ONE.

Somewhere a phone was ringing. I reached out and touched something warm and soft. The something flowed into my arms like hot lava and purred Oh, Ed Oh, Ed and drew itself against me from head to toe. Mouths kissed and hands fluttered urgently. and drew itself against me from head to toe. Mouths kissed and hands fluttered urgently.

Somewhere a phone was ringing. The girl in my arms sighed l.u.s.tily and made preliminary movements. I kissed the side of her face and her throat. A bedspring complained with a metallic whine. It was the world's best way to wake up except for that d.a.m.ned phone.

Somewhere a phone was ringing. The girl in my arms sighed a sigh pregnant with thoughts of what might have been. Her mouth stopped kissing, her hands stopped fluttering, and, reluctantly, she drew herself away.

"Ed, the phone is ringing," she said.

l.u.s.t coughed and died. I blinked cobwebs from disappointed eyes, swung my legs over the side of the bed, and picked up the d.a.m.n phone. A female voice said, "No names. Please listen carefully-this is urgent. I need help. Are you listening to me?"

"Yes."

"I can't talk now, but I want you to call me this afternoon. At two. Have you got that?"

"At two this afternoon."

"From a pay phone. Not from your apartment. Call me at TRafalgar 30520. Do you have the number?"

"TRafalgar 30520," I said. "Whom do I ask for?"

"Don't worry," she said. "I'll answer."

The phone clicked. The girl in my bed wanted to know who had called. I told her I didn't know. She said well now, what the h.e.l.l was this, anyway? That I didn't know either. I got out of bed and found a magazine and a pencil. On the magazine cover was a painting of a general. He had a high forehead. Across it I printed "TRafalgar 30520" and under that "2 P.M P.M."

The girl in my bed yawned, a wide, open-mouthed yawn. No prelude to love-making. The d.a.m.ned phone had ended that. She got out of bed and started putting on clothes.

"It's morning, all right," she noted. "Make some coffee, Ed. I've got a head that's two sizes too big for me."

I made a pot of coffee which we drank in the living room. She asked about the phone call.

"Probably some crank," I said. "All cloak and dagger. That's one trouble with being a detective. You get a lot of idiot phone calls."

"And all at the wrong time, Ed. You're supposed to call her back. You going to?"

"Probably."

"And the number'll turn out to be the YWCA, or something. You lead a rough life."

I told her it had its moments.

At 2 P.M P.M. I called TRafalgar 30520. It wasn't the YWCA. The same voice answered on the first ring, saying, "Ed London?"

"Yes. Who is this?"

A sigh of relief. "I'm in terrible trouble," she said. "Somebody is trying to kill me. I need your help. I'm scared."

I started to tell her to come to my place, but she cut me off. "I can't go there," she said.

"Why not?"

"It's not safe. Listen, I'll meet you in Central Park. Is that all right?"

"It's a pretty big place. Want to narrow it down a little?"

"There's an entrance to the park at 94th Street and Fifth Avenue. There are two paths. Take the one that bears uptown. A little ways up there's a pond, and the path divides to go around the pond. I'll be sitting on one of the benches on the uptown side of the pond."

"How do I recognize you?"

"I'm blond. Not too tall. Don't worry, just come. It never gets crowded there. I'll be alone. I'll...I'll recognize you, Mr. London."

"What time?"

"Four-thirty. Please be on time. I'm very scared."

She had picked a quiet part of the park. I walked in through the 94th Street entrance and pa.s.sed a covey of maids pushing carriages. They milled around near the entrance and gossiped about their employers. I took the path that led uptown and walked toward the pond.

The pond came into view, flat, calm, and stagnant. Three beer cans and two ducks floated on the water. I thought of sitting ducks. I started walking around the uptown side of the pond and then I saw her, sitting alone on a bench and not looking at me. I wanted to call her name but she had never gotten around to telling me what it was.

"h.e.l.lo there," I called.

No answer and no glance. I looked at my watch. It was 4:30, I was right on time, and she was the only person around. She was blond, young, and dressed nicely. I walked faster. She still did not look at me. I hurried along, worried now, and I reached her and looked at her and saw, finally, why she had not moved.

I was on time. But someone had gotten to her first, had found her before me.

Once she had been pretty, and once she had been frightened...and now she was dead.

TWO.

I looked around. The park was as still as the girl. I went through the inane formality of holding her cool and limp wrist and feeling for a pulse. There was none. There is rarely a pulse in the wrist of a girl who has been shot through the middle of the forehead. She had been dead fifteen or twenty minutes.

If she had a purse, someone had s.n.a.t.c.hed it. No identification. I did not know her name, who had scared her, who had followed her, who had killed her, or why. She had wanted help, my help, but I did not get to her in time.

I didn't want to leave her on the bench. There is something ineffably discordant about a lone corpse left to cool and stiffen on a park bench. But I turned and walked back around the edge of the pond and down the path. I stopped once to look back at her. She did not look dead from a distance. She looked like a young girl sitting quietly, waiting to meet a suitor.

I walked to Fifth Avenue, down to 86th Street, east toward home. There was a bar on Madison. I stopped there to use the phone booth. I dialed Centre Street Police Headquarters.

