"That's a chance I'll take. But I'm a big boy."

She looked me up and down, the kind of look I had given her earlier. "Yes," she said evenly. "You are."

"Give me your apartment key."

She went over to her purse and gave me a brown leather key-wallet. She started to hand it over; then she took it back and looked at it, frowning. "This is Jackie's," she said.

"What?"

"It happens all the time," she said. "We both have these things for our keys, same color, and we keep taking each other's-" She broke off and looked at me. Her eyes were bright, as though she were trying to put a smile on top of a scream. "I keep forgetting she's dead. I talk about her as if she's still here..." She collapsed in a chair and cried. Her shoulders heaved from her sobs.

I'm no good at that sort of scene. The reality of her sister's death was first hitting home, and for the next hour or so there wasn't anything I or anybody else could do for her.

I took her dead sister's keys and said, "Jill, I'll hurry back."

There were three other apartments on the second floor besides the one I sought, and someone was standing in the hallway in front of one of them. I didn't want an audience when I opened Jill's door-New Yorkers are tolerant people, but there is no point in straining this inherent tolerance. I walked up to the third floor and waited. Then I went back to the second floor, emptied my pipe in a hall ashtray, and stood in front of Jill Baron's door.

I took out the key to the apartment, listened at the door, heard nothing. On a hunch I dropped to one knee and squinted myopically through the keyhole. The apartment was dark inside.

I stood up again, stuck the key in the lock, and turned. I twisted the doork.n.o.b, pushed the door open, and stepped into a black room. I was groping around for the light switch when the Empire State Building fell on my head.

It was good but not good enough. He caught me on the side of the head just above the ear and I did a little two-step and wound up on my knees. He moved in the darkness, coming in to throw the finisher. My head was rocky and my legs wouldn't behave. I managed to swerve out of the way of the blow and got to my feet, but my rubbery legs didn't want to hold me. He came at me again, a blur in the darkness, and something hard shot past my head. I ducked and swung, aiming for where his gut should be.

My aim was good but there was nothing behind the punch-the shot on the head had drained my strength. He backed away from the blow and hit me in the chest. It wasn't a hard punch but it sent me reeling.

Somehow, I got to the light switch. I flicked it on and saw him, moving toward me and blinking at the sudden burst of light. A big man, a fast man. A chin like Gibraltar and a chest like a beer barrel. Hamhock hands, and a leather-covered sap in one of them. He swung the sap. I dodged, caught it on one shoulder. My arm went numb and my fingers tingled. I tried to make my hand fish the .38 out from under my jacket, but my arm was having none of it. It wouldn't behave.

He moved at me, grinning. I doubled up a left hand and pushed it at him. He batted it out of the way casually and kept coming. I lowered my fat head and charged him like a bull, and he picked up that sap and let me have it right between the horns.

This time it worked. I caught a knee in the face on the way down but I barely felt it at all. I just noticed it, thinking, Ah, yes, I've been kneed in the face Ah, yes, I've been kneed in the face, taking note of it but not caring a h.e.l.l of a lot about it one way or the other. Then I blacked out...

FIVE.

I wasn't out long. Five minutes, ten minutes. I opened both eyes and blinked in the darkness and tried to get up, which was a mistake. I fell down again. It was as though someone had cut the tendons in my arms and legs. They just wouldn't do my bidding.

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 pa.s.s 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 h.e.l.lo to a couple of detectives from Homicide. They might get upset.

"Hey," someone yelled. "Hey, open up in there, w.i.l.l.ya?"

I got up reluctantly, walked to the door.

"Hey, Jackie," the voice yelled again. "Open up, Jackie. What the h.e.l.l, open the door!"

This was no cop.

"Who's there?" I said.

"It's Joe Robling, dammit, and where the h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l 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 ma.s.s 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 oddb.a.l.l.s 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."