Free This Dame for Hire by Sandra Scoppettone

don’t know how angry Porter can get.”
    “How angry?” I asked. I felt a little alarmed.
    “He rages,” Myrna said.
    “Ya mean he yells? Nothin else?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “He doesn’t hit ya or anything like that?”
    She sat up straight. “Of course not. What kind of people do you think we are?”
    I thought I’d let that one pass. No time to explain it happened in the best of families.
    “Myrna,” Walker said. “You have to tell Miss Quick whatever you know.”
    There was a long silence while she thought it over and then she said, “Are you going to tell the police?”
    “That depends on what I find out.”
    “Oh, what’s the difference? His name is Alec Rockefeller.”

NINE
    Myrna told me that the Rockefeller kid lived on Park Avenue. Where else? Armed with his address I took a bus across Eighty-sixth Street through the park and another one down Fifth Avenue. I wasn’t in a big hurry, and sometimes I didn’t feel like being underground.
    Sitting by the window I watched people rushing to somewhere. Every once in a while I’d see a person, usually a woman, in a coat or jacket, and I’d think: That person actually went to a store and picked out that item. It boggled my mind. What could she have been thinking? She paid a lot of filthy lucre for that ugly thing. Why?
    And that speculation always led me to taste. A very individual thing. The woman I was passing now was wearing a coat with big green and yellow squares like a checkerboard gone crazy. She must’ve thought she looked swell in it or she wouldn’t have bought it. But how could she see it like that? It was a futile game I played with myself, cause I never came up with satisfying answers.
    I quit my rubbernecking and settled down to thinking about Alec Rockefeller. Myrna told me he was in his early twenties, very good-looking, courteous, and charming. He’d come to the funeral and had visited the Wests once a week for about a month and then he stopped. She figured it was too painful for him. She also said he was a second cousin of a more famous Rockefeller but couldn’t remember which one.
    My stop came at Sixtieth Street. When I got off, I walked east toward Madison. There were a lotta town houses on this block, and I knew you had to be rolling in dough to live in one of them. And there were trees. Small, but still they were there.
    I crossed Madison and walked the final block to Park. The building I was looking for was on the corner of Sixtieth across the avenue.
    It was tall and brown except the top two floors, which were a tan color. Even from where I was standing I knew that under the eaves was a lot of decorative stonework. It could’ve been flowers or angels or anything, but I’d never know.
    When the light changed, I crossed. Standing in the doorway was a doorman, of course. My life was getting to be nothing but these mugs. This one was wearing a green uniform with the usual generous gilt. I honestly didn’t know how I was gonna get into a Rockefeller household, but I had to try.
    “Good afternoon,” I said.
    This one looked like something you’d mount on a wall. He touched the shiny black bill of his cap and nodded politely. “How may I help you, miss?”
    “I’m not sure I have the right address, but I’m supposed to meet with an Alec Rockefeller.”
    “Rockefeller?”
    “Yeah, Alec.”
    “I’m afraid we don’t have any Rockefellers in this building.”
    “No Alec Rockefeller?”
    “No any Rockefeller. Believe me, I’d know.”
    Dopily I handed him the piece of paper that I’d written on when Myrna read it to me from her address book.
    He stared at it a long time as though the numbers might change. “Well, that’s this building, but no one by that name lives here.”
    “Is there a young man who has the first name Alec?”
    “No one.”
    “You didn’t even think about it.”
    He took a step back from me and looked stern. “Miss, I don’t have to think about it. I know the name of everyone who lives