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—but 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.
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 rooms for the pictures or tapes or whatever it was that she was holding 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.
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.
At which point the doorbell rang.
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 Robling, 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.”
“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 gave him ten 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 Avenue without anyone behind me.
SIX
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.
“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.
“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.
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 Modern Art and modern jazz—”
“Men?”
“She didn’t have a sweet man. Neither of us did. I think she was seeing someone, not business, but I don’t remember his name. I’m not sure if she ever told me his name.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“I don’t think so. Is he important?”
“I don’t know yet. Keep talking. Was Jackie having money troubles?”
She stood up, walked across the room. Her dress was snug on her professional body. She lit a fresh cigarette, stood at the window, blew out smoke. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “but you’re wrong. She couldn’t be a blackmailer, she couldn’t. She was my sister. We had differences, but she was still my sister, and I can’t believe that of her—”
“Tell me about those differences, Jill.”
“What’s there to tell? The usual minor spats over nothing.”
“How about money?”
“No problem at all. We kept separate bank accounts. No community property. What was mine was mine and what was Jackie’s was Jackie’s. I don’t know what she had in the bank. I’ve got ten or fifteen thousand saved, and she certainly earned as much as I did, except…”
“Except what?”
“I don’t know. Something was bothering her. She had a weakness for horses, phoned in bets every morning from our apartment. Possibly she was a heavy player.”
“And got in deep?”
“Maybe. She didn’t talk about it, but I think she owed a little money here and there. She dressed well, I told you that, and of course we both had charge accounts and credit cards and all that. She may have run up some fairly heavy tabs around town, and owed her bookmaker.”
She paused, then said, “This is guesswork, Ed. A guess I don’t particularly like to make. My sister was no more of a saint than I am, but I hate to think…”
Her voice trailed off. She leaned over and ground out her cigarette in one of Maddy’s ashtrays. “I would have loaned her the money. I would have been glad to.”
“Did she ever ask?”
“No. Never.” She narrowed her eyes, remembering. “But there was something. She mentioned how nice it would be if a pile of money fell into her lap. We always talked like that; it was nothing special. But if I had only thought to offer her money, if I had only asked her—”
“Don’t blame yourself, Jill.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” Her voice nearly broke, but she controlled it.
I stood up, took her arm. “Jackie was riding for a fall,” I told her. “If you had bailed her out this time, she would have gotten in over her head some other time. Blackmail’s an easy out in your line of work. You must have thought of it yourself once or twice.”
“Not seriously.”
“But for all you knew Jackie did think of it—seriously. She might have tried to squeeze somebody before. But this time she picked on the wrong man and he squeezed back. There was nothing you could do about it, Jill.”
She drew close to me and her perfume was heady. I felt the warmth of her before her body actually touched mine. Her head was tilted and her eyes were misty and half-closed. “You’re good for me,” she sighed. I was holding her arm, and she drew even closer to me.
“I’m cold and I’m scared and I’m shaky, but I’m no frail petunia, am I, Ed? But right now I wish I was. I wish I could make you believe I need to be treated like a frail petunia.”
I made some sort of motion toward her, and inexplicably she now backed away from me. “You know what’s worst, Ed? I feel guilty.”
“Guilty? What for?”
“Jackie’s dead, but I’m alive, and I’m glad I’m alive. I’m glad it was Jackie instead of me. That thought’s been in my mind ever since you told me she was dead. I’ve been trying to make it go away, but I can’t. Isn’t that terrible, Ed?”
“No, it isn’t,” I told her. “That’s the most normal reaction in the world.”
“My God, are you good for me. I’m cold and I’m scared and I’m a no-good prostitute. And poor Jackie’s on some cold slab someplace; and I’m—I’m—I know, I’m cold. She’s cold but she doesn’t know it, she—Ed, for the love of God, make me warm.”
I looked at her, and I told myself she was just another hooker. There were thousands of them, and none of them were worth it. That’s what I told myself. But I went over anyway and put my arms around her, and she was trembling.
“I’m a stranger here,” she whispered, with a pathetic attempt at coquettishness. Her voice trembled like her body, but she persevered. “A stranger who doesn’t know her way around. Show me where my bed is, Ed.”
