Evan Hunter: Candyland

"Yes," he says. "Terrible."

"They found the bodies, you know."

“Yes. "

"A tragedy," she says.

Shaking her head, eyes all wide in wonder and awe. Green eyes , he notices. Those cool and limpid green eyes . The Jimmy Dorsey orchestra. The Big Band sound. His father playing trumpet at more weddings and engagement parties and beer parties and bar mitzvahs and proms than Ben can count, most often with just four pieces, sometimes seven, less frequently with what his father used to call "a full orchestra," ten or twelve or fourteen pieces, like the time he played a gig — he called them gigs — up at Saranac Lakes in New York.

Weekend musician, he always pretended to be oh so hip. How you doin, man? he'd say to his own son. Called Ben "man."

How you doin, man?

Sported a little triangular beard under his lower lip, the tip pointing toward his chin, called the beard a "Dizzy kick," after Dizzy Gillespie, one of his idols. Told Ben it cushioned the mouthpiece, so how come AJ Hirt didn't have one? Or Herb Alpert? Ben was growing up during the time of the Tijuana Brass and "Taste of Honey" , Mama Cass and "California Dreamin' " , The Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, but his father's music drowned out the sounds Ben preferred. He couldn't count the number of times he'd heard his father blowing "Concerto for Cootie" or "Night in Tunisia" in the spare room of the old house in Mamaroneck, where he practiced every night of the week after he got home from his day job selling real estate.

"How'd you like that, Louise?" he would proudly ask Ben's mother, opening the spit valve on the horn, blowing moisture into a chamois cloth, which his mother found disgusting.

"Don't give up your day job, Henry," she would say, shooting him down, and wink at Ben, conspirators. Henry. A wimp's name, an accountant's name. HENRY THORPE REAL ESTATE, it said on his stationery. But he called his band The Hank Thorpe Orchestra, even when it was just four pieces at an Irish wedding, and that's what it read on the business cards he handed out, The Hank Thorpe Orchestra, in delicate script lettering. His mother never stopped calling him Henry.

"Have you eaten here yet?" the redhead asks.

"I'm sorry?"

"The hotel dining room. Zagat says it's very good."

"No, I haven't."

"I thought… well, actually, I don't even know if you are, for that matter."

"Are what?" he asks.

"Staying here," she says. "At the hotel," she says.

"Yes, I am."

"Which is what I assumed. Which is why I asked if you'd eaten here yet."

There is still time to back away from this. He knows there is time. But in that instant, the redhead crosses her legs, and all at once there is a sleek expanse of naked white thigh below the suddenly higher hem of the already short black dress. His mouth goes dry. He tries not to appear too aware of her exposed thigh, but he is thinking she's not wearing pantyhose, maybe she isn't wearing panties, either, maybe she is naked under that short black dress. He pokes his forefinger into the gin, toys with the olive, finally grasps it between thumb and forefinger, and pops it into his mouth.

"What are you drinking?" he asks.

"Bourbon. Rocks."

"Would you care for another?"

"Are you having another?"

"I thought it might be a good idea."

"Then sure."

The dazzling smile again.

He signals to the bartender.

"Another round here," he says.

The bartender nods.

The bartenders all know who the hookers are. In most good hotels, the manager doesn't like hookers wandering in off the street, but for a slight weekly fee the bartender allows a select handful to solicit at the bar. He knows this for a fact because a bartender in St. Louis, where he was designing a synagogue four years ago, shared the information during the early hours of the morning, just before the bar closed. Of course, if anyone dared mention to the compassionate barkeep here in this fine hotel that at least in this one respect he is behaving suspiciously like a pimp, he would become highly offended, no Eugene O'Neill character he, oh nossir. But, really, sit, isn't that what the situation here most closely resembles? You, sit, are something of a pimp, and I am something of a john, and this redhead sitting beside me with,her legs recklessly crossed is most certainly something of a whore.

Or is she?

Before he asks the essential question

In architecture, or at least in the kind of architecture lie practices, the essential question is: Does it work? Does it work both functionally and, esthetically? For him, for Benjamin Thorpe, AIA, that is all there is, and all there is to know. Will it delight the eye and will it not fall down around the ears? Does it work? The essential question in the game afoot here at the bar is quite similar to the question Ben asks himself each time he sits at his computer. Does it work? Or, to be more precise, does she work? Is she a working girl? Or is she, in reality, an innocent young thing who has wandered in out of the storm in search of an overpriced dinner here in the hotel restaurant?

"Cheers," he says, and raises the fresh drink the bartender has deposited before him without a word. The redhead raises her glass, too.

"Cheers," she responds, with a tone and a shrug that suggests she never expected to be sitting here sharing a drink with a delightful male companion on this otherwise distressing night.

It's unusual that a hooker will sit drinking hard liquor when she is trolling for a customer, or a client, or a patron, as he has been called variously by women from whom he's accepted comfort and solace hither and yon, one of whom called him a son of a bitch bastard, in fact — but that was another story. The redhead's drink looks genuinely alcoholic, though, so perhaps she isn't what she seems to be at all, but is indeed a sweet little naif enjoying a pre-dinner drink in the cozy warmth of the hotel bar, it being so nasty and stormy and wet out there. Or perhaps she is, in fact, the slut he first took her for and still guesses she is, who's decided that old Ben here — who is forty-three, mind you, and incidentally beginning to feel these two and a bit more gins — is a sure thing, and so it's safe to have a drink in celebration of her catch. In which case, all that remains is for one or the other of them to ask the essential question.

"So what's your name?" she asks.

This is not the essential question.

Besides, it's been his experience that most respectable ladies

Oh, listen, don't give me the Madonna and the whore bullshit, he thinks suddenly and fiercely. I'm not cruising the universe tonight because I think my mother was Hail Mary, full of grace, and all other women are harlots, I mean the hell with that shit. I am sitting here working this redhead because… Well, who knows why I'm here? It has nonetheless been my experience, lie thinks, still annoyed without knowing quite why, that most respectable ladies as opposed to most whores will not immediately ask a man what his name is, preferring him to take the lead as they've been taught in proper finishing schools where they wear white gloves.

"Michael," he lies. "And yours?"

"Karen," she says, which is not the sort of name hookers normally choose for themselves. He has never in his life met a hooker with a name like Mary or Jane. Or Karen, for that matter. Kim seems to be the most common hooker's name, or for that matter the name of most common hookers.

Hello, Michael, I'm Kim.

Or Tiffany.

Tiffany is a good one.

Or Lauren.

He has met three hookers named Lauren, two of them in Miami.

"Do you live here in New York, Karen?"

"Oh yes," she says.

There is an almost playful manner about her now. Well, if not playful, at least more relaxed, more casual. It is as if now that the matter has been settled — although it really hasn't been settled since the essential question hasn't yet been spoken by either of them. But perhaps it's already been settled in her mind — I am a whore and you are a john — and so she can afford to be more, well, intimate, he guesses, swinging her stool around so that her knees are almost touching his, the skirt riding very high on her thighs now, her legs looking white and shiny and young and smooth and touchable in the pale blue spill from the lights behind the bar.