“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.”

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?”

“Nothing. We’re working on it. Think it’s your pigeon?”

“I hope not. Mine is a blonde, not too tall, pretty face—”

“So’s this one.”

“—brown eyes, slender build—”

“This one is blue-eyed and stacked. You sure about the eyes?”

“Positive,” I said. “I guess it’s not my girl. I didn’t think so but I wanted to check it out. I’ve got a hunch the girl I’m after skipped to Florida.”

We said pleasant things to each other and he hung up.

“No identification,” I told Jill. “They don’t even sound close. We’ve got time.”

“Well, where do we go from here?”

“Good question.” I dug out a pipe and tobacco, filled the pipe, and lit it. “Jackie was blackmailing someone—either the guy who sapped me or whoever hired him. She could have been blackmailing him with something she knew or with something she had. The ape-man turned your apartment inside out, so it must have been something she had. You follow?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Which leaves two possibilities,” I continued. “Possibility one is that the goods were stowed in your apartment, in which case the killer has them by now. The other possibility is that Jackie parked the stuff elsewhere.” I drew on the pipe. “Did she have any friends who might be holding it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Any hiding place that might appeal? Think.”

She thought and her eyes narrowed. She said, “Oh!”

“What?”

“She has a—a safe-deposit box. The Jefferson Savings Bank on Fifth Avenue. She took the box about a year ago because she wanted a safe place for her insurance policy. We both took out policies a long time ago payable to each other, and she kept hers in the box. I don’t know what else she kept there.”

“It wasn’t a joint box? You don’t have access to it?”

“No.” She smiled. “I told you we kept money matters separate. I think there were a lot of things Jackie didn’t tell me. I didn’t have a key. But she had the box. I know she still has it, because they bill every year and she got a bill not too long ago.”

“Did she go to the box often?”

“I don’t know. I never asked her about it.” She took out a cigarette and I gave her a light. “That would be the obvious place, wouldn’t it? If she had something to hide—”

“Of course,” I said.

She took a deep breath. “But it doesn’t do us any good. Now that Jackie’s dead, we can’t get to the box. Unless, if we could tell them she was dead—”

“You’d still need a court order.”

“Then we’re stuck.”

I stood up, walked over to the window. “They don’t know Jackie is dead—”

“So?”

“Do you know how she signs her name?”

“Yes, but—”

“Could you fake her signature? After all, you have her keys. One of them may be the key for the safety-deposit box.”

She hurried into the bedroom, came out again with her purse in tow. It was a large black bag. She dipped into it and came out with Jackie’s key-wallet. She sat down on the couch and inspected the keys one by one.

“Let’s see—this is to the apartment, and this is the outer door and…Does this look right?”

It was a large brass key with a number on it. “That’s the key,” I said. “And that would be the box number. Two-zero-four-three. Now we need something with her signature on it.”

“I can forge her signature,” Jill said, “and she can—I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“I was going to say, she can forge mine. Wrong tense.” Again she repressed tears, sighed, and continued. “We used to practice copying each other’s signatures when we were kids. It’s been a long time, but I think I can come fairly close. Not exact, though. Do you think I can get away with it?”

I nodded. I did think so. The signature they require with each visit to a safe-deposit vault is more a matter of form than anything else. Not many people sign their name identically every time.

“There are little things,” I said. “You won’t know your way around. Won’t know which is your box or where you’re supposed to take it. Jackie might even have known the guards well enough to have exchanged a few words.”

“I think I can manage it.”

“Are you sure?”

She looked at me bravely. “Do we have a choice, Ed?”

We went inside together. It wasn’t immediately apparent where they kept the safe-deposit vault, but it would have been somewhat out of character if we had wandered around asking directions. Then I saw a sign at the head of a staircase and nudged Jill. We walked down the stairs together, broke an electric eye beam, went up to a long desk. A little old man looked up at us over the desk and smiled at Jill.