'And the best emeralds?'

'That's right. Kim's jeweler wasn't a married guy. I figured he was, that's why he was so hard to get a line on, but he never married. Maybe he never fell in love until he fell in love with Kim, and maybe that's why he was ready to kick his life over. Anyway, he was a bachelor. No wife, no kids, no living parents. You want to rub out his family, what do you do? You kill his girlfriend.'

Bryna's face was as white as her hair now. She didn't like stories where they killed the girlfriend.

'The killing was pretty professional,' I went on, 'in that the killer was careful about evidence. He covered his tracks pretty well. But something made him do a butcher job instead of a couple of quick bullets from a silenced handgun. Maybe he had a thing about prost.i.tutes, or maybe it was women in general. One way or another, he went and did a number on Kim.

'Then he cleaned up, packed the dirty towels along with the machete, and got out of there. He left the fur jacket and he left the money in the purse but he took her ring.'

'Because it was worth so much money?'

'Possibly. There's no hard evidence on the ring, and for all I know it was cut gla.s.s and she bought it for herself. But it might have been an emerald, and even if it wasn't the killer might have thought it was. It's one thing to leave a few hundred dollars on a dead body to show you don't rob the dead. It's something else to leave an emerald that might be worth fifty thousand dollars, especially if it's your emerald in the first place.'

'I follow you.'

'The room clerk at the Galaxy Downtowner was a Colombian, a young kid named Octavio Caldern. Maybe that was a coincidence. There are a lot of Colombians in town these days. Maybe the killer picked the Galaxy because he knew somebody who worked there. It doesn't matter. Caldern probably recognized the killer, or at least knew enough about him to keep his mouth shut. When a cop came back to have another talk with him, Caldern disappeared. Either the killer's friends told him to disappear or Caldern decided he'd be safer somewhere else. Back home in Cartagena, say, or another rooming house in another part of Queens.'

Or maybe he got killed, I thought. That was possible, too. But I didn't think so. When these people killed, they liked to leave the corpses in plain sight.

'There was another wh.o.r.e that got killed.'

'Sunny Hendryx,' I said. 'That was a suicide. Maybe Kim's death triggered that, so maybe the man who killed Kim has some moral responsibility for Sunny's death. But she killed herself.'

'I'm talking about the street hustler. The TV.'

'Cookie Blue.'

'That's the one. Why did she get killed? To throw you off the track? Except you weren't on the track to begin with.'

'No.'

'Then why? You think the first killing turned the killer nuts? Triggered something in him that made him want to do it again?'

'I think that's part of it,' I said. 'n.o.body would do a second butcher job like that unless he enjoyed the first one. I don't know if he had s.e.x with either of his victims, but the kick he got out of the killings had to be s.e.xual.'

'So he just picked up Cookie for the h.e.l.l of it?'

Bryna blanched again. It was bad enough hearing about someone who got killed for being the wrong person's girl- friend. It was even worse hearing about a girl getting killed at random.

'No,' I said, 'Cookie was killed for a specific reason. The killer went looking for her and pa.s.sed up a batch of other streetwalkers until he found her. Cookie was family.'

'Family? Whose family?'

'The boyfriend's.'

'He had two sweeties, this jeweler? A call girl and a transvest.i.te hustler?'

'Cookie wasn't his sweetie. Cookie was his brother.'

'Cookie - '

'Cookie Blue started life as Mark Blaustein. Mark had an older brother named Adrian who went into the jewelry business. Adrian Blaustein had a girlfriend named Kim and some business a.s.sociates from Colombia.'

'So Cookie and Kim were connected.'

'They had to be connected. I'm sure they never met each other. I don't think Mark and Adrian had any contact in recent years. That may explain why it took the killer so long to find Cookie. But I knew there had to be some kind of link. I told someone earlier that they were sisters under the skin. That wasn't far off. They were almost sisters-in-law.'

He thought about this, then told Bryna to give us a few moments alone. This time I didn't interfere. She left the table and Danny Boy motioned to the waitress. He ordered vodka for himself and asked me what I wanted.

'Nothing right now,' I said.

When she brought back the vodka he took a careful little sip and set the gla.s.s down. 'You've been to the cops,' he said.

'No cops.'

'Why not?'

'Just didn't get around to it yet.'

'You had to come here instead.'

'That's right.'

'I can keep my mouth shut, Matt, but Bryna the v.a.g.i.n.a wouldn't know how. She thinks unexpressed thoughts build up inside your head and explode your skull, and she's not taking any chances. Anyway, you were talking loud enough for half the room to pick up on what you were saying.'

'I know that.'

'I figured you did. What do you want?'

'I want the killer to know what I know.'

'That shouldn't take long.'

'I want you to pa.s.s it on, Danny Boy. I'm leaving here, I'm walking back to my neighborhood. I'll probably spend a couple of hours in Armstrong's. Then I'll walk around the corner to my room.'

'You're gonna get killed, Matt.'

'This f.u.c.ker only kills girls,' I said.

'Cookie was only half a girl. Maybe he's working his way up to men.'

'Maybe.'

'You want him to make a move on you.'

'Looks that way, doesn't it?'

'Looks to me as though you're crazy, Matt. I tried to head you off the minute you came over here. Tried to cool you down some.'