I said it would be my pleasure.

  It was raining when I got outside, but I didn’t feel like springing for another cab. I had run up enough expenses, especially since my client had thus far paid me nothing in negotiable cash. There had been other compensations, of course.

  TEN

  SOMETHING stank.

  I spent a long time sitting at my window watching the rain come down on 83rd Street. There was a drink at my elbow but I somehow never got around to touching it. There was a pot of coffee on the stove, and I left that alone, too. I looked at the rain and at 83rd Street and I added up everything, and something still stank.

  The packet of pornographic pictures was still in my jacket pocket. Gunther had not wanted them. They were evidence, but with Traynor dead there would be no trial, just the formality of an inquest to tie up what loose ends remained so the file could be marked closed.

  I took out the brown envelope and opened it. I spilled the black-and-white glossies into my lap. Then, one by one, I examined them again.

  An odd sensation. Pornographic photos, sure to arouse the libido of any vicariously-oriented lecher. But this was a special case; both subjects engaged in such lively activity were lively no more. The nubile blonde was dead, and the massive man was dead, and neither would again have the chance to play bedroom games.

  A very odd sensation.

  I reached for my drink, took a small sip of the cognac. A little bell rang somewhere in the back of my mind. I tried to ignore the bell but it fought to be heard with the tenacity of an alarm clock on a cold morning.

  I looked at the pictures again. Three of them had similar scratches, little seemingly meaningless spots…

  Outside, it went right on raining.

  At a quarter after four I called Centre Street and got through to Jerry Gunther. “I was wondering about Traynor,” I said. “Get anything more on him?”

  “A little. Listen, it’s over, Ed. And you’re out of it anyway. What’s your interest?”

  “I’ve got to type up a report for my client.”

  He didn’t argue. They had found a little more about Traynor, not a hell of a lot but enough. He was in good shape financially, though not rich. He had been seeing a lot of Jackie Baron, and his wife knew he was playing around—but not with whom. She had been thinking of divorcing him, had even gone to a lawyer to ask what a divorce would entail. She wanted to get rid of him, but she also wanted to gouge him for every nickel she could get.

  “That made him a good blackmail prospect,” Jerry Gunther said. “With those pictures in her lap, Mrs. Traynor wouldn’t have to take a plane to Reno. She could get a New York divorce and a nice piece of alimony. But Traynor wasn’t rich enough to pay forever. He forked over money once or twice, which accounts for the dough you found in Jackie’s safe-deposit box. Then she squeezed too hard and he decided to kill her instead.”

  “Did you check his bank account for large withdrawals?”

  “Ed,” he said exasperatedly, “we’re not working on this case. We’re closing it. Something eating you?”

  “No. Just routine, Jerry.”

  I thanked him. He said what the hell, call him anytime, he was just a public servant. I told him I might take him up on that sooner or later.

  I took him up on it 20 minutes later, after two cups of coffee and a lot more thought. I got him on the phone and heard him growl something to somebody else; then he asked me what the hell I wanted now.

  “A favor.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Has Jackie Baron’s body been released yet?”

  “No.”

  “It’s still at the morgue?”

  “Yes. The sister hasn’t claimed it yet, probably won’t until tomorrow, I guess. Why?”

  “Call the morgue for me. Tell them I have permission to look at the body.”

  He didn’t say anything at first. Then he spoke softly. “Ed, you ‘re onto something.”

  “Partly.”

  “Tell Papa.”

  “I’ll tell Papa as soon as there’s something to tell. I’m just stabbing in the dark right now. I don’t know anything for sure.”

  “You think there’s something funny?”

  “There could be. Make the call for me, will you?

  He swore at me a little, but said he would make the call. I hung up, finished my coffee end put on my trench coat. Every private cop has to have a trench coat; it comes with the license. I added a slouch hat to keep the rain off my head and checked myself in the mirror to make sure I looked true to form. I did. Then I went outside and ducked around the corner to pick up my car.

