I shook my head. "Wrong customer."

"Why?"

"h.e.l.l, he hired me to keep the girl off his neck. If he was going to shoot a hole in her, why would he want a detective along for company?"

"To make the alibi stand up, Ed. To make us reason just the way you're reasoning now. How do you know he was scared of the girl?"

"Because he said so. But-"

"But he got a phone call?" Jerry smiled. "For all you know it was a wrong number. Or the call had been staged. You only heard his end of it. Remember?"

"I saw his face when he took a good look at the dead girl," I said. "Mark Donahue was one surprised hombre, Jerry. He didn't know who she was."

"Or else he's a good actor."

"Not that good. I can't believe it."

He let that one pa.s.s. "Let's go back to the shooting," he said. "Were you watching him when the gun went off?"

"No."

"What were you watching?"

"The girl," I said. "And quit grinning, you fathead."

His grin spread. "You old lecher. All right, you can't alibi him for the shooting. And you can't prove he was afraid of the girl. This is the way I make it, Ed. He was afraid of her, but not afraid she would kill him. He was afraid of something else. Call it blackmail, maybe. He's getting set to make a good marriage to a rich doll and he's got a mistress hanging around his neck. Say the rich girl doesn't know about the mistress. Say the mistress wants hush money."

"Go on."

"Your Donahue finds out the Price doll is going to come out of the cake."

"They kept it a secret from him, Jerry."

"Sometimes people find out secrets. The Price kid could have told him herself. It might have been her idea of a joke. Say he finds out. He packs a gun-"

"He didn't have a gun."

"How do you know, Ed?"

I couldn't answer that one. He might have had a gun. He might have tucked it into a pocket while he was getting dressed. I didn't believe it, but I couldn't disprove it either.

Jerry Gunther was thorough. He didn't have to be thorough to turn up the gun. It was under a table in the middle of the room. The lab boys checked it for prints. None. It was a .38 police positive with five bullets left in it. The bullets didn't have any prints on them, either.

"Donahue shot her, wiped the gun, and threw it on the floor," Jerry said.

"Anybody else could have done the same thing," I interjected.

"Uh-huh. Sure."

He grilled Phil Abeles, the man who had hired Karen Price to come out of the cake. Abeles was also the greenest, sickest man in the world at that particular moment.

Gunther asked him how he got hold of the girl. "I never knew anything about her," Abeles insisted. "I didn't even know her last name."

"How'd you find her?"

"A guy gave me her name and her number. When I...when we set up the dinner, the stag, we thought we would have a wedding cake with a girl jumping out of it. We thought it would be so...so corny that it might be cute. You know?"

No one said anything. Abeles was sweating up a storm. The dinner had been his show and it had not turned out as he had planned it, and he looked as though he wanted to go somewhere quiet and die.

"So I asked around to find out where to get a girl," he went on. "Honest, I asked a dozen guys, two dozen. I don't know how many. I asked everybody in this room except Mark. I asked half the guys on Madison Avenue. Someone gave me a number, told me to call it and ask for Karen. So I did. She said she'd jump out of the cake for $100 and I said that was fine."

"You didn't know she was Donahue's mistress?"

"Oh, brother," he said. "You have to be kidding."

We told him we weren't kidding. He got greener. "Maybe that made it a better joke," I suggested. "To have Mark's girl jump out of the cake the night before he married someone else. Was that it?"

"h.e.l.l, no!"

Jerry grilled everyone in the place. No one admitted knowing Karen Price, or realized that she had been involved with Mark Donahue. No one admitted anything. Most of the men were married. They were barely willing to admit that they were alive. Some of them were almost as green as Phil Abeles.

They wanted to go home. That was all they wanted. They kept mentioning how nice it would be if their names didn't get into the papers. Some of them tried a little genteel bribery. Jerry was tactful enough to pretend he didn't know what they were talking about. He was an honest cop. He didn't do favors and didn't take gifts.

By 1:30, he had sent them all home. The lab boys were still making chalk marks but there wasn't much point to it. According to their measurements and calculations of the bullet's trajectory, and a few other scientific bits and pieces, they managed to prove conclusively that Karen Price had been shot by someone in McGraw's private dining room.

And that was all they could prove.

Four of us rode down to Headquarters at Centre Street. Mark Donahue sat in front, silent. Jerry Gunther sat on his right. A beardless cop named Ryan, Jerry's driver, had the wheel. I occupied the backseat all alone.

At Fourteenth Street Mark broke his silence. "This is a nightmare. I didn't kill Karen. Why in G.o.d's name would I kill her?"

n.o.body had an answer for him. A few blocks further he said, "I suppose I'll be railroaded now. I suppose you'll lock me up and throw the key away."

Gunther told him, "We don't railroad people. We couldn't if we wanted to. We don't have enough of a case yet. But right now you look like a pretty good suspect. Figure it out for yourself."

"But-"

"I have to lock you up, Donahue. You can't talk me out of it. Ed can't talk me out of it. n.o.body can."

"I'm supposed to get married tomorrow."

"I'm afraid that's out."

The car moved south. For a while n.o.body had anything to say.

A few blocks before police Headquarters Mark told me he wanted me to stay on the case.

"You'll be wasting your money," I told him. "The police will work things out better than I can. They have the manpower and the authority. I'll just be costing you a hundred a day and getting you nothing in return."

