Where is Bianca?

Ellery Queen

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

1

Wherefore is this day different from all other days? Corrigan was to ask himself before the day was over (vaguely remembering the rituals of some of the Jewish boys he had palled around with in his youth). It turned out different, all right. The girl (or woman—it was hard to tell) brought into the morgue by the meat wagon spelled the difference. And a disagreeable difference it was.

But that was later.

Corrigan’s day began in the usual way. He left his bachelor pad in the Brookfield at 8:03 A.M., jockeyed the balky self-service elevator down to the basement parking area, got into his deliberately meaningless black Ford with its powerful Interceptor engine and nosed it out into the sunny street, reaching for the two-way. He reported in briefly to the communications center on the top floor of headquarters and then hung up to devote himself wholemindedly to bucking the New York traffic.

As he maneuvered Car 40, NYPD, through the unorganized hell of the city streets, Corrigan kept one ear cocked for the interchange of voices coming from his loudspeaker. None of the calls concerned him; nothing was said about the discovery of the girl—or woman—in the sewer or the routine delivery of her dehumanized body to the morgue.

Downtown in the frowning old headquarters building on Centre Street, Corrigan exchanged the usual top of the morning with patrolmen, plainclothesmen, and detectives. “Hi, Mac.” “Captain.” “How’s Molly, Joe?” “Great, Tim. The kid’s almost eight pounds.” “Morning, Inspector. How’s tricks?” “They’ll have to work the street till they open up again”—this with a grin; and so it went until he reached his office. It was a small room whose dinginess belied his rank and name on the frosted glass door.

He shut the door and went quickly through his mail.

Corrigan did not look like a police officer. He was an unostentatious 5′10″, with a build that suggested he spent an hour or two a day at some businessman’s gym; he was wearing a smart dark Madison Avenue type suit. His features were all angles, their sharpness softened by an amiable expression. The authority was in his eye, which was brown, steady, and watchful as a boxer’s. But he could mask it, and when he did he almost contrived to look like any one of thousands of executives who stopped into side-street bars in late afternoon on their way home to Stamford or Darien. The “almost” modification was his other eye, which was not there.

The missing eye—his left—presented problems not altogether biological. For one thing, there were the department regulations. He had almost not reapplied after Korea and the hospitalization; but certain police brass with two good eyes found themselves able to wink, after carefully inspecting his pre-Korea record. For another thing, there had been that long dreary stretch in the base hospital wondering what an ex-cop with an eye gone was going to do with the rest of his life. No self-pity; Corrigan had long ago licked that in himself. It had been a cold reappraisal, with cold prospects; but that was before he was discharged and the brass winked. The third problem was appearance.

A police officer wearing an eye-patch was certainly unusual. It limited his usefulness. He could not, for example, engage in undercover police work; the patch was as identifying as the beacon on a lighthouse. Worse, it called attention to him, in a profession in which the ability to melt into the populace was often an asset and sometimes a necessity.

Corrigan made a plus out of his liability. If he could not hide, he would make himself stand out like a sore thumb. Let them be afraid of him. Here comes Corrigan, the s.o.b. It meant getting rough; he got rough, sometimes when it sickened him. He deliberately built a reputation for toughness. It worked. He was rated the most valuable man on the Main Office Squad.

Only once had he considered a glass eye, for about five seconds. Then he went into the bathroom, threw up, and that was that.

His mail this morning was not exciting: a postcard from a vacationing Safe and Loft specialist attached to the MOS; a couple of invitations to speak before groups—one from a boy’s camp; he glanced at the calendar and made a note to accept this last. A note on pink, perfumed paper brought back pleasurable memories of a few weekends; this he stowed safely in his pocket, where none of the Main Office Squad, always quick with a ribbing, could be expected to chance upon it. Then a letter scrawled in pencil threatening his life; he put it aside for Fingerprint and Lab with as much concern as if it had been a pre-sale announcement about exclusive neckwear from his favorite haberdasher. Nine out of ten of these death threats were empty of content, the scrawlings of safely entrenched psychos or cranks; the tenth … well, Corrigan would have said, he hadn’t joined the PD to die in a rocking chair.

He picked up the long morning teletype, copies of which went out to every precinct, bureau, and squad leader in the city. The report detailed each crime and arrest that had taken place in the city since the previous afternoon.

A rapid reader, Corrigan began checking the items against his mental file. More than once a name, an alias, or the M.O. of some crime had given him a break in an old case.

His capacity to spot and link up seemingly unrelated details was as natural to him as brushing his teeth. He had been weaned on a policeman’s shield. Three generations ago, the first American Corrigan had joined New York’s Finest the day after he got his citizenship papers. The name Corrigan had been on the PD roster ever since, with time out only for the Korean war. The 38th Parallel—and the rape of his eye—had given Tim Corrigan a distaste for the military, but the operative chicanery of the OSS had appealed to him, and his record had been sufficiently shiny to make a major general suggest a career in military intelligence. Corrigan had turned the general down. “I can’t change my metabolism now, General,” he had said. “I’m a chronic cop, and I’ve got to go back and find out if they still want me.” And eventually the prodigal had found himself back in the barren squadrooms.

Corrigan’s knowledgeable eye went over the teletype. It seemed to present nothing out of the ordinary. Assault with deadly weapon (switchblade knife) … stolen car … possession of heroin … assault on female … armed robbery … possession of burglar’s tools … suspicion of arson.…

He read the report on the girl-woman with the same practiced half attention. But by the time he was finished with it his built-in alarm had begun to ring; and he went back and started over again.

Nude body of unidentified female … height 5′5″ … weight estimated, 118 lbs … age indeterminate, but probably in the mid 20’s … race, Caucasian … hair and coloration, brunette … no description of facial features possible. One item of personal adornment, a sterling silver ring described by consulting expert as of Mayan motif, worn on little finger of right hand. No gunshot wounds. No (detectable) knife wounds. P.M. scheduled.…

The details were not nice, and Corrigan, case-hardened as he was, felt gripes in his groin as he read them over.

The body had been literally brought to light late the previous day by a city employe assigned to a sewer crew. This particular crew had the unlovely job of spreading rat poison in the ceaseless underground war waged by the city on the multimillions of New York’s rodent population. The workman had opened a manhole cover and descended into the dank cavern. The beam of his hand lamp had immediately caught the body. The man had gone into hysterics.

Corrigan picked up the phone and asked for Missing Persons.

“John. I just finished the morning report.…”

“And you want to know if she’s been reported missing,” said Ginther’s cheerful voice.

“Right,” Corrigan said.

“No. Funny thing. The general description fits enough broads in New York to repopulate Staten Island. Sometimes we get half a dozen MPs who’d match her description to a T, and then again none.”

“And this is a none day,” Corrigan said.

Ginther was afraid so. But the papers would note it, and they would get calls. They always did, from crackpots looking for a daughter dead and buried for ten years, or some sucker whose wife had run off with a whoopee-maker who had hit town with a convention.

“I’ll keep in touch,” the MP man said.

“Thanks,” said Corrigan.

He was about to hang up when Ginther said, “They’ve pegged it homicide?”

“Not yet, John, but I’ve got that certain feeling.” Girls who died of natural causes were not likely to be found in sewers.

“One hell of a thing,” Ginther said. “Somebody hefting a manhole cover and dropping her down there with a reception committee of those little furry bastards waiting. You know what I’d give you for half the human race? A set of matched rat pelts from the sewer they found her in.” And the MP man, a notoriously cynical observer of the human scene, banged up.

Corrigan placed a second call.

Chuck Baer’s answering service responded. Mr. Baer was not in. Would he care to leave a message?

“Please have him call Tim Corrigan at police headquarters as soon as possible.”

Corrigan hung up and spent a few minutes thinking over a conversation he had had with Baer the previous afternoon. In their OSS days, he and Chuck had been a working team; each owed his life to the other several times over. They had been mustered out at about the same time, Corrigan to return to the department, Baer to open a private detective agency.

Yesterday Chuck had mentioned to Corrigan a current case involving a client with a missing wife. The wife was rich and attractive, with no particular oddities of appearance. She was twenty-five years old. She weighed about 120 pounds, and stood 5′5½″ in her stockinged feet. Coloration brunette. And she maintained a town house not far from the East Side location where the sewer crewman had opened the manhole cover.

It could be a coincidence, and in any event it was a long shot; but Corrigan’s official life was often characterized by long shots. File and remember. Meanwhile, wait for Baer’s call-back.

Corrigan pursued the routine. He took the elevator to the fourth floor. The room he went into was vast. It had once housed the police gymnasium; now it was used for the daily lineup. The night’s haul was in the bullpen—every size, shape, and color, brought in from precincts all over the city.

He shot the breeze briefly with several of the seventy or eighty detectives present. But he was not there for conversation. He sat down and watched and listened intently, studying the faces of the men under the lights. You never knew when the memory of some sullen mugger of today came back to nail the killer of tomorrow.

When he got back to his office, Chuck Baer was there.

“Thought I’d return your call in person. What’s up?” Baer was smoking one of his endless supply of panatellas.

Corrigan delivered a left hook to Baer’s belly. The big man did not even whince. “Still in condition, I see.”

“I’m a stationary two-oh-five, got the framework to carry it, and I will take no guff from middleweights. Want to fight?”

“No, thank you,” Corrigan said with a grin. “I know when I’m overmatched. Give your dogs a break, Chuck. And have a look at this.”

Baer deposited his bulk on the chair beside Corrigan’s desk. Corrigan passed him a sheet from the morning report. “The MP,” he said. “The one near the top.”

Baer stubbed out his cigar as he reached for the report. He was not much taller than Corrigan, but where Corrigan was built like a greyhound he was built like a bull. And where Corrigan was almost handsome, Baer was almost ugly. His skin was swarthy and thick, his nose was big, his lips were heavy. And, surprisingly, he had red hair. He looked like a heavy-footed, kindly old uncle. He was the toughest man in a fight Corrigan knew. Their friendship was based on mutual respect.

“I hope to hell it isn’t her.”

“How long have you been on the case, Chuck?”

“Couple of days. Her husband came into my office day before yesterday. Said she’d walked out on him five days previously, after a spat That would make it a week ago today. Her full name was Bianca Fielding Lessard.”

“Fielding?” Corrigan said. “New York Fielding? Theatrical real estate?”

“Theatrical real estate.” Baer nodded. “But way up there socially. Her parents and a maiden aunt were killed in a private plane crash, reducing the Fielding clan to one. At least until Bianca became Mrs. Lessard.”

“Did her husband mention a ring like the one in the report? A sterling Mayan ring?”

“No, but it’s worth a call.”

Corrigan was already pushing the phone forward. Baer gave a number to the switchboard. Several seconds passed.

The private detective covered the mouthpiece. “Maybe he’s still beddy-bye. Or out doing whatever it is that the husbands of missing heiresses do.” He removed his hand. “Hello? Mr. Lessard? This is Chuck Baer. I’m not sure, but I may have some news.… No, I’m not at my office.… Can you meet me at police headquarters right away? Yes, on Centre Street I’ll be in the office of Captain Tim Corrigan. He’s attached to the Main Office Squad … No, I can’t say definitely. I’d rather not say on the phone. Good. I’ll expect you.”

Baer hung up. “His full name is Vincent Lessard. He told me a lawyer he knew had mentioned my name while he was asking around about a private detective.”

“Background?”

The big man shrugged. “No information. My guess is it’s not what it ought to be.”

“Family chauffeur or something?”

“I don’t think so. It’s not that.…”

“Well, a hobo doesn’t often get to marry into an old-line family.”

“No, but punks sometimes do.” Baer reached for another cigar, scowling. “He knows which fork to use and can probably discuss pop art. But he’s just a little too smooth. Like he’s putting on an act he’s spent a long time rehearsing.”

“Money of his own?”

“I don’t think he had a dime when he hooked Bianca.” Baer lit his cigar. “Maybe I’m turning suspicious in my old age. But I peg him as a fortune hunter who managed to make the scene.”

“Why did you take the case?” Corrigan asked.

“Well, he made an appointment He was better than on time. ‘I’m Vincent Lessard,’ he said, ‘and you simply must help me in a matter involving my wife.’ So I said, ‘I don’t take divorce cases.’ And he said, ‘You don’t understand. I want a marriage saved, not broken up.’ So I heard him out.”

“He wanted her back in the nest?”

“Right,” Baer said. “He told me Bianca had walked out in a temper. He waited for her to come back, finally decided she was spending the night in a hotel. When she hadn’t returned by next morning, he became concerned. Called the hospitals, even the morgue. Drew a blank. Decided she was okay, just making him sweat. Said it miffed him. That he figured she figured to let him stew in his own juice, so he’d let her stew, too. A day later she hadn’t returned. He still figured she was needling him, and it made him sore. But by the fourth day he was on his hands and knees calling hotels, and on the fifth day he came to see me.”

“To locate her so he could coax her back?”

“That was my job,” Baer nodded. “He was afraid that if he waited to hear from her, they might wind up in a divorce court. He didn’t want that. No, sir.”

“Grounds?” Corrigan said.

“Adultery. He didn’t like having to tell me,” Baer said. “I asked what the argument had been about, the one that had sent Bianca roaming. He said at first that it was just a family misunderstanding. Honestly, I’m only half as dumb as I look. What did the guy take me for?”

“Whom did he finally name?”

“A dame named Frances Weatherly. She writes plays, those far-out ones—full of kookie symbolism, the kind they produce in back rooms off Broadway. This she-playwright had a new play, and she wanted a decent theater for it. So she came to Fielding Theatrical Realty, which is how their lives got intermingled. Lessard actually said ‘intermingled.’”

The phone on Corrigan’s desk tinkled. It was Solly, from downstairs.

“Man inquiring for you, Captain. A Vincent Lessard.”

“I’m waiting for him. And, Solly.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“It won’t hurt to tape it.”

“I’ll advise CC,” Solly said.

“This man’s wife is missing. So tell Communications Center it’ll be all-go if she owned a Mayan ring.”

2

Even the innocent rarely face the law with a total naturalness. Corrigan seldom put stock in the first image an individual presented to him.

A darkly handsome man, conservatively tailored and barbered, Vincent Lessard entered Corrigan’s office with a spurious self-assurance that seemed to be covering up a carefully controlled fear.

He gave Baer a strong man’s nod. Then he stared at Corrigan with large dark eyes in which alarm was barely detectible.

“I’m glad you were able to make it so quickly,” Corrigan said in his pleasant tenor. “Have a seat, Mr. Lessard.”

Lessard gripped the arms of the straight wooden chair and eased himself down, not taking his eyes from Corrigan’s face. Sunlight from the dusty window struck his chiseled face, making it glow like a spotlight; it also glinted on the drops of sweat below the line of his thick, black, wavy hair. He reminded Corrigan of a boy who had been told that no one could lie while meeting his parents’ eyes. Or perhaps it had something to do with Corrigan’s eye-patch. It was a minor irritant to Corrigan, sometimes not being able to tell whether an interviewee was exercising hard control over inner fears or mere fascination over the piratical patch.

“It’s about my wife, isn’t it?” Lessard said. He had a stage-British accent. “Is she—has something happened that—” There was the lightest break in his voice. Corrigan instantly recognized what Chuck Baer had mentioned. Lessard was emoting by the book. The script called for distress, so the actor was registering distress. On the other hand, Corrigan was not leaping to conclusions. There were people who put on an act about everything, even the real things when no act was necessary. If Lessard were such a man his act proved nothing. And he might well be such a man.

“I don’t want to alarm you,” Corrigan said, “and maybe we’re taking up your time for nothing. But there is a report.…” He stopped deliberately.

“Oh, God,” Lessard said. “Has Bianca been hurt? Attacked?”

“We’re not sure we even have a lead on your wife,” Corrigan said. “But we need your help, Mr. Lessard. If you’ve no objection to answering a few questions?”

“Of course not, Captain! I can’t imagine how I can help, but if this concerns Bianca—my darling Bianca—I’ll do anything I can.”

He’s a lousy actor to boot, Corrigan thought.

Chuck Baer said smoothly, “Mr. Lessard’s been under a considerable strain, Captain. You know how it is when a loved one turns up missing and suddenly a call comes from the police.”

“You’re right, Mr. Baer!” Lessard said. “That’s exactly it. It began in such an innocent way.… If only I’d stopped her from leaving that night.… Captain, please! Tell me if my wife is—”

“How long have you and Mrs. Lessard been married?” asked Corrigan.

“Captain, I insist you tell me—”

“Where did you meet her, Mr. Lessard?”

The man’s knuckles whitened on the arms of the chair. A sort of ferocity had sprung into the eyes staring at Corrigan, the mask slipping for a moment; but then he went back into his act. There was nothing in the pleasant face confronting him across the desk that promised a performance of any kind except by Corrigan’s own script.

Lessard’s hands went to his lap, limply; so helpless. “I met Bianca in the Adirondacks,” he said. “At a resort hotel, the Nulan Inn.”

“Where you were both staying?”

“Well, no. As a matter of fact, Bianca was staying at Adirondacks Hall.”

Corrigan said, “Adirondacks Hall. That’s a sanitarium, I believe.” Chuck Baer was sitting up a little. “Isn’t it?”

“If you’re implying that my wife was a mental case,” Lessard said stiffishly, “I can assure you she wasn’t.”

“I wasn’t implying anything, Mr. Lessard. I’m simply trying to get some information. Adirondacks Hall is widely known as a hideaway for people with emotional problems—and lots of money to pamper them.”

“She wasn’t pampering them, Captain! She’d been through a terrible ordeal. Her parents and her aunt had been killed. Bianca flew back from Europe, managed to take hold of things and only collapsed after the triple funeral. Anyone might have, especially a sensitive girl like Bianca. She needed rest, and she needed a little therapeutic help, to get her over the hump.”