  The pimply attendant asked me where I was going on a day like this.

  “To the morgue,” I said.

  He laughed. He thinks I’m a great comic.

  THE LITTLE man at the morgue had thick glasses and no jaw. He was not a lovely man and he had an ugly job. I showed him identification and he checked my name with the little note on his clipboard. Then, flashing a ghoulish smile, he said: This way, Mr. London.

  I followed him past the slabs on which reposed bodies covered with sheets.

  “Here we are,” he said finally. “Miss Jacqueline Baron. We didn’t know who she was, you know, until a few hours ago. That’s dreadful, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “To be dead and unknown. I’d hate that. People should have serial numbers.” He clucked his tongue. “Do you want to see the girl?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, drew the sheet down as far as her neck. They had performed an autopsy. It wasn’t pretty.

  “All the way,” I said.

  He took the sheet off and we stood viewing the body like a pair of necrophiliacs in paradise. I tried not to look at the chinless man’s eyes. His job might have unwritten compensations for him, and I did not want to think about them.

  I looked at the body, at the legs. Smooth white skin everywhere. No scars, no blemishes. Nothing but clear flesh frozen in the gray permanence of death.

  I turned away. The little man covered her with the sheet and joined me. We walked to the exit. He asked me if I had known the girl. I said I had seen her once, not mentioning that she had been dead at the time. He did not say anything more.

  At 7 PM I parked in front of the building on 58th Street. I went up the stairs for Jill Baron. She was ready, and she looked better than ever. “You’re on time,” she said. “Let’s go, I’m starving.”

  We drove to a steakhouse on Third Avenue, one of the dark quiet restaurants where newspapermen go when they sell a magazine story. A waiter brought us rare sirloins and baked potatoes, then drinks and coffee. We talked trivia all through dinner. She kept smiling at me, a smile ripe with promise. I smiled back. A good meal shared together in pleasant surroundings. A prelude to an intimate evening.

  Afterward I said something about a club downtown where they played good jazz. She took my arm, stepped up close and let me smell her perfume. “We don’t have to go anywhere,” she said.

  “I thought you’d want to celebrate your deliverance from terror.”

  “I do.” Her voice turned husky. “But we can celebrate at my place, can’t we?”

  I smiled. Who was I to argue with a woman?

  We drove back to her apartment.

  She poured drinks and we sat on the couch and imbibed them. Traces of chalk marks remained on the carpet, and a throw rug did not quite hide the stain of Traynor’s blood.

  “I won’t be living here much longer,” she said. “I may even leave New York. One thing is sure…I’m getting out of this business, Ed.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I can’t say I hated every minute of it because I didn’t. It was easy and profitable. But it does things to a girl, makes her start hating herself. Jackie wasn’t a blackmailer, not at heart. The work changed her. It must have. I don’t want to tum into something that would fill me with self-loathing. It’s important to like yourself, Ed.”

  We finished our drinks. On cue we turned to each other. Her face was flushed from the drink and her lips tasted of it. She snuggled up against me and whispered sweet somethings.

  The bedroom was neat and clean, the bed turned down. She moved to tum off the light. I told her to leave it on.

  “You want to see me naked, Ed?” A narcissistic smile showed I had scored 100 percent with an apt remark.

  “Yes, from head to toe.”

  “I’m glad,” she murmured. “I like that.”

  We kissed. She undressed slowly, sensuously. We stretched out on the bed. She lay back, her eyes closed, her arms at her sides. A nude goddess, waiting.

  I touched her cheek, her shoulder. My hand moved over silken flesh. My finger touched the strawberry birthmark on the side of her thigh and she quivered beneath my touch.

  The birthmark. The one that had been scratched from the negatives of the pornographic photographs. The one that was nowhere to be seen on the body in the morgue!

  Her eyes opened and she looked at me. There was the shadow of a question on her face but she kept it back, waiting. I took my hands away from her body.

  “It was a nice try, Jackie,” I said. “It almost worked.”