I showed her…
It was very dark in the bedroom, with the barest bit of light coming in through the window from a streetlamp down the block. I got out of my clothes in the darkness and found her in the bed. Her body was naked and waiting.
Her mouth was a warm well. Her arms went around me, drew me close. Her body moved beneath mine, twisting and writhing in a horizontal dance as old as time. My hands went all over her and all of her was smooth and soft and fine.
“Oh, hurry, hurry—”
I had stray thoughts. I thought how disloyal it was to Madeline Parson to embrace another girl in her bed, and I thought, too, that this display of affection was Jill’s own way of paying me a retainer instead of cash. Unhappy thoughts, those.
But she was good, very good, and the thoughts went away. One thought came back at the end, one that was almost funny. That morning her sister Jackie had interrupted something along these lines, and now sister Jill was making up for it. It was ironic.
Then that thought, too, vanished. The scene dropped off and the world went away, and there were only the two of us alone in some special bracket of space and time. We visited a special place devoid of call girls and criminals and sudden death. We went there together.
A pleasant trip. Afterward, sleep came quickly.
SEVEN
In the morning, no telephone intruded. The smell of coffee woke me. I yawned, rolled over, and buried my face in the pillow. The room was heavy with the air of spent passion. I yawned again, opened my eyes, and saw her come in with a steaming cup in her hand.
“I made coffee,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. She was wearing some sort of silky black thing and the sight of her brought memories in a flood.
“But it’s too hot,” she said.
“What is?”
“The coffee, silly.” She turned and stared. “What did you think I meant?”
“Forget what I thought. What about the coffee?”
“It’s too hot.” She set it down on the bedside table. “While it cools—”
While it cooled, we warmed. She slipped the nightgown off and came back to bed. She said Mmmmm, what a way to wake up and then she did not say anything for a very long time. The phone stayed respectfully silent.
Later she curled up beside me while I drank the coffee. She made good java. She would murmur something from time to time, and from time to time I would run a hand over her. I touched the arch of her hip, the strawberry birthmark on the side of her thigh. A large measure of reality faded away. Intimacy does that. It pushes away unpleasant things, things like Jill’s profession and Jackie’s death and the big-chinned murderer-at-large.
But these things came back, slowly. I finished the coffee and got out of bed. Jill asked me where I was going.
“To get a paper,” I said. “I want to find out what the police know about your sister. Wait here.”
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It was somewhere after nine. The sky was overcast and the air thick with overdue rain. People hurried by in blankets of sweat. Later, with any luck, the sky would open up and the rains would come. I walked down Eighth Avenue to 23rd Street and picked up the four morning papers. I carried them back to the loft.
I found Jill Baron as nude as I’d left her. She wanted to know if there was anything in the papers.
“I haven’t looked yet,” I told her. I gave her the News and Mirror, kept the Times and the Tribune for myself. We sat side by side on Maddy’s couch and went through the papers looking for a report of Jackie’s murder.
The Times didn’t print the story, but the other three papers did. It wasn’t an important one. There was no obvious sex angle and the body had not been identified, at least not by the time they made up the papers.
The journalistic tone varied from paper to paper but the message was the same in each story. Acting on an anonymous phone tip, police had found the body of a girl in her middle twenties on a bench in Central Park. She had been shot once at close range in the forehead and had died instantly. Her body had not yet been identified, and no clues as to the probable identity of her killer had been announced.
“Then they don’t know anything,” Jill said.
“The papers don’t. Or didn’t, when they went to press. That was awhile ago. The police may know a lot more.”
I reached for the phone. “I’m calling them,” I said.
“To tell them—”
“No. To ask them.”
I asked the desk man at Centre Street for Jerry Gunther in Homicide.
“Ed London, Jerry. How’s it going?”
“Well enough. What’s up?”
“I just read something about a dead girl in the park. The one who was shot in the head. Know who she was?”
“Are you mixed up in this one, Ed?”
I laughed that off. “I don’t think so. I have a Missing Person to look for and she comes close to the description in the Tribune. Have you got a make on this girl yet?”