“From what I’ve heard, Adirondacks Hall was just the place for Mrs. Lessard to get both,” Corrigan said agreeably. “How did she happen to be at Nulan Inn?”

Vincent Lessard looked uncomfortable. “Well.…”

“Were you a guest there, Mr. Lessard?”

Lessard’s classic chin came up. “I was employed there.”

“In what capacity?”

“See here—”

“Just asking,” Corrigan said.

“I was the social director, if you must know. The Hall is close by. Once in a while patients who were ready to leave the sanitorium would drop over to our Saturday night dances or Sunday lawn brunches.”

Corrigan could visualize Lessard, in French flannels and blazer, leading a community sing, profile to the sun. He must have had a high old time with the ladies.

“And you met Bianca Fielding at one of these things?”

“I did!”

“Lonely girl, I suppose,” Corrigan murmured.

The details of Lessard’s façade shifted. Deep in his beautiful eyes appeared a sparkle of caution.

“Of course she was lonely, Captain. Poor little girl. Bianca was born in the United States, but she was a stranger here. Her parents took her to Europe when she was very young, and she did most of her growing up there. Losing those nearest and dearest to her so suddenly.… Yes, she was lonely. What’s the point of all this, Captain?”

The point, Corrigan thought, is that a poor little rich girl, an overnight orphan, probably unhappy to begin with, straight out of a sanitorium (under other circumstances it could have been a convent), was sucker bait for any slick operator in the immediate foreground, or even an operator not so slick. Maybe I’m doing the guy an injustice, Corrigan thought. There is such a thing as falling in love. And he still didn’t know what Bianca looked like. He stared hard at Vincent Lessard, and mentally shook his head. If there had been love in the Fielding-Lessard affair, it was on the Fielding side. Lessard wouldn’t know what love was. But he would certainly have a solid appreciation of money. And Bianca Fielding had been loaded.

“Did you argue often?”

“What?” said Lessard.

“The question is plain enough,” Corrigan said. His voice was not so pleasant now. “Were you and your wife in the habit of arguing?”

For the first time since entering the office, Lessard gave his attention directly to Chuck Baer. It was over in a moment, but for that moment his eyes said that he regretted ever having met Baer.

“No,” Lessard said cautiously to Corrigan. “Bianca and I got on beautifully.”

“That’s not what you told me,” said Baer.

“Well, certainly in the beginning.…”

“There was a change in her?” Corrigan suggested.

“I don’t believe I follow you.”

“I’m trying to interpret you correctly, draw a picture of your wife. You met, you married, you came to live in the Fielding home here in New York. Then differences developed.”

“I didn’t say that!”

“Differences mean only that something has changed. I assume, from the facts, that the change was in Mrs. Lessard. She’d been exhausted emotionally. Now she was regaining her stability. That means she wasn’t quite the same woman you married.”

“Captain, I love my wife! Every molecule in her body is precious to me. Do I have to call a lawyer in to make you tell me what’s happened to her?”

Let him have it, Corrigan thought. “You loved her so much you began to tomcat around,” he said.

This time the glance Lessard turned on Baer was positively murderous.

“So a man slips once,” he said sullenly. “I thought a client’s communication with a private detective is privileged, as with a lawyer or a clergyman.”

“This,” said Corrigan before Baer could say anything, “happens to be a special case, Mr. Lessard. You’ll find out why in due course. How long have you known that woman playwright—Frances Weatherly?”

“Six weeks. Two months. She came to Bianca looking for a theater.”

“Not long after you and Miss Fielding were married?”

“My God, you make it sound as bad as Bianca did!” The phony British accent was noticeably sloppy now.

“You mean you wife didn’t share your view that playing with dolls is a harmless pastime?”

“What’s this all about? Why am I being treated as if I were a criminal? See here, Captain Corrigan, if you know something about my wife, I want to know it, and I want to know it now!”

“Your wife accused you of tiring of her,” Corrigan said thoughtfully.

“I wasn’t. When she turns up, I’ll convince her of that. Not that it’s any of your business, Captain! Where is she?”

It was still an act, Corrigan decided. But was it an act to cover up guilt, or simply a way of life so ingrained that it permeated everything he said and did, even innocence?

“I haven’t asked enough questions yet, Mr. Lessard,” Corrigan said, smiling. “Of course, you don’t have to answer any of them. But then I won’t feel any particular inclination to pass out official information. It’s up to you.”

The sweat drops along Lessard’s hairline fattened visibly. A sudden thought struck Corrigan. Could the man be wearing a top piece? He tried to picture Lessard bald, and failed. He decided it was Lessard’s own hair.

Lessard lit a cigarette. His hands were trembling slightly. Over the second puff he said in a flat voice, “All right, fire away.”

“Let’s go back to the last time you saw your wife. That was a week ago tonight, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“How heated was the argument?”

“Hot enough.”

“How hot? Did it come to blows?”

Lessard choked over the cigarette. “Blows! Certainly not. I don’t hit women. And even if I did, you don’t hit a woman like Bianca.”

“Why not?” Corrigan asked curiously, as if woman-hitting were the most natural sport in the world.

“You just don’t. She’s so—so ethereal. I mean, she’s like a butterfly. I know that sounds corny, but it’s the only comparison I can think of. Who’d swat a butterfly?”

“You ought to sit behind this desk,” said Corrigan. “So it was a hot argument that didn’t come to blows. The subject was Frances Weatherly?”

“Yes. I tried to explain to Bianca that a man sometimes gets involved with a woman before he really knows what’s happening. With a certain sort of woman.”

“What sort is that?”

“Frances Weatherly. No … no sense of moral values. And she doesn’t give a—she doesn’t care whom she hurts. I said it wasn’t my fault, just a combination of circumstances that I was helpless to stand up against.”

“Your wife,” said Corrigan dryly, “didn’t buy it?”

“She wouldn’t listen. It’s the first time I wasn’t able to reason with Bianca. She was all emotion.”

Brother, thought Corrigan, you have just described the différence that the Frenchmen vive.

“How,” he asked, “did Mrs. Lessard find out about you and Miss Weatherly? It is Miss Weatherly, by the way, not Mrs.?”

“Miss. How did Bianca find out? I don’t know—gossip, I suppose.” Lessard suddenly seemed conscious of his hairline. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and blotted the sweat away, then sat holding the handkerchief tightly. “How does any wife find out? Anyway, she followed me—it was on the night before our row. She saw Frances and me in a cocktail lounge together, saw us go up to Fran’s place afterward. Waited for me to come out. I still can’t understand it. It’s so unlike Bianca. I was flabbergasted.”

“Let’s stick to the night she followed you. She waited for you to come out. How long did she have to wait?”

“Well,” said Lessard, “a pretty long time.”

“And the next night, when you got home, you had your quarrel, and Mrs. Lessard walked out on you?”

“That’s correct, Captain.”

“And you haven’t seen or heard anything from her from that moment to this?”

“Yes. I mean, no!”

“Does your wife have any distinguishing marks? Scars? Birthmarks?”

“No.”

“Bridgework?”

“No, no.”

“How about dental work generally? Who is her dentist?”

“Her teeth were taken care of in Europe, I don’t know by whom. She hasn’t had time—I mean she hasn’t needed—to see an American dentist since she got back.”

And that, Corrigan thought, is a really tough break.

“How about a ring? An unusual ring, I mean—not an engagement or wedding ring.”

“Oh. Yes,” said Lessard. “She has a Mayan ring—of silver—I mean of Mayan design; it’s a copy in sterling silver of what’s supposed to be a very old one. It was given to Bianca by a close friend, a Mexican girl, daughter of a diplomat, who attended finishing school with Bianca in Switzerland.”

“Was Mrs. Lessard wearing this ring the night she walked out on you?”

“She always wore the ring.” Lessard suddenly sat up straight. He had become very pale. “Are you telling me that you’ve found the ring, Captain?”

So Corrigan told him.

3

“I suppose I’d better warn you, Mr. Lessard,” Corrigan said on their way to the morgue. “The body is in very poor condition.”

Lessard swallowed.

“Do I have to?” he gulped. “Do I have to?”

“I’m afraid so. Not that I’m very hopeful, considering. But it’s just possible you may see something that will enable you to make an ID—an identification.”

“Her face,” began Lessard.

Chuck Baer said suddenly, “She has no face.”

Lessard looked at the big detective, but not as if he saw him. The beautiful eyes were rolled back slightly. His complexion by now was pale green.

Corrigan said nothing.

The drawer in the morgue had a Jane Doe tag on it. The attendant in the white smock slid it open. Even he looked a little sick at the sight of the bleached muslin shroud. He twitched it off. He had seen the body before.

Between Korea and the Main Office Squad Corrigan had seen enough mutilations of the human housing to harden him—he would have said—against anything. But this time he found himself fighting his stomach. Even a body blown apart by a direct mortar hit was not so traumatic a sight; in such tragedies nothing human was left.

The girl’s body had been half eaten away.

There’s something about rats, Corrigan thought. To this day, for all his experience with the vile, he could not see a technician pick up a laboratory rat without wondering how the man was able to do it. He remembered a story his paternal grandfather had once told him. It had happened in his grandfather’s boyhood on the East Side, in the ’80s, when the boy had been locked in an empty coal bin of the public school cellar for some infraction of the rules, and the janitor had forgotten about him and gone home. The boy had sat up all night in a corner of the filthy bin fighting off rats as long as his arm. Corrigan remembered as a child wondering if that was why his grandfather had snow-colored hair. He still had nightmares about it.

Chuck Baer took one look and turned away.

Vincent Lessard took one look and fainted.

Corrigan caught the man under an armpit as he slumped. Baer reacted almost as quickly. Lessard dangled between them.

The attendant hastily restored the shroud and shut the drawer. Dr. Samuelson, a city pathologist, the other member of the group, gestured and said, “Take him in there.” He preceded them to a nearby office, Lessard’s toetips dragging.

They laid him on a couch, neck and head flat, feet resting in an elevated position on the arm of the couch, at Dr. Samuelson’s direction.

The doctor administered aromatic spirits of ammonia to Lessard’s nose. At the first whiff, Lessard thrashed back to consciousness.

“My God,” he mumbled. “My God.”

He tried to sit up.

“Easy,” the doctor said. “Don’t rush it. Lie there a few minutes.”

Lessard lay staring at the ceiling.

“No,” he said. “No.” Then he said, “It couldn’t be Bianca. Not my lovely Bianca. Is it Bianca, Captain?”

“That’s what we hoped you could tell us,” Corrigan said.

“But her face.” Lessard began to breathe rapidly. Samuelson stooped to give him another whiff. Lessard pushed the doctor’s hand away.

“Bianca.… No wonder she didn’t come back. She went out. It was late. The streets were dark. She was alone. And some mugger.…”

“We don’t know what happened to her,” Corrigan said. “Not yet. Are you up to looking at the ring now?”

“Ring?”

“The Mayan ring. You said she was wearing it when you last saw her.”

“All right,” Lessard said listlessly.

Dr. Samuelson went out.

“The ring is unique. Without duplicate. It was handmade by an old family retainer for the Mexican girl. If that … thing in there was wearing it.…”

Samuelson returned with a manila envelope. He handed the envelope to Corrigan.

A silver ring slid from the envelope to Corrigan’s palm. Attached to the ring was a tag marked with an identification number. Corrigan offered the ring to Lessard.

Lessard stared at it without touching it. Then he shut his eyes.

“It’s Bianca’s ring,” he said.

Corrigan returned the ring to the envelope and handed it to Samuelson. The doctor glanced briefly at Lessard. Then he went out. He did not come back.

Lessard struggled to his feet His face looked like soft putty that was perceptibly losing shape. He looked ten years older than when he had come in.

“Aside from the ring,” Corrigan said. He felt sorry for the man, regardless of other considerations. The fellow had slept with what lay in the drawer. He would have nightmares for the rest of his life, dreams in which he embraced what the rats had left. “Aside from the ring, did you spot anything that pinpoints the body as your wife’s?”

Lessard shuddered. “No. No.”

“Well.” Corrigan shrugged. “We’ll have to keep going until we pin the ID down.”

“The ring,” Chuck Baer said.

“We can’t accept it as conclusive, Chuck, although of course it’s a long step in Mrs. Lessard’s direction. By the way, Mr. Lessard, who is in charge of the Fielding enterprises? Who’s taken care of the administration of the business since the death of your wife’s parents?”

“What?”

Corrigan repeated himself patiently.

“Oh.” Lessard’s color was coming back. “A girl named Jean Ainsley. One of those bright young career women. I believe she’s been with the Fielding enterprises for five or six years. Hails from California. Do I have to answer any more questions, Captain?”

“No, of course not. Sorry I’ve had to put you through this. We’ll be in touch.”

Baer said, “I’ll drop you off at your place if you’d like, Mr Lessard.”

“Would you?” Lessard said emptily.

After they left, Corrigan consulted a Manhattan directory and found that Fielding Theatrical Realty had offices in a building in the 1600 block on Broadway. He dialed, identified himself, and asked for Miss Ainsley. The girl at the switchboard kept him waiting a full minute.

He listened to a warmly pleasant voice identify its owner as Jean Ainsley. Somehow, it did not fit in with his image of a career girl.

“What can I possibly do for a police officer, Captain Corrigan?”

“There’s a matter concerning your employer I have to discuss with you. How soon can we get together?”

The other end of the line went silent. Then the warm voice said, “Right after lunch, if that’s all right with you. I get back at two.”

Jean Ainsley turned from the phone on her blond wood desk to the man standing at the tall window in her office. He stood in a contemplative, almost brooding, posture, as if he were philosophizing over the vanity of the minute movements on the streets below.

Like some statue by Rodin, Jean thought. But it’s just a pose. He’s the model, not the sculpture. Philosophy was far from his thoughts. He was engaged in his favorite pastime, contemplating himself. And she loved him anyway. That was the hell of it.

At fifty-two, Carlton Ainsley still presented a young man’s waistline; his broad shoulders were still without a hint of curvature. The profile, the walking stick, the elkskin gloves, the carnation in his lapel, shrieked “actor.” There were dozens like him at the Lambs’ Club. His hair was a mane thrown back from the high forehead. Its coloration was striking, an intense black dusted with pulverized silver.

Just look at him, Jean thought, the youth of him, after all those years of drinking and women and Hollywood parties; even the years in that other horrid place hadn’t left a mark on him, at least not physically.

How could such a mature, handsome body and face conceal such a child?

Ainsley said to the traffic below, “I don’t blame you for being angry with me, Jeanie.”

“Let’s not go through the promises and resolutions bit again, Daddy, shall we?”

“Very well.”

“Sometimes you do more than make me angry,” she said in a too-quiet voice. “Sometimes you almost make me wish.…”

Carlton Ainsley turned, his electric blue eyes full of affection. His beautifully modulated baritone sounded sad. “I wish it, too, my dear. For your sake. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to get up enough nerve to do it.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Jean said wearily. “What am I going to do with you, Daddy?”

The corners of his mouth turned down, the child upbraided. But it would pass, Jean thought. He had a sort of built-in emotional sieve for straining out unpleasantness. In and out, and away we go.

She banged down in her white leather desk chair and reached for a cigarette. “I do wish you’d stop playing games and tell me what’s been bothering you the past few days.”

“Jeanie dear,” he said, making for her. “You’re imagining things.”

“And don’t start pawing me. You know how I hate it.” He stopped in mid-stride. “Why can’t you ever talk to me as if I were what I am? You know you can’t con me, Dad. I figured you out a long time ago. Right now my radar tells me you’re setting yourself for another unpleasantness. It doesn’t make sense, with Dmitri Karam coming back from Europe and the details worked on for the new TV series. You ought to be riding high, instead of trying to drown yourself in vodka martinis. And, by the way, that’s one mystery about you I’ve never solved. How do you drink so much and still manage to look as if you’d just got back from a month in the fresh air?”

Ainsley fingered his silk cravat with the gesture that indicated he was pleased. “The good Lord invested me with incorruptible tissues,” he said. “As for the martinis, can’t a man go on a toot for no other reason than that he feels like going on a toot?”

“Not you, Pa. And it wasn’t just a toot, it was a hundred-proof swinger. You left a three-day spoor through several dozen cheap bars, joints where you wouldn’t ordinarily be caught dead. And with Mr. Karam’s palace of an apartment at your disposal while he’s abroad, you wind up in a flophouse that would make you throw up if you were sober.”

“I know, I know,” he muttered.

He sounded utterly miserable, and Jean, to her disgust, softened. She tossed her cigarette into the ashtray and got up and went to him. The arm she touched was actually shaking.

“What made you suddenly start punishing yourself again, Daddy?”

He put his arms around her and held her tightly. “I’m a trial to you, I know. I represent an unpleasant past, a questionable present, and a frightening future. All the time you should be occupied with no other thoughts than hooking some handsome young millionaire and settling down to a flock of rampaging brats.”

“Oh, the hell with that,” said Jean in a muffled voice. It was useless.

“No man’s ever had a more wonderful child. Jean, I love you, I really do. I’ve been the world’s lousiest father to you, and you’ve deserved the best. The truth is, I’m gutless. Always have been. I didn’t want responsibilities when I married your mother, and I suppose I still don’t want them. All I can ask is your understanding.”

She knew that he was not merely indulging in histrionics, however theatrical his delivery. He was no more capable of uttering an honest-sounding line than most other actors of his generation.

Jean pushed away from him. “All right, Dad, you want my understanding? Suppose we start by your telling me what kind of roof is about to fall on our heads this time.”

“Roof? What roof?” Ainsley said innocently. “The only roof that’s about to fall is the roof of the heavens, in a shower of stars.”

“Dad, please.”

