"Chance."

"You know him?"

"I might know who he is."

I waited. A man in a long coat was walking along the block, stopping at each storefront. He might have been looking in the windows except that you couldn't; every shop had steel shutters that descended like garage doors at the close of business. The man stopped in front of each closed store and studied the shutters as if they held meaning for him.

"Window shopping," Royal said.

A blue-and-white police car cruised by, slowed. The two uniformed officers within looked us over. Royal wished them a good evening. I didn't say anything and neither did they. When the car drove off he said, "Chance don't come here much."

"Where would I find him?"

"Hard to say. He'll turn up anyplace but it might be the last place you would look. He don't hang out."

"So they tell me."

"Where you been lookin'?"

I'd been to a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, a piano bar in the Village, a pair of bars in the West Forties. Royal took all this in and nodded thoughtfully.

"He wouldn't be at Muffin-Burger," he said, "on account he don't run no girls on the street. That I know of. All the same, he might be there anyway, you dig? Just to be there. What I say, he'll turn up anywhere, but he don't hang out."

"Where should I look for him, Royal?"

He named a couple of places. I'd been to one of them already and had forgotten to mention it. I made a note of the others. I said, "What's he like, Royal?"

"Well, shit," he said, "He a pimp, man."

"You don't like him."

"He ain't to like or not like. My friends is business friends, Matthew, and Chance and I got no business with each other. We don't neither of us buy what the other be sellin'. He don't want to buy no stuff and I don't want to buy no pussy." His teeth showed in a nasty little smile. "When you the man with all the candy, you don't never have to pay for no pussy."