Her face screwed up in concentration and then relaxed. She shook her head negatively.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “And Jackie?”

  “If she was, I never knew about it.”

  “Then it can only add up one way,” I said. “Somebody had a reason to see Jackie dead. But you both looked alike and you both acted alike and he couldn’t tell you apart. Maybe Jackie was working some sort of deal of her own. He couldn’t be sure it was Jackie he was after, or that you weren’t in on it with her. So he has to kill both sisters to make sure he gets the one he wants. Do you follow me?”

  She nodded but looked perplexed. “Jackie wouldn’t do anything like that,” she said.

  “Are you positive?”

  “Well—”

  I got to my feet. “I want you to stay here,” I told her. “Don’t leave the apartment, not for anything. Don’t make any phone calls. As long as you’re here, you’ll be safe. Nobody followed us here and nobody’s going to come here looking for you. Just stay put and wait for me.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To your apartment.”

  She stared at me. “Is that safe? The police—”

  “I’m sure they haven’t identified Jackie’s body yet. It should take them two or three days unless they get lucky. And if I spot any cops, I’ll come right back. If not, I’ll have a look at your place and see if Jackie left anything around of interest.”

  “And suppose the…the killer is waiting there?”

  “That’s a chance I’ll take. But I’m a big boy.”

  She looked me up and down, the kind of look I had given her earlier. “Yes,” she said evenly. “You are.”

  “Give me your apartment key.”

  She went over to her purse and gave me a brown leather key-wallet. She started to hand it over; then she took it back and looked at it, frowning. “This is Jackie’s,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It happens all the time,” she said. “We both have these things for our keys, same color, and we keep taking each other’s—” She broke off and looked at me. Her eyes were bright, as though she were trying to put a smile on top of a scream. “I keep forgetting she’s dead. I talk about her as if she’s still here…” She collapsed in a chair and cried. Her shoulders heaved from her sobs.

  I’m no good at that sort of scene. The reality of her sister’s death was first hitting home, and for the next hour or so there wasn’t anything I or anybody else could do for her.

  I took her dead sister’s keys and said, “Jill, I’ll hurry back.”

  I FOUND a cab heading uptown on Eighth. We rode through dark streets, past the bright scar of light on Times Square—then east on 57th. I got out of the cab at 57th and Park and lit up a pipe in a doorway. Four college kids hurried past me, the girls tottering drunkenly on their high heels, the boys wondering if the girls would be drunk enough…

  I walked up to 58th Street and found her building. It was a remodeled brownstone with a new front and an air of impressive prosperity. There were no squad cars parked outside, nobody who looked like a cop near the doorway. I crossed the street and walked into the building. A row of doorbells with name cards showed that the Baron girls lived in apartment 2-D. I buzzed. No one buzzed in reply.

  The building was a walk-up. I used a key on the outer door, then climbed a flight of carpeted stairs. A finer building than Maddy’s no question about it. Whoring paid far more handsomely than acting.

  There were three other apartments on the second floor besides the one I sought, and someone was standing in the hallway in front of one of them. I didn’t want an audience when I opened Jill’s door—New Yorkers are tolerant people, but there is no point in straining this inherent tolerance. I walked up to the third floor and waited. Then I went back to the second floor, emptied my pipe in a hall ashtray, and stood in front of Jill Baron’s door. A good heavy door, with 2-D painted neatly upon it, and a little card beneath the bell on which someone had neatly lettered THE MISSES BARON.

  The customers must have liked that.

  I took out the key to the apartment, listened at the door, heard nothing. On a hunch I dropped to one knee and squinted myopically through the keyhole. The apartment was dark inside.

  I stood up again, stuck the key in the lock and turned. I twisted the doorknob, pushed the door open and stepped into a black room. I was groping around for the light switch when the Empire State Building fell on my head.