"Are you trying to talk yourself out of a fee?"

"He's an ethical b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Jerry put in. "In his own way, of course."

"I want you working for me, Ed."

"Why?"

He waited a minute, organizing his thoughts. "Look," he sighed, "do you think I killed Karen?"

"No."

"Honestly?"

"Honestly."

"Well, that's one reason I want you in my corner. Maybe the police are fair in these things. I don't know anything about it. But they'll be looking for things that'll nail me. They have to-it's their job. From where they sit I'm the killer." He paused, as if the thought stunned him a little. "But you'll be looking for something that will help me. Maybe you can find someone who was looking at me when the gun went off. Maybe you can figure out who did pull that trigger and why. I know I'll feel better if you're working for me."

"Don't expect anything."

"I don't."

"I'll do what I can," I told him.

Before I caught a cab from Headquarters to my apartment, I told Mark to call his lawyer. He wouldn't be able to get out on bail because there is no bail in first-degree murder cases; but a lawyer could do a lot of helpful things for him. Lynn Farwell's family had to be told that there wasn't going to be a wedding.

I don't envy anyone who has to call a mother or father at 3 A.M A.M. and explain that their daughter's wedding, set for 10:30 that very morning, must be postponed because the potential bridegroom has been arrested for murder.

I sat back in the cab with an unlit pipe in my mouth and a lot of aimless thoughts rumbling around in my head. Nothing made much sense vet. Perhaps nothing ever would. It was that kind of a deal.

THREE.

Morning was noisy, ugly, and several hours premature. A sharp, persistent ringing stabbed my brain into a semiconscious state. I cursed and groped for the alarm clock...turned it off. The buzzing continued. I reached for the phone, lifted the receiver to my ear, and listened to a dial tone. The buzzing continued. I cursed even more vehemently and stumbled out of bed. I found a bathrobe and groped into it. I splashed cold water on my face and blinked at myself in the mirror. I looked as bad as I felt.

The doorbell kept ringing. I didn't want to answer it, but that seemed the only way to make it stop ringing. I listened to my bones creak on the way to the door. I turned the k.n.o.b, opened the door, and blinked at the blonde who was standing there. She blinked back at me.

"Mister," she said. "You look terrible."

She didn't. Even at that ghastly hour she looked like a toothpaste ad. Her hair was blond silk and her eyes were blue jewels and her skin was creamed perfection. With a thinner body and a more severe mouth she could have been a Vogue Vogue model. But the body was just too bountiful for the fashion magazines. The b.r.e.a.s.t.s were a perfect 38, high and large, the waist trim, the hips a curved invitation. model. But the body was just too bountiful for the fashion magazines. The b.r.e.a.s.t.s were a perfect 38, high and large, the waist trim, the hips a curved invitation.

"You're Ed London?"

I nodded foolishly.

"I'm Lynn Farwell."

She didn't have to tell me. She looked exactly like what my client had said he was going to marry, except a little better. Everything about her stated emphatically that she was from Long Island's North Sh.o.r.e, that she had gone to an expensive finishing school and a ritzy college, that her family had half the money in the world.

"May I come in?"

"You got me out of bed," I grumbled.

"I'm sorry. I wanted to talk to you."

"Could you sort of go somewhere and come back in about ten minutes? I'd like to get human."

"I don't really have anyplace to go. May I just sit in your living room or something? I'll be quiet."

There are a pair of matching overstuffed leather chairs in my living room, the kind they have in British men's clubs. She curled up and got lost in one of them. I left her there and ducked back into the bedroom. I showered, shaved, dressed. When I came out again the world was a somewhat better place. I smelled coffee.

"I put up a pot of java." She smiled. "Hope you don't mind."

"I couldn't mind less," I said. We waited while the coffee dripped through. I poured out two cups, and we both drank it black.

"I haven't seen Mark," she said. "His lawyer called. I suppose you know all about it, of course."

"More or less."

"I'll be seeing Mark later this afternoon, I suppose. We were supposed to be getting married in"-she looked at her watch-"a little over an hour."

She seemed unperturbed. There were no tears, not in her eyes and not in her voice. She asked me if I was still working for Donahue. I nodded.

"He didn't kill that girl," she said.

"I don't think he did."

"I'm sure. Of all the ridiculous things...Why did he hire you, Ed?"

I thought a moment and decided to tell her the truth. She probably knew it anyway. Besides, there was no point in sparing her the knowledge that her fiance had a mistress somewhere along the line. That should be the least of her worries, compared to a murder rap.

It was. She greeted the news with a half-smile and shook her head sadly. "Now why on earth would they think she could blackmail him?" Lynn Farwell demanded. "I don't care who he slept with...Policemen are asinine."

I didn't say anything. She sipped her coffee, stretched a little in the chair, crossed one leg over the other. She had very nice legs.

We both lit cigarettes. She blew out a cloud of smoke and looked at me through it, her blue eyes narrowing. "Ed," she said, "how long do you think it'll be before he's cleared?"

"It's impossible to say, Miss Farwell."

"Lynn."

"Lynn. It could take a day or a month."

She nodded thoughtfully. "He has to be cleared as quickly as possible. That's the most important thing. There can't be any scandal, Ed. Oh, a little dirt is bearable. But nothing serious, nothing permanent."