"Rent me your outfit for an hour and take a walk. Go downstairs and buy yourself a beer."

He rubbed the top of his head although it needed no further polishing. "You are some kinda nut, aintcha?" There was a hint of real admiration in his voice.

"What difference does it make? All I want is to rent your rig, no questions asked. You make half a yard for sitting on your duff for an hour. How can you beat that?"

"Okay. You got a deal, buddy. Long as you're giving it away, I'm a guy who'll take it."

"Smart move."

The window washer jerked his head for me to follow and led me back down the corridor to a narrow door close by the fire exit. It was a custodial closet. "Leave all my gear in there when you're done with it," he said, unstrapping his safety harness and peeling off the dirty coveralls.

I hung my overcoat and suit jacket on top of a mop handle and pulled on the coveralls. They were stiff and smelled faintly of ammonia, like pajamas after an orgy.

"Better take off your tie," the window washer cautioned. "Unless you wanna look like you're running for office in the local."

I stuffed the necktie into my coat pocket and had the window washer show me how to use the safety harness. It seemed quite simple. "You ain't planning on going outside, are you?" he asked.

"You kidding? I just want to play a gag on a lady friend. She's a receptionist on this floor."

"Fine with me," the window washer said. "Just leave the stuff in the closet."

I tucked the folded fifty into his shirt pocket. "You and Ulysses Simpson Grant go have a party." His expression was blank as a poleaxed beef. I told him to look at the picture on the bill. He sauntered off whistling.

I removed my .38 before stashing the attache case under the concrete sink. The Smith & Wesson Centennial is a handy piece. Its two-inch barrel fits conveniently in a pocket and, being hammerless, there's nothing to hang up in the fabric when you make your play. Once I had to cut loose with the gun still in my jacket. Rough on my wardrobe, but a lot better than being fitted for one of those backless funeral home suits.

I slipped the little five-shot into my coveralls and transferred the contact mike to the other pocket. Bucket and brush in hand, I strolled down the corridor toward the impressive bronze and glass entrance of Krusemark Maritime, Inc.

TWENTY-SEVEN.

The receptionist looked right through me as I crossed the carpeted lobby between glass-cased tanker models and clipper ship prints. I winked at her, and she spun away on her swivel chair. The frosted doors to the inner sanctum had bronze fouled anchors mounted in place of handles, and I pushed through humming a sea chanty under my breath. "Yo ho, blow the man down ..."

Beyond was a long hallway with offices opening off either side. I ambled along, swinging my bucket and reading the names on the doors. They were all the wrong names. At the end of the hall was a large room where a pair of Teletypes clattered like robot secretaries. A wooden ship wheel stood against one wall, and more clipper ships hung on the others. There were several comfortable chairs, a glass-topped table spread with magazines, and a pert blonde slicing envelopes with a letter opener behind an L-shaped desk. Off to one side was a polished mahogany door. At eye level, raised bronze letters said: ETHAN KRUSEMARK.

The blonde glanced up and smiled, spearing a letter like a lady D'Artagnan. The stack of mail beside her was a foot high. My hopes of being alone with the contact mike went right out the window, an image I would soon regret.

The blonde ignored me, busy with her simple task. Clipping the bucket to my belt harness, I pulled open a window and closed my eyes. My teeth were chattering, but it wasn't from the rush of cold air.

"Hey! Please hurry up," the blonde called. "My papers are blowing all over the place."

Holding tight, I ducked under the bottom rail and sat backward on the sill, my legs still inside the security of the office. I reached up and hooked one strap of the safety harness to the outside casing. There was only the thickness of glass separating me from the blonde inside, but she might as well have been a million miles away. I switched hands and clipped in the other strap.

Standing up took everything I had in me. I tried remembering wartime buddies in the Airborne who walked away from hundreds of jumps without a scratch, but it wasn't any help. The thought of parachutes only made it worse.

There was barely room for my toes on the narrow ledge. I pushed down the window, and the comforting sound of the Teletypes inside was lost in the gusty wind. I told myself not to look down. That was the first place I looked.

The shadowed canyon of 42nd Street yawned beneath me, pedestrians and traffic reduced to ant specks and crawling metallic beetles. I looked east to the river, past the vertical brown-and-white stripes of the Daily News Building and the glistening, green slab of the United Nations Secretariat. A toylike tugboat steamed along, hauling a string of barges in its silver wake.

The strong, icy wind stung my face and hands and tore at my clothing, making the wide cuffs on my coveralls snap like battle flags. It wanted to tear me from the face of the building and send me sailing out over the rooftops, past the circling pigeons and billowing smokestacks. My legs trembled with cold and fear. If the wind didn't take me, I would soon vibrate free from my white-knuckled perch. Inside, the blonde sliced open the mail without a care in the world. As far as she was concerned, I was already gone.