  It was good but not good enough. He caught me on the side of the head just above the ear and I did a little two-step and wound up on my knees. He moved in the darkness, coming in to throw the finisher. My head was rocky and my legs wouldn’t behave. I managed to swerve out of the way of the blow and got to my feet, but my rubbery legs didn’t want to hold me. He came at me again, a blur in the darkness, and something hard shot past my head. I ducked and swung, aiming for where his gut should be.

  My aim was good but there was nothing behind the punch—the shot on the head had drained my strength. He backed away from the blow and hit me in the chest. It wasn’t a hard punch but it sent me reeling.

  Somehow, I got to the light switch. I flicked it on and saw him, moving toward me and blinking at the sudden burst of light. A big man, a fast man. A chin like Gibraltar and a chest like a beer barrel. Ham-hock hands, and a leather-covered sap in one of them. He swung the sap. I dodged, caught it on one shoulder. My arm went numb and my fingers tingled. I tried to make my hand fish the .38 out from under my jacket, but my arm was having none of it. It wouldn’t behave.

  He moved at me, grinning. I doubled up a left hand and pushed it at him. He batted it out of the way casually and kept coming. I lowered my fat head and charged him like a bull, and he picked up that sap and let me have it right between the horns.

  This time it worked. I caught a knee in the face on the way down but I barely felt it at all. I just noticed it, thinking, Ah, yes, I’ve been kneed in the face, taking note of it but not caring a hell of a lot about it one way or the other. Then I blacked out…

  FIVE

  IN THE movies they shake their heads, blink a few times and everything is all right again. Men have miraculous powers of recovery in the movies. A deep breath, a nod of the head and they’re in perfect shape.

  It’s not like that, friend,

  I wasn’t out long. Five minutes, ten minutes. I opened both eyes and blinked in the darkness and tried to get up, which was a mistake. I fell down again. It was as though someone had cut the tendons in my arms and legs. They just wouldn’t do my bidding.

  This time I stayed down for a while. I took deep breaths the way they do in the movies, and I also took inventory. My head felt like a sandlot baseball after nine innings. My shoulder was aching and my arm was numb.

  I got up and, this time, stayed erect. The room was dark—apparently my “friend” had shut off the lights before leaving—I managed to find the light switch for the second time that night. This time, though, I was alone. I found a chair, collapsed into it and smoked a cigarette.

  There had been just the two of us, me and the man with the sap. But the room looked as if it had been the scene of a gang war. A bookcase stood empty on one wall, its contents heaped on the floor. Chair and sofa cushions were scattered around. My friend had been looking for something. Whether he had found it, I couldn’t tell.

  I got up a little shakily and checked out the rest of the apartment. There were two bedrooms branching off a hallway, one Jackie’s the other Jill’s. Each came equipped with a huge bed, which more or less figured. Each had been searched, and was a mess. I gave the rubble a quick once-over, pawing through mounds of lacy underwear that would have given a fetishist a quick thrill. I didn’t find anything very interesting. I didn’t expect to.

  There was some aspirin in the medicine chest, and it seemed like a good idea. The aspirin bottle nestled between a tube of vaginal jelly and a bottle of oral contraceptives… Jackie and Jill were not careless lovers, it seemed. I gulped down three aspirins with a water chaser.

  It was beginning to look more and more like blackmail. My man was systematic, I reasoned. He had somehow trailed Jackie to the meeting place in the park, then got close enough to her to put a gun to her forehead and shoot. Then he had doubled back to the girls’ apartment for a crack at Jill. Jill wasn’t there, of course, so he’d jimmied the door and rifled the room for the pictures or tapes or whatever it was that she was holding out on him.

  He might have found them and he might not—I couldn’t say. But it was an odds-on bet that, if he didn’t find them, they weren’t around. The place had been turned upside-down.

  Then I came along and rang the buzzer, and he rose to the occasion by dousing the lights and hiding in the dark. I opened the door in the darkness and he was there, ready and waiting. From there on in it had been reasonably quick, if not painless.