“I know you’re thinking about San Quentin again. Jeanie, San Quentin is no longer even a memory. I’ve forgotten that it was once my address, and I assure you there’s no chance of my moving back. I’m a craftsman of the theater about to demonstrate anew to the millions my mastery of my craft, that’s all. Naturally,” he added with a cough, “it makes me a little nervous. You know I always get the flutterbyes.”

“You ham,” Jean said without inflection. He had ducked the issue, as he always did. Further pressure would get her nowhere. And it was always possible that he was telling the truth. Perhaps something less than catastrophic had set him on the bender that had ranged from Times Square, to the Village, to up beyond 101st Street.

He had moved to the door, sensing the psychological moment for an exit.

“Au ’voir, my princess. Worry not; it will age you. Everything will work out. You’ll see.”

He went out swiftly.

Jean stood motionless in her silent office, looking at the door.

As usual, he had talked his way out without really saying anything.

She returned to her desk. Her always crowded calendar was an unfailing escape, an old friend. She gave herself up to some thoughts about the business at hand.

Frances Weatherly and her producer, Travers Proehl, were due shortly. The woman never gave up. She hadn’t enough backing, Jean thought, and I’m not sure her play would keep the doors of a midtown theater open for a third performance.

But the Weatherly woman and her play had the approval of Vincent Lessard, husband of the girl who owned so many theaters all over the country. Jean’s business sense could not stand up against a connection like that.

And there was this policeman to complicate the day, Corrigan. Probably a big Irisher accustomed to taking tough criminals apart with his hands, although he’d had a very nice telephone voice. He had given her a bad moment. The last time policemen had come into her life, her father had wound up in San Quentin. Thank heaven, this time, Jean thought, the subject was Bianca Fielding Lessard, not Carlton Ainsley.

She flipped the intercom switch. “Miss Tolliver, I’m running late. I’ll lunch here. Have a chicken sandwich on toast and a glass of milk sent in. And if Frances Weatherly and her producer show up on time, stall them. I promised that policeman I’d see him at two.”

“Yes, Miss Ainsley.”

“Are the land-lease contracts ready on the Kansas City property?”

“Our attorneys just returned them.”

“Fine. Bring them in with my lunch, please.”

Jean broke the connection. A huge old theater in Kansas City that had served a generation of moviegoers would be torn down. A chain department store would rise in its place, and the Fielding enterprises would collect rent on the land for the next ninety-nine years.

She would have to get Vincent Lessard’s signature on the papers. Her nose crinkled at the thought of having any dealings with Lover Boy, as she called Lessard in the privacy of her thoughts.

4

Corrigan was five minutes early for his appointment. Several people were waiting in the surprisingly plain outer office. A rather dowdy secretary was being firm with a man and woman at her desk.

Corrigan knew that the Fielding corporation more and more in the recent past had juggled its resources against the decline in theaters the country over. Theatrical real estate was now only one of its interests.

“I’m sorry for the delay, Miss Weatherly,” the receptionist was saying, “but I assure you it’s unavoidable.”

Corrigan’s ears and eye went to work immediately.

The object of Vincent Lessard’s adultery was a tall, bonethin, model-like woman wearing an unbecoming brown shift dress. She had dirty-looking blonde hair that hung straight to her square shoulders. Her face was dominated by prominent cheekbones and a pointed chin. It was a prowling, watchful sort of face, with a too-wide mouth and eyes of pale blue that were set too far apart.

But as she strode over to a chair and sat down and crossed her legs—she had very good legs, Corrigan observed—and began to swing one long, narrow, sandaled foot, she drew every male eye in the office. She was one of those rare women, he decided, who managed to make the least of herself and yet conveyed sex in every part and movement. He was willing to bet that she had a habit of licking her lips. Yes, there it was—a flick of a pointed tongue, sheer lechery.

The man with her was a gross hulk with restless little eyes and a pendulous mouth whose corners were bitterly quirked.

Corrigan gave his name to the secretary. He could feel Frances Weatherly’s stare burning into his back—the interloper who had forced the postponement of her appointment.

“Captain Corrigan?” said the girl behind the small desk as he entered the inner office. He carefully shut the door behind him.

“How do you do,” Corrigan said. She indicated a chair. As he went to it he looked her over.

Neither she nor her office was quite what he had expected. He had anticipated a Hollywood set, a sort of Joan Crawford or Rosalind Russell kind of businesswoman’s background, with dramatic drapes, the last word in Scandinavian-modern furniture, and two-inch-thick carpeting. Instead, it was an almost plain office, its furniture showed signs of wear and tear from a long life and hard use, and there were threadbare patches on the rug. Whatever else the Fielding enterprises went in for, it was certainly not swank.

The girl was young, much younger than he had anticipated. She was lovely in a pixie way, with a mouth ready for humor and a perky little nose. Her eyes were hazel under long, smoky lashes. Her hairdo was unaffected. She wore an oxford gray, two-piece knit outfit.

She was as surprised by him as he was by her. She had apparently expected a clumsy-footed cop with a 44-inch waistline and a big fanny. He was amused that she tried not to let her pleasant disappointment show. When she spoke again it was in her most businesslike tone.

“You mentioned Bianca Lessard on the phone, Captain.” If his eye-patch startled her, she concealed it effortlessly. That’s one for you, Corrigan thought.

“We need some information about her.”

“Of course I’ll help in any way I can.”

“Have you known her long?”

“Only since she came back from Europe almost a year ago,” Jean said. “Her family had been killed in a private plane crash. Her father was piloting—”

“I know all about that, Miss Ainsley. I understand she got through the funeral all right, then had a breakdown.”

“It depends on what you mean by breakdown,” Jean said. “She didn’t go off her rocker, or anything like that. She simply folded, and went away for a rest.”

“How long had you been with the firm at that time?”

“About four years,” Jean said, frowning at him. “I came from California. Making this connection was very fortunate for me. Although it’s true I’ve known nothing but theaters and theatrical people all my life.”

Corrigan said, “Ainsley. Are you related to Carlton Ainssley?”

“He’s my father.”

“I remember his pictures well. He was always the suave Continental, or the rich man who never got the girl.”

A faint irritation came into her voice. “Dad was a better actor than the cut-and-dried, two-dimensional type character you saw on the screen. But we were talking about Bianca, Captain Corrigan.”

“Did she have many friends?”

She seemed to hesitate. “I hate gossiping.…”

“If there’s any truth in it, I want to hear it.”

“I’ve seen and heard only hints, nothing I can prove.…”

“But they’ve given you an opinion. What is it?”

She made a vague gesture. “I don’t think he wants her to have friends.”

“By ‘he’ you mean her husband?”

Jean nodded. “Vincent would like people to believe she’s still not well. It would be convenient for him if she became a nervous wreck. I know that’s an awful thing to say about anybody—”

“Do you believe it’s true, Miss Ainsley?”

“It’s only my opinion, Captain, but I think Mrs. Lessard is getting back on the track more and more each day. Her outlook is steadying, her judgment and assessment of people, places, and events around her.”

“I gather that you don’t like Vincent Lessard.”

“Really, Captain, don’t ask me to discuss things like that. I’ve said too much already.”

“You’ve answered me,” said Corrigan, smiling. “When did you last see Bianca Lessard?”

“A week ago, I think. Funny, she failed to keep a luncheon appointment with me. She was beginning to show a healthy interest in the Fielding enterprises, and it was my impression she wanted my advice as to how she could take a more active part. But for some reason she didn’t keep our date.”

“Did she phone you?”

“No, Vincent did. He said they’d had a tiff the previous evening and if Bianca showed up for lunch would I please phone him. When she didn’t appear, I called him, and he said she must have forgotten—in her ‘state of mind,’ as he put it—and for me to forget it, too.” She gave Corrigan a sudden penetrating look. “Where is Bianca, Mr. Corrigan?”

“Then you don’t know?” Corrigan said, watching her.

“No, but a child could tell that something’s happened,” Jean burst out. “First, Vincent’s request to phone him immediately if I heard anything from Bianca. Next, inquiries by a mysterious man named Chuck Baer. Finally, you. Captain, I admire and respect Bianca and consider her my friend. She had the guts to face her tragedy and do what had to be done. She’s a fine and sensitive person, and I know something’s happened to her, and I think you’re being cruel playing cat and mouse with me!”

So Corrigan, who was a working cop, said cruelly, “There’s the body of a woman believed to have been in her mid-twenties in the city morgue. We have reason to think that it may be Bianca Fielding Lessard’s.”

He kept watching her. It had come as a blow to her, all right. She actually went white. That was what shock did, and it took an almightly able actor to simulate it.

He half got out of his chair. But she shook her head at him. “I’ll be all right. Just give me a second.”

Corrigan studied her fight for calm. Her breathing evened gradually. Some color came back to her face. If it was an act, she deserved an Academy Award.

“May be Bianca?” she echoed. “How is it you’re not sure?”

“I don’t think,” said Corrigan, “you’d care for the details.”

“Oh,” she said faintly, and the color receded.

“The point is, so far we’ve not been able to come up with a physical identification, Miss Ainsley, because of the condition of the body.”

“Then what made you think it was Bianca’s?”

“The woman was wearing an unusual silver ring. Her husband says the ring was his wife’s.”

“I know the ring. A Mayan motif. But if she was wearing it, it must be … Bianca.”

“It would seem so. On the other hand, it’s hardly conclusive as an ID. I mean, there’s no question that it’s Mrs. Lessard’s ring—”

“What you mean is that the ring might have been lost or stolen and turned up on someone else’s finger.”

Corrigan smiled at her. “You’re quick, Miss Ainsley. That’s just what I mean.”

“Poor, poor woman.” The girl’s voice was quiet; she was making no production of her anxiety. Or was it possible she was thinking of the mutilated nobody on the slab—who in same way or other had got hold of Bianca Lessard’s Mayan ring and so involved herself in the other woman’s life? (Or death?)

“Miss Ainsley,” Corrigan asked, “can you think of any detail of identification, however insignificant-seeming, that might help us?”

“I can’t recall a single blemish on Bianca,” Jean said, shaking her head. “But then, of course, I never saw her nude.” This time she colored slightly. “But Vincent—”

“He couldn’t help us.”

She was silent. Corrigan wondered what this clear-eyed girl was thinking. Finally he said, “I suppose your work here will be complicated by Mrs. Lessard’s disappearance.”

“Not any,” the girl said dryly. “Vincent spared Bianca the irksome business details. It seems she wasn’t up to handling them, according to him. In fact, he got her to assign him a full power of attorney right after the honeymoon. He’s a very considerate man.”

Corrigan received the news without expression. But it jolted him. He had been operating on the theory that Lessard was behind the disappearance of Bianca Fielding. But if he had her power of attorney, the theory weakened. Unless, of course, as she pulled herself out of her disturbed state she had come to see him for what he was, and had threatened to rescind his legal authority over the business, or was actually about to do so.

Corrigan rose. “I won’t take up any more of your time, Miss Ainsley. You’ve been very helpful.”

“I don’t see how.”

He smiled down at her. “You wouldn’t want me to reveal all my girlish secrets, would you? Thanks again. I assume you won’t mind my calling on you further, if it becomes necessary?”

“Mind! Of course not, Captain.” She was on her feet; too. “Any hour of the day or night.”

She put out her hand, and Corrigan took it. It felt warm and eager, like a puppy, in his paw. He left with reluctance. Quite a girl, he thought. He hadn’t been so taken with a female for a long, long time.

On his way through the reception room Frances Weatherly gave him another dark look. He ignored her. Her time would come.

In the elevator Corrigan’s thoughts turned from Jean Ainsley to her father … Carlton Ainsley. Some sort of criminal action. Hadn’t he done time in California? Corrigan made a mental note to look it up.

In the lobby of the building, Corrigan sought out a phone booth, called headquarters, and requested a report from the West Coast.

California’s reply was brought to his desk shortly after he got back to his office.

Name of Subject: Carlton Ainsley.

Subjects Address at Time of Arrest: 1102 Willowshaven Drive, Woodland Hills, California.

Subject’s Occupation: Actor.

Charge: Grand Larceny, Conspiracy. (Latter charge dropped.)

Arresting Officers: Dennison Coles, Sergeant, and Howard B. Blalock, Detective First Grade.

Presiding Judge: Lamont Hathway Tillison, Circuit Judge, Los Angeles County.

Verdict: Guilty.

Sentence: 7 to 10. Reduced to 5 yrs., good behavior.

Version of Crime: Subject conspired with one Lawrence Robertson to raise funds for the alleged purpose of forming a production company which would produce motion pictures for commercial exhibition, subject to star in said productions.

Subject used his name and reputation in the motion picture industry to influence friends and the general public to invest in the scheme. Subject caused to be prepared brochures and statements to the press as to prospects for securing production facilities, such as sound stages, technical crews, etc., and facilities for release of completed motion pictures.

As a direct result of his efforts, subject caused the investment of $183,000 in the venture. Suspicions were aroused when an investor, unable to locate Lawrence Robertson, learned that Robertson had disappeared from California. Warrants were subsequently issued on two counts. Subject was charged with Grand Larceny and a Conspiracy whereby one conspirator, Lawrence Robertson, would clandestinely remove funds from the United States and rendezvous with subject later for a division of said funds.

At his trial, subject claimed that he had been used as a dupe by Lawrence Robertson. But no gounds for rescinding his legal liability were found.

A year after subject’s sentence to San Quentin, the body of an American, certified as dead from a heart attack, was found in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The dead man’s fingerprints were subsequently identified as Lawrence Robertson’s. The missing funds have not been located as of this date.

Upon his release from San Quentin, subject was met by his daughter, Jean Ainsley. She informed authorities that she was taking her father to New York City, where she had found employment, in order to afford subject a fresh start.

Our records show no further criminal activity on part of subject. Our last information was to effect that he was still residing in New York City.

Fingerprint classification follows. Advise if further information needed.

Corrigan dropped the report on his desk and sat thinking. Jean Ainsley loomed larger in his thoughts than the actor. Corrigan imagined how she must have felt, leaving California when her father was imprisoned. When she joined Fielding Realty, her job had been more than just a job. It had been a safety valve, a means of escape. No wonder her rise in the company had been so spectacular. Now, years later, she had brought her father to New York, constituting herself his backstop, his picker-upper. Remembering those hazel eyes, that warm little hand, Corrigan could not think of Carlton Ainsley with sympathy. He felt irritated by his own lack of objectivity, and welcomed the tinkle of his phone.

“Corrigan.”

“Doctor Samuelson, Tim. I’ve got some prelim stuff on the Jane Doe that was picked up wearing the Mayan ring.”

Corrigan pricked up his ears. “Yes, Doc?”

“First, the conclusion arising from the circumstances in which the body was found holds true. She was dead before she was dropped in the sewer. Second, Tim, she was drowned.”

“Drowned?”

“No question about it. But not in the place where she was found. Get the picture. When the sewer man went underground, he discovered her remains slumped against the curved wall of the concrete drain, crumpled backward. The feet and the lower part of the legs were in shallow water. Her head and torso were clear.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Positive. Of course, you could argue that somebody opened the manhole, carried her down while she was still alive, drowned her, then arranged her body in the position in which it was found. But that would be pretty far out, Tim.”

“It certainly would. Drowned.…”

“She was drowned somewhere else, then carried to the manhole and dropped in the sewer in an effort at disposal. If she’d been dropped in a main line, the rush of water would eventually have carried her all the way to the East River.”

“It would have to have been done at night,” Corrigan said thoughtfully. “A man couldn’t go walking about Manhattan in the daytime with a body across his shoulder, find a likely manhole, and stop traffic until he’d disposed of his burden.”

“Man, or a strong woman,” Dr. Samuelson said.

“When did all this happen, Doc?”

“Eighty or ninety hours ago. Can’t pinpoint the hour after so long a time. By the way, it’s my educated guess that the body was disposed of while it was still warm, before rigor mortis set in.”

“Sounds to me like a bathtub job.”

“Me too. If she’d drowned in the river, it would have been easier to sink her body with weights than haul her over to a sewer. Just for ducks, though, I’m going to do a complete analysis of sections of her lung tissue. Meanwhile—I hope you’re up to another unpleasant surprise, Tim—the dead girl may not be Bianca Fielding Lessard after all.”

Here we go, Corrigan thought.

“I’ve got an old biddy over here name of Anna Gavin,” Doc Samuelson said. “She says the dead girl is her daughter Nancy.”

5

Samuelson entered his office a few minutes after Corrigan got there. The pathologist wore a green surgical smock and skullcap, a surgical mask dangling. He was flexing his fingers as if he had just stripped off a pair of rubber gloves.

He chose a cigar from the humidor on his cluttered desk, lit it, puffed with enjoyment, and asked, “Know anything about Anna Gavin, Tim?”

“I remember that years ago there was an avant-garde poetess by that name.”

“Ever read any of her so-called poetry?”

“I’ll have to confess to a flaw in my cultural background,” Corrigan said.

Samuelson grinned. “You didn’t miss anything. Her crazy poems were never taken seriously by anybody except herself. Her philosophy of life seemed to be that death was the only true beauty, or some such garbage. According to her, everybody ought to go out in one grand explosion of riotous living.”

“Sounds like just another kook,” Corrigan said. “I suppose she practiced what she preached, with the poetry her excuse.”

“Yes, but she loused up her act. She didn’t go out in a burst of glory, she fizzled like a paper match on 57th Street and Broadway. So, Timmy boy, be prepared.”

Samuelson led the way to a dim and dusty anteroom he used for storage. “She refused to wait in my office,” he explained. “It seems sunshine is a dirty word, or hurts her eyes, or something.”

Corrigan had to peer in the dimness of the storage room. He saw what looked like a bundle of twigs wrapped in rags, but it turned out to be a tiny withered old woman sitting on the edge of a broken office chair.

“Miss Gavin,” Dr. Samuelson said, “this is Captain Corrigan. I was telling you about him, remember?”