  Her mouth made an O and her eyes bugged. She was already out of her clothes. Now she jumped out of her skin.

  ELEVEN

  SHE WASN’T talking. She lay naked on the bed with beads of sweat already starting to emerge upon her forehead. Her eyes were trying to say that she didn’t know what I was talking about. Their message didn’t convince me.

  “I’ve been calling you Jill,” I said. “But you’re not Jill. Jill’s in the morgue. She’s there because you put a gun to her forehead and killed her!”

  She stared at me, her breasts heaving with emotion.

  “You ‘re not Jill. You ‘re Jackie. And some of the things you told me about Jackie were true. Jackie had money worries. Jackie was a gambler and Jackie owed a lot of tabs around town. Jill had money in the bank but Jackie didn’t. Jackie owed money.”

  I stopped for a breath. “So Jackie killed Jill,” I said. “You needed money, fast. A long time ago you and Jill took out policies naming each other as beneficiaries. If Jill was eliminated, then you got the money you needed in a hurry. So you thought it all out and decided to kill your sister.”

  “You’re insane—”

  “No. You figured it all out and somewhere along the line you saw a way to do it better. It was one thing to kill Jill—then you got the money and paid your debts. But it was even neater to kill her and assume your sister’s identity. Then your debts would be written off completely. You could start fresh with no one mad at you. You could be Jill.”

  I looked at her coldly. “Probably Jill was a nicer girl, anyhow.”

  The room was quiet. I looked at her naked body and looked quickly away. Flesh in and of itself is no stimulant. She kindled no desire, not after I’d proved to myself that she had killed her own sister, and Ralph Traynor.

  “There was more to it than that,” I went on. “You might have had a lot of trouble figuring out a good way to kill Jill. But it became infinitely easier when you made it look as though Jackie had been murdered. Jill didn’t have any reason to work a blackmail dodge. Jill had money in the bank. But you had plenty of reason to be a blackmailer, and if you made your sister look like a blackmailer nobody would look your way if she got herself murdered. They would just look for the person she had been blackmailing.

  “You probably started to play a little blackmail at the beginning. Figured on squeezing some money out of Ralph Traynor. Hell, you’re not the sentimental type. You wouldn’t have put Traynor on the free list because you liked his looks. You started seeing him because you thought you could blackmail him. You had a set of blackmail pics taken and were ready to start showing them to him; but then you realized he couldn’t come up with the big money you needed.”

  Jackie had a pack of cigarettes on the night table. I took one and lit it. “That was one thing I wondered about,” I continued. “Traynor made a good living but he wasn’t rich. I could see him coming up with three thousand dollars in a pinch, but I couldn’t see how you figured on getting any more than that from him. But you never blackmailed him at all. You had the pictures taken, and when you saw the prints and thought about the money you needed, you got the idea of killing Jill.

  “And you went right ahead with it after you put a pile of money and the pictures in your safe-deposit box That set the stage. Jill never suspected a thing. Maybe she noticed you were a little nervous. Probably not. You ‘re a good actress, Jackie.”

  She looked at me. Her face showed no expression whatsoever, as though she was waiting patiently for me to finish spouting my nonsense and to return to reality. I took a final drag on the cigarette and ground it out in an ashtray.

  “A damned good actress. Maybe you have to be a good actress to be a good whore. Anyway, yesterday morning you got away from Jill and called me. You were all mystery on the phone. You were willing to risk my writing the whole thing off as a gag because you wanted things to work out just right. And you wanted to make sure you had me playing ball with you. If I didn’t call you back, you’d just postpone the murder a day or two and phone some other private eye.

  “But I cooperated. You were there when I called you back and you arranged a meeting with me at 4:30. Then, about an hour ahead of time, you took Jill for a walk in the park. She thought the two of you were just going out for some fresh air. You went to the spot where you were supposed to meet me, took the automatic from your purse and blew your sister’s brains out.”