  It was too late to search the place. My friend had already taken care of that. But it made sense to straighten up a little. The way things stood, anybody who stumbled into the apartment for one reason or another was going to figure out that things were not according to Hoyle. A maid or a janitor might wander in and call the cops, and that would fix up their body-identification problem for them.

  The longer it took the police, the more time I had to work. So I went through the apartment like somebody’s maid, putting the books back in the bookcase, fluffing up cushions and placing them where they belonged, stuffing clothes into drawers and closets. I didn’t go overboard. The place did not have to pass muster, just so long as it lost the aftermath-of-a-hurricane look.

  There was a bottle of scotch in one of the closets. This slowed me down a little. Aspirin is all well and good, but it’s limited. It can’t get rid of the full effects of a couple of slugs on the skull. I swallowed enough of the scotch to take the edge off things, capped the bottle and stuck it back in the closet.

  At which point the doorbell rang.

  The cops are great when it comes to timing. They always show when you don’t want them, right to the second. It didn’t seem likely that they could have identified Jacqueline Baron’s body that quickly. If I had been anxious for them to figure out who she was, I would have waited a week. But this time I wanted them to have trouble, so they were setting a record for speed.

  The bell rang again.

  I sat down softly on an overstuffed chair and waited. Maybe they would go away. Maybe they would come back tomorrow. A feeble hope at best, but somehow I couldn’t see myself going to the door, opening it and saying hello to a couple of detectives from Homicide. They might get upset.

  “HEY,” someone yelled. “Hey, open up in there, willya?”

  I got up reluctantly, walked to the door.

  “Hey, Jackie,” the voice yelled again. “Open up, Jackie. What the hell, open the door!”

  This was no cop.

  “Who’s there?” I said.

  “It’s Joe, dammit, and where the hell is Jackie?”

  A customer. A drunk customer, from the sound of things. I dug my wallet out of a pocket, opened the door, flipped open the wallet and shoved it in the man’s face. He blinked and I pulled the wallet back and buried it once more in my pocket. I had given him a quick look at my driver’s license but he didn’t know the difference.

  “Crawley, Vice Squad,” I said. “Who the hell are you, chum?”

  His eyes clouded, then turned crafty. He was sad because Jackie was not available and scared because I was there, holding him by the arm. “I—I made a mistake,” he stammered. “I must have the wrong apartment.”

  He was a white-faced man with a network of blue veins showing around his cheeks. He wore an expensive suit and a Sulka tie. He was a rich drunk with a married look who looked as though he desperately wanted to be home.

  “You’ve been drinking,” I said.

  “Well, a couple of beers.”

  “You know where you are?”

  “Sure.”

  “This place is a cathouse, chum. You know that?”

  He tried hard to look shocked. He didn’t manage it at all. He looked lost and comical but I didn’t laugh at him.

  “Maybe I better be going,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “Uh—” he closed his eyes. “Maybe I ought to buy some tickets to the Policeman’s Ball, officer. Do you have any?”

  I told him to see a patrolman, He said yes, he would be sure to do that, and he mentioned a captain who, he said, was a very good friend of his. I must not have looked impressed. He coughed nervously, turned and hurried off down the stairs. I didn’t think he would be back soon, or ever.

  I gave him 10 minutes to disappear completely, then turned off all the lights and left the Baron girls’ apartment. The hallway was clear this time. I walked down carpeted stairs, through the vestibule and out to the street. There was no one around. I walked two blocks without spotting a tail, stepped into a hotel lobby on Central Park South and came out on Fifth A venue without anyone behind me.

  A cab was waiting for a light to turn green. I got in, the light changed and we headed downtown to a loft on West 24th Street where a blue-eyed blonde call girl was waiting for me.

  SIX

  I CLIMBED the two flights of rickety stairs and knocked on Maddy Parson’s door. A voice asked me to identify myself, which I did, and the door opened.

  Jill Baron drew back when she saw me. “You look terrible,” she said. “What happened?”

