The meal was flawless. We led off with a thick lentil soup. The main course was lamb, naturally, not skewered a la shish-kebab, but marinated in a teasing, subtle sauce and cooked slowly over hot coals, then served on a thick bed of yellow rice. There was thin Syrian bread on the table, a paste of almonds and vegetables on the side, and a few other goodies.

  Our waiter brought a bottle of very sweet white wine to go with the entrée.

  “I was bitchy before. I’m sorry about it.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Ed—”

  I looked at her. She was worth looking at in a pale green dress which she filled to perfection. The soft lighting of the Alhambra made her face quite different from the one I had seen in the harsh glare or an unshaded light bulb on Sullivan Street. The planes and angles that had connoted toughness before were now hallmarks of character and beauty.

  “You want to ask me some questions,” she said, “don’t you?”

  “Well—”

  “I don’t mind, Ed.”

  I gave her a brief run-down on the way things seemed to shape up at that point. Sometimes it’s clever to do this; my own mind has a tendency to take short cuts and miss obvious bits and pieces, and bouncing ideas off another person will occasionally strike a valuable spark. This wasn’t one of those occasions. She heard me all the way through, nodding from time to time and hanging on every word. By the time I was done I hadn’t come up with a new angle.

  “Let me try some names on you,” I suggested. “Maybe you can tell me whether Karen mentioned them.”

  “You can try.”

  I ran through the eight jokers who had been at the stag. A few sounded vaguely familiar to her, but one of them, Ray Powell, turned out to be someone Ceil knew personally.

  “A chaser,” she said. “A very plush East Side apartment and an appetite for women that never lets up. He used to see Karen now and then, but there couldn’t have been anything serious.”

  “You know him—very well?”

  “Yes.” She colored suddenly. She was not the sort you expected to blush. “If you mean intimately, no. He asked often enough. I wasn’t interested.” She lowered her eyes. “I don’t sleep around that much,” she said. “Karen—well, she came to New York with stars in her eyes, and when the stars dimmed and died, she went a little crazy, I suppose. I wasn’t that ambitious and didn’t fall as hard. I have some fairly far-out ways of earning a living, Ed, but most nights I sleep alone.”

  Lines like that can stop a conversation cold. For a moment or two we both sat there feeling slightly awkward. Then one of us changed the subject, and we buzzed along for a while on small talk. It was easy and relaxed with no push and no tension, and we enjoyed it.

  She was one hell of a girl. She was hard and soft, a cynic and a romantic at the same time. She hadn’t gone to college, hadn’t finished high school, but somewhere along the way she had acquired a veneer of sophistication that reflected more concrete knowledge than a diploma. With what she was, it would have been very easy for her to have turned brassy or bitchy or sour or stupid or coarse. She was none of these things. Surprisingly, she came across as a vital person, with quiet dignity.

  We stuck to brandied coffee for two rounds, then stayed with the brandy but left out the coffee for two more rounds. Her eyes got slightly misty. During one of the little conversational lulls her face clouded completely.

  “Poor Karen,” she said. “Poor Karen.”

  I didn’t say anything. She sat somberly for a moment, then tossed her head so that her bleached blond mane rippled like a wheat field in the wind. “I’m getting morbid as hell,” she said. “You’d better take me home, Ed.”

  The night was cold and gray. A haze blotted out most of the moon. The stars were hidden. We got into the Chevy and I drove downtown on Seventh Avenue. She stayed on her side of the car. I turned left at Bleecker, perked on Sullivan. We walked slowly to her building. The same old Italians ruminated ln the Sons Of Palermo Social & Athletic Club.

  We climbed three flights of stairs. I stood next to her while she rummaged through her purse. She came up with a key and turned to face me before opening the door. “Ed,” she said softly, “if I asked you, would you just come in for a few drinks? Could it be that much of an invitation and no more?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hate to sound like—”

  “I understand.”

  We went inside. She turned on lamps in the living room and we sat on the couch. She didn’t run off to the bedroom to change into something more comfortable. It wasn’t to be that sort of an evening. It would have been nice, but that wasn’t part of the program for the night’s entertainment.

