I didn’t tell him that they already knew, and that they had passed the information on to me.

  Ray Powell came in grinning. He was a bachelor, and this made a difference. “Hello, London,” he said. “I made it with the girl, if that’s what you want to know.”

  “I heard rumors.”

  “I don’t keep secrets,” he said. He sprawled in the chair across from me and crossed one leg over the other. It was a relief to talk to someone other than a reticent, guilt-ridden adulterer.

  He certainly looked like a Don Juan. He was twenty-eight, tall, dark and handsome, with wavy black hair and piercing brown eyes. A little prettier and he might have passed for a gigolo. But there was a slight hardness about his features that prevented this.

  “You’re working for Mark,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  HE SIGHED. “Well, I’d like to see him wind up innocent, but from where I sit, it’s hard to see it that way. He’s a funny guy, London. He wants to have his cake and eat it, too. He wanted a marriage and he wanted a playmate. With the girl he was marrying, you wouldn’t think he’d worry about playing around. Ever meet Lynn?”

  “I’ve met her.”

  “Then you know what I mean.”

  I nodded. “Was she one of your conquests?”

  “Lynn?” He laughed easily. “Not that girl. She’s the pure type, London. The one-man woman. Mark found himself a sweet girl there. Why he bothered with Karen is beyond me.”

  I switched the subject to the married men in the office. With Powell, I didn’t try to find out which of them had been intimate with Karen Price, since it seemed fairly obvious they all had. Instead I tried to ascertain which of them could be in trouble as a result of an affair with the girl.

  I learned a few things. Jack Harris was immune to blackmail—his wife knew he cheated on her regularly and had schooled herself to ignore such indiscretions just as long as he returned to her after each rough passage through the turbulent waters of adultery.

  Harold Merriman was sufficiently well-off financially so that he could pay a blackmailer indefinitely rather than quiet her by murder; besides, Merriman had already told me that his wife knew, and I was more or less prepared to believe him.

  Both Abeles and Joe Conn were possibilities. Conn looked best of all. He wasn’t doing very well in advertising but he could hold his job indefinitely—he had married a girl whose family ran one of Darcy & Bates’ major accounts. Conn had no money of his own, and no talent to hold a job if his wife wised up and left him.

  Of course, there was always the question of how valid Ray Powell’s impressions were. Lynn? She’s the pure type. The one-man woman.

  That didn’t sound much like the drunken blonde who had turned up on my doormat the night before.

  Jack Harris revealed nothing new, merely reinforced what I had managed to pick up elsewhere along the line. I talked to him for fifteen minutes or so. He left, and Joe Conn came into the room.

  He wasn’t happy. “They said you wanted to see me,” he muttered. “We’ll have to make it short, London. I’ve got a pile of work this afternoon and my nerves are jumping all over the place as it is.”

  The part about the nerves was something he didn’t have to tell me. He didn’t sit still, just paced back and forth like a lion in a cage before chow time.

  I could play it slow and easy or fast and hard, looking to shock and jar. If he was the one who killed her, his nervousness now gave me an edge. I decided to press it.

  I got up, walked over to Conn. A short stocky man, crew cut, no tie. “When did you start sleeping with Karen?” I snapped.

  He spun around wide-eyed. “You’re crazy!”

  “Don’t play games,” I told him. “The whole office knows you were bedding her.”

  I watched him. His hands curled into fists at his sides. His eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared.

  “What is this, London?”

  “Your wife doesn’t know about Karen, does she?”

  “Damn you.” He moved toward me. “How much, you bastard? A private detective,” he snickered. “Sure you are. You’re a damn blackmailer, London. How much?”

  “Just how much did Karen ask for?” I said. “Enough to make you kill her?”

  He answered with a left hook that managed to find the point of my chin and send me crashing back against the wall. There was a split second of blackness. Then he was coming at me again, fists ready, and I spun aside, ducked and planted a fist of my own in his gut. He grunted and threw a right at me. I took it on the shoulder and tried his belly again. It was softer this time. He wheezed and folded up. I hit him in the face and just managed to pull the punch at the last minute. It didn’t knock him out—only spilled him on the seat of his tweed pants. He sat on the floor for a few seconds without moving. Then he looked up at me and rubbed his face with one hand.

  “You’ve got a good punch, London.”

  “So do you,” I said. My jaw still ached.

  “You ever do any boxing?”

  “No.”

  “I did,” he said. “In the Navy. I still try to keep in shape. If I hadn’t been so angry I’d have taken you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But I got mad,” he said. “Irish temper, I guess. Are you trying to shake me down?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t honestly think I killed Karen, do you?”

  “Did you?”

  “God, no.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You think I killed her,” he said hollowly. “You must be insane. I’m no killer, London.”

  “Of course. You’re a meek little man.”

  “You mean just now? I lost my temper.”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “I never killed her. You got me mad. I don’t like shakedowns and I don’t like being called a murderer. That’s all, damn you.”

  I CALLED Jerry Gunther from a pay phone in the lobby. “Two things,” I told the lieutenant. “First I think I’ve got a hotter prospect for you than Donahue. A man named Joe Conn, one of the boys at the stag. I tried shaking him up a little and he cracked wide open, tried to beat my brains in. He’s got a good motive, too.”

