"Let me get to it. We started talking and, Jim, I'll be a son of a gun, I asked her to go out to dinner."

O'Boyle looked at him, saying nothing.

"I mean we started talking and I liked her. She was real. No bullshit put-on or, you know, cute acting."

"She was real."

"She was very honest and sincere, down to earth. She used a few words once in a while like 'shit,' but it was natural. She was easy to talk to and we started laughing at things each other said."

"So you took her out to dinner."

"Yes. Listen, you try and think of a place to go you're not going to run into somebody. It's almost impossible."

"I've never been faced with the problem," O'Boyle said.

"Yeah, well good for you. We ended up in someplace downtown, I'm looking around the whole time we're there expecting somebody to walk in. Place you never even heard of, all of a sudden you start picturing all your friends and neighbors walking in."

"Guilty conscience."

"That's what I pay you for, huh?"

"You score that night?"

"Jim, we were having a nice time, that's all. I didn't even think about it."

"Well, when did you start thinking about it?"

"I guess when I saw her without any clothes on."

"That could do it."

"I told you she was a model? Well, when I first met her she worked in one of those places you go in, take pictures of a nude girl, fifteen bucks for a half-hour."

O'Boyle stared; he didn't say anything.

"Thirty bucks you can body-paint them."

"How much for a plain old-fashioned lay?"

"She didn't do that. Maybe some of the others did, I don't know."

"She just took her clothes off for any guy who came in."

"Jim, she didn't see anything wrong with it. She said a body's a body, everybody's got one, so what's the big deal? I told you she was… natural, honest."

"A real person."

"She was different. Jim, I'm not good at describing people.