  The liquor cabinet was well stocked with expensive brands. Girls who live in Ceil’s and Karen’s world don’t have to buy their own liquor. Men take care of that. I mixed bourbon and soda for her and poured cognac for myself.

  SHE STARTED talking about the modeling session she’d gone through that afternoon. “The money was good,” she said, “but I had to work for it. He took three or four rolls of film. Slightly advanced cheesecake, Ed. Nudes, underwear stuff. He’ll print the best pictures and they’ll wind up for sale in the dirty little stores on 42nd Street.”

  “With the face retouched?” She laughed.

  “He won’t bother. Nobody’s going to look at the face, Ed.”

  “I would.”

  “Would you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And not the body?”

  “That too.”

  She looked at me for a long moment. There was something electric in the air. I could feel the sweet animal heat of her. She was right next to me. I could reach out and touch her, could take her in my arms and press her close. The bedroom wasn’t far away. And she would be good, very good.

  Two drinks later, I got up and walked to the door. She followed me. I stopped at the doorway, started to say something, changed my mind. We said good night and I started down the stairs.

  After I walked a flight I heard her door close. I stopped, just for a moment, and then proceeded out of the building. I put the Chevy’s top down. It was cold out, but I was warm enough not to mind.

  If she had been just any girl—actress, secretary, college girl, or waitress—then it would have ended differently. It would have ended in her bedroom, in warmth and hunger and fury. But she was not just any girl. She was a halfway tramp, a little tarnished, a little soiled, a little battered around the edges. And so I could not make that pass at her, could not maneuver from couch to bed.

  A cute distinction. The old saying: Treat a whore like a queen and a queen like a whore. She was no harlot, but she was too close to that unhappy state to be treated as anything but a queen. A cute distinction, and frustrating.

  I didn’t want to go back to my apartment. It would be lonely there. I drove to a Third Avenue bar where they pour good drinks.

  I called Mark Donahue. Again no answer. I let the phone ring a dozen times. Then I let the man behind the bar pour me a lot of cognac. He knew his job and did it well.

  Somewhere between two and three I left the bar and looked around for the Chevy. By the time I found it I decided to leave it there and take a cab. I had had too little sleep the night before and too much to drink this night, and things were beginning to go a little out of focus. The way I felt, they looked better that way. But I didn’t much feel like bouncing the car off a telephone pole or running down some equally stoned pedestrian. I flagged a cab and left the driving to him.

  He had to tell me three times that we were in front of my building before it got through to me. I shook myself awake, paid him, and wended my way into the brownstone and up a flight of stairs.

  Then I blinked a few times.

  THERE was something on my doormat, something that hadn’t been there when I left. It was not a summons or a charity appeal or a copy of the New York Times.

  Not at all.

  It was blonde, well-bred and glassy-eyed. It had an empty wine bottle in one hand and its mouth was smiling lustily. It got to its feet and swayed there, then pitched forward slightly. I caught it and it burrowed its head against my chest.

  “You keep late hours,” it said.

  It was very soft and very warm. It rubbed its hips against me and purred like a kitten. I growled like a randy old tomcat.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” it said. “I’ve been wanting to go to bed. Take me to bed, Ed London.”

  Its name, in case you haven’t guessed, was Lynn Farwell.

  We were a pair of iron filings and my bed was a magnet. I opened the door and we hurried inside. I closed the door and slid the bolt. We moved quickly through the living room and along a hall to the bedroom. Along the way we discarded clothing.

  She left her skirt on my couch, her sweater on one of my leather chairs. Her bra and slip and shoes landed in various spots on the hall floor. In the bedroom she got rid of her stockings and garter belt and panties. She was naked and beautiful and hungry…and there was no time to waste on words.

  Her body welcomed me. Her breasts, firm little cones of happiness, quivered against me. Her thighs enveloped me in the lust-heat of desire. Her face twisted in a blind agony of need.

