Finally, she sighed, drained her glass. She picked out a piece of fresh pineapple and began to chew on it. He waited patiently.

"I couldn't swear to it in a court of law," she said dreamily. "I might have fallen asleep up there. I really don't know what he did while I was asleep. I really couldn't say."

"Thank you, Belle," he said humbly. "Thank you very much. Now just one more thing ... I've got the three sketches we found in Maitland's studio. Would you take a look at them and see if you recognize the model?"

"Sure," she said, straightening up. "Let's have a look."

He slid off the rubber band and handed the drawings to her. She went through them slowly.

"Nice," she said. "I could sell these with one phone call."

"I'm afraid not," he said "They belong to the estate."

"What a body. Yum-yum. What's this one-the finished head?"

"Jake Dukker did that one. What he thought the girl looked like, done the way he thought Maitland would have done it. Recognize the girl?"

"No. Never saw her before. Wish I could help you-you've been sweet-but I can't. Sorry."

"Just a long shot," he shrugged, rolling up the drawings again. "Well, I'll be on my way."

"Send Bobbie in on your way out," she commanded him. "You bastards interrupted my massage. Bobbie finishes me off with a mink glove. Ever get rubbed down with mink, Scarecrow?"

"No," he said, getting to his feet, "I never have."

"Well ..." she said speculatively, looking at him, "you keep on being sweet to me and telling me what's going on, and you never know ..."

Chief Delaney was waiting patiently in the car, slumped down. He was smoking a cigar, his straw hat tilted down over his eyes. He pushed it back when Boone got behind the wheel.

"How did you make out?" he asked.

"Not bad, Chief," Boone said. "You got her so sore, I could play the Father Confessor."

"What did you get?"

"First of all, she doesn't recognize the girl in the sketches. Says she never saw her before. On the drug and prostitution things, she and Dukker are in on it together. Like we figured. But they've probably knocked off while we're sniffing around."

"Only temporarily," Delaney said.

"Sure," Boone agreed. "Also, she's ready to throw Dukker to the wolves. Says now she might have fallen asleep up in his place and couldn't testify that he was there all the time."

"Oh-ho," the Chief said. "Isn't she a nice lady? That's what Dukker gets for telling us about the poppers."

"But the big thing is this: Maitland wasn't paying for her tush. She says. She claims they were in business together. I couldn't get her to spell it out, but it sounded like maybe she was getting her rich friends to buy Maitland's paintings, and she was taking a slice."

Delaney thought about that a moment.

"Fucking Saul Geltman?" he asked.

"That's how it adds up to me, Chief. She said she knows well-heeled collectors all over the country and in Europe. Maybe they were cutting out Geltman."

"Could be," Delaney nodded. "We'll have to check to see if Maitland and Geltman had any kind of an exclusive contract or signed agreement. Look, sergeant, we know Maitland was selling paintings he wasn't telling his wife about. It's very possible he was also selling paintings he didn't tell Geltman about."

"That would give Saul baby motive enough," Boone noted. "Or ..."

"Or what?" Delaney said.

"This is a wild one, Chief."

"Go ahead, try it."

"Well, this is just a scenario ... We know Jake Dukker can forge Maitland's style. My God, he proved it to us. Now suppose-"

"I got it," Delaney interrupted. "Maybe Dukker was producing fake Maitlands. Sarazen was peddling them to her rich collector friends, and Maitland found out. So they clipped his wick."

"Right," Boone said.

"It's all jazz," the Chief said. "But I'll ask Lieutenant Wolfe to see if he can find someone, somewhere, who owns a Maitland painting that wasn't sold through Saul Geltman. That would confirm that either Maitland was selling his own stuff on the sly, or Dukker was pushing fakes. Good work, sergeant."

"Thank you, sir."

"And now," Delaney said, sighing, "I suppose I can expect a call from Deputy Commissioner Thorsen expressing the displeasure of all her important friends at the rude way I treated Belle Sarazen."

"No, I don't think so," Abner Boone said. "I told her you had nothing on her, and if she screamed, I'd be the only one who'd get the shaft. I don't think she'll yelp."

"I owe you one," Delaney said.

Boone wanted to say, "We're even," but said nothing.

On the evening following the interrogations of Jake Dukker and Belle Sarazen, Monica and the Chief relaxed in the study with after-dinner rye highballs while he delivered a precis of his day's activities. She sat slouched in the worn leather club chair, her shoeless feet parked up on his desk. He sat in his swivel chair behind the desk, occasionally consulting his notebook and reports as he told her what had been learned.