"There's a body in Central Park, a dead girl," I said, and quickly gave him the location. He kept trying to interrupt, to get my name, to find out more. But I had said everything I wanted to say.

The day had started off with an unreal quality to it. Private detectives do not get mysterious phone calls from anonymous people. They do not keep unexplained rendezvous with nameless voices in secluded parts of Central Park. It had all seemed a game staged by some more or less harmless lunatic, and I had gone through the paces like a dutiful clown.

The corpse changed all of that. The girl, so neatly shot, posed so un.o.btrusively on the park bench, was a jarring coda to the symphony of annoyance that began with a phone call's interruption of romance. I had made my call to the police without giving my name and, consequently, was not involved. I had gone through the motions and had stumbled on the death of a prospective client who had not lived long enough to pay me a retainer. I had gone to her aid without believing she really existed, and when I had found her she was dead, and I never had the chance to become involved.

But I still felt involved.

At 5:30 I was still nursing my drink. Time dragged. Outside, the street was still bright. Then a buzzer sounded: someone was downstairs in my vestibule. I got up slowly, drink in hand, and pressed the answering buzzer that would open the downstairs door. I waited and listened to footsteps on the staircase. The footsteps halted in front of my door. There was a knock.

I finished the cognac and went to the door. I turned the k.n.o.b and flung open the door-to look into the face of the girl I had found dead in Central Park. I saw the blue eyes, the blond hair, the b.u.t.ton nose. I saw everything but the little hole in the middle of the forehead.

"You're Ed London," she said.

"You're not you!" I exclaimed stupidly as she stepped inside my apartment.

"I don't understand."

I took a deep breath and stammered, "B-but I just saw you, in Central Park, where I was supposed to meet you. Only somebody else met you first and you were dead. Shot between the eyes."

It sounded idiotic now-her standing beside me, a living, breathing doll. But she made her way through the maze of my meaningless words and something soaked in. Her mouth fell open and she gasped like a fish on a line. Her eyes bugged. She said, "Oh no! Good G.o.d," and gave a shrill little scream and fell into my arms and cried her eyes out...

THREE.

I held the girl until she got a half-nelson on herself, then eased her into one of the twin leather chairs that give my living room the air of a British men's club. She stayed in the chair and finished her crying while I poured cognac into a gla.s.s for her.

I made her drink the cognac.

After a long time she said, "I can't believe it, Mr. London. I can't believe Jackie's dead."

"Jackie?"

"Jacqueline Baron," she said. "She was my sister." She broke down again, suddenly regained her composure. "Not my twin sister. She was a year older. But we looked enough alike to pa.s.s for twins. My parents named her Jackie and me Jill. Jackie and Jill. Like the nursery rhyme. They thought it was cute."

"Who called me? You or Jackie?"

"She did."

"Because she was afraid?"

"Because we were both afraid," Jill said. She held the gla.s.s of cognac in her hand, stared at it a moment, then drained it. "This is very good," she said. "What is it?"

"Cognac."

"Oh. It tastes good, makes me feel warm. But I still feel cold inside. Somebody killed Jackie and now they're going to kill me. Oh, G.o.d, I'm scared."

She started to cry again.

After a while she calmed down again. I asked if she knew who had been trying to kill Jackie and her. She said she didn't know. I asked why anyone would want them dead. She didn't know that either.

"We'd better take this from the top," I said. "When did it all start?"

"Three days ago, I think."

"What happened?"

"There was a phone call. Jackie answered. We share an apartment-shared an apartment," she added morosely. "Jackie answered it. She listened for a minute, looked frightened, and slammed the phone down."

"Who was it?"

"She wouldn't say. Wouldn't tell me anything about it. Then, the next day, someone in a truck tried to run us both down. It was so frightening. We were crossing the street and a truck came speeding at us from out of nowhere. He missed us by inches. Luckily, we got across in time."

"Did you get a look at the truck?"

She shook her head. "No, I was too frightened. And I thought-then-it was just accidental. But Jackie was worried. I could tell something was wrong. When I prodded her, she told me about the phone call. Someone was going to kill us both."

"Did she say why?"

"She didn't know."

"No idea?"

"Nothing she told me about...But there's more. Yesterday, someone tried to kill me. Right on Park Avenue. A car whizzed by and somebody shot at me. Whoever it was missed. I was petrified."

"Why didn't you go to the police?"

"It's...We couldn't."

"And this morning Jackie called me. She wouldn't call the police either, but she called me. That doesn't make much sense."

She didn't answer.

"Look at me," I said. "This is no game. Somebody shot your sister. Killed her in cold blood. Right now the police are picking her body up from Central Park and trying to figure out who the h.e.l.l she is. You can't afford to sit around deciding how much you can tell me and how much you can keep to yourself. You either open up or I'll pick up the phone and call the police and you can tell it to them. Which is probably a fairly good idea at this stage."

"No, don't."

"Then you'd better start talking."

"Yes," she said. "I guess you're right."

She started talking. Jill and Jacqueline Baron lived together in an expensive apartment on East 58th Street off Park. They were self-employed. They earned a good living.

They were call girls.

"We were going to be models," she said. "You know, everybody starts out to be a model. Only we never did make it.