At 5:30 I was still nursing my drink. Time dragged. Outside, the street was still bright. Then a buzzer sounded. Someone was downstairs in my vestibule. I got up slowly, drink in hand, and pressed the answering buzzer that would open the downstairs door. I waited and listened to footsteps on the staircase. The footsteps halted in front of my door. There was a knock.

  I finished the cognac and went to the door. I turned the knob and flung open the door—to look into the face of the girl I had found dead in Central Park. I saw the blue eyes, the blonde hair, the button nose. I saw everything but the little hole in the middle of the forehead.

  “You’re Ed London,” she said.

  The same voice. The telephone voice. I froze momentarily and tried to get my breath. My head was spinning and the world was slightly out of kilter, as though some son of a bitch had tilted it like a pinball machine. I had just seen this lovely little blonde—dead; and now she stood at my door on her own two shapely feet.

  “You’re not you!” I exclaimed stupidly as she stepped inside my apartment.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand!” I echoed. “That’s the understatement of the year when it comes to my confusion.”

  SHE SCREWED up her face and looked at me as though I had lost my mind. Maybe I had. I started wondering how much cognac I had downed. Not that much, but maybe it was having a weird affect on me.

  I took a deep breath and stammered, “B-but I just saw you, in Central Park, where I was supposed to meet you. Only somebody else met you first and you were dead. Shot between the eyes.”

  It sounded idiotic now—her standing beside me, a living, breathing doll. But she made her way through the maze of my meaningless words and something soaked in. Her mouth fell open and she gasped like a fish on a line. Her eyes bugged. She said, “Oh no! Good God,” and gave a shrill little scream and fell into my arms and cried her eyes out…

  THREE

  I HELD the girl until she got a half-nelson on herself, then eased her into one of the twin leather chairs that give my living room the air of a British men’s club. She stayed in the chair and finished her crying while I poured cognac into a glass for her. I could have used some myself, but things made little enough sense sober and I didn’t want to get a load on.

  I made her drink the cognac. Then I lit cigarettes for both of us, and sat down in the other leather chair and waited for her world to settle down a little.

  After a long time she said, “I can’t believe it, Mr. London. I can’t believe Jackie’s dead.”

  “Jackie?”

  “Jacqueline Baron,” she said. “She was my sister.” She broke down again, suddenly regained her composure. “Not my twin sister. She was a year older. But we looked enough alike to pass for twins. My parents named her Jackie and me Jill. Jackie and Jill. Like the nursery rhyme. They thought it was cute.”

  “Who called me? You or Jackie?”

  “She did.”

  “Because she was afraid?”

  “Because we were both afraid,” Jill said. She held the glass of cognac in her hand, stared at it a moment, then drained it. “This is very good,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Cognac.”

  “Oh. It tastes good, makes me feel warm. But I still feel cold inside. Somebody killed Jackie and now they’re going to kill me. Oh, God, I’m scared.”

  She started to cry again. She started to cry again. She was trembling. I wanted to go to her but figured I would let her cry herself out. Nothing I could say would bring back her sister.

  After a while she calmed down again. I asked if she knew who had been trying to kill Jackie and her. She said she didn’t know. I asked why anyone would want them dead. She didn’t know that either.

  “We’d better take this from the top,” I said. “When did it all start?”

  “Three days ago, I think.”

  “What happened?”

  “There was a phone call. Jackie answered. We share an apartment—shared an apartment,” she added morosely. “Jackie answered it. She listened for a minute, looked frightened and slammed the phone down.”

  “Who was it?”

  “She wouldn’t say. Wouldn’t tell me anything about it. Then, the next day, someone in a truck tried to run us both down. It was so frightening. We were crossing the street and a truck came speeding at us from out of nowhere. He missed us by inches. Luckily, we got across in time.”

  “Did you get a look at the truck?”

  She shook her head. “No, I was too frightened. And I thought—then—it was just accidental. But Jackie was worried. I could tell something was wrong. When I prodded her, she told me about the phone call. Someone was going to kill us both.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “She didn’t know.”

  “No idea?”

  “Nothing she told me about… But there’s more. Yesterday, someone tried to kill me. Right on Park Avenue. A car whizzed by and somebody shot at me. Whoever it was missed. I was petrified.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? Someone threatened you and then tried to kill you. Twice. Why didn’t you notify the police?”

  “It’s… We couldn’t.”

  “And this morning Jackie called me. She wouldn’t call the police either, but she called me. That doesn’t make much sense.”

  She didn’t answer. She asked for a cigarette. I gave her one and lit it for her. I knew there was a lot she wasn’t telling me.

  ‘’Look at me,” I said. “This is no game. Somebody shot your sister. Killed her in cold blood. Right now the police are picking her body up from Central Park and trying to figure out who the hell she is. You can’t afford to sit around deciding how much you can tell me and how much you can keep to yourself. You either open up or I’ll pick up the phone and call the police and you can tell it to them. Which is probably a fairly good idea at this stage.”

