“What did you find?”

  “I’ll show you. But not here. Can we go someplace?”

  We walked over to Sixth Avenue and up a few blocks. There was a small, run-down tavern at the comer, with one man behind the bar and two drunks in front of it. Otherwise the place was empty. We took a booth in the back and sat together, facing the door.

  The bartender came back and asked us what we wanted. We said coffee would do, and he recommended a luncheonette down the street. I ordered cognac for both of us. He went away and came back with two shots of brandy. I paid him and he left us alone.

  I pointed to her purse. “Well, what did you find?”

  She reached into the purse and pulled out a long white envelope, a short fat manila envelope, and a thick roll of bills. The bills were secured by a doubled-up rubber band. I riffled them. There were thirty or forty, most of them hundreds with a sprinkling of fifties.

  “Three or four thousand here,” I said.

  “Three thousand. I counted.”

  I reached for the white envelope. “That’s the insurance.”

  I opened it. The policy had been written by the Ohio Mutual Insurance Company. It had been drawn about a year and a half ago and the face amount was $50,000.

  “You’ve come into a lot of money,” I said.

  “If l live to collect it.”

  I opened the brown envelope. There were a dozen pictures inside, black and white glossies. The precise scenes varied in form but the game was the same in each. There were two persons in each photograph, a man and a woman. Both were nude and busy; and this photographic record of their activities would have sold well in the back room of a 42nd Street pornography shop. The prints were good and clear, the composition fine.

  The girl was Jackie, and a look at her showed that the resemblance between the Baron sisters was just as striking when the girls were unclad. She was a dead ringer for her sister. A very dead ringer, now.

  And the man was no stranger, either. When I had seen him he had clothes on, which constituted an improvement. He wasn’t beautiful. When I had seen him, for that matter, he had a sap in his hand and had been swinging it at my skull.

  “The man,” I said, feeling my scalp. “I recognize him.”

  “So do I,” Jill murmured.

  EIGHT

  I PICKED up my glass and drank the brandy. They do not stock fine cognac in the Sixth Avenue joints. But it went down anyway and the warmth spread.

  “His name is Ralph,” Jill said. “That’s all I know.”

  “A customer of Jackie’s?”

  “Not a customer.” She lowered her eyes. “I think I told you she was seeing somebody. I couldn’t remember his name then. Seeing his picture, I remembered. His name is Ralph. I saw him with her…oh, maybe three times altogether. I never talked with him but I saw him. He came over to take her out. Where they went, I never knew.”

  “When was this?”

  “The first time was maybe two months ago, and then again two or three weeks after that.”

  “Did she talk about him?”

  “Not much. Jackie wasn’t that much of a talker.”

  I tapped the stack of pictures. More of a doer, I thought. But I didn’t say it. De mortuis nil nisi bonum—speak well of the dead.

  “What did she say?”

  “That she had started seeing him. That he wasn’t a customer but a friend. The first time I got a little bitchy, I think. I don’t remember it very well. I was slightly stoned and I’m not too good at remembering things that happen when I drink.”

  “Give it a try. It’s important.”

  She closed her eyes and thought it over while I drank her brandy. The bartender looked our way to see if we wanted more. I shook my head and he looked the other way again.

  “I asked her if she was taking a pimp,” Jill said suddenly. “I remember now. And Jackie…slapped me. Not hard, but slapped me. “

  “Did she say anything?”

  “She said she was thinking about marrying him, but I don’t believe she really meant it.”

  “Was this the first time you met him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she ever say anything about it again?”

  “No. Maybe she felt I disapproved of the whole thing, I don’t know. I met him one more time, but we just said hello and passed like ships at night. She never mentioned him again, or marriage.” She paused. “He was the man in the apartment?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “She might blackmail a customer. But her boyfriend—”

  I thought about that and it started to make more sense than she thought it did. Jackie met Ralph, then either fell in love with him or pictured him as a good prospect for marriage and a way out of her debt-ridden state and call girl routine. She was in hock up to her eyeballs and she needed an out in the worst way—this made more sense than the love bit, which sounded out of character. So she played him hard, and she gave away something she usually sold at a good price.