She peered up at Corrigan with weak, watery eyes which she brushed at continually with the bleached knuckles of her right claw. The filthy cotton dress she wore was too big for her; it was held together with rusty safety pins. Her face, probably dainty once, had so shriveled and shrunk that Corrigan was reminded of the prized possession of a headhunter. It was topped with a tangle of wiry gray hair. The whole incredible creature was surrounded by the smell of stale wine and neglected old age.

A wavering glint came into the aqueous eyes. “Oh, yes, I remember. He’s the one who’ll find out what happened to my Nancy.” Her voice was like the squeaking of mice.

“Yes, Miss Gavin. And you’ve got to tell him everything you can remember about Nancy.”

“She was my daughter.” The old woman squinted up at Corrigan uncertainly. “I never was sure who her father was. Not that it mattered. Marriage is a trap designed to stifle the spirit. I wrote a lovely poem about it. If I could recall the opening line, I’d recite the poem to you. Oh, damn, I can’t.”

“Why don’t we save it for later?” Samuelson said gently. “Right now, tell us about Nancy.”

“What’s there to tell? She was a sickly kid, a brat. Always underfoot, always needing attention. People used to stick their noses in and tell me to my face I was a lousy mother. Who asked to be a mother?”

Anna Gavin traced the faded pattern of her dress with a a skeleton’s fingertip. “I don’t feel well,” she whined. “I need a drink. Just a little pick-me-up to settle my stomach. What do you say, Doc?”

“I’m sorry,” Doc said, “we don’t have any. But we won’t keep you long. Just until you’ve told us all about Nancy.”

“She ran off, is what she did. When she got big enough she threw things at me. Stole money from me. Then she started taking up with men. One night she cursed me and went away.”

“What night was that?” Corrigan asked.

The old woman looked at him blankly.

“I’m Corrigan,” he reminded her. “You were about to tell us when Nancy left you.”

“A long time ago.”

“How long? One year? Five? Ten?”

“Maybe ten.” Anna made an I-don’t-care gesture with her hand. “She was fifteen. That’s right, the man was three times her age. Forty-five. Ten years ago. Yes, ten. I remember now.”

“And you haven’t seen her since?”

“No. Nancy is dead. I know she’s dead. I’ve written a poem about it.” She fumbled over her person, then shook her head. “I think I wrote it I intended to write it. Had the opening couplet all worked out in my mind. Can’t remember.…”

“Do you know how—in what manner—she died?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know she’s dead?”

“You bastard! Bastard! Bastard!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. Her shriveled face lit up like a torch. “Calling Anna Gavin a liar! Bastard!”

“Miss Gavin,” Corrigan began.

“You’re common, filthy fuzz! That’s what you are! Police brutality! You hit old women over the head with saps! You run your horses into innocent people!” Her invective turned scatological. Corrigan patiently heard her out. Finally, she jumped out of the broken chair. “I’m Anna Gavin. People come to sit at my feet and listen. They’re giving me a party!”

She sprang to the doorway, rage putting strength into her knees and straightening her spine. There she paused. She began to cry like a child. But then she stopped and struggled to focus on Corrigan.

“The party,” she whimpered. “It isn’t tonight?”

“No,” Corrigan said. “The party was a long time ago.”

She sucked in her lips, pushed them out peevishly. “What the hell. I’ll go find a drink.”

“Good idea,” Corrigan said. “May I go with you?” He nodded at Samuelson and took her arm; it felt like a bird’s leg. “We’ll talk some more about Nancy, shall we?”

“Nancy’s dead.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. A year ago I knew. I was sick. Oh, so sick. And she never came back to me. She was my daughter and she is dead and I’m alone.”

“Do you know where Nancy was living, who her friends were?”

“No, only that she went away and died.”

Corrigan let the old woman go. She lived, he assumed, by the grace of Welfare and street handouts. One day she would be put away for good, or found dead in a bug-infested bed.

Corrigan expelled the stench of Anna Gavin from his nostrils, along with a feeling of depression, and turned back to Samuelson. The pathologist was resting his buttocks on the edge of an old desk.

“Okay,” Corrigan said, “you had a reason for calling me over to talk to this crackpot. How many times has Anna Gavin been here to identify her dead daughter?”

“Twice at least,” Samuelson said placidly. “She comes around when she gets hold of a newspaper and learns that a girl of Nancy’s size and age is in the morgue.”

“But this time is different.”

“This time she came by invitation.”

“Yours?”

“Who else?”

“Why?” Corrigan asked.

“Because one of the morgue men remembered a detail. Last time Anna Gavin was here and we were trying to get her out of our hair, the old girl mentioned a birthmark. A growth on Nancy’s right shoulder, just above the shoulderblade. That was a new note.”

“I don’t remember anything about a growth on Jane Doe’s shoulder.”

“Because there isn’t any,” retorted the pathologist. “But there is something—at that exact spot. It’s a surgical scar, very faint, almost indistinguishable. The kind of scar that might have been left by a G.P. who removed the growth in his office, depriving some impoverished surgeon of a fee.”

Corrigan stared at him. “That doesn’t make Jane Doe Nancy Gavin in my book, Doc.”

“That’s your business. Mine is to mention it.”

“Of course, it’s possible.”

Samuelson said nothing. He seemed miffed.

“Somewhere along the line one of Nancy’s men may have given her a few dollars to get herself deblemished. One of the choosier kind.”

“I point out,” said Doc Samuelson, “that Jane Doe is in the correct age range. I’ve already checked with Vital Statistics on the Gavin girl’s birth record.”

“I wonder,” said Corrigan, paying no attention to the pathologist’s stiff tone, “how reliable anything the old woman says is.”

“I wouldn’t know. You’re the great detective.”

“Oh, come off it, Doc.”

Samuelson seemed mollified. “Who knows what the old woman knows or doesn’t know? She’s probably anile. A bundle of short circuits. Her liver and kidneys are undoubtedly shot—”

“All I’m concerned with is her brain.”

“You heard her. The persistent certainty that the girl is dead, based on no facts whatever. But this business of the growth … it’s not the same thing. I’m inclined to believe it.”

“So am I. When can I expect a report?”

“When I get around to it.”

“I’m in a hurry, Doc.”

“That,” said Samuelson, “is the story of my life.”

At the door Corrigan said, “By the way, I’d appreciate it if you stalled off the newsmen. There’s been no leak yet that Bianca Fielding Lessard may be involved. Play the Jane Doe bit for all it’s worth.”

“What do you think I am,” the pathologist said, “a first-year man? Go peddle your papers, Tim, and let me get back to work.”

Back at his office near the Main Office Squadroom, Corrigan sought out his typewriter. In the streets below, the homegoing rush hour was in full cry, but not for cops. The old building on Centre Street whirred and jangled as if it were ten o’clock in the morning. Corrigan was so used to it that he did not even hear the noise.

He typed out his report and addressed it to the Inspector who was his immediate superior. The report concluded with: “Assignment of at least two detectives will immediately be made for the purpose of tracing said Nancy Gavin from the time of her alleged disappearance.”

Corrigan pulled the sheet from his typewriter, signed it, and reached for the telephone.

Chuck Baer seemed short of breath, as if he had left his office, heard the ringing of his phone, and rushed back to answer it.

“What’s up, Tim?”

“Vincent Lessard may still be your client instead of a sitting duck.”

“Talk English. There’s a new wrinkle in Jane Doe’s ID?”

“That’s right. Bianca Fielding Lessard may not be in the morgue after all.”

“How come? What about that Mayan ring?”

“I’m damned if I know,” Corrigan confessed. “Has Lessard ever mentioned a girl named Nancy Gavin, Chuck?”

“Not to me. Who is she?”

“I can’t answer a question about her yet. Apparently a tart, or easy pickings if she’s playing respectable. I don’t even know where she lived. But she might have been the kind to appeal to a man like Lessard.”

“Jane Doe is this Nancy Gavin?”

“Could be. If so, I want to know how she got hold of that Mayan ring, and who kept her company during the final day or night she wore it.”

“Sounds as if you’re asking me to do some extracurricular snooping, Tim. Why don’t you have one of your boys handle it?”

“Because Lessard may go dead cautious if the name is first put to him officially.”

“You’re still suspicious of him.”

“I just don’t know,” said Corrigan.

“Well, I’m seeing him this evening. To pick up my fee. If I pull this on him, he’ll probably ask me to keep going.”

“Let him. You’re my secret weapon.”

“I don’t know,” said Baer. “I don’t like this playing two sides of the street, Tim.”

“Look,” Corrigan said. “He’s paying you to do a job, and you’re doing it. That doesn’t mean you’re married to him, Chuck. Of course, if you’d rather not—”

“Oh, go to hell. How about a briefing on this possible new ID?”

“Just tell Lessard that an old woman’s come in, as a result of which there are now doubts that the body is Mrs. Lessard’s. That the old woman claims the body is her daughter’s. Then, without seeming to make a point of it, work your way around to Nancy Gavin.”

“Are you going to tell me how to do a job?” Baer grumbled.

“Chuck, Chuck. If Lessard doesn’t open up to you, he may find himself being raked over. In a way you’ll be doing your client a favor.”

“Oh, sure,” said Baer. “Stop sweet-talking me, Tim. I said I’d do it, didn’t I? Only I don’t have to like it.”

“Of course you don’t,” Corrigan said. “Check with me in the morning?”

6

Baer was on deck before 10 A.M., mopping the sweat from his heavy jaw. He found Corrigan in the MOS squadroom taking his coffee break. With the big man at his heels, Corrigan retired to his office.

“Lessard scores zero on Nancy Gavin,” Baer said. “And I’m pretty sure he wasn’t conning me. He’d never heard the name before, he said.”

“He keep you on the case?”

Baer nodded. “But God’s gift to off-Broadway didn’t like it.”

“Frances Weatherly?” Corrigan asked.

“She was there when I got to the Lessard place. Looked to me as if they’d had a fight. Maybe Lessard figures his yen for this scribbling sexpot is costing him.”

“What’s your next move, Chuck?”

Baer shrugged. “I’d hit a dead end when Jane Doe turned up at the morgue. I haven’t got a lead on Bianca.”

“Jean Ainsley said you visited her office.”

“I’ve been everywhere. For all the progress I’ve made, Bianca might just as well have dissolved the night she walked out on that crumb. If this Jane Doe turns out to be Nancy Gavin, I’m right back where I was—nowhere.”

The phone on the desk rang. Corrigan picked it up and said, “Corrigan.”

“Munthe.” Munthe was with Missing Persons.

“What’s with you, Munnie?”

“Busy-busy-busy. That story in the papers last night about the body in the sewer has landed it right in our laps, as usual. We’ve already had no less than four inquiries about the dead girl.”

Corrigan came alert. Although in a city of over eight million people four inquiries about an unidentified body was not up to par—there would probably be three or four more before the day was out—it was always possible that one of them was playing the course legitimately. The trouble in this ID was that there was so little to identify. Jane Doe might well be the chick whose mama phoned in that she hadn’t been home for the better part of a week. Or some lightfooted love of a wet-eared Lothario who preferred to believe that she was dead rather than admit to himself that she had gone off to shack up with a new swinger.

“One of them,” Munthe of MP said, “sounds promising, Tim. A Peggy Simpson; she’s waiting right now with the desk sergeant.”

“What’s her beef?”

“She waltzes in and says her roommate’s turned up missing. She saw the story about the body in the morgue and thinks she ought to have a look.”

“What’s promising about that?”

“Wait a minute, will you? First thing, this Simpson girl says her roomie’s been missing five days. That figures out. Also she gives a description that fits in pretty well with Jane Doe.”

“That description would fit thousands of women in this town,” Corrigan said. He wasn’t being difficult; he wanted to get the feel of this one.

“Yes, but Simpson comes up with a detail, Tim. Her roomie, she says, was slicing some cold cuts a couple of nights before she disappeared. The knife slipped and she cut the thumb on her left hand. A pretty good gash about half an inch across where the thumb joins the hand.

“So I call the morgue. I tell one of Doc’s assistants to take a look at Jane Doe’s left thumb and report back what he sees. He goes and looks and sees a cut right where Peggy Simpson said. You with it, Captain?”

“Maybe I’m a jump ahead,” Corrigan grunted. It was pure hunch. “Let’s see if I can pull her roommate’s name out of my hat. The roomie’s initials are N.G.”

“What are you, a magician or something?” Munthe demanded. “Or did you get prior information on this?”

“Neither. It’s my radar. I take it, then, that the missing roomie’s name is Nancy Gavin.”

To Corrigan’s astonishment Munthe laughed. “You sure gave me a turn there, Captain. You should have quit while you were ahead.”

“What d’ye mean?”

“This Peggy Simpson’s roommate’s name is Noreen Gardner.”

“Oh,” said Corrigan. Could Nancy Gavin have changed her name? Why not? But it did seem like a long shot. He sighed. “What’s the dope on this Gardner girl?”

“She’s a young off-Broadway actress. We’ve got a pretty full story on her—we’ve been interrogating this Peggy Simpson—giving her the treatment—for nearly an hour, since she came up with that cut-thumb detail.”

“Don’t fry her any more,” Corrigan said sharply. “Have a matron take her to a comfortable office downstairs. See if she needs a sandwich, or wants some coffee. I’ll talk to her right away.”

Corrigan hung up and rose. “A third ID,” he told Chuck Baer. “Now she’s an actress named Noreen Gardner.”

“Who says so?”

“Her roommate. I’m going to talk to her. Want to come along?”

“You kidding?” Baer pushed himself to his feet. “We get further from Bianca all the time,” he complained.

As they rode the elevator down, Corrigan’s mind explored possibilities. A double or even triple tentative identification was not unique. Most multiple IDs resulted from honest mistakes. People were hardly at their best, going into a morgue to view the mutilated or contorted remains of someone with whom they were emotionally involved. Corrigan knew cases in which an overwrought claimant had wrongly identified a male corpse as a female. Nearly all such IDs were resolved by patient police work.

So while this Jane Doe was not unique in posing a problem of three different identifications, she did present a twist. Three details. An unusual ring, a growth, a cut on a thumb.

A queer thought flashed into Corrigan’s head. The Three Faces of Eve. It was a book about a multiple personality that he had read with interest and a steadily dwindling skepticism. Multiple personality—different personalities occupying the same human body—seemed to be a well-established fact of abnormal psychology, although he was aware that some authorities pooh-poohed it Could Jane Doe have been such a multiple personality?

It took courage even to pursue this outrageous theory, but Corrigan stuck to it. Life—an official life like his—was full of surprises.

He knocked out Bianca Fielding Lessard at once. Her physical history was readily separable from that of the other two.

But how about Nancy Gavin—N.G.—and Noreen Gardner—N.G.?

In the end, Corrigan decided to abandon the outré theory. If Nancy Gavin and Noreen Gardner occupied the same body, it was not because “they” were a multiple personality. A far simpler explanation presented itself.

Noreen Gardner might well be the same girl who had cursed her kookie mother and walked out of her home, such as it was, at the age of fifteen, to shack up with some man who apparently liked to live dangerously. Under the circumstances, it was not improbable that Nancy would be moved to change her name, if only to make it harder for Anna Gavin to trace her. That would explain the identical initials. It was a commonplace of such tragedies that the subject changing her name still clung to a vestige of her original identity.

The hang-up here was Bianca Lessard. If Noreen Gardner and Nancy Gavin were the same, and if Noreen-Nancy was the Jane Doe in the morgue, what was she doing wearing Bianca Lessard’s Mayan ring? How had she come by it?

And—again, and again, and again—where was Bianca?

Corrigan’s first impression of Peggy Simpson was on the negative side. His own taste in women tended toward female strength, and the Simpson girl was fragile, a pretty little thing whose prettiness seemed superficial, like a prop at a bal masque. Her one asset of genuine beauty was her hair, a thick honey-gold that to his practiced eye was innocent of dye or tint.

But her chief liability in his eyes was not physical. There was an eagerness to please about her that was almost fawning. Brown-noses were among Corrigan’s pet dislikes. He especially disliked the female of the breed.

After the police matron made a discreet exit from the office at a nod from Corrigan, he offered Peggy Simpson a cigarette, lit it for her, eyed Chuck Baer to a chair beyond the girl’s line of sight, and said, “Tell me about yourself, Miss Simpson.”

She seemed surprised. “About me? But I’m not important, Captain Corrigan. It’s Noreen who is. She’s the one with talent. It wouldn’t make any difference to the world if I disappeared, but in Noreen’s case—if anything’s happened to her—there would be a real loss.” She had a fragile voice, too, with just the suggestion of a whine.

Baer’s glance at Corrigan over the girl’s head said: She’s not for real. I don’t believe it.

Corrigan said with a smile, “Let me be the judge of that, Miss Simpson. You’re an actress, too, aren’t you?”

“I want to be. Very much. I can’t imagine anything more wonderful than being even a tiny part of the theater.”

It sounded infantile to Corrigan. He had nothing against the theater, and the hard work that went into it, but he had run across too many of the fringe groups that were drawn to it because it represented a dream come true. They had a need, not to fulfill, but to escape.

“How long have you known Noreen Gardner?”

“Oh, about six months,” the girl said.

“May I ask how you happened to meet her?”

“I first saw her in one of Frances Weatherly’s plays. Have you ever seen a Weatherly play?”

“I’m afraid not,” Corrigan said.

“They’re out of this world.” Which is why, of course, Corrigan said silently, you’re attracted to them. “They cut right to the depraved core of what human beings really are. You come out afterward and the sunlight isn’t quite real after what you’ve seen on the stage.”

“Were you in that play, Miss Simpson?”

She stared at him as if questioning his sanity. “I? Of course not. I’m not ready for a Weatherly play—I’m years away, years of study and soul-searching.”

“Soul-searching,” Corrigan said gravely. “I don’t think I get that, Miss Simpson.”