He followed up the account of Jason T. Jason's encounter with the two Spanish women by showing Monica the drawing Jake Dukker had made of the young model's face, based on the Maitland sketches. Monica guessed the girl's age as fifteen or sixteen. She asked the Chief if he intended to circulate copies of the drawing to the city's precincts, in hopes of locating the girl.

Delaney rose to pin the drawing to his map board alongside the Maitland sketches. He told her that he and Boone had discussed that possibility, but decided against it for the time being, since they had nothing more than a wild hope that the two women might be helpful in identifying the killer. If other, more promising leads fizzled, then Jason T. Jason would be sent to work with a police artist, and drawings of both women would be circulated in hopes of locating them.

The Chief described the Mutt and Jeff technique he and Boone had used with Belle Sarazen. He thought the results had justified what they had done, although he admitted it probably meant Boone would have to handle Sarazen by himself in the future. Monica said Sarazen sounded like a dreadful woman, and Delaney told her she'd probably get a chance to meet the lady herself at Saul Geltman's pre-show party. In fact, the Chief said, he hoped Monica would try to meet all the principals in the case at that party; he wanted her take on them.

Monica asked if he really thought Belle Sarazen had sufficient motive for killing Victor Maitland. Would a jury, for instance, believe that a woman had knifed a man to death because he insulted her in public? Monica didn't think so.

Delaney said there might be an additional motive in those "business dealings" Belle Sarazen claimed she had with Maitland. But even if no further motive was uncovered, he still believed Sarazen was capable of killing to revenge a real or even fancied slight to her amour propre. He said Monica's doubts were based on the fact that she assumed Sarazen was a rational human being who acted in a reasonable manner. The truth was, he said, she was an unstable personality who had lived an incoherent life, with a history of irrational acts.

He said, almost as much to himself as to Monica, that one of the hardest things for a cop to learn was that people frequently acted in ways that not only contravened the laws of society, but of intelligence and good, utter common sense. Cops sometimes failed, Delaney said, because they looked for reason and logic in what was too often an unreasonable and illogical world. They could not grasp the essential nuttiness of the human situation. The Chief told Monica of a homicide he had worked in Greenwich Village when he was a lieutenant ...

This kid had come out of the midwest. A college kid, good family, money. He wanted to get into the theater, and his parents agreed to bankroll him for two years. So he came to New York, signed up for courses in an acting school, began to make the rounds.

The freedom in the Village in the 1960s almost literally exploded his mind. Drugs. Sex. Whatever he wanted. He couldn't handle it. Trying to reconstruct it later, the cops could nail some of it and guess the rest. The kid never did get hooked on the hard stuff, but he was dropping acid and bombed out of his gourd most of the time on pills and booze. He moved into a loft with five or six others, men and women. Different cast every night, but the play never changed. He was fucking everything that moved and being used the same way himself. He had to experience everything: that was the road to revelation and great art. After awhile, he couldn't even judge the quality of pleasures.

One night he strangled the young girl he was sodomizing. It could have been another man or a child: that night it happened to be a woman. After they got him dried out and off the pills, they asked him why he had done it. He looked at them, puzzled. He didn't know. He actually didn't know. The victim was almost a stranger to him. It had just occurred to him to kill her, to experience that, and so he had done it.

It was the freedom, Delaney said somberly to Monica. It was partly the drugs, he agreed, but mostly it was the freedom. Complete, without any restraint. There were no rules, no laws, no prohibitions. Moral anarchy. The kid was really surprised, Delaney said, when he finally realized he was going to be punished for what he had done. He couldn't understand it. It didn't seem to him all that big a deal.

The Chief told Monica that it frequently happened that way with people who couldn't handle freedom. They didn't know self-discipline. They acted only on whim, impulse. They couldn't sacrifice the pleasure of today for the satisfaction of tomorrow.

He thought that might be what was happening to Belle Sarazen. She lived in a world of easy money, easy thrills. No rules, no laws, no prohibitions. Total liberty, and a greed for kicks. It was, Delaney acknowledged, a difficult motive to present to a jury. They looked for neater reasons: vengeance, hate, lust, jealousy. It was hard to convince reasonable people that someone could kill casually, without motive. But it did happen. It was happening more and more often.

So motive was important, he told Monica, but not so important as to make an experienced cop rule out motiveless crime. Sarazen sold drugs and bodies; that was evident. Was it such a quantum leap from that to pushing a knife into someone who annoyed you? Especially when you believe nothing is wrong, everything is right?

Monica shivered, and hugged herself. She asked her husband if that meant Belle Sarazen was the leading suspect. He said no, that what he said about her could also be said about Jake Dukker. And Alma Maitland, Ted Maitland, and Saul Geltman had firmer, more conventional motives.

And the mother and sister? Monica wanted to know. Did they also have motives?