  “Ed, listen—”

  “That’s the first thing,” I said. “The other is that I’ve been trying to get in touch with my client for the past too-many hours and can’t reach him. Did you have him picked up again?”

  There was a long pause. All at once the air in the phone booth felt much too close. Something was wrong.

  “I saw Donahue half an hour ago,” Jerry said. “I’m afraid he killed that girl, Ed.”

  “He confessed?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “He confessed…in a way.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  A short sigh. “It happened yesterday,” Jerry said. “I can’t give you the time until we get the medical examiner’s report, but the guess is that it was just after we let him go. He sat down at his typewriter and dashed off a three-line confession. Then he stuck a gun in his mouth and made a mess. The lab boys are still there trying to scrape his brains off the ceiling. Ed?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t say anything…I didn’t know if you were still on the line. Look, everybody guesses wrong some of the time.”

  “This was more than a guess. I was sure.”

  “Well, listen, I’m on my way to Donahue’s place again. If you want to take a run over there you can have a look for yourself. I don’t know what good it’s going to do—”

  I’ll meet you there,” I said.

  EIGHT

  THE LAB crew left shortly after we arrived. “Just a formality for the inquest,” Jerry Gunther said. “That’s all.”

  Corpses are rarely pretty. A dead man does not look as though he is only sleeping. He looks dead. When the cause of death is a bullet that bas gone up through the roof of the mouth and out through the top of the skull, then Death itself is ugliness personified. I’ve seen Death often enough, natural or violent. I’ve looked into open caskets at men who have died in their sleep, and I’ve looked at what was left of a pretty woman when she went through the windshield of a smashed-up car.

  I’ve never gotten used to it. Undertakers are supposed to be acclimated to it, and doctors. Detectives should be. I don’t work that way. Each death hurts.

  “You’re sure it’s a suicide, then?”

  “Stop dreaming, Ed. What else?”

  What else? All that was left in the world of Mark Donahue was sprawled in a chair at a desk. There was a typewriter in front of him and a gun on the floor beside him. The gun was just where it would have dropped after a suicide shot of that nature. There were no little inconsistencies.

  The suicide note in the typewriter was slightly incoherent. It read: It has to end now. I can’t help what I did but there is no way out any more. God forgive me and God help me. I am sorry.

  “You can go if you want, Ed. I’ll stick around until they send a truck for the body. But—”

  “Run over the timetable, will you?”

  “From when to when?”

  “From when you released him to when he died.”

  Jerry shrugged. “Why? You can’t read it any way but suicide, can you?”

  “I don’t know. Give me a rundown.”

  “Let’s see,” he said. “You called around five, right?”

  “Around then. Five or 5:30.”

  “We let him go around three. There’s your timetable, Ed. We let him out around three, he came back here, thought about things for a while, then wrote that note and killed himself. That checks with the rough estimate we’ve got of the time of death. You narrow it down—you did call him after I spoke to you, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. No answer.”

  “He must have been dead by that time; probably killed himself within an hour after he got here.”

  “How did he seem when you released him?”

  “Happy to be out, I thought at the time. But he didn’t show much emotion one way or the other. You know how it is with a person who’s getting ready to knock himself off. All the problems and emotions are kept bottled up inside.”

  I went over to a window and looked out at Horatio Street. It was the most obvious suicide in the world, but I couldn’t swallow it. Call it a hunch, a stubborn refusal to accept the fact that my client had managed to fool me. Whatever it was, I didn’t believe the suicide theory. It just didn’t sit right.

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “I don’t think he killed himself.”

  “You’re wrong, Ed.”

  “Am I?” I went to Donahue’s liquor cabinet and filled two glasses with cognac. He wouldn’t miss it. I gave a glass to Jerry. He was important enough so that he could drink on duty without looking over his shoulder. He sipped his drink. I drained mine.

  “I know nothing ever looked more like suicide,” I admitted. “But the motives are still as messy as ever. Look at what we got here. We have a man who hired me to protect him from his former mistress—and as soon as he did, he only managed to call attention to the fact that he was involved with her. He received threatening phone calls from her. She didn’t want him married. But her best friend swears that the Price girl didn’t give a damn about Donahue, that he was only another man in her collection.”

  “Look, Ed—”

  “Let me finish. We can suppose for a minute that he was lying for reasons of his own that don’t make much sense, that he had some crazy reason for calling me in on things before he knocked off the girl. Maybe he thought that would alibi him—”

  “That’s just what I was going to say,” Jerry interjected.

  “I thought of it. It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, but it’s possible, I guess. Still, where in hell is his motive? Not blackmail. She wasn’t the blackmailing type to begin with, as far as I can see. But there’s more to it than that. Lynn Farwell wouldn’t care who Mark slept with before they were married. Or after, for that matter. It wasn’t a love match. She wanted a respectable husband and he wanted a rich wife, and they both figured to get what they wanted. Love wasn’t part of it.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t respectable,” Jerry said. “Maybe Karen knew something he didn’t want known. There’s plenty of room here for a hidden motive, Ed.”