  And then some roof fell in on her. Maybe he had a wife somewhere. Maybe he wasn’t interested in marrying her. One way or another, she turned out to be the sucker and she had the money worries without any help from Ralph in the offing. So she decided to make him pay through the nose for the free samples. She set up a date, rigged a camera or hired a cameraman, and took a flock of pictures. Then she used them to put the squeeze on Ralph.

  That was a mistake. It changed everything, turned the whole world upside-down. Ralph paid her off—this was what the three grand in the safe-deposit box represented. But he didn’t pay her enough and she kept squeezing; but he was willing to take only so much. He shot her, turned her apartment upside-down looking for the pictures, and would kill Jill if he got a chance, since she was the only possible link to him and Jackie.

  I knew the killer now. I had his picture and his first name. The rest would take some finding, but the police were the ones who could pull it off.

  “I have to make a phone call, Ed,” Jill said. “My answering service. And I want to use the little girl’s room.” She started to leave, then called back. “Ed, I could use a drink now. Will you order me a highball?”

  She scooped up her purse and left the table. I sat there with an insurance policy, a roll of bills and a stack of dirty pictures. I looked at the pies again—solely for investigational purposes, of course—and put them in their envelope and tucked the envelope into my jacket pocket. I put the policy in its envelope and pocketed the roll of bills. Then I went to the bar and got myself a fresh brandy and a rye and ginger ale for Jill.

  When she came back to the table, she sipped her drink and smiled at me. We talked some more until we finished our drinks. Then we rose to leave. I gave her the insurance policy and the money. She didn’t ask for the pictures.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Call the police.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? They can run down Ralph a lot faster than we can. And the sooner we level with them, the easier it will go. Do you know how many laws we’ve broken in the past 20 hours?”

  “I’m used to breaking laws,” she said.

  So was I, but I never felt too secure about it. I’ve played it loose and thrown out the book when unavoidable, but I don’t play games with the police unless absolutely necessary. I live in a comfortable apartment and I drink good cognac and pay my bills on time. It’s hard to do this if they lift your license.

  “Ed, wouldn’t it be better if we could give them Ralph’s full name? Wouldn’t that make it simpler all around?”

  “Sure it would.”

  “Jackie had a little black book,” she said. “It’s one of the tools of the trade, along with a bottle of Enovid and a strong stomach. I know where she kept hers.”

  “Where?”

  “In the apartment, and in a place where Ralph probably couldn’t find it.”

  “Would his name be in it?”

  “Of course. And if I could go there—”

  “We could go to the police first,” I said. “Then we could hunt down the little black book.”

  Jill made a face. “Let’s do this my way,” she said. “Please, Ed? Please?”

  WE DID it “her” way. Actually we wound up doing what I had really wanted to do in the first place, although I had managed to argue the other side fairly convincingly. You don’t play private cop unless you’ve got a kind of a hero complex, a strong wish to do things on your own. I wanted to get out from under, sure, but I also wanted to be able to walk up to Jerry Gunther with the whole thing tied up in a neat package. I had been playing with the case on my own, and it only seemed fitting and proper to finish it up the same way instead of running to Gunther at this stage of the game.

  While I paid the bartender, Jill went to the ladies room to play games with her make-up. I got impatient. It wouldn’t take forever for Homicide to figure out who Jacqueline Baron was, and once they did, we couldn’t get to the apartment without running into an army of cops. She came out and we left the bar. We flagged down a vacant hack, then took off for her place.

  The cab crawled through traffic like a salmon bucking the current on its way upstream to spawn. The cabbie kept swearing at the traffic and each time he would excuse himself to Jill. The ride took forever. She was tense and jittery toward the end and I could understand why. We were coming down the stretch now, on the heels of the fiend who had killed her sister and threatened her own life.