  We were both pretty well stoned. This didn’t matter. We could never have done better sober. There was a beginning, bittersweet and almost painful. There was a middle, fast and furious, a scherzo movement in a symphony of fire. And there was an ending, gasping, spent, two bodies washed up on a lonely barren beach.

  At the end she used words that girls are not supposed to learn in the schools she had attended. She screamed them out in a frenzy of completion, a song of obscenity offered as a coda.

  And afterward, when the rhythm was gone and only the glow remained, she talked. “I needed that,” she told me. “Needed it badly. But you could tell that, couldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re good, Ed.” She caressed me. “Very good.”

  “Sure. I win blue ribbons.”

  “Was I good?”

  I told her she was fine.

  “Mmmmm,” she said.

  I think she fell asleep then. At least she stopped jabbering. My eyes were closed and my head was buried in a pillow and I was thoroughly exhausted, but for some reason I stayed awake awhile longer.

  Thoughts.

  I had a client, and my client had a girl he was going to marry, and l was in bed with her. A bad way lor a private detective to behave, all things considered. They don’t take your license away far that sort of thing, but it doesn’t give you a very good name in the outside world.

  Thoughts.

  Not long ago I had been with girl named Ceil, and I liked her and she liked me, and I wanted her and the quite possibly wanted me. But, because she was an amateur slut in a not-too-refined way, nothing had happened. And then I had come home, and a rich bundle of fluff was on my doorstep, and because she was as socially acceptable as a black tie, there was no need for a hands-off policy, and without a word or a kiss or a caress, we wound up in the hay.

  Thoughts.

  The thoughts spread out and became more and more confused. Too much Courvoisier, too little sleep the night before, too wild a bedroom romp with little Lynn Farwell. Too much of everything to let a tired private cop think too clearly.

  The thoughts turned gray and the grayness turned to black. I slept.

  SEVEN

  I ROLLED out of bed just as the noon whistles started going off all over town. Lynn was gone. I listened to bells from a nearby church ring 12 times; then I showered, shaved and swallowed aspirin. Lynn had left. Living proof of indiscretions makes bad company on the morning after.

  I had breakfast in a lunch counter around the block on Third. I wolfed down a plateful of shirred eggs with chicken livers and drank three cups of black coffee. Outside, the sun was shining. It was a warm day, the kind to put down the top of a convertible.

  Which reminded me.

  I caught a cab, and the driver and I prowled Third Avenue for my car. It was still there. I drove it back to the garage and tucked it away. Then I called Donahue, but hung up before the phone had a chance to ring. Not that I expected to reach him anyway, since calling him on the phone didn’t seem to produce much in the way of concrete results. But I didn’t feel like talking to him just then.

  A few hours ago I had been busy coupling with his bride-to-be. It seemed an unlikely prelude to a conversation.

  My conscience was a pain in the neck. Listen, I told it, she was no virgin and the two of them are no lovebirds. So quit casting yourself in the role of Wicked Seducer. It doesn’t lit.

  All of which was quite true. The sex bit had been Lynn’s idea all the way. Sunday morning she had barged into my apartment. and in the course of things she had managed to make it plain that she was available for fun and games if I was in the mood. Sunday night she was waiting at my door with the proverbial gleam in her babyblue eyes. Maybe she was a little bit of a nymph. Maybe she just liked bedroom games.

  And the two of them were no Romeo and Juliet, no Tristan and Isolde, no star-crossed lovers. He wanted to marry her, all right, but that didn’t stop him from warming his bed with Karen Price until a month or so before the wedding was scheduled. It was the standard marriage-of-convenience routine. It came off well enough in French novels. In real life it didn’t sound like heaven on earth.

  I told myself this and some other things. I had a properly stiff battle with my conscience, and tried not to confuse the issue by dragging Ceil Gorski into it. A conscience is not a very powerful foe. I beat it down, inch by stubborn inch, and then I dropped the dime back in the slot and dialed Mark Donahue’s number one more time.

  I could have saved myself the trouble. He didn’t answer.