  For the first time, she shuddered. It was a momentary reaction, a quivering of the upper lip, a brief outbreak of gooseflesh over her naked body. It passed quickly. Maybe now, hearing it from me, the enormity of the whole diabolical plot was beginning to sink in.

  “You stuck the gun back in your purse and left the park, Jackie. Maybe you hung around long enough to make sure I discovered the body. Maybe not. Either way, you had plenty of time to double back to my apartment and wander in like a little lost lamb. You staged that part beautifully. You hadn’t told me anything about sisters over the phone and as far as I knew there was only one of you, and that one was dead on a park bench. You came into my arms with a whole load of shock value working for you, and then you let yourself fall apart in tears when I told you your sister was dead. You played the scared act to the hilt and made it look as though you were in a hell of a lot of danger.”

  SHE SAT speechless—mouth agape, looking ludicrous in her nudity.

  “And that worked, too. If the non-existent blackmail victim had only been after your sister, I would have taken the whole thing straight to the police and they would have picked it to pieces. But the killer was supposed to be after you, too—and I had to catch him and keep you in the clear at the same time. I stowed you at Maddy’s, and you got busy setting up a frame for Traynor.

  “You were cute about it,” I went on. “You never did get around to blackmailing Traynor, so he still thought he was your loving boyfriend. As soon as I left Maddy’s you got on the phone and called him, told him to get over to your apartment. Or maybe he was there all along—it’s the same either way. You told him some pest was on his way over and that he should knock the pest out and leave him there.

  “Traynor didn’t know anything about murder. All he knew was that he was crazy about you, the poor fool. So he waited in the dark until I came in, and he slugged me. Then he turned your apartment upside-down to make it look as though it had been searched. I don’t know what you told him to get him to go along with that. It must have been good.”

  She laughed. “Ralph would do anything for me,” she said. “He didn’t need a reason.”

  “Sure. Anyway, he knocked me out and gave me a good look at him in the process. I believed your story right off the bat, but this made it perfect. The whole blackmail pattern was fixed now. I had to believe in Traynor because he damn well existed and I had an aching head to prove it. I went back to Maddy’s with my head in a sling and you let me coax a little more information out of you. About Jackie being in debt, and about Jackie having a boyfriend—all of that. If you gave me all of it at once I would have tried to pick holes in it, but you were too smart for that. You made me pry it out of you and I swallowed it whole.”

  “You said I was a good actress, Ed.”

  She was smiling now. I had her pegged and she knew it, but she could still manage a smile. God knows how.

  “I didn’t get a chance to look for holes in your story, not that night,” I said. “You kept me busy in bed. More acting, Jackie.”

  “That wasn’t all acting.”

  I ignored the line. “A repeat performance in the morning,” I said. “And then the safe-deposit box—hell, that was something. You let me talk you into impersonating Jackie, and what it amounted to is that you impersonated yourself. No wonder you didn’t have any trouble with the signature. It was your own signature.

  “You did a good job there, you know. You had to look uncertain enough to make me think you were Jill and confident enough not to make the guard suspicious. You got the money and the pictures from the box and you were home free, or close to it.”

  SHE MOVED a little on the bed, a coldly calculated but subtle and seductive maneuver that made her breasts jut out. She wanted to make me conscious of her body, but didn’t want to act whorish about it.

  She could have saved herself the trouble. Her body was now about as exciting to me as Jill’s, stretched out on a slab in the morgue. She stretched like a cat and ran her tongue over her lower lip and not a single spark flew.

  “We went to the bar and looked at the pictures, Jackie,” I continued. “Then you got up to make a phone call. You didn’t call your answering service. You called Traynor, told him to get to your apartment right away. I don’t know what reason you gave him, but you pulled the strings and he performed on schedule. You worked a stall act at the bar to give him time to get there, dawdled in the john, all of that. Then we got to your apartment to look for Jackie’s address book. You made me wait downstairs. What would have happened if I went up with you?”