  “No, don’t.”

  “Then you’d better start talking.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I guess you’re right.”

  She started talking. Jill and Jacqueline Baron lived together in an expensive apartment on East 58th Street off Park. They were self-employed. They earned a good living.

  They were call girls.

  “We were going to be models,” she said. “You know, everybody starts out to be a model. Only we never did make it. You have to starve yourself, get so thin it’s disgusting.”

  I didn’t say anything

  “But we did all right,” Jill said. Her eyes turned hard, bitter. “We had all the qualifications for our chosen work… I’m not bad to look at, am I?”

  She was wearing a green sheath dress that hid her figure as effectively as Saran Wrap. She had long legs, and they were crossed at the knee now so that I could see their shape, which was fine. Her breasts pushed out at me in a way that would keep her out of bounds for the fashion photographers but undeniably in bounds for any red-blooded man between the ages of 18 and 80. And she was beautiful to boot.

  “Pretty,” she said. She rolled the word on her tongue and her eyes clouded. “Our looks were our downfall. It’s an easy life for a lazy girl, with looks and a figure, Ed. It doesn’t take any talent at all. The men come and they tell their friends about you and pretty soon you have a date every night, and every date is at least a fifty dollar bill and maybe a hundred, and no income tax out of that, either… Would you pay me fifty, Ed?”

  “I wouldn’t pay even if the girl were mink lined.”

  “But do you think I’d be worth it?”

  “I’m sure you would.”

  SHE LAUGHED softly. She was playing Little Miss Desirable now, running her tongue over her lower lip, pouting a little, arranging herself in the chair to make herself appear as the personification of commercial lust. The act drained away her sorrow, and her fear. She got caught up in it and part of the reality of Jackie’s death left her for the moment.

  “It was handy,” she said. “Jackie and I had good times together. We were closer than sisters, Ed. You…well, you say how much we looked alike. We’ve always been able to pass for twins. That was an asset in business, you know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we could cover each other’s dates.” She smiled, remembering. “If Jackie had two dates at the same time and I was free, I would take one of them and pretend I was Jackie. The tricks never knew the difference. They couldn’t even tell us apart in bed.”

  “Handy.”

  “Uh-huh. Sometimes we would take a trick together. You know, a man would want to go to bed with both of us at once. A real sister act.” She closed her blue eyes. “Men get their kicks in funny ways. Some need two girls in order to get their jollies. Men are all sick, Ed.”

  “You get a distorted picture.”

  “Do I?’’

  “Yes. You just meet the men who pay you. The straight ones, the sane ones, they’re home with their wives in front of a television set with a can of beer close by. But you don’t get to see that kind.”

  Her eyebrows went up a notch. “And you? Have you got a wife, Ed London?”

  “I don’t even have a television set. But let’s forget my sex life for the time being.” I felt like forgetting it myself; her sister had put a crimp in it with an ill-timed morning phone call and her sister’s death had make me break a date with Ceil Gorski. The less said about my sex life, the better.

  “Let’s take it from the top,” I said. “You’re both call girls and you live together. That is, lived together. Someone is trying to kill you and you don’t know who or why. Any ideas at all?”

  “None.”

  “Were you blackmailing anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Was Jackie?”

  “If she was, she didn’t tell me about it.”

  “Okay. How about men? Any boyfriends?”

  “The only men in my life are customers, Ed.”

  It was a sort of hopeless line of questioning. All she knew was that her sister had been shot and she was next in line.

  I went into the kitchen and made two cups of instant coffee. She took cream and sugar in hers. I had mine black, with enough cognac to sweeten the brew. We sat at my kitchen table and drank the coffee while I made meaningless notes on a pad of yellow paper. I jotted down her name and her address, and made notes of the “timetable “ of Jackie’s murder from the first phone call to the discovery of the body. I didn’t fill much of the paper—there wasn’t much to write.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?” I asked Jill Baron.

  “You should know that by now. Call girls don’t look for help from the law. The police leave you alone if you live a quiet life and stay out of trouble, but if you draw them a map of who you are and where you live and how you earn your living, you might as well hang out a sign. The crooked cops come with their hands out and the honest ones haul you off to jail.”

  She worked on her coffee. “Jackie didn’t even want to call in a private detective. She said you couldn’t trust them. But your name had been mentioned somewhere, and I heard you were honest. So I insisted we call you.”

  “Well, now’s a good time to go to the police, Jill. Whoever is after you is playing for keeps.”

  She shook her head. “But they’ll just ask me questions,” she said. “Questions, questions, questions, and I don’t know any of the answers that count. So what good will it do me?”

  Her voice broke off and her eyes dropped. I took one of her small hands in mine. Her flesh was cold.

  “Ed, help me,” she pleaded. “If you help me maybe we can find out what it’s all about and then go to the police. It won’t do any good to go to them now.”