  The cab stopped outside her building. Her key opened the outer door. Then she turned toward me and said, “Wait here for me, Ed. I’ll be down in a minute.”

  “I’ll come up with you.”

  “No. Wait here. If the police are there, Ed, it’s sensible for me to come walking in; it’s my home. But if you’re with me and they find out you’re a private detective, they’ll start asking a lot of questions we can’t answer.”

  She had a point, but I said, “What about our friend Ralph?”

  “He’s already been here and searched the place,” she said. “Why would he come back?”

  I shrugged. “All right.”

  Her feet led her hurriedly up the flight of carpeted stairs. I stayed in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, poised to ward off imaginary intruders. No intruders appeared. I reached for a pipe and listened as her key entered the lock upstairs and the door opened. I hauled out a pouch of tobacco and her door swung shut. I opened the pouch and started to fill the pipe and Jill screamed, “Ed…”

  The scream was shrill and brittle. I dropped the pipe and the tobacco and dug my .38 out of the shoulder rig, simultaneously charging up the staircase. I was halfway up when a gun went off. The apartment had thick walls and a heavy door but that shot echoed loud and long through the building, and another scream followed its shattering concussion.

  Her door was locked. I put the mouth of the .38 to the lock and shot it to hell and gone, gave the door a kick and watched it fly open.

  Jill was standing in the center of the room. She had a little gun in her little hand. Her dress was tom, her hair messed up. She was through screaming and she stood staring downward with wild and stricken eyes.

  He was on the floor. Ralph, the mystery man, he of the bulldog jaw and the descending blackjack. He was on his back with his legs tangled awkwardly under him and his hands clutching out at nothing and a fountain of blood still gushing from the raw red wound in his throat.

  She turned, saw me. I went to her and the gun spilled from her fingers and clattered on the floor. She put her head against my chest and wailed. I held her and her wailing stopped. After a while, she pushed me away, sucking in gulps of air. She looked ready to keel over. I led her to a chair and she sagged into it.

  She said, “I should have…I should have let you…come with me. I didn’t think—”

  “He was waiting for you.”

  She managed to nod. “I came in. I closed the door…turned around and…he was pointing a gun at me. I tried to grab it and he grabbed at me and he tore my dress and—”

  “Take it easy.”

  “I can’t take it easy. I killed him. Good God, I killed him!”

  I calmed her down. A cigarette helped. She smoked it greedily. Then I asked her how it had happened.

  “I fought with him. I didn’t even fully realize what was happening. I just knew he was trying to shoot me, and I screamed. I must have deflected the gun… It went off and—”

  Ralph lay dead, a bullet wound in his throat. I looked at Jill. The intruder had torn her dress and her bra in the struggle. Her body was visible to the beltline. She pulled the dress together in unnecessary modesty.

  “It’s over now,” I said. I crossed the room and picked up the phone.

  NINE

  IT COULD have been worse. Jerry Gunther could have been off and some other Homicide cop could have taken charge. But it was bad enough as things stood.

  “I thought you were a friend of mine,” Jerry sneered.

  “I am.”

  “A friend is somebody who plays cute with me? A friend withholds evidence?”

  I didn’t say anything. Policemen were moving around the room, measuring things. A photographer took pictures. Other cops made chalk lines across the carpet.

  “I’m not a stupid cop, Ed. Am I?”

  “No. Jerry—”

  “You should have called me when you found the girl in the park. You should have called me when the sister showed up at your apartment. You should have called me when you ran up against Traynor the first time. You should have—”

  The dead man was Ralph Traynor. It said so in Jackie’s address book and on a batch of cards and papers in his wallet. He lived somewhere in Brooklyn.

  “You should know better, Ed.”

  I gave Jerry my side of it. I told him that my first aim was to keep the girl free and clear and save her from publicity and the killer. “You would have spotlighted her,” I said.

  “I would have stuck her in a cell.”