  “Maybe. Still I wish you’d keep the case open, Jerry.”

  “You know I won’t.”

  “You’ll write it off as suicide and close the file?”

  “But I have to. All the evidence points that way. Murder and then suicide, with Donahue tagged for killing the Price girl and then killing himself.”

  “I guess it makes your bookkeeping easier.”

  “You know better than that, Ed.” He almost sounded hurt. “If I could see it any other way I’d keep on it. I can’t. As far as we’re concerned it’s a closed book.”

  I walked over to the window again. “I’m going to stay with it,” I said.

  “Without a client?”

  “Without a client.”

  We had one more short drink of Donahue’s cognac. Men came to pick up the corpse. Jerry and I both turned away while they collected Mark Donahue’s body and carried it off. Then, together, we left the apartment. Jerry sealed the place. We went outside.

  At the curb Jerry said, “I’ll have to tell his girl. She’s not next of kin, but someone has to tell her.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “You want to?”

  “I don’t want to,” l said. “But I will.”

  A MAID answered the phone in the Farwell home. I asked to speak to Lynn.

  “Miss Farwell’s not home,” she said. “Who’s calling, please?”

  I gave her my name.

  “Oh, yes, Mr. London. Miss Farwell left a message for you to call her at—” I took down a number with a Regency exchange, thanked her and hung up.

  I was tired, unhappy and confused. I didn’t want the role of bearer of evil tidings. I wished now that I had let Jerry tell her himself. I was in my apartment, it was a hot day for the time of the year, and my air conditioner wasn’t working right. I dialed the number the maid had given me. A girl answered, not Lynn. I asked to speak to Miss Farwell.

  She came on the line almost immediately. “Ed?”

  “Yes—I.”

  “I wondered if you’d call. I hope I wasn’t horrid last night. I was very drunk.”

  “You were all right.”

  “Just all right?” I didn’t say anything. She giggled softly and whispered, “I had a good time, Ed. Thank you for a lovely evening.”

  “Lynn—”

  “Is something the matter?”

  I’ve never been good at breaking news. I took a deep breath and blurted out, “Mark is dead. I just came from his apartment. The police think he killed himself.”

  Silence.

  “Can I meet you somewhere, Lynn? I’d like to talk to you.”

  More silence. Then, when she did speak, her voice was flat as week-old beer. “Are you at your apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stay there. I’ll be right over. I’ll take a cab.”

  The line went dead.

  NINE

  WHILE I waited for Lynn I thought about Joe Conn. If one person murdered both Karen Price and Mark Donahue, Conn seemed the logical suspect. Karen was blackmailing him, I reasoned, holding him up for hush money that he had to pay if he wanted to keep wife and job. He found out Karen was going to be at the stag, jumping out of the cake, and he took a gun along and shot her.

  Then Mark got arrested and Conn felt safe. Just when he was most pleased with himself, the police released Mark. Conn started to worry. If the case dragged out he was in trouble. Even if they didn’t get to him, a lengthy investigation would turn up the fact that he had been sleeping with Karen. And he had to keep that fact hidden.

  So he went to Donahue’s apartment with another gun. He hit Mark over the head, propped him up in the chair, shot him through the mouth and replaced his own prints with Mark’s. Then he dashed off a quick suicide note and got out of there. The blow on the head wouldn’t show, if that was how he did it. Not after the bullet did things to Mark’s skull.

  But then why in hell did Conn throw a fit at the ad agency when I tried to ruffle him? It didn’t make sense. If he had killed Mark on Sunday afternoon, he would know that it would be only a matter of time until the body was found and the case closed. He wouldn’t blow up if I called him a murderer, not when he had already taken so much trouble to cover his tracks.

  Unless he was being subtle, anticipating my whole line of reasoning. And when you start taking a suspect’s possible subtlety into consideration, you find yourself on a treadmill marked confusion. All at once the possibilities become endless.

  I got off the treadmill, though. The doorbell rang and Lynn Farwell stepped into my apartment for the third time in two days. And it occurred to me, suddenly, just how different each of those three visits had been.

  This one was slightly weird. She walked slowly to the same leather chair in which she had curled up Saturday morning. She did not wax kittenish this time. She sat down slowly, with her hands folded decorously in her lap and her feet planted one next to the other on the floor in front of the chair. I gave her a cigarette.

  “I don’t feel a thing,” she said.

  “Shock.”

  “No,” she admitted. “I don’t even feel shock, Ed. I just don’t feel a thing.

  A car passed outside, took a comer on two wheels and sped uptown on Third Avenue. I asked her if she wanted a drink. She didn’t answer. I poured her one. She didn’t drink it. I poured one for myself and nursed it.

  “I wasn’t in love with him” she said. “You knew that, of course.”

  “I gathered as much.”

  “It wasn’t a well-kept secret, was it? I told you that much before I told you my name, almost. Of course I was on the make for you at the time. That may have had something to do with it.”

  She looked at her drink but didn’t touch it. Slowly, softly she said, “After the first death there is no other.”