“Oh, I’m so inarticulate! You see, Frances Weatherly gets so close to the real reality that she seems unreal to those who don’t understand her. And that extends to the actors, too—those who aren’t ready, I mean.” She went on and on. Behind her, Baer shifted his bulk restlessly.

“I take it that Noreen Gardner was one of the actors who was ready for a Weatherly play?”

“It was made for her, Captain Corrigan. She was herself. Such a wonderfully free spirit.”

“Hold it,” Chuck Baer said. “What is a wonderfully free spirit?”

Peggy Simpson turned all the way around to look at the private detective. “A free spirit, Mr. Baer, is a person who kicks over the silly rules that ruin the lives of ordinary people.” She was about to go on when Corrigan stopped her.

“If you weren’t in the play, how did you meet Miss Gardner and become well enough acquainted to share an apartment?”

“Travers Proehl, the producer, was a mutual acquaintance. I come from a little factory town in the Midwest My father didn’t understand or appreciate the things I wanted to do. We had terrible scenes. I finally took off for New York, met Travers Proehl, and paid him for dramatic coaching whenever he could spare the time. Through him I met Frances Weatherly and Noreen Gardner. I was so lucky. Noreen and I hit it off right away. It was she who suggested we share an apartment.”

“Who footed the bills?” Corrigan asked wearily.

The Simpson girl’s brows drew together. “I did, of course. It was a privilege just to be near such a talent.” Incredibly, the girl began to cry. “If she’s gone … her voice stilled forever.…” Corrigan could hardly believe his ears. As for Chuck Baer, he took out a cigar and began to chomp on it with disgust.

“When did you see Noreen last?” Corrigan said.

“Five nights ago.”

“Why didn’t you report her absence sooner?”

“I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t alarmed at first. Sometimes she spent a night or two with a man.”

“Any man in particular?”

“Travers Proehl, at least for a while.”

“Not recently?”

“She’d met some other man,” Peggy Simpson said. “I don’t know who. She was kind of secretive and pleased about it. She said this new man was going to do big things for her in the theater. She’d developed a hostile attitude toward Travers and Frances. Travers didn’t like it.”

“Oh?”

“He’s very jealous. Noreen deliberately provoked him sometimes, just to get slapped around. When he … she.…”

“Yes, Miss Simpson?”

“When he slapped her around, she seemed to want to take her clothes off for him.” She flushed.

“Did he use a whip?” Chuck Baer growled.

The girl said stiffly, “I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Did Noreen leave your place with Travers Proehl five nights ago?” Corrigan asked.

“No, she left alone. I think she was meeting the other—the new—man. Travers dropped in at the apartment later that night. He’d been drinking, and he acted—well—ugly. He said he ought to find Noreen and kill her, he’d be doing the world a favor. I was scared to death.”

“Because of his threat?”

“Well, of course! Wouldn’t anyone be?”

“Then why didn’t you report Noreen’s failure to come home? I mean right away?”

“You misunderstand me. I wasn’t scared that Travers would carry out his threat against Noreen. He always says things like that. I was afraid he’d start beating up on me. He’s quite capable of it.”

Corrigan was getting tired of Peggy Simpson’s egocentricity. “When did you get alarmed by her faliure to show up?”

“The third day. She’d never gone off so long without at least phoning me to do something or other for her. I looked for Travers and found him and asked if he’d seen her. He looked at me as if I were a bug.”

“Did he say he’d seen her?”

“He didn’t say anything. He just got up and walked out of the bar.”

“What did you do then, Miss Simpson?”

“I decided to hunt up Frances Weatherly and ask her. It wasn’t anything I looked forward to. Fran always makes me feel stupid and sort of—you know—Middle West.”

“Miss Simpson,” Corrigan said. “You sought out Frances Weatherly and you asked her if she’d seen or heard from Noreen. What did she say?”

It appeared that the playwright had a barn of a studio not far from Peggy Simpson’s apartment in the Village. Peggy had gone there in fear and trembling and had been received graciously for a change. Apparently the Weatherly woman had always regarded Peggy Simpson as “being in Noreen’s camp.”

“Noreen and Miss Weatherly didn’t get along?” Corrigan asked sharply. Peggy Simpson’s reply was that “geniuses clash.” He felt like throwing up his hands. They now had to listen to a rambling analysis of the difference between Frances Weatherly’s temperament and Noreen Gardner’s. It seemed that Frances was artistically demanding and Noreen hated rehearsals. Frances would insist on Noreen’s coming to the Weatherly studio to go over lines and business endlessly, to Noreen’s irritation. According to Frances, “You are a great talent, but you haven’t any more discipline than a runaway express train.” Noreen felt that Fran was simply trying to make her life miserable. And so on and so on.

“But Noreen and Fran and Proehl made a tremendous combination. If only they’d managed to get Fran’s new play in a Fielding theater uptown, man, would the critics have seen something!”

Corrigan tried once more to bring the girl back to the business at hand.

“You haven’t answered my question, Miss Simpson. Had Miss Weatherly seen Noreen? Did she know anything about Noreen’s whereabouts or movements since the last time you saw your roomie?”

“No,” the girl said. “In fact, at first Fran thought I was bringing her a message from Noreen. This was … let’s see … yesterday. She hadn’t seen Noreen in a week, she said. I explained that Noreen had dropped out of sight. She was very angry. Kept raving about Noreen’s ‘irresponsibility,’ things like that.”

“This new man Noreen had met,” Corrigan said, “the one who was going to do so much for her in the theater. Did you discuss him?”

“Frances knew no more about him than I did. We both thought that Noreen’s meeting this man is what made her change her attitude toward all of us. Then people began to drop in—Vincent Lessard, Travers Proehl, one or two others—and Fran couldn’t talk any more. Nobody was paying any attention to me, so I slipped away. Went home and—well—cried.”

You’re a weeper, all right, Corrigan thought. He glanced over at Chuck Baer, who was making signs, thumb jerks, toward the door, with a scowl that said, “Get rid of this broad or I’ll throw up right here.”

So, after eliciting the further information that, on reading the papers about the unknown girl found in the sewer, Peggy Simpson had decided to come to the police with her story, Corrigan got rid of her.

7

During her short residence in New York, Bianca Fielding Lessard had occupied a town house on the upper East Side.

Corrigan turned Car 40, NYPD, off Park Avenue onto a side street where a few genuine trees actually cast a little shade. Oh for a million bucks, he thought, as he nosed around a curbed brute of a Mercedes being worked over with a dust cloth by a uniformed chauffeur. Corrigan parked the police car before the entrance, and he and Chuck Baer got out and looked the building over.

The pile of gray stone looked like turn-of-the-century. Its façade had had a recent scrubdown. It oozed riches.

They walked over to the street-level door, a black, brassstudded monster, and Corrigan fingered the bell. A manservant in a white coat promptly opened the door.

“I’m Captain Corrigan. Mr. Lessard is expecting me.”

“This way, sir.”

They followed the man through a foyer displaying a few pieces of 19th century sculpture, and into a high-ceilinged living room. This room, too, had been done over, in cheerful colors, with light modern furniture. There were flowers on the mantel above the Italian marble fireplace. Even with the shutters closed and the artificial lighting, there was a feeling of airiness about it, and no pretentiousness at all. Corrigan was quite ready to leap to the conclusion that this was a reflection of Bianca Fielding Lessard, not the beautiful-eyed husband who rose to meet them. Lessard cheapened the room. He didn’t belong here, Corrigan thought. He still doesn’t.

“Drink?” Lessard said. When Corrigan and Baer declined, the man said, “If you don’t mind.… Sit down, gentlemen.”

He opened a lowboy cabinet, took out a bottle of twelve-year-old Scotch, and poured himself a long one, neat He was sweating lightly. He drank the whiskey as if it were his best friend.

“This thing about the identification … Mr. Baer told me last night.… Quite a jolt, Captain.”

“Because your wife may not be dead?” Corrigan said.

He expected a hot denial. But Lessard had evidently prepared himself. “Of course we pay you people to be suspicious. No, that’s not why. There are pleasant shocks, too, you know. Have you turned up anything on this Nancy Gavin?”

“Not yet.”

Baer said to his client, “Captain Corrigan passed the assignment along to the experts this morning. They’ll start by finding out where and when she was born, and the sawbones who yanked her into the world. Eventually they’ll be able to report what size shoe she wore and if she preferred chop suey to Bok Choy.”

“And, I hope, the name of the maniac who dropped Nancy Gavin into that sewer.”

“If she is Nancy Gavin,” Corrigan said.

Lessard looked blank. Then he paled slightly. He glanced from Corrigan to Baer and back again. “What do you mean, if? Is there any question about it?”

“In a case like this,” Corrigan said, “there are always questions, Mr. Lessard.”

Lessard’s pretty face went from pallor to flush. “See here, Corrigan, I don’t know that I can take much more of this! I went through the horrible ordeal of viewing that—that thing in your morgue and believing it once belonged to my Bianca. Then I was told that maybe a mistake had been made, that it wasn’t Bianca’s. Now you aren’t sure it was Nancy Gavin’s. What’s the matter with you people?”

“We’re not magicians, Mr. Lessard. Do you know a Noreen Gardner?”

Lessard, who had gone over to the lowboy to replenish his glass, hesitated in mid-stride. It was a very short hesitation, but it told the answer to Corrigan’s question. Corrigan knew it, and Lessard knew it. Lessard said, “What’s she got to do with this?”

“You do know her.”

“Well, yes.” He said viciously, “A nympho with sharp teeth. She appeared in Fran Weatherly’s last play, the one that closed recently.”

“We understand she’s on tap for Weatherly’s new play, the one you favor putting into a Fielding theater.”

“Several people favor putting the play into a decent house.”

“Did your wife?”

“I didn’t bother Bianca with a lot of trivia,” Lessard said pettishly.

“Well, I’m afraid you and your playwright playmate may have to look for a new leading lady.”

“Now, see here, Corrigan! I don’t have to listen to your insinuations about me and Fran!”

“Because,” Corrigan said, “the girl in the morgue may be Noreen Gardner.”

“What!” Lessard was literally staggered. He went over to a chair and sat down and put his drink aside and took out his handkerchief and wiped his hands.

“How well did you know Noreen Gardner?”

“I’ve had nothing to do with her, not in the way you mean. Any man could take her for the price of a promise. But not me, friend—not that one. She’s a greedy, grubbing, petty thief who’d steal the label off your necktie if that was the best she could do at the moment. She’s bad news—or was, if she’s dead.”

“Sounds like a mighty sick girl,” Chuck Baer said.

“Are you serious about her petty thievery?” Corrigan asked Lessard.

“I think she’s a kleptomaniac. She’ll lift anything she can lay her hands on. She even eats as if she’s afraid the food will get away from her. She acts as if she grew up having to scrounge in garbage cans.”

“Would she have stolen a ring?”

Lessard stared at him. “Bianca’s ring.…”

“This morning,” Corrigan said, “a girl named Peggy Simpson showed up at Missing Persons and says she thinks the body in the morgue is Noreen Gardner’s. She couldn’t explain the Mayan ring. Can you?”

“I don’t see.…”

“Maybe Noreen was here about the time Bianca disappeared, and had a chance to steal the ring,” suggested Baer.

“No, absolutely not. Noreen’s been here only twice. Once with Travers Proehl, the producer of Fran’s plays, and another time with Travers and Fran when they came here to talk business. The second time was several days before Bianca disappeared. Anyway, as I told you, Bianca wore that ring all the time. I’m sure she was wearing it the night she walked out. Noreen had no chance to sneak the ring.” Lessard squirmed in the chair. “The ring made me so sure.…”

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” Corrigan said. “To the night you last saw Bianca.”

“On the eighth of this month.” Lessard turned to glare at the private detective. “I’ve been all over it with you, Baer.”

“Sometimes you remember a detail afterward,” Baer said. “Something pops into your head.”

“Well, nothing’s popped into my head. And I ask you again—who the hell are you working for, Baer—me or the police department?”

“You hired me for an assignment. The assignment is to locate your wife. How I do it is my business. Yours,” said Baer, sucking on his dead cigar, “is to pay my fee.”

Lessard’s glare faded. He got up and began to walk around. “Of course, of course. It just occurs to me. You may have to go to Europe to find her. Maybe she found New York too much for her, too foreign. She may have decided to go back to where she had friends.”

“Not because New York was too foreign to her,” Corrigan said, watching him. “But because she couldn’t take you and Frances Weatherly. That seems to me a more plausible theory, Mr. Lessard.”

Lessard began to gnaw at his fingernails.

“Did Bianca mention Europe that last evening?”

“No.”

“Can you remember anything during your brawl with her that night that may have some bearing on her intentions?”

Lessard stopped walking and faced Corrigan in a curiously pleading attitude. “You know how these things go. One word leads to another, and before you know it you’re saying things you don’t mean. I remember telling her at one point that she ought to have married some hand-kissing sonofabitch of a European, that he’d have shown her a thing or two about having mistresses. I shouldn’t have said that, but she was making such a thing about Fran and me.…”

“And that’s when she walked out on you?”

“Yes.”

“Did she say anything as she left?”

“No, she just gave me one of those dirty looks women specialize in.” The man actually contrived a groan. “Those eyes of hers! I’ll never forget that look. She picked up her handbag and wrap and ran down the stairs.”

“Did you follow her? Try to stop her?”

“Well, I followed her down, yes. Yelling, I’m afraid. I didn’t really believe she’d walk out. She turned on me in the foyer. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, ‘don’t speak to me, and don’t try to stop me. You and Frances Weatherly deserve each other, and I want you both to know it. I hope you’ll be very happy.’ And she left. She didn’t even bang the front door.”

“And you let it go at that?”

“The hell I did. I was hopping mad, I tell you. The quiet way she shut that door was worse than a kick in the teeth. I ran to the door, yanked it open, and saw her hurrying down the sidewalk. “You crazy fool,’ I called after her, ‘where do you think you’re going?’ She said one thing back at me: ‘I don’t need you for anything, anything!’ Then she went around the corner, and I kicked the door closed. I actually wasn’t too concerned at that time. I figured she’d cool off and come back bawling in a day or two, and the whole thing would be over.”

Corrigan continued to watch him. Under the act he seemed genuinely distressed. With an operator like Lessard it was hard to separate the true from the false sometimes, but this was not one of those times. He wanted Bianca back, all right. Also, he was scared to death. But all this could have a less than innocent explanation. He could have engineered her death and now regretted it.

Baer said, “First thing I did was check out the cab companies, Tim. No dice.”

“She could have walked for blocks, in the state she was in,” Corrigan said. “She might be an item in some cab company time sheet as a fare beginning at an address nowhere near this one.”

“Or an independent picked her up and made no record at all.” Baer’s gaze locked briefly with Corrigan’s.

The message passed between them.

Or she didn’t get into a taxicab at all.

Lessard caught the interchange. He said suddenly, “I know I’m not being much help … but I’ve told you everything I know, Captain. I simply can’t explain the Mayan ring—unless the body is Bianca’s.”

“Well, we can tackle that a different way, a way in which you can help.”

Lessard became suspicious. He was making his glance hold nobly steady, like any honest man, but it was too steady, too honest.

“I? How, Captain?”

“I’d like your permission to let one of our tech men come to the house here to examine some of Mrs. Lessard’s personal things.”

“Oh?” Lessard was like a cornered animal trying to pretend that it was not conscious of the flashlight pinning it down. “What would that be for?”

“I’m referring to a fingerprint man. He’ll dust items it’s likely she alone handled, like a lipstick or compact from one of her purses, a perfume bottle, a cosmetic jar, other things on her dressing table. The toothbrush she was using around the time she walked out. Okay?”

“Naturally,” Lessard said. He had relaxed slightly.

“The object, of course, is to get as full a set of her prints as possible, so that we can match them with the prints of the body in the morgue, what’s left of them. May I use your phone?”

Lessard waved grandly. “Be my guest, Captain.”

8

The black Ford slid into Sullivan Street. A young woman in a knit shirt and toreador pants, wearing her hair in a ponytail, emerged from a delicatessen halfway down the block. In the crook of her right arm, buttocks riding her hipbone, a fat baby happily blinked in the waning sunlight over Greenwich Village. A white-aproned boy carrying a bag of groceries opened the door of a convertible at the curb and deposited the bag behind the front seat. The young woman secured the baby in his car seat and drove off.

Car 40 parked in the space.

Corrigan got out. He checked a store front for the street number, fed the parking meter, and started along the sidewalk.

He found the house a few yards beyond an espresso café. The entrance, its concrete lintel glowering over the sidewalk, was above street level, reached by a short flight of stone steps.

Corrigan walked up to the second floor.

Apartment 2A was at the front of the building. Corrigan was raising a finger to the buzzer when he heard the sounds of a struggle. A soprano scream was cut short. Footsteps rushed toward the door. A man’s voice uttered an obscenity. The footsteps reversed direction.

Corrigan quickly tried the door. It was unlocked. He stepped into Peggy Simpson’s apartment.

The Simpson girl and the gross man he had seen in Jean Ainsley’s outer office accompanying Frances Weatherly were not immediately aware of him. The hulking producer had dragged Peggy Simpson from the door and was forcing her toward an overstuffed chair in the tiny living room.

“You’re hurting me,” she whimpered. “Don’t kill me, Travers. Please.”

“You mindless little crumb,” Travers Proehl panted, “you aren’t worth killing. But you’ve got to be taught a lesson.”

“Let her go,” Corrigan said.

Proehl swiveled the bullet head on his fat neck.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked, staring. He was still stooped over the frightened girl, gripping her arm.

“I said let her go.”

“You—”

Corrigan took two steps. His right hand came up in a blur and the gross man went over backward as if he had been struck by lightning. Corrigan straddled him and frisked him. The man was clean. He pulled back and looked down at the quivering hulk.

“Next time,” Corrigan said, “do what you’re told when you’re told.”