  She had a point. She couldn’t give the cops anything much to work on, and any protection they might give her would disappear sooner or later. Police protection is a nice theory but it can never work out the way it should. The cops don’t have the manpower to guard a person closely for any length of time.

  And I had a reason of my own for wanting to stay away from Centre Street—police headquarters—for the time being. I had found a body in Central Park and had reported it anonymously, leaving out my own role in the case. The police frown on this sort of thing, especially on the part of a private cop. They can say nasty things about it when a man’s license comes up for renewal.

  “Jill.”

  She looked at me.

  “Think, now. Were you or Jackie ever arrested? I mean for any offense at all.”

  “Just a traffic ticket once. Nothing more.”

  “Did they fingerprint you?”

  “No, I just got a ticket.”

  “Were either of you ever fingerprinted for anything? A government job? Anything?”

  “I turned a trick with a UN diplomat once. But you don’t get fingerprinted for that sort of thing. Why the questions?”

  I filled a pipe and lit a match. Without prints, it was going to take them a while to identify Jackie Baron’s body. A corpse without identification is a tricky thing, and although police routine always comes up with an answer, it takes time. They run through Missing Persons files, they ship the prints to Washington, they play games with laundry marks…

  So we had time to dig around a little.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll leave the police out of things, at least for the time being.”

  “And you’ll help me, Ed?”

  I was a knight in tarnished armor, and she may have been in distress, but it would take some imagination to call her a maiden.

  “I’ll help you,” I said.

  FOUR

  I PUT MY gun in the shoulder rig where it belonged, went to the window, pulled back the shade and peered across the street. A few old ladies were walking home. No one seemed to be lurking in the shadows.

  “Did anyone follow you here?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No.”

  I told her to wait there and left the apartment. I walked downstairs, then left through the rear exit where the janitor drags the garbage. There is a low fence between the yard of my building and the yard of the building behind it that fronts on 84th Street. I pushed a garbage can against the fence, climbed onto the can and dropped over the fence. I walked through that building, smiled at a curious seven-year-old boy, and came out on 84th.

  The air was cooler now with the beginnings of a storm blowing up over the East River. The sky was a darker gray; in a few hours it would be completely black. I walked around the block to 83rd and headed toward my own building again, keeping my eyes open. All the parked cars were appropriately empty, all the doorways were now untenanted. If she had been followed, her shadow had melted. The coast seemed clear.

  I went upstairs. She was standing by the fireplace looking at some of my books. “Grab your purse,” I said.

  “Where we going?”

  “Downtown. I’m hiding you.”

  We left the apartment. A cab drove up, and I gave the driver an address in the West Twenties. As he put the taxi in gear, Jill looked at me inquisitively.

  “It’s a friend’s apartment,” I said.

  “Anyone I know?”

  “Probably not. She’s an actress, out of town with a road company. She won’t be back for two months.”

  “And you have a key to her apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled. “How cozy, Ed. Hiding one girl at a girl friend’s apartment. Won’t she mind?”

  I thought of Maddy Parson—the deep, intense eyes, the soft voice, the warmth. We were long-time friends, much more than that. Once or twice I might have married her, if she hadn’t already been wed to greasepaint and footlights. No, I thought. Maddy wouldn’t mind.

  “She won’t be there to mind,” I said.

  She kept quiet the rest of the trip. Once or twice she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. The cabby took Second Avenue downtown to 23rd Street, then cut west and doubled uptown a block to the address I had given him. The meter read a dollar and change, I gave him two singles and waved him away.

  “Here?” Jill said, surprised.

  “That’s right.”

  “Your actress friend can’t be making much money.”

  “It’s a tough business.”

  “It must be. Maybe she should try my line, Ed. Or doesn’t she have any aptitude in that direction?”

  “Don’t be bitchy.”

  She pouted. “Was I being bitchy?”

  “Very.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll try to be good. It’s just…I guess I’m cracking wise to get Jackie out of my mind, what happened to her, and oh, it isn’t really working, Ed.”

  The apartment was a third-floor loft in an old brick building that had been condemned years ago. It wasn’t legal to live there, but Maddy and the landlord had taken care of that. According to the lease she gave acting lessons in the loft and didn’t live there. Maddy paid her rent the first of every month, and the landlord bought off the firemen every few months, and everybody was happy.

  Jill and I climbed an unlit and shaky staircase past the machine shop on the first floor and Madame Sindra’s palmist studio on the second floor. She stood in front of Maddy’s door while I found the right key and opened it. We went inside. She sat down on a couch while I turned on the lights.

  “Well,” she said. “Now what?”

  I sat down next to her. “You’ll be safe here,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “And you can stay here while I try to get a line on whoever is after you. But I’ve got to ask you a question I already asked you, Jill. And you have to answer it straight.”

  “Go on.”

  “Were you mixed up in anything besides hustling?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “I’m serious. Ever try blackmailing a customer? Or did you ever overhear anything you shouldn’t have heard? Think about it. It’s important.”