Suddenly, it seemed very funny: Harry Angel, the Human Fly. I remembered a circus ringmaster's stentorian hoopla, "... where angels fear to tread," and laughed out loud. Easing back against the safety harness straps, I found to my joy that they supported me. It wasn't so bad. Window washers did it all day long.

I felt like a mountain climber on an incredible first ascent. Several floors above, radiator-cap gargoyles jutted from the corners of the skyscraper, and beyond them, the building's stainless steel spire tapered into the sunlight, shining like the ice-clad summit of an unconquered peak.

It was time to make my move. I undipped the righthand harness strap, bringing it over and attaching it to the same fastening which held the other. Then, inching along the sill, I undipped the inner strap and reached across the void to the casing on the next window over. I blindly felt the brickwork until I found the fastener and clipped my strap to it.

Secured to both windows, I stepped across with my left foot. Unclip, clip, step over with the right foot: done. The entire traverse took no more than seconds, but it might have been a decade.

I looked into the office of Ethan Krusemark as I fastened the left-hand safety strap to the opposite casing of his window. It was a large corner room with two more windows on this wall and another three on the Lexington Avenue side. His desk was a vast, oval slab of Pentelic marble, completely bare except for an executive six-button telephone and a patined bronze statuette of Neptune waving his trident above the waves. A recessed bar near the door glittered with crystal. French impressionists hung on the walls. No clipper ships for the boss.

Krusemark and his daughter sat on a long beige couch set against the far wall. A pair of brandy snifters glistened in front of them on a low marble table. Krusemark looked much like his portrait: a ruddy-faced, aging pirate crowned with a mass of well-combed silver hair. To my way of thinking, the resemblance was more Daddy Warbucks than Clark Gable.

Margaret Krusemark had abandoned her solemn black outfit in favor of a peasant blouse and embroidered dirndl, but she still wore the upside-down gold pentacle. Occasionally, one of them looked straight across the room at me. I brushed soapy water on the glass in front of my face.

I got the contact mike out of my coveralls and plugged in the earphone. Wrapping the instrument in a large rag, I pressed it to the glass and pretended to wipe the window. Their voices sounded so clear and sharp, I could easily have been sitting next to them on the couch.

Krusemark was speaking: "... and he knew the date of Jonathan's birth?"

Margaret toyed nervously with the golden star. "He had it exactly," she said.

"It would be no trouble to look up. You're sure he's a detective?"

"Evangeline Proudfoot's daughter said he was. He knows enough about Jonathan to have gotten to her asking questions."

"What about the doctor in Poughkeepsie?"

"He's dead. Suicide. I called the clinic. It happened earlier this week."

"Then we'll never know if the detective spoke with him or not."

"I don't like it, Father. Not after all these years. Angel knows too much already."

"Angel?"

"The detective. Please pay attention to what I'm telling you."

"I'm digesting it all, Meg. Just give me time." Krusemark sipped his brandy.

"Why not get rid of Angel?"

"What good would it do? This town is crawling with two-bit private eyes. It's not Angel we need to worry about, but the man that hired him."

Margaret Krusemark gripped her father's hand in both of hers. "Angel will be back. For the horoscope."

"Draw it up for him."

"I already have. It was so much like Jonathan's, only the birthplace differed. I could have done it from memory."

"Good." Krusemark drained his brandy. "If he's any good at all, he'll have found out you have no sister by the time he comes back for the chart. Play him along. You're a clever girl. If you can't trick the information out of him, slip a drop of something in his tea. There are many ways to make a man talk. We must know the name of his client. We can't let Angel die until we find out who he's working for." Krusemark stood up. "I have several important meetings coming up this afternoon, Meg, so unless there's something else ..."

"No, there's nothing else." Margaret Krusemark got to her feet and smoothed her skirt.

"Fine." He draped an arm around her shoulder. "Call me as soon as you hear from the detective. I picked up the art of persuasion in the Orient. We'll see if I've lost my touch."

"Thank you, Father."

"Come, I'll walk you out. What are your plans for the rest of the day?"

"Oh, I don't know. I thought I might go over to Saks and do some shopping. After that -" The rest of it was lost as the heavy mahogany door closed behind them.

I stuffed the rag-wrapped contact mike into my coveralls and tried the window. It was not latched and opened with a little effort. I undipped one side of the safety harness and swung my trembling legs inside. A moment later, I had the other strap undipped and was standing in the relative safety of Krusemark's office. The risk had paid off; playing window washer was a picnic compared with finding out about Krusemark's Oriental artistry first-hand.