Proehl sat up, messaging his throat. “I remember you now,” he gasped. “The man with eye-patch. I saw you in Jean Ainsley’s office. You’re a police officer.”

“That’s right. Corrigan, of the Main Office Squad. Is this the way you get your kicks, slapping women around?”

Proehl did not reply at once. He scrambeld to his feet, still feeling his throat tenderly. He must have weighed 275 pounds. He was dressed to the nines and had a pink barbershop look. All the same, Corrigan thought, there’s something unscrubbed about him. Unsavory. His restless little eyes had glints of meanness in them, and worse.

When he did answer, it was sullenly. “It isn’t as bad as it looks. I didn’t hurt her.”

“Oh, no?” squealed Peggy Simpson. “Look at my arm!” It was bruised.

“You look at it. I’m sick of it, and you.”

“That’s enough,” Corrigan said. “What’s this all about?”

“He came in and started beating on me,” Peggy Simpson sniveled. “For no reason at all! He’s a crazy man. Crazy, I tell you.”

“No reason?” Proehl snarled; he was still feeling his neck. “I found out she’d been to the police. I wanted to know what kind of tale she’d been carrying. She accused me to my face of killing Noreen Gardner.”

“I didn’t say you meant to kill her,” the girl wept. “I just said you couldn’t keep your hands off her, that you knew you were losing her to some big wheel in the theater she’d met, and maybe you’d lost your head. He always does, Captain Corrigan. He never ended an affair with a girl pleasantly in his life. He’s overpossessive and unreasonably jealous, and he has a homicidal temper.”

Proehl started toward her. Corrigan stepped in front of him.

“Sit down.”

Proehl stood unyieldingly, breathing murder. Corrigan put his fingertips on the enormous chest and applied pressure. The man sat down on a studio couch with a crash.

“Can you account for your whereabouts the night Noreen Gardner disappeared?”

“This is no courtroom!”

“Look,” Corrigan said. “I’ve got too much on my mind to play patty-cake with the likes of you. If you won’t answer my questions here, maybe you’ll change your mind at headquarters. Which will it be?”

“I was seeing a man uptown that night,” Proehl growled, “trying to raise additional backing for the new Weatherly play.”

“You’re trying to hit the big time, is that it?”

“What producer isn’t? I’d give my right arm to produce a Broadway smash. But I didn’t do anything to Noreen Gardner. If she’s really dead, find the operator who was feeding her that line about his important connections in first-line theater. The bastard who turned Noreen against her friends.”

Proehl was pounding the arm of the couch with a big fat fist. Corrigan watched the show for a few moments. Then he said, “Any idea who this man is, Proehl?”

“By God, I wish I had! The snake-tongued sonofabitch is probably married and he’ll spit on Noreen when she palls on him. But she’s too stupid to size him up. Or she doesn’t care.”

“Did Noreen ever mention a Nancy Gavin to you?”

“Nancy Gavin? Never heard.”

“What do you know about Noreen’s background?”

“Who the hell cares about her background? I don’t ask to see their A.K.C. papers.”

“How did you meet her?”

“I was working out of a theater on Bleecker Street. Converted old store building.” Proehl’s little eyes shimmered violently. “Filthy rat’s nest! Trying to make do with makeshift scenery … idiots and kooks to work with! The same damn old miserable story.”

“You met her in this theater?”

Proehl got up and walked heavily to the window, ignoring Peggy Simpson as he passed her. “Noreen answered a casting call. She read for me, and I knew I was in luck. A kid had shown up who could really act. I didn’t ask her any questions about herself, so I can’t tell you anything about her. To a producer a find like Noreen is money in the bank. The only thing I wanted to do was hold on to her.”

Proehl turned from the window. He looked drained suddenly. His jowls sagged. His color was bad. Corrigan had seen many a man who looked like that just before a suicide attempt He’s manic, Corrigan thought. Way up there one minute, in hell the next.

“But you came here to talk to Peggy,” Travers Proehl said. He was quite listless now. “Do you want anything more of me, Captain?”

“We’ll see,” Corrigan said, watching him closely. “For now, no. But stay on tap.”

The gross man laughed. “Where would I go?” he asked, as if the world ended at the bounderies of Manhattan Island. He shuffled to the door, opened it, and let himself out like a ghost.

Peggy Simpson reached out as if she felt a need to cling to Corrigan’s hand. He pretended not to see it.

“Miss Simpson—” he began.

“Call me Peggy,” she said. There were still tears in her eyes. “He frightened me so. I don’t know what’s happened to everyone. People used to be fun.…”

“If you don’t mind,” Corrigan said, “I have things to do, Miss Simpson. I’d like to borrow a few items that belong to Noreen, things only she handled.”

“Whatever for?”

“Fingerprints.”

The girl raised a limp hand. “Noreen’s bedroom is there, the one with the bath. I slept in the little room off the kitchen. Help yourself. I don’t think I’ll ever have the strength to get out of this chair again.”

When Corrigan got to his office, he found Chuck Baer waiting for him.

“I’m checking the passport people and circulating pictures of Bianca Lessard among agents for overseas airlines,” Baer said. “Just in case she did decide quietly to take herself back to Europe.”

“Good. Fingerprinting should have something shortly.”

Corrigan went to his desk. Reports from the lab and the Medical Examiner’s office were lying on the green blotter.

He scanned the reports, jerked his head up. “Jane Doe’s lung tissue yielded water showing a trace of soap.”

“Soap?” Baer said.

“A French-milled type, the lab says. Expensive. That narrows it down, Chuck. The girl in the morgue was drowned in a bathtub in a house or apartment where you’d expect to find such luxuries as expensive French soap.”

“Upper East Side?”

“It would fill the bill.” Corrigan nodded slowly. “Then her body was carried out to a manhole and she was dumped underground.”

His phone rang. He did more listening than talking. When he hung up, he said to Baer, “Fingerprinting. The dead girl in the morgue is Noreen Gardner. The prints check against some things I took from her bedroom.”

Baer grunted. “So I’ve still got a client, and I’m still stuck with the original question: Where is Bianca?”

“This case is like a cancer cell,” Corrigan complained, “that keeps subdividing. I’m stuck with the question: Who killed Noreen Gardner?”

“I’ve only got the brains for one question at a time,” Baer said. “If a travel agent doesn’t come through for me, I’ll put some mileage on the swindle sheet and take a run up to Adirondacks Hall. It was the one place Bianca’d found peace and quiet. After her blow-up with her crumb of a husband, maybe she wanted to go back there for a while. And asked them not to get in touch with Lessard or tell him where she was if he inquired.”

“Keep me posted, Chuck.” Corrigan glanced at his wrist watch. “Jean Ainsley probably works late. I might still catch her at Fielding Realty.”

As he reached for his phone, Baer chuckled, “While you have dinner with the chick, think of this poor old private peeper gumshoeing the heels off his brogans.”

“Strictly in the line of duty,” Corrigan said with a straight face.

9

With the Chateaubriand pleasantly in his gut, Corrigan thumbed his lighter and held it to Jean Ainsley’s cigarette.

Her hazel eyes examined him over the flame. She’s lovely, he thought, and had to bring himself to remember what he was there for. But it was difficult. My God, he thought, have I finally fallen for a doll? It was not only unprecedented, it was unprofessional. She was an item in a case. A police officer on duty could hardly afford to lose himself in a pair of hazel eyes. But he had picked a bad place to keep his mind off his gonads. It was a hideaway restaurant with soft lights and self-effacing waiters and an excellent pianist in the background who was playing Mozart.

Jean smiled at him as she drew back from the lighter.

“Well, Captain?”

“Oh, the hell with it,” he said. “I’ll have to admit something to you. You’re far and away the unlikeliest lady executive I ever met. Certainly not what I pictured when I first heard about you.”

“Really?” Jean murmured. “Then I’ll admit something to you. I have to keep reminding myself that you’re a policeman. But I must, mustn’t I?”

“We both must.”

“That sounds interesting,” she said. “Why do people always think of policemen in terms of big feet and brutality?”

“Because we’re in the middle. If we don’t do a job we’re corrupt. If we do do it, we’re brutal. We’re damned either way.”

“Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself,” she laughed.

“You’d better know it now,” Corrigan said, twirling his brandy by the stem. “My motives in asking you to dinner weren’t entirely official.”

“You sound as if you really mean that.”

“I mean it.”

She looked at him steadily over her cigarette. He looked back. It was she who turned away, flushing. “Hadn’t we better keep this official until the Bianca thing is settled?”

He kept looking at her. She’s in trouble, he thought. Or troubled. He caught a flash of Carlton Ainsley and wondered what having a father like that must mean to a girl like this. Ainsley was enough to trouble any daughter. Or did it go deeper? Was it tied up with this Bianca Lessard business? But here his mood balked.

He said, “Bianca might well turn up safe, you know.”

She glanced back at him quickly. “But the girl in that morgue.…”

“I’d get a coarse dressing down if my superiors heard about this,” Corrigan said, “but I’m going to tell you anyway. Don’t ask me why, but I trust you.”

“If you think you shouldn’t.…”

“In my racket you play hunches.” And pray, he thought.

“All right, Tim,” she said.

Tim.

“We’ve identified the body. I don’t want the papers getting it just yet A lot of questions remain unanswered. It’s like war. What the enemy doesn’t know we know can hurt him.”

“So the girl isn’t Bianca,” Jean said, drawing a breath. “Thank God for that. Who is she, Tim? Can you tell me?”

“In confidence, Noreen Gardner. An actress.”

Jean looked a little sick.

Corrigan said quickly, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s just that I thought some pretty drastic thoughts about that girl. Now, hearing she’s dead, I suppose I feel guilty.”

“I had a brother whose wife died,” Corrigan said. “She was a bitch. It was a long time ago. But I still remember. My mother bawled me out for not ‘grieving’ at the funeral. I said to her, ‘Ma, I didn’t like her when she was alive, and I can’t see why her death ought to make me like her any better.” I got smacked in the face for it; I had a tough mama. I still feel that way. What were the thoughts?”

“Noreen always seemed to me to be greedy and sly,” Jean said. “I hope you won’t think me a snob if I characterize her as an alley brat. A pure slum product that never straightened out. Is that awful of me?”

“Along with the sweet-smelling roses,” Corrigan said, “a lot of garbage comes out of the slums. I’ll accept the characterization; it only confirms what I’ve heard from other sources. Anyway, I thought it would help if you knew that Vincent Lessard had made a mistake about what was lying on that slab.”

Her hand closed over his. For the briefest moment. When she pulled back, he could still feel the tingle of its warmth. “Thank you, Tim. And for taking me into your confidence.”

“How well did you know Noreen Gardner?”

“Not well, really. She was part of the Travers Proehl gang. She tagged along a couple of times when Travers and Frances Weatherly came over to talk to me about a theater for the new Weatherly play.”

“Did Noreen try to get chummy with you?”

“I never gave her the chance. She knew my father had been a well-known actor, and she would pump me about life in Hollywood. I finally told Travers and Fran Weatherly not to bring her along any more.” She looked at him with a touch of defiance. “I’m trying not to be catty, Tim. But I’ve seen so many Noreens. The Coast is lousy with them. So is New York, for that matter. They hop from bed to bed with no more compunction than prostitutes, and they’ll slice up anyone who stands in their way. I can’t stand the. breed.”

Of course you can’t, Corrigan thought with an inward grin. You’re a female who has to do it the hard way. He changed the subject abruptly. “This new Weatherly play. Is it any good?”

“It isn’t bad,” said Jean. “But it’s not good enough to buck the competition of Broadway.” She shrugged. “It’s one woman’s opinion, of course, and I can be wrong. But I’m responsible for the Fielding properties, and I have to follow my judgment.”

“Weatherly and Proehl seem to think they can win you over, from the way they’re chasing you.”

“If they had the money,” Jean said dryly, “they wouldn’t give me the time of day. They keep trying because they have Vincent Lessard on their side.”

“Has Lessard put any pressure on you?”

“He’s practically squashed me to death. Vincent is very anxious to get a favorable opinion from me to show Bianca. That would encourage him, with his power of attorney, to dip into Fielding money for additional financing of the play, as well as a theater.”

“This thing between Fran Weatherly and Lessard,” Corrigan said. “Could it be the Weatherly woman’s way of getting Lessard over on her side? Is she that unscrupulous?”

“I can’t answer that, but I don’t think she’s playing the bedroom game with him solely because of her precious play. I think Fran and Vincent would have gravitated together under any circumstances. Fran has a brilliance that Vincent lacks. But the two are made from the same material.”

The shadow of the maître d’ fell across the table. “Telephone call for you, Miss Ainsley.”

Jean excused herself. She was gone for five minutes. When she came back, she looked bleak.

“Bad news?” Corrigan asked.

“My father, calling from Fran’s apartment. Simply wonderful cocktail party, he said. Why didn’t I join him?”

“Thoughtful of him.”

She shook her head. “Not my daddy, Tim. He went on a three-day tear recently. He’s just showing me that he’s being a good boy, keeping me posted on his comings and goings.”

“How did he know where you were?”

“These days,” she said grimly, “I leave him a schedule of my whereabouts. It’s easier most times for him to find me.”

“Why don’t we take him up on it?” Corrigan suggested. “It might be instructive.”

Jean recovered her humor. “That’s the policeman talking. The human computer who’d like to gather data about Fran Weatherly, Carlton Ainsley and company in their natural habitat.”

“Not altogether,” Corrigan said. “You’re stuck with me for the evening, anyway. I won’t let go of you.”

“All right,” she laughed. “I can’t fight the P.D. While you’re taking care of the check, I’ll make repairs on the face.”

The party lacked the verve that had once made Village get-togethers events either to be remembered or forgotten as quickly as possible. Nowadays, Corrigan mused, too many people regarded boredom as a status symbol.

Frances Weatherly’s apartment was in one of those old Village buildings that had escaped real estate developers, urban renewers, and highway department planners. Half a century ago the apartment might have housed the descendant of some princeling of American history. The living room ceiling was vaulted, and tall French doors at the end of the long room had probably opened out on a romantic balcony.

Tonight, the underfurnished room was a raffish background for twenty-five or thirty people whiling away the evening. They sat, stood, milled about; small groups discussed the theater, op art, atonal music. A hi-fi set voiced some low-volume caterwauling to which a few couples jerked and twisted in the curious noncontactual dancing that would have so interested Sigmund Freud.

A lanky young man with lank hair admitted Jean and Corrigan and promptly turned his back on them. But the new arrivals were not ignored for long. Corrigan had barely begun scanning the scene when Frances Weatherly came bounding toward them.

She seized Jean’s hand. “Carlton told me you’d mentioned the restaurant where you were having dinner, and I insisted he tell you to join us. So glad you could make it.”

While she was talking to Jean she was giving Corrigan the out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye once-over. She remembered him, all right. As Travers Proehl had remembered him, from that chance meeting in Jean’s outer office. He wondered if Ainsley had also mentioned to the Weatherly woman that his daughter was having dinner with a cop. The cop, the one mucking about the whereabouts of Bianca Lessard.

“This is Captain Tim Corrigan,” Jean said.

“I hope you don’t mind a gate-crasher,” Corrigan smiled.

“We get all kinds, Captain,” Fran Weatherly said coolly. “Crash right in.” She had trained her naturally nasal voice to a throaty huskiness, to go with the illusion of her body. She was sexy, all right, Corrigan thought, with a lean sensuality that must have been irresistible to Vincent Lessard. Certainly his marriage to Bianca, which more and more Corrigan was convinced had been only for Bianca’s money, would be no impediment.

The Weatherly woman did something Corrigan disliked and Jean, from her struggling expression, loathed: she continued to hold on to Jean’s hand as she linked her free arm in Corrigan’s. She hustled her latest guests toward the long table with the stained cloth where Travers Proehl was imitating a bartender. Proehl was turned away and had not noticed them.

Jean was looking about the room for her father. But Fran Weatherly was not ready to release her captives.

“Have you heard from Bianca, darlin’?”

“What? Oh. No, not yet. Excuse me.” Jean went off, still looking.

“Can’t you find her, Captain Corrigan?”

“We’ve received no official complaint,” Corrigan said. “The case is in the hands of a private detective.”

“But you do try to keep your eyes open, don’t you?” Fran Weatherly said sweetly. “Oops, my mistake. Or is it? Do you wear that patch because you’re moonlighting for the Hathaway Shirt ads, or is it legit?”

“I try to keep my eyes open, Miss Weatherly,” Corrigan said.

“Neat. Well you probably won’t be needed. I’ve heard that Mr. Baer is very good at these things. Although if Vincent had asked my advice, he wouldn’t have gone to a private detective. At least not right off.”

“May I ask why not?”

“Oh … there are several reasons, Captain.”

“Care to name one?”

Fran Weatherly laughed from her diaphragm. “How clever you are! Here not five minutes, and already I’m on the grill. But hell, no, I don’t mind.”

They had drifted over to the drinks table, and now Travers Proehl spotted them. His immense face turned stony at the sight of Corrigan. He stalked away, and Fran took his place and prepared a Scotch on the rocks for Corrigan.

“Firstly,” their hostess said, making a vodka and bitter lemon for herself, “buttons will get you bows that Bianca gets in touch with Vincent one of these days. Without benefit of private eye or the fuzz—begging your pardon, Captain.”

“What makes you think that, Miss Weatherly?”

“Bianca is all feeling. Her blood vessels are on the outside. And nerves. She’s just the kind to creep into a hole somewhere and brood over her marital troubles. But with the Biancas of this world that’s only a step in the right direction. Eventually she’ll plod her way to a decision. When that happens—watch out. She’ll either come out blasting, or jump back into bed with Vincent.”

“You talk as if you know her very well.”

“I don’t know her—in the social sense—at all. But I have an instinct for characterization. That’s why I’m a writer.”