  “And we never would have gotten anywhere. You know that and I know it, dammit. My way worked.”

  “It did?”

  “Yes, Jerry. You have the killer. He’s dead, but he would have been just as dead in a year after a trial and a batch of appeals. The state comes out a few dollars ahead and the case is closed out that much faster.” I took a breath, smiled. “I know I played it cute. Maybe I was wrong. My reasons seemed good at the time.”

  He sighed, then punched me in the arm to show that we were still friends. I took Jill by the arm and went down the stairs behind Gunther. A police car was parked in front alongside a fire hydrant. Jerry’s uniformed driver was at the wheel.

  Jerry got in next to the driver and Jill and I sat in the back. The driver didn’t use the siren. We drove moderately across town, then went down to Centre Street on the East Side Drive.

  It took time for them to get our statements. I gave them mine as quickly as possible in a little room with Gunther and a police stenographer. I took it from the top, starting with the first phone call the day before and concluding with the arrival of the law. I left out little things like the interlude with Jill at Maddy Parson’s apartment. Certain facts don’t belong in a police report.

  Jill took a little longer with her statement. The stenographer typed them both up and we signed them.

  “You can both go now,” Jerry said. “We’ll be getting a report from ballistics and a rundown on Traynor pretty soon. So far everything checks out.”

  Jill nodded. She got to her feet and turned to me. “Are you coming, Ed?” There was invitation in her voice. I thought of the part of the statement that I’d omitted. That diverting interlude.

  “I’ll stick around for the ballistics report,” I said. “But how about dinner?”

  “Wonderful,” Jill said. “I haven’t eaten in 24 hours. Just coffee this morning. Before, I was too scared to think about it. Now I’m suddenly starving.”

  Looking at her, thinking about another interlude, I felt hungry, too.

  Jill said goodbye to Jerry, and we watched her go. Afterward we sat for a few minutes without saying anything. Then Jerry commented on Jill’s looks. He poked me in the ribs. “Hearty appetite, tonight,” he smiled. Then, serious again, he said, “Ed, you certainly fall into some bizarre cases.”

  “I guess so.”

  “But it all works out. Ballistics should confirm what we’ve already pretty well established. Jacqueline Baron was shot with a slug out of a .25 calibre automatic, probably foreign made. The gun that finished Traynor was an Astra Firecat. It fits.”

  “A little gun.”

  “Uh-huh. Easy to hide in a pocket. No bulge under the jacket, like the cannon you’re wearing.” He tapped me over the heart. “No gun for deer hunting, but good enough at close range. And he got close enough to the Baron girl to leave powder bums on her forehead.”

  “I know,” I said. “I saw them.” I lit my pipe. “A peculiar gun for a man like Traynor to use. A little gun would get lost in those big mitts of his.”

  Jerry grinned. “Sure. Chances are he’d have bought himself a Magnum, if he had the choice to make. But when it comes to picking up an unregistered gun, you take what you can get. We had a little old lady who shot her husband with a Super Blackhawk. The recoil on that thing must have knocked her into the next room. And then a hulk like Traynor uses a little job like the Astra. Those foreign guns—the thing is you can get ‘em sent to you through the mail, Ed.” He frowned. “Traynor’s gun did a job though. Killed the Baron girl, then killed him.”

  He had things to do. I went outside and walked around the comer to a lunch counter. A group of uniformed patrolmen sat around eating. I had a pair of hamburgers and two cups of coffee.

  When I finished, I went back to Headquarters. The ballistics report had confirmed what everyone already took for granted. The same gun had killed both Jackie Baron and Ralph Traynor. I was not surprised. They also knew a little about Traynor. A master mechanic, he owned his own collision shop on Pitkin Avenue. He was married. Someone was going over there now to tell his wife. I did not envy the man on that particular assignment.

  Gunther passed me in the hallway. He said, “Go home now, Ed. We have everything we need. We’ll want you and Jill Baron for the inquest in a day or. two. Let her know, will you?”