever give him. But there was no point in blaming the shark for being a shark.
        One of the elevators opened, disgorging uniformed policemen, morgue employees, and a gurney bearing a corpse in an opaque plastic body bag.
        Jorja and Pepper rose from the sofa.
        Even as the stretcher was being rolled out of the first elevator, the doors of the second opened, and four more cops appeared, two in uniform plus a team of plainclothes detectives. A detective came to Pepper Carrafield and asked a few final questions.
        No one asked any questions of Jorja. She stood rigid and suddenly numb, staring at the body bag that contained her ex-husband.
        They rolled the gurney across the travertine. The wheels squeaked.
        Jorja watched it moving away.
        Two cops held the lobby doors while the morgue attendants pushed the gurney outside. It moved past the lobby windows. Jorja turned to observe its progress. She still felt no grief, but she was swept by a powerful wave of melancholy, a profound sadness at what might have been.
        From the nearest of the elevators, where she was holding a door open, Pepper said, "Let's go up to my place."
        Outside, they closed the doors of the coroner's van.
        In the elevator on the way up, and in a discreet whisper in the fourteenth-floor hallway, then continuing in a normal tone of voice as they entered her big living room, Pepper insisted on describing Alan's peculiar sexual hunger. He had always had the carnal appetite of a gourmand, but apparently sex had become a sick obsession with him as his life had wound down through its last couple months.
        Jorja did not want to hear about it, but stopping the hooker seemed more difficult than simply enduring her chatter.
        In recent weeks, Alan's days had been devoted