“And what’s another reason?”

“Another reason is that this town is crawling with lice. Most of whom write for newspapers.”

“And the Fielding name rates a better fate?” Corrigan murmured. “It’s nice of you to care, Miss Weatherly.”

The woman stared at him. Then she threw back her dirty blonde locks and laughed with such energy that even Travers Proehl, nursing a drink in a corner, looked over at her.

“You’re wonderful, Captain,” she cried. “I understand now why there’s no crime problem in New York City. You think I give a good goddam about the Fieldings?”

“It never entered my mind,” Corrigan said. “I was, in my clumsy way, being satirical. You want to know what I think, Miss Weatherly?”

“Not particularly.”

“I’ll tell you anyway. I think you’re a lot of horse manure. I think you’ve built up a brassy front to cover up a lot of mean little egocentricities.”

“A literate fuzz!” Frances Weatherly said. “Will wonders never cease? Do go on, Captain.”

“I think that what concerned you in this Bianca Lessard business was having your name booted about the columns. It still concerns you. You’re red meat for the journalistic lice, and you know it. And you’re scared to death they’ll go to work on you.”

She tilted her angular head as she studied Corrigan. It was as if she had just become aware of him. Her far-apart eyes widened disagreeably.

“You’re tremendous, Captain. What are you doing in the Police Department? You ought to be hanging out a shingle. Do you always read people so easily?”

“I have an instinct for characterization,” Corrigan said gravely. “That’s why I’m a police officer.”

“Touché!” This time she laughed with real appreciation. “Next time I throw a party, I want you to draw up the guest list. It would make an interesting evening. But we were talking about Bianca.”

“Or Noreen Gardner,” Corrigan said. “Whichever you prefer.”

“Bianca is preferable. Noreen is … or should I say was?—Travers tells me a dead girl in the city morgue has been identified as Noreen by little Peggy Simpson—”

“Oh, we’ve had several people trying to identify the body,” Corrigan said. He had no intention of telling her that a positive identification had been made through her verifiable fingerprints.

“Noreen is … was—which the hell is it?—a disappointment. But I refuse to worry about her, Captain, dead or alive. Whether she comes crawling back or not.”

“If she’s alive, you think she’ll crawl back?”

“That worm?” Fran Weatherly said contemptuously. “You can bet your old man’s straw benny on it, brother. As soon as this new man she’s hooked onto is through with her. Stupid little pot! Big-Man-in-Theater-Going-to-Make-Star-out-of-Her. Imagine falling for a line like that in this day and age!”

“Any idea who the man is?”

“No, and I don’t give a four-letter word. Alive or dead, Noreen Gardner no longer exists in my dramatis personae. I’m sick of the little tart—of the pleading, the demanding, the scenes. She’ll have to find somebody else to hammer a sense of dedication into her. When I think of all the talent lurking behind that vaginal mind … it infuriates me!”

“When did you see her last?”

“Two Sundays ago, I think it was. I tried to show her that the man was just looking for an easy tumble. I saw soon enough that she couldn’t see beyond the end of his genitals. So I told her to get the hell out and forget to come back. She’s apparently taken me at my word—unless the Simpson creature was right and she’s lying in your morgue.”

Fran glanced past Corrigan as new arrivals joined the party. She patted his hand. “Don’t go ’way, Captain.” She left him.

Travers Proehl had captured Jean Ainsley. He was talking to her and glancing over at Corrigan now and then.

Corrigan moved aside as several people came up to the bottle-littered table. He found himself beside the fireplace. There were fire tools—poker, tongs, shovel, brush, a screen—but the fireplace itself was naked. Apparently Fran Weatherly’s taste for the romantic did not run to cuddling before an open fire. Corrigan wondered where her tastes did run. Something far-out, he was sure.

He edged his way toward Jean. Proehl saw him coming and abruptly left her to join Frances Weatherly, who was chatting with a pair of beatniks near the door.

Jean failed to notice Corrigan. She was moving toward the other side of the room. From the tension in her figure, he was sure she had found her father.

10

Corrigan managed to intercept her by shoving some people aside. Jean threw him a look of despair and apology for what was taking place near the French doors.

The argument going on was between Carlton Ainsley and a powerfully built, shag-blond young man wearing a black turtleneck knit shirt and tight cotton pants. Ainsley was gripping his walking stick. The hero of innumerable TV late shows was purple-faced with alcohol and fury.

“You rutting old goat,” the young man was saying. “You don’t know modern theater from your own fossilized rear end. Why don’t you totter back to the Old Folks’ Home?”

Ainsley raised the stick. “How do you dare,” he said thickly. “How do you dare! I’ve forgotten more about the theater than you’ll ever know. You deserve a thrashing, by heaven, and if you don’t think I’m man enough to give it to you—”

“Cool it, dad,” the young man sneered. “You hit me with that cane and I’ll cram it up you know where.”

Ainsley cursed and struck. But the blow never reached its target. Corrigan caught the stick in mid-descent and twitched it out of the actor’s hand. Ainsley staggered and almost fell. Corrigan grabbed him.

“Release me, sir! I’m going to teach this degenerate some manners!”

“Ah, let him go, man,” the blond boy said. “We’ll see like who’ll teach who what.”

“Let—me—go!”

“Old Man History,” the boy laughed. “You can’t turn the clock back, dad. If this one-eyed do-gooder will turn you loose, I’ll rub your nose in your own drool.”

Corrigan thought that Ainsley was going to have a stroke. He shoved the blond young man back without turning around; the boy staggered against the people crowding around and slid to the floor, where he sat with a foolish look on his face.

“You could use a lesson in manners, at that,” Corrigan said to the boy. “It’s all over, Mr. Ainsley.… Would some of you people please get Strong Boy out of here? Hold his hand or something. Mr. Ainsley?”

Ainsley went limp in his arms. “No man can talk to me that way—humiliate me—and get away with it,” he muttered. “There must be some respect left in this world. Jean, what are you doing here?”

Jean had managed to push through. “Daddy, look at you.”

“Jeanie.”

She took the handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiped the spittle off his lips. He made a feeble attempt to get out of Corrigan’s grip. “Remove your hands, sir!”

“Dad, this is Captain Tim Corrigan of the Police Department. He’s been helping you. Daddy?”

“He’s a gendarme?” Carlton Ainsley said. He blinked at Corrigan. “They’re making them altogether different these days. You don’t look like one, Captain—what was it?”

“Corrigan,” said Corrigan. “I think you’d better call it a day, Mr. Ainsley. What do you say?”

“That foul creature is fortunate,” the actor said, glowering owlishly at the blond boy, who was being assisted to his feet by two cronies with identical long blond hair and apparel. “How does it feel to be saved by the law for a change, scum gullion?” he shouted to the youth. “Actor? You disgrace a noble profession!”

“Dad, you’re making a spectacle of yourself.” Jean was pulling at his arm. “Please. Let’s get out of here.”

Corrigan sensed the trio closing in on him. He let go of Ainsley’s arm, feeling himself go quite cold. He did not turn around. A voice in his ear said softly, “Do yourself a favor, fuzz. Turn the old square loose, take a walk, and I’ll forget the shove. You hear me?”

Strong Arm pushed him. Without turning around, Corrigan said, “One more contact and I’ll run you in for assault.”

He was struck from behind. But he was ready for it. As he ducked, the blow glanced off his head. He staggered deliberately and went down on one knee. The blow had been delivered by the youth he had felled. The trio were standing shoulder to shoulder, grinning. In the right fist of the troublemaker gleamed a switchblade knife. His two companions took a half step forward.

Corrigan came up whirling, like a discus thrower. The discus was the edge of his left hand. It performed double duty on the throats of Strong Boy’s two friends. They flew over backward, each clutching his throat as if it had been cut. Then Corrigan was facing the troublemaker.

A hush had come over the long room. The only sound came from the other end of the room, where Frances Weatherly was calmly lifting the telephone from its cradle.

“Come on, Strong Boy,” Corrigan said. “Let’s see how good you are against a one-eyed do-gooder nearer your own age.”

The youth was quite pale. His lips were curled back from his strong white teeth. He held the switchblade in the classic fighting position, blade up.

He lunged.

Corrigan felt sorry for him. He always felt sorry when he had to go into action. That was because he had long ago recognized the icy blood lust in himself at such times, a clear joy of combat. He had to watch himself closely, exercise a discipline that came hard to him.

He swiveled his hips like a dancer and caught the powerful young wrist in his two hands and broke it across his knee. The youth screamed and went down, and the switchblade fell to the floor, making music.

“If you’re calling the police,” Corrigan said to Frances Weatherly in the silence, “you’d better make a second call to a hospital.”

After the patrol car and the ambulance took off, Fran Weatherly followed them into the hall. “I’m sorry about those three, Captain Corrigan. They crashed the party. I’d never seen them before in my life.”

“And I’m sorry, Miss Weatherly,” Jean said to the playwright. She looked about to cry, and Corrigan felt a glow in his chest. A hint of tears, and he was ready to melt! He was amused and irritated with himself. “My father doesn’t act this way when he’s sober.”

Carlton Ainsley made a sweeping bow and almost fell on his face. Corrigan caught him. “Her father’s keeper,” Ainsley said. “My little Jeanie. What an albatross I am.…”

“She ought to spit in your albatross eye, Carlton,” the Weatherly woman said. “Don’t hold this against me, Captain. My parties aren’t all this wild. Try another one some time.”

“I’ll do that, Miss Weatherly.”

When they reached the street Ainsley began to pout. “I’m in the doghouse, I see. Well, daughter, deliver your lecture and get it over with.”

“Would it do any good?” Jean said, almost inaudibly. “Has anything ever done any good?”

The note of old sadness in Jean’s voice pierced Ainsley’s haze. His broad shoulders sagged. He made a groping gesture, like a child reaching for a strong hand. “Jeanie.…” he said, and tried to say more; but he did not, and lapsed into silence.

“We’d better get into the car,” Jean said. “We can’t monopolize Captain Corrigan all night.”

Ainsley slumped in the rear seat and fell asleep. Jean got in beside Corrigan.

“Where’s he staying?” Corrigan asked her.

“At an apartment on East Seventy-first Street.”

The drive uptown was made without talk. Jean looked so grimly miserable that Corrigan ached for her, and again wondered at himself. If this was the way liking a girl affected a man, what was all the shooting about? Or, he thought, am I too damned case-hardened to open myself up to what other men accept as natural? For one of the rare occasions of his life he felt confused.

Corrigan turned off Park Avenue and stopped Car 40 at the sidewalk canopy of the stately apartment building. The doorman glanced into the car and quickly opened the door. “Good evening, Mr. Ainsley. Mr. Ainsley?”

The actor woke up. He got out wobbling.

“I’ll see you upstairs,” Jean said, “if Captain Corrigan doesn’t mind waiting.” To Corrigan she added: “I’ll only be a minute, Tim.”

“Take your time.”

“Good night, sir,” Ainsley said, beginning to bow and thinking better of it. “You have restored my faith in the horse marines. Or something.”

“Good night.” Corrigan watched father and daughter disappear into the building. He rubbed his nonexistent eye; it itched. It always itched when he was upset. The thought was disturbing; the fact that it was about Jean Ainsley’s father also made it unpleasant.

Bianca Fielding Lessard lived just a few blocks from here. A few blocks east a manhole cover had been raised five nights ago and a dead girl disposed of in a sewer. Tonight Ainsley had been the guest of the woman whose adulterous relationship with Vincent Lessard had caused Bianca to walk out.…

When Jean returned to the car, she said, “Now you know all about me.”

Corrigan started the car. Maybe there were a few skeletons she didn’t know about. “Don’t worry about it. Where to?”

“How about a nightcap? I mix a mean drink if you like Scotch on the rocks or bourbon with branch.”

“I’m a nonmixer myself.”

“I live across the park,” Jean said. “On Central Park West.”

Her apartment was as he had imagined it, direct and uncluttered and warm as she was. She had made no attempt to go in for periods or styles or fads; each piece of furniture had evidently been picked for its own sake, its lines or its utility or the way it looked in the spot where she had placed it. There were bright prints on the walls, some as delicate as the Dufys, others as forthright as the Utrillos, and not a trace of abstraction or pop art or the other trends in art Corrigan despised. There was a little fireplace with a real charred log, and scatter rugs on the chestnut random-board floor (and what that floor must have cost her he tried not to think about). The fiberglass drapes let in what sun Manhattan and the across-the-way park allowed. On the mantelpiece stood a Swedish glass Madonna with lovely lines, as simple as faith, and a few pieces of Mexican pottery. The bookcase was full of books that looked as if they had been read. There was a modest stereophonic player, and a shelf of recordings.

She put Wanda Landowska softly to work on some Bach for background, seated him in a deep chair, made two drinks, and kicked a hassock toward him. “Put up your feet and loosen your tie. There’s nothing as useless and ridiculous as a necktie. If I were a man, I’d simply refuse to wear one.”

“We’re sheep,” Corrigan said. “Far worse than women.”

She slid her shoes off and tucked her feet under her on the raw-silk sofa. “Have you been a policeman very long?”

“One kind of cop or another just about all my life. I was in Korea, and pulled a hitch in the OSS before a New York police inspector lassoed me.”

“You love New York, Tim, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid I do.”

“I’ve never felt at home here. I suppose it’s because I grew up in California.”

“I know,” Corrigan said. “I looked into your father’s background.”

“Oh,” she said, and took a sip of her bourbon.

“He seems to have done well since he was released from San Quentin.”

She laughed. “You mean that rich-bitch East Side apartment where he’s staying?”

Corrigan nodded.

“It’s borrowed. Daddy stayed here, with me, until recently. Do you know a man named Dmitri Karam?”

“I’ve heard the name. Isn’t he a big wheel in television?”

“That’s the one. He happens to be a friend of my father’s from the old Hollywood days. In those days Dad had connections and influence, and Dmitri was just getting his toe in the studio door.”

“Your father helped him?”

She made a small, disturbed gesture. “Dmitri Karam is brilliant He even has that obsolete word, integrity. He doesn’t forget his friends. He’s never forgotten that Daddy helped him when he needed help.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Corrigan said. “That aspect of your father wasn’t in the reports I read.”

Jean nodded slowly. “Daddy is basically a generous man. And impulsive. Like a child in many ways. He’s always needed someone. He never got over losing my mother. She died when I was ten.”

And you’ve been his mother ever since, Corrigan thought But he did not say it.

“I won’t make excuses for him, but that childlike side of him is what got him into trouble in California. He was all aglow with the prospect of breaking out of the mold of typecasting in films of his own. It was pitiful, Tim, when he realized he’d been played for a fool and that his partner had made off with the investors’ money. But the thing that hurt him most was that he’d lost his chance to star. It nearly killed him.”

She made a face and suddenly laughed again. “There’s something about you that brings out the true confessions in people. Here I am, ruining your evening with a lot of morbid personal talk. Is that what’s made you such a success as a policeman?”

“Mother Corrigan, they call me,” Corrigan said with a grin.

“And did anybody ever tell you that you’re a pretty nice guy?”

“Just my mama and a few old ladies I’ve helped across the street.” He felt his neck warming.

“Let me join the crowd.”

“No crowd,” Corrigan heard himself saying. “I’ve never met a girl I could stand for more than one night. Until I met you.”

She looked away. “I wish you wouldn’t say that, Tim,” she said in a low voice.

“Because of the case I’m working on?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” he said, “but only until this Bianca-Nancy-Noreen things shapes up.” He consulted his Scotch. “Now tell me about your father and Dmitri Karam.”

“Dmitri was in Europe when the trial came up. He flew back just to appear as a character witness. When Dad was sentenced, Dmitri suggested that I might want to relocate. This was more than five years ago. Dmitri recommended me to Fielding Realty, and I had a job.

“When my father was released, he came and shared my apartment while he haunted the agents for any kind of acting job. Nobody would hire him. A few weeks go, Dmitri Karam called. He was planning a new TV series, and there was a role in it, he said, that should fit Dad perfectly. One of those second leads that offers a character actor a chance to go all-out.

“My father went to see Dmitri, and it was like the old days. He and Dmitri put their heads together over the series idea and the treatment almost around the clock.

“Then one of those foul-ups occurred in a film Karam was shooting in Europe, and he had to fly over there. That was a couple of weeks ago. Dmitri maintains the East Side apartment the year round, and he invited Daddy to live there, continuing script and idea development on the TV thing.”

“When is Karam due back?” Corrigan asked.

“In about ten days.”

The way she said it put Corrigan on the alert. “You sound as if you dread his return, Jean.”

“Maybe I do,” she said, wrinkling her little nose. “Everything was going so beautifully when Dmitri had to take off. Dad was getting back his old zing. But as soon as Dmitri left, he went on a bender. A bartender who knew him phoned me. I searched high and low before I located him.” She shivered. “In a buggy flophouse, the most horrible place I ever saw. I sobered him up, and just before you came to my office that first time Carlton was there, assuring me it wouldn’t happen again.”

“It will, I’m afraid,” Corrigan said.

“Don’t you think I know it?” she cried. “Something’s eating away at him, Tim. That mess tonight in Fran’s apartment—it would never have happened if Dad were himself. He gets belligerent only when he’s scared.”

“What would he be scared about?” Corrigan asked, wondering if certain grim possibilities had occurred to her.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s that he’s lost confidence in himself. I thought he’d regained it during that session with Dmitri, but it could have been a false confidence that left him the minute Dmitri had to go back to Europe. To let himself get involved in a brawl with that dreadful blond boy!”

“The character was baiting him, and your father’d had too much to drink.”

“That wasn’t the real cause. I know the signs.” For the first time, bitterness crept into Jean’s voice. “I’ve had plenty of practice reading them.… Sometimes I wonder if I haven’t hurt Dad as much as I’ve helped him.”