  Darcy & Bates wasn’t really on Madison Avenue. It was around the corner on 48th Street, a suite of offices on the fourteenth floor of a 22 story building. I got out of the elevator and stood before a reception desk. A girl with bouffant hair and false breasts smiled metallically at me. I returned the smile. She asked me whom l wished to see.

  “Phil Abeles,” I said.

  “May I ask your name?”

  “Go right ahead,” I smiled. She looked unhappily snowed. “Ed London,” I finally said. She smiled gratefully and pressed one of 20 buttons and spoke softly into a tube.

  “If you’ll have a seat, Mr. London,” she said.

  I didn’t have a seat. I stood instead and loaded up a pipe. I finished lighting it as Abeles emerged from an office and came over to meet me. He motioned for me to follow him. We went into his air-cooled office and he closed the door.

  “What’s up, Ed?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I want some help.” I drew on the pipe. “I’ll need a private office for an hour or two,” I told him. “And I want to see all of the men who were at Mark Donahue’s bachelor dinner. One at a time.”

  “All of us?” He grinned. “Even Lloyd and Kenneth?”

  “I suppose we can pass them for the time being. Just you and the other five then. Can you arrange it?”

  He nodded with a fair amount of enthusiasm. “You can use this office,” he said. “And everybody’s around today, so you won’t have any trouble on that score. Who do you want to see first?”

  “I might as well start with you, Phil.”

  I talked with him for ten minutes. But I had already pumped him dry the day before. Still, he gave me a little information on some of the others I would be seeing. Before, I had tried to ask him about his own relationship with Karen Price. Although that tack had been fairly effective, it didn’t look like the best way to come up with something concrete. Instead, I asked him about the other men. If I worked on all of them that way, I just might turn up an answer or two.

  Abeles more or less crossed Fred Klein off the suspect list, if nothing else. Klein, whose wife was in Reno, had tentatively made the coulda-dunnit sheet on the chance that Karen was threatening to give his wife information that could boost her alimony, or something of the sort. Abeles knocked the theory to pieces with the information that Klein’s wife had money of her own, that she wasn’t looking for alimony, and that a pair of expensive lawyers had already worked out all the details of the divorce agreement.

  I asked Phil Abeles which of the married men he knew definitely had contact at one time or another with Karen Price. This was the sort of information a man is supposed to keep to himself, but the mores of Madison Avenue tend to foster subtle back-stabbing. Abeles told me he knew for certain that Karen had been intimate with Harold Merriman, and he was almost sure about Joe Conn as well.

  After Abeles left, I knocked the dottle out of my pipe and filled it again. I lit it, and as I shook out the match, I looked up at Harold Merriman.

  A pudgy man with a bald spot and bushy eyebrows, forty or forty-five, somewhat older than the rest of the crew. He sat down across the desk from me and narrowed his eyes. “Phil said you wanted to see me,” he said. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Just routine,” I smiled. “I need a little information. You knew Karen Price before the shooting, didn’t you?”

  “Well, I knew who she was.”

  Sure, I thought. But I let it pass and played him the way I had planned. I asked him who in the office had had anything to do with the dead girl. He hemmed and hawed a little, then told me that Phil Abeles had taken her out for dinner once or twice and that Jack Harris was supposed to have had her along on a business trip to Miami one weekend. Strictly in a secretarial capacity, no doubt.

  “And you?”

  “Oh, no,” Merriman said. “I’d met her, of course, but that was as far as it went.”

  “Really?”

  The hesitation was admission enough. “Listen,” he stammered, “all right, I…saw her a few times. It was nothing serious and it wasn’t very recent. London—”

  I waited.

  “Keep it a secret, will you?” He forced a grin. “Write it off as a symptom of the foolish forties. She was available and I was ready to play around a little. I’d just as soon it didn’t get out. Nobody around here knows, and I’d like to keep it that way.” He hesitated again. “My wife knows. I was so damn ashamed of myself that I told her. But I wouldn’t want the boys in the office to know.”