I shut the window and glanced around. As much as I wanted to do some snooping, I knew there wasn't time. Margaret Krusemark's brandy snifter sat barely touched on the marble table. No drop of something slipped in that. I breathed its fruity aroma and took a sip. The cognac slid like velvet fire across my tongue. I downed it in three quick swallows. It was old and expensive and deserved much better treatment, but I was in a hurry.

TWENTY-EIGHT.

The blonde secretary merely glanced at me when I slammed the polished mahogany door. Perhaps she was accustomed to window washers having the run of her boss's office. I bumped into Ethan Krusemark himself striding back down the long corridor with his chest thrust forward like he had a row of invisible medals pinned to his grey flannel suit. He grunted in passing. I suppose he expected me to tug my forelock. Instead, I said, "Fuck you!" but it rolled off him like spit off a duck.

On my way out, I blew a loud kiss at the receptionist with the poker up her ass. The face she made suggested a mouthful of caterpillar guts, but two salesmen cooling their heels in matching Barcelona chairs thought it was real cute.

I did a quick-change number in the broom closet that would have made Superman envious. There wasn't time to repack the attache case, so I stuffed my Smith & Wesson and the contact mike in my overcoat pockets and left the coveralls and safety harness crammed into the dented bucket. In the elevator, I remembered my necktie and made a clumsy, blind job of twisting a knot around my shirt collar.

There was no sign of Margaret Krusemark out on the street. She had mentioned going to Saks, and I figured she caught a cab. Deciding to give her time to change her mind, I cut across Lexington to Grand Central and went in through a side entrance.

I detoured down the ramp to the Oyster Bar and ordered a dozen bluepoints on the half-shell. They went fast. I sipped the juice from the empty shells and ordered another half-dozen, taking my time with them. Twenty minutes later I pushed my plate back and headed for a pay phone. I dialed Margaret Krusemark's number and let it ring ten times before hanging up. She was safe at Saks. Maybe she'd hit Bonwit's and Bergdorf's before heading home.

The shuttle train hauled my mollusk-stuffed carcass over to Times Square where I caught an uptown BMT local to 57th Street. I called Margaret Krusemark's apartment from the phone booth on the corner and again got no answer. Walking past the entrance to 881 Seventh, I spotted three people waiting for the elevator and continued on to the corner of 56th. I lit a cigarette and started back uptown. This time the lobby was empty. I went straight to the fire stairs. There was no percentage in being recognized by elevator operators.

Climbing eleven flights is all right if you're in training for the marathon, but no fun at all with eighteen oysters tumbling around inside. I took it easy, resting every couple of floors, surrounded by the cacophonous blend of a dozen disparate music lessons.

When I got to Margaret Krusemark's door I was breathing hard and my heart hammered like a metronome in presto. The hallway was deserted. I opened my attache case and pulled on the rubber surgeon's gloves. The lock was a standard make. I rang the doorbell several times before sorting through my ring of expensive skeleton keys for the appropriate series.

The third key I tried did the trick. I picked up the attache case, stepped inside, and dosed the door behind me. The smell of ether was overpowering. It hung in the air, volatile and aromatic, bringing back memories of the ward. I got my .38 out of my overcoat and edged along the wall of the shadowed foyer. It didn't take a Sherlock to know something was very wrong.

Margaret Krusemark hadn't gone shopping after all. She was lying on her back in the sunlit living room, spread out across the low coffee table under all those potted palms. The couch we'd had tea on was pushed over against the wall so that she was all alone in the center of the rug like a figure on an altar.

Her peasant blouse was torn open, and her tiny breasts were pale and not at all unpleasant to look at except for the ragged incision that split her chest from a point below the diaphragm to midway up her sternum. The wound brimmed with blood and red rivulets ran down across her ribs and puddled on the tabletop. At least her eyes were closed; there was something to be said for that.

I put my gun away and touched my fingertips to the side of her throat. Through the thin latex I could feel she was still warm. Her features were composed, almost as if she were only sleeping, and something very much like a smile lingered on her lips. At the far end of the room, a mantel clock chimed the hour. It was 5:00 P.M.

I found the murder weapon under the coffee table. An Aztec sacrificial knife from Margaret Krusemark's own collection, the bright obsidian blade dulled with drying blood. I didn't touch it. There was no sign of any struggle. The couch had been carefully moved. It was easy to reconstruct the crime.

Margaret Krusemark had changed her mind about shopping. She'd come straight home instead, and the murderer was waiting for her inside the apartment. He, or she, surprised her from behind and clamped an ether-soaked pad over her nose and mouth. She was unconscious before she had time to put up a fight.

A wrinkled prayer rug near the entrance showed where she'd been dragged into the living room. Carefully, almost lovingly, the killer had lifted her onto the table and moved the furniture back so there'd be lots of space to work in.