Delaney said that none were presently apparent, but that didn't mean none existed.

Monica sighed, and after awhile she asked if his working lifetime as a cop, in dealing with things like the Maitland homicide-which, he had to admit, had a depressing sordidness about it-if dealing with the baseness of people had not soured him on the human race.

He thought a long time, and finally said he didn't think it had. He had learned, he told her, not to expect too much from people, and thus avoided being constantly disappointed. Abner Boone, on the other hand, Delaney said, was a closet romantic. And this was probably the cause of his drinking. Boone said it was the "filth" of police work, but he really meant the evil of human beings. He expected so much good and found so little.

Edward X. Delaney said he expected little, and sometimes was pleasantly surprised. And so he kept his sanity. And it was also important, he added stoutly, that his own life, his personal life, be ordered and coherent. That was a cop's salvation.

Monica said she hoped Rebecca Hirsch could help Abner Boone achieve that. The Chief said he hoped so, too. Then they each had another rye highball, talked about summer camp for the girls, and argued drowsily about whether or not onions should be grated into potato pancakes.

13.

THEY ORDERED COFFEE AND dessert, then Chief Delaney rose and excused himself. Sergeant Boone followed immediately. Monica and Rebecca Hirsch watched their men troop away, the Chief lumbering, Boone bouncing after him.

"Has he been behaving?" Monica asked.

"So far," Rebecca said.

"You can never trust him," Monica said severely. Then she smiled sadly. "I'm beginning to talk like Edward."

Rebecca covered Monica's hand with hers. "That's all right. We know it. We take it a day at a time."

Monica freed her hand, glanced at her watch.

"Worried about the girls?" Rebecca asked.

"It's the first time they've been alone at night. They've got to learn sometime. But I think I'll give them a call to say good night. When the men come back."

In the lavatory, Delaney and Boone relieved themselves at adjoining urinals.

"I had lunch with the Hemley woman," Boone said in a low voice. "She never saw Geltman after he entered the office about ten o'clock. When Simon came out to pay for the sandwiches, he closed the door to his private office behind him."

"Tricky business," Delaney said.

"You think the two of them have the balls for something like that?"

"Sure," the Chief said equably. "The risk wasn't all that big."

"And I got a call from Jason T. Jason," Boone went on as they zipped up and began washing their hands. "He's been spending a few hours a day of his own time, in plainclothes, wandering around looking for the Spanish woman and the girl."

"Good for him."

"He thinks they might have come from east of the Bowery. Maybe around Orchard Street. A lot of Puerto Ricans around there, he says. I think he was hinting maybe we could get him detached from patrol to spend all his time looking for the women."

"Well ... not yet," Delaney said. "He's ambitious, isn't he? Nothing wrong with that. I'll get a list of Maitland's hangouts from the file, and we'll have Jason Two check them out. Maybe Maitland met the woman in a bar, or near one. Will Susan Hemley be at the party tonight?"

"She said yes."

"Does Rebecca know you had lunch with her?"

"Yes, sir. I told her."

"That's good," Delaney said. Faint smile. "I wouldn't want her to misunderstand if Hemley says something. If Emily Maitland shows up, and you get a chance to talk to her, mention casually that we know about all the times she and her mother came down from Nyack for lunches and dinners with Victor."

Boone stared at him a moment before they went out to rejoin the ladies.

"I get it," he said finally. "You want to know if they took the bus or train or if they drove down in that big, old Mercedes."

"Right," Delaney said. "You're beginning to think like me."

When the Chief saw the crush of people inside the Geltman Galleries, with more arriving every minute, he turned to the others and said: "If we get separated in the crowd, suppose we all meet right here on the sidewalk at midnight. That'll give us more than two hours. Should be long enough to see everything."

They all agreed, and plunged into the mob.

Delaney saw the Mephistophelian features of Lieutenant Bernard Wolfe. The detective was wearing a collarless suit of black velvet, ruffled mauve shirt, glittering studs, and cufflinks that looked like glass eyes. He bent low over Monica's hand.

"Watch this guy," Chief Delaney advised his wife with heavy good humor. "He's dangerous."

"I can believe it," she said, staring at the lieutenant with admiration. "And I thought all cops bought their clothes at Robert Hall."

"The costume's a scam," Wolfe grinned at her. "Actually, I'm a brown shoes and white socks guy."

"I'll bet," she scoffed.

"You know all these people?" Delaney asked, maneuvering to keep from being jostled away.

"Most of them," Wolfe nodded. "Want to meet anyone?"

"Not at the moment," Delaney said. "If you can get Geltman alone for a minute, will you ask him if Belle Sarazen ever helped him find buyers for Maitland's paintings? Keep it casual. And keep me out of it."