  We sat on Maddy’s couch and I told her. Outside, the night was soundless. We were in a business neighborhood and the businesses had all shuttered their doors long ago. Once in a while a truck rumbled by, and now and then a crowd of tourists staggered along the street, fresh from one of the Greek nightclubs in the area, with Retsina in their stomachs and visions of belly dancers in their heads.

  “Did he hurt you badly, Ed?” she asked.

  “I’ll live.” I described him again, the hulking mass of him, the bulldog chin, the once-broken nose. “Try to get a picture of him, Jill. Think. Any bells ring?”

  She screwed up her face and shook her head. “No bells, Ed. I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I could probably think of a hundred men who fit that description. I might know the man if I saw him, but this way—” She spread her hands. “A better description might help. If you could tell me about his appendectomy scar—”

  “I wouldn’t be in a position to know about that.”

  “But I might,” she said. Her face brightened. “You know, I would have given a thousand dollars for a look at Joe Robling’s face. Was he very frightened?”

  “A little.”

  “I ought to be angry at you,” she said. “He was a good customer. Generally drunk, but a hundred-dollar trick who never got rough and never complained.”

  “He asked for Jackie.”

  “He always asked for Jackie,” she said, a wry smile breaking through her generally somber mood. “But I took him a few times, now and then, if Jackie was busy. He never knew the difference. You don’t think you scared him off for good, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  She looked at me and pouted. “Oh, stop it,” she said. “For heaven’s sake, don’t go moral on me, Ed. You know what I am and I know what I am, and if we can’t relax and accept it, there’s something wrong with us. Didn’t you ever know a call girl before?”

  I’ve known a few. Hard little girls with something missing inside them, as empty in their own way as their habitual clients. The mythical whore with the heart of gold is a creature I have never met. The respectable prostitute is a creature of existentialist drama, nothing more. White slavery doesn’t exist, not for the New York hooker. Girls stay in the business because of some inner flaw. They tell me the psychiatrists can trace it all back to Oedipal fixations and toilet training, but it doesn’t much matter how it started. Yes, I’ve known call girls before. I’ve even liked a few of them. But not many, and not very much.

  “You don’t want to talk about my business,” she said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Your sister.”

  “Oh.” The somber mien returned.

  “You didn’t see that apartment after our unidentified friend got through with it. Either you or Jackie had something he wanted badly. If it wasn’t you—”

  “It wasn’t, Ed.”

  “—then it must have been Jackie. She had something or knew something and it got dangerous for her. And now it’s dangerous for you, too.”

  She frowned. “I don’t know, Ed. Suppose it was just some…well, some nut. You meet them in my business. I know you don’t want to talk about the world’s oldest profession, but that much is true. The oddballs you meet!”

  She closed her eyes, reminiscing. “Why couldn’t it be like that? What if one of them, some man who was a customer, what if he got it into his head to kill us? A Jack-the-Ripper type.”

  “It doesn’t add.”

  “Why not?”

  “Look, a psycho might have his own reasons for wanting to kill a couple of hookers, I’ll grant you that. But a psycho wouldn’t play it so cool. He might come after you with a knife, might bust down your door and try to beat your brains in or shoot you or whatever. But I doubt if he would carefully trail Jackie to Central Park and put a neat little bullet in her forehead and then methodically search the apartment.

  “He might go on a destructive rampage, just trying to rip up everything he could get his hands on. But that isn’t what our boy did. He gave the place a thorough search and let it go at that. He’s got a reason, Jill.” I stopped for breath. “It looks like blackmail to me.”

  “But Jackie—”

  “Tell me about her, Jill.”

  “She—” She stopped there, and then grimaced. “It’s hard to talk about her,” she said.

  “I know this is tough on you, Jill, but it’s necessary.”

  She took a deep breath, and tried again. “She liked good clothes, fancy restaurants, expensive furniture. She hated nightclubs but sometimes she had to go to them on dates. She liked the Museum of Modem Art and modem jazz—”