I had a long look around. Nothing seemed to be missing. Margaret Krusemark's collection of occult doodads appeared intact. Only the obsidian dagger was out of place, and I knew where to find that. No drawers were opened; no closets rifled. There was no attempt to simulate a burglary.

Over by the tall window, between a philodendron and a delphinium, I made one small discovery. Resting in the basin of a tall bronze Hellenic tripod was a glistening lump of bloodsoaked muscle about the size of a misshapen tennis ball. It looked like something the dog might have dragged in, and I stared at it a long time before I knew what it was. Valentine's Day would no longer seem the same. It was Margaret Krusemark's heart.

Such a simple thing, the human heart. It goes on pumping day by day, year after year, until someone comes along and rips it out, and it ends up looking like so much dog food. I turned away from the Witch of Wellesley's ticker, feeling all eighteen oysters stampeding to get out.

After a bit of poking around, I found an ether-saturated rag in a woven wicker wastebasket in the foyer. I left it there for the homicide boys to play with. Let them take it downtown with the dead meat and run it through the lab. There'd be reports to file in triplicate. That was their job, not mine.

There was little of interest in the kitchen. It was just another kitchen: cookbooks, pots and pans, a spice rack, an icebox full of leftovers. A shopping bag from Bloomingdale's held the trash, but it was just trash: coffee grounds and chicken bones.

The bedroom looked more promising. The bed was unmade, rumpled sheets stained with sex. The witch was not without her warlocks. In a small adjoining bathroom I found the plastic case to her diaphragm. It was empty. If she got laid this morning, she must still be wearing it. The boys from downtown would find that, too.

Margaret Krusemark's medicine cabinet overflowed onto tall shelves framing either side of the mirror above the sink. Aspirin, tooth powder, milk of magnesia, and small vials of prescription drugs competed for space with jars of foul-smelling powders marked by obscure alchemical symbols. A variety of aromatic herbs was sealed in matching metal canisters. Mint was the only one I recognized by smell.

A yellow skull grinned up at me from the top of a Kleenex box. There was a mortar and pestle on the counter next to the Tampax. A double-edged dagger, a copy of Vogue, a hairbrush, and four fat, black candles crowded the lid of the toilet tank.

Behind a jar of face cream I found a severed human hand. Dark and shriveled, it lay there like a discarded glove. When I picked it up it weighed so little I nearly dropped it. I didn't find any eye of newt but not because I didn't try.

There was a small alcove off the bedroom where she did her work. A filing cabinet crammed with customers' horoscopes meant nothing to me. I looked under the "F's" for Favorite and the "L's" for Liebling without success. There was a small row of reference texts and a globe. The books were propped against a sealed alabaster casket about the size of a cigar box. Carved on the lid was a three-headed snake.

I thumbed through the books hoping for some hidden scrap, but found nothing. Searching among the disordered papers on the desktop, a small printed card edged in black caught my attention. An inverted five-pointed star inscribed within a circle was printed at the top. Superimposed within the pentagram was the head of a horned goat. Below the talisman it said MISSA NIGER in ornate caps. The text was also in Latin. At the bottom were the numerals: III. XXII. MCMLIX. It was a date. Palm Sunday, four days away. There was a matching envelope addressed to Margaret Krusemark. I slipped the card back inside and stuck it in my attache case.

Most of the other papers on the desk were sidereal calculations and horoscopes in progress. I glanced at them without interest and found one with my name written on the top. Wouldn't Lieutenant Sterne like to get his hands on that? I should have set fire to it, or flushed it down the toilet, but instead, like a dummy, I tucked it in my attache case.

Finding the horoscope made me think to check Margaret Krusemark's desk calendar. There I was on Monday the 16th: "H. Angel, 1:30 P.M." I ripped the page free and put it with the other stuff in my case. Today's page on the desk calendar showed an appointment for five-thirty. My watch was a few minutes fast, but twenty after was close enough.

On the way out, I left the apartment door slightly ajar. Someone else could find the body and call the police. I wanted no part of this mess. Fat chance! I was in it up to my neck.

TWENTY-NINE.

There was no rush going down the fire stairs. I'd had enough exercise for one day. When I hit the lobby I didn't make for the street, but cut through the narrow passage leading to the Carnegie Tavern. I always buy myself a drink after finding a body. It's an old family custom.

The bar was jammed with the Happy Hour crowd. I elbowed through the press and ordered a double Manhattan on the rocks. When it came, I took a long swallow and struggled back with it, stepping on toes all the way to the pay phone.

I dialed Epiphany Proudfoot's number and finished my drink while listening to the endless ringing. There was something ominous about not getting any answer. I hung up, thinking of Margaret Krusemark split like a Christmas goose eleven flights above. Hers was the last number that didn't answer. I left my empty glass on the shelf under the phone and shouldered through to the street.