“How so?”

“By babying him. Maybe I should have let him battle out his own problems.”

Baby, Corrigan thought, you don’t know what problems he may have!

11

Meisenheimer, Detective Second Grade, was waiting in the 10 × 12 office when Corrigan passed through the Main Office Squad room the next morning. A big man with bushy gray hair and mustache and a meerschaum usually fuming at his lips, Meisenheimer was absorbed in one of the police periodicals from the stack on the table beside the filing cabinet.

The detective rose as Corrigan came in, and immediately sat down again to relight his pipe. “It can wait a minute, Tim. Go ahead and check your mail and the morning report.”

Corrigan got his chores out of the way quickly. Then he said, “Okay, Meis. Let’s have it.”

“We went all the way back to Nancy Gavin’s beginning,” Meisenheimer said. “Nancy and her mother Anna moved from dump to dump, each time a little dumpier. The old gal was a boozer and a nympho. The kid grew up like a scorpion. By the time Nancy ran away, Anna had wandered to Greenpoint in Brooklyn, where some rummy Don Juan paid her rent for a while.

“They lived in a cockroach-infested flat over a hole-in-the-wall Italian grocery store. Under all those hanging cheeses I found an old Italian woman who remembers everything that’s happened in the neighborhood for a quarter of a century. She came up with the name of the slug who hustled Nancy off. Mrs. Vermicetti remembers his name well, she says, because her husband—he died last year—couldn’t stand the idea of a guy forty-five years old running after a fifteen-year old, and the old man told this crumb off but good.”

“And you’ve traced the man?”

“Traced him? I’ve worn my legs down to the knees. He’s right in your morning report. James Darson. The sheet on him is a yard long, all the same charge. Only a legal lobotomy, or castration, or both, is going to stop the creep.”

Corrigan went back to the morning report:

… James Darson. Age 55, arrested on suspicion of molesting a minor child, female … complaint made by mother of child, Mary Menendez, 243 East Ninety-sixth Street.…

Corrigan dropped the report on his desk. “Let’s take a look at Darson in the line-up.”

The line-up room on the fourth floor was in its usual prebusiness state of chaos. Detectives stood about, smoking and comparing notes, while prisoners were being brought into the bullpen.

Snatches of talk went by Corrigan’s ear:

… When I made the collar it wasn’t the punk who gave me trouble, it was his girl friend.…

… Three decks of horse on him.…

… Hit a lamppost with a stolen car and the door handle flew off and went straight into the face of this old lady on the sidewalk.…

… Six inches of steel in his switchblade, and I like my liver the way it is, so I hit him with the gun barrel and broke his arm, and now that crew uptown are trying to get a charge of brutality slapped on me.…

At the wooden table near the platform, Lieutenant McHenry blew against the microphone to test it.

“All right, all right! Let’s bring them in.”

Corrigan reached the table just as McHenry made the announcement. The room was settling into quiet McHenry glanced up. “Hi, Tim.”

Corrigan put his palm over the microphone. “You’ve got a James Darson this morning. I want to talk to him in an interrogation room.”

“Now?”

“No, the arresting officers need their sleep to pull night duty. What I want to discuss with this Darson goes back ten years. It can wait a few minutes.”

Corrigan eased from the table to a nearby chair.

The interrogation room was furnished with a table, four straight chairs, and a fluorescent light mounted in the ceiling.

Corrigan was leaning against the edge of the table and Meisenheimer against the wall, filling his pipe, when James Darson was brought in by a patrolman. The patrolman closed the door and put his back to it.

Close up, Darson was even more repulsive than he had looked in the line-up, an obese man with the features of a pig and a blotched, greasy bald head.

“Sit down, Darson,” Corrigan said.

Darson backed into a chair, overflowing it. His little bloodshot eyes, imbedded in fat, flicked from Corrigan to Meisenheimer. “Look, that Menendez woman has a grudge against me. She’s using her kid to get me. I never touched the kid. I swear it!”

“This has nothing to do with your arrest last night,” Corrigan said.

“No?” The little eyes became cautious. “You trying to make a deal?”

“Not with you, friend.”

Corrigan’s change of tone was unsettling. Darson heaved to his feet. “Listen, I got a right to a lawyer, I want a lawyer.”

“Sit down,” Meisenheimer said. His voice had ice on it, too. “Nobody’s getting hurt. The captain is just going to refresh your memory.”

“Of a girl named Nancy Gavin,” Corrigan said.

“Never heard.”

“You’re a liar,” Meisenheimer said, “and we can prove it. Wise up, Darson. This time the truth won’t hurt you. We just want information.”

Darson searched their faces. “What’s the pitch?”

“You knew a woman named Anna Gavin and her daughter Nancy, fifteen at the time, in Brooklyn ten years ago?” Corrigan said.

“If I talk I get a break?”

“If you don’t talk, it won’t get you a break,” Corrigan said.

“I didn’t do nothing to the girl. I knew the Gavin slut and her kid, sure.”

“You took the girl away.”

“Oh, no. She came of her own free will.”

“Jail bait,” Meisenheimer said.

“I was just trying to help her,” Darson protested. “Her life was hell with her old lady. I had a spare room. It was like I was adopting the kid, see? I treated her like she was my own daughter.”

Corrigan and Meisenheimer traded glances. “All right, Darson,” Corrigan said. “We’re going to surprise hell out of you. We’ll buy that cock-and-bull story. How long did you treat Nancy like a daughter?”

“Six, seven months,” Darson said eagerly. “I don’t remember for sure. It’s been a long time.”

“Then what happened?”

“She met some punk kid. I come home one night and she’s lifted everything that ain’t nailed down. She and this punk took off.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must have tried to find her, Darson, if I know your kind. And I know it. What did you come up with?”

“Okay,” Darson stuttered, “I did go looking. I hear her and the punk have moved in with a pal of the punk’s on the edge of Harlem. But I couldn’t locate them.”

“She change her name?”

“She was always changing her name. She hated her real name.”

“Did she, now?” Corrigan’s eyes flickered. “Did she try out the name Noreen Gardner, say?”

“I dunno. She used to drive me nuts, making me call her by a new name every week. The kid was nuts.”

“When did you last see her?”

“I ain’t laid eyes on her from that day to this.”

Corrigan gave Darson the once-over.

“I swear I’m telling the truth, Captain!”

Corrigan was convinced. But he said nothing.

“If she hadn’t glommed my stuff, Captain, I’d have been glad to see her go. I’m telling you straight. She was mean and sneaky. Fight you like an alley cat if you got her dandruff loose.”

“Did she have any habits you remember?”

“Habits?”

“Any subject she was bugs on.”

“Oh. She was one of them movie bugs. Used to want to spend all her time in movie houses. See the same pictures over and over. Then she’d come home and make up her face different, her hair. It was like she wanted to become the star she’d seen in the movie. If you’d put in a word for me to the arresting officers, Captain.…” The swinish face looked slyly up at Corrigan.

“I’ll put in a word for you,” Corrigan said. “I’ll tell the officers who picked you up not to forget that the Menendez kid might have been one of their own.”

Chuck Baer was in the MOS squadroom talking shop with a couple of detectives. He followed Corrigan into his office.

“You look bushed, Chuck.”

“Need the sleep I didn’t get last night.”

“Drive up to Adirondacks Hall?”

Baer nodded.

“How did it go?”

“Bianca hasn’t returned to the sanitorium,” the private detective said. “No one there’s seen or heard from her since she checked out on the arm of her husband-to-be. I confirmed one thing, though. Vincent Lessard was a straight-out fink of a fortune hunter.”

“I figured that out long ago, Chuck.”

Baer sucked on his cigar. “The administrator of the sanitorium is a good man, Tim. An M.D., Ph.D., and psychiatrist for good measure. And Dr. Hall’s been around long enough to know every gimmick in the book. He tagged Lessard right away. It put him in a spot.

“Here he had this rich girl who was an emotional wreck. If she wanted to marry a fortune hunter after she pulled out of it, he was helpless to do anything about it. But in view of her condition Dr. Hall felt it was his ethical duty to let her know the kind of man she was dealing with.”

“So he had to talk with Bianca,” Corrigan said, “and all it did was make her defend Lessard.”

“That’s right,” Baer said. “This was the big one Lessard had waited for all his lousy life, and he was covering every angle. He planted the thought in Bianca’s head that Dr. Hall wasn’t her friend—that he was out for all he could take from a defenseless rich patient.”

But Dr. Hall had proved no easy antagonist. He hired the security man at Nulan Inn, where Lessard was social director, paying him out of his own pocket, to look into Lessard’s record. The man began with Lessard’s employment application; he pumped two disgruntled widows at the inn whom Lessard had been cultivating until Bianca Fielding came into his life; he used the long distance telephone. In a few days a dossier took shape.

Vincent Lessard’s employment history, Baer went on, ran the gamut from paid-escort “service” to dance instructor to social director at swank resorts. He had always sought jobs that would put him in proximity with the kind of women he could milk. His career was a succession of lonely females, chiefly widows with money, who were feeling the years slip by and were hungering for the romance they had either left behind or never had. “A professional lapdog,” Chuck Baer grunted. Lessard took these women for all he could wheedle out of them, until they got sick of him or some relative bought him off.

Dr. Hall was about to confront Bianca Fielding with his findings when Lessard, who apparently had a flair for strategy, got wind that he was being investigated.

“A hot pants on the inn switchboard who drooled every time Lessard turned his Barrymore profile her way unbagged the cat. She told him what was going on.

“Lessard lost no time. He sweet-talked Bianca into leaving the sanitarium before the roof fell in on him. There was no legal way Dr. Hall could stop her. He didn’t even see her leave. Lessard sneaked her out to moonlight and roses, orange blossoms, her town house in New York, and happiness ever after. They were married enroute in a civil ceremony in Connecticut.”

“None of which gets us any closer,” Corrigan said, “to where Bianca is.”

“That goddam Mayan ring,” Chuck Baer grumbled. “It ought to tell us something, but I’m damned if I can figure out what.”

“Well, we know that Bianca and Noreen Gardner made a crossing somewhere,” Corrigan mused. “The ring tells us that, Chuck.”

He stopped suddenly.

“What’s the matter?” Baer asked, sitting up.

“It just occurred to me.”

“What just occurred to you?”

“Maybe Noreen died because she might have been able to tell us where Bianca is.”

12

A stiffness invaded Travers Proehl’s gross shoulders. The producer did not turn his head either to the right or the left. He simply glared at the images of Corrigan and Baer in the bar mirror as they slipped onto stools beside him.

“Hello, Proehl,” Corrigan said. “Your building super said you sometimes drink your lunch here.”

“It’s a good place,” Proehl growled. “The whiskey’s not cut, the tables are clean, and the old men with the beards keep it quiet for their chess games.”

“Who’s distrubing them?” Baer growled back.

“You’re distrubing me. What do you two want?”

“I’ve got a couple of officers starting in the past and working forward,” Corrigan said. “I thought it might be interesting to reverse the process, starting now and going back in time.”

“Whose time?” the producer said.

“Noreen Gardner’s.”

“Why don’t you ask Peggy Simpson? She was telling you a library full about Noreen.”

“But not how Noreen came to show up in the Village.”

“Who the hell knows how anybody comes to show up in the Village, except the finks who skyrocket the rents down here?”

“If anybody knows about Noreen, it should be you.”

“Why me?”

“She lived with you, didn’t she? Before she shared the apartment with Peggy Simpson?”

“So she lived with me. You going to make a federal case out of it?”

“Living with a woman, a man gets to know her pretty well,” Corrigan said. “You might tell us how well Noreen knew Bianca Lessard.”

“Who says they knew each other at all?” Proehl flicked a finger at the bartender for a refill.

“An old Mayan sun god says it,” Corrigan said. “Its image in sterling was wrapped around Bianca’s pinkie when she disappeared. When Noreen Gardner turned up dead, she was wearing it. By the way, where were you the night Bianca and Lessard had their big hassle and she walked out on him?”

A tremor rippled through Proehl’s enormous body. He jerked his head as if to clear it. “Damn you; what in the hell is this?”

“Relax,” Corrigan said. “Are you afraid to answer my question?”

“Why should I be afraid?” Proehl shouted.

“If I knew I wouldn’t be asking you. You do remember the night Lessard says he last saw his wife?”

“I remember.” The producer’s voice was hoarse from his effort at self-control. “Vincent has talked about it enough. I was at Fran Weatherly’s that night. We were going over costs of some scenery. We needed figures—Jean Ainsley, the woman in charge of the Fielding theaters, never gives with enough figures. She’s a real bitch when it comes to stalling. She’s a bitch in every way.”

Corrigan felt himself tighten all over. Chuck Baer, who knew him better than anyone else, gave him a startled look. But Corrigan worked on himself, and the moment passed.

“Let’s get back to Noreen Gardner,” he said evenly. “She didn’t simply knock on your door one day and move in.”

“Almost,” Proehl said. “Almost.”

“Where did she walk from in order to knock on your door?”

“She was living over on Eighth Street. Fellow runs a book and art store on the ground floor called The Treasure Trove. He rents out the flats upstairs.”

“His name?”

“How the hell should I know? Sellar, Shelton, something like that.”

Corrigan rose from the bar stool, and Baer did, too.

“Don’t hurry back,” Proehl said. He sounded as if he were spitting.

Corrigan walked out, and Baer followed.

The dusty window of The Treasure Trove featured a sample of pop art on an easel—the precise likeness of a beer can opener—and a display of posters extolling a volume of erotica about love cults around the world. The shop smelled dusty inside.

At the counter a skinny young man was examining some brushes. He was being waited on by a tiny man in his fifties with a dwarf’s face that came to a perfect point in a brownish-red Vandyke.

“Be with you in a moment. How about a browsing around?” The proprietor turned back to the young man studying the brushes.

The customer completed his selection, paid for the brushes, and left, with a light in his eye.

“Are you Mr. Sellar?” Corrigan asked.

“Chellarn,” the tiny man said.

“I’m a police officer.” Corrigan flipped his wallet open. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

The little man looked alarmed. He reached for a package of Turkish cigarettes that lay on the counter and selected one with care.

“I understand you rent the apartments upstairs.”

“I lease the whole building. Is one of my tenants in trouble? I try to screen them, Officer.” He held his cigarette between thumb and forefinger, European fashion, puffing energetically.

“No,” Corrigan said, “we simply want some information about a past tenant. A girl named Noreen Gardner.”

“Oh, yes. I remember her.” He seemed relieved; he dropped the cigarette and ground it out with his heel.

“How long did she sublet from you?”

“Three, four months. Actress of great promise. Chameleon quality, you know. Becomes wholly the character she is playing. Quite rare. I saw her in the Weatherly play that closed a couple of weeks ago.”

“You have any trouble with her?”

“Well, she had temperament. But she was never more than a week late with her rent.”

“Do you know where she lived before she came here?”

Chellarn waved Corrigan’s question aside with his tiny hand. “Never pry. If a tenant keeps paid up, his apartment is his castle. Provided they’re not destructive, of course.”

“Then you didn’t know Noreen Gardner very well?”

“I don’t believe in getting chummy with my tenants,” Chellarn said. “A good morning, and that’s it. Anything more, and soon they’re asking you to wait for the rent.”

“Do you know if she had close friends among your other tenants?”

“I can’t say.”

“I’d like to talk to some of them.”

“The ones who were here when Miss Gardner occupied an apartment have all gone. They come and they go. However.…”

“Yes?”

“One thing I do recall about Noreen Gardner. She was a sick girl.”

“Sick?” Corrigan asked sharply. “How?”

“She came in to pay the rent one day. For the last month she was here, if memory serves. I was busy with a customer, and Miss Gardner waited. Suddenly she uttered a gasping moan, a really frightful sound.

“She was standing beside that table where the art magazines are stacked. Her mouth was open, and her eyes seemed to be pushing out of their sockets. Before I could reach her, she had fainted.”

“Do you know what was wrong with her?”

“No. The customer and I carried her to a couch I have in the rear. I called Dr. Pelligrini, whose office is across the street. Then I elevated Miss Gardner’s feet and put damp cloths on her forehead. She was coming to by the time the doctor got here.”

“Did you talk to Pelligrini about her?”

“I told him what had happened and who she was,” Chellarn said. “Then it was no longer my business.”

Corrigan said thanks and they left.

Pelligrini was an overworked and overowed neighborhood doctor, deliverer of babies, patcher of lacerations, dealer in measles, arthritis, snifflles, and coronaries. His office was shabby and crowded.

A rumpled, rotund man, with a smile that suggested optimism in a lost cause, he bustled into the inner office where his nurse had parked Corrigan and Baer.

“It looks as if you’re busy, Doctor,” Corrigan said. “We won’t keep you long.”

“I’m always busy, Captain,” Pelligrini said, glancing casually at Corrigan’s eye-patch. What can I do for you?”

“Almost a year ago you were called in an emergency by the proprietor of The Treasure Trove to treat a girl—Noreen Gardner—who had fainted.”

“Yes, I remember. It’s easy to remember her.”

“Why?”

“Because she was a case of walking death. And wouldn’t believe it. Is she dead, Captain?”

“Yes.”

Pelligrini’s tired eyes ambled about his office, past the fly-specked medical diploma, across the shelves of faded books. “You try to tell them. But in the end they have to do some things for themselves. With this girl it was useless. She had a fixation more dangerous than her infirmity, because her mind ruled out any chance for physical repair. She absolutely refused to face, much less accept, the fact that she was ill. She insisted that heat had caused her to faint, and nothing I could say would convince her otherwise.”

“Why did she faint, Dr. Pelligrini?”

“She had a touch-and-go cardiac condition resulting from heart damage early in life. From the necessarily inadequate examination I was able to make I’d say that she suffered a severe attack of rheumatic fever at a very young age. I’m sure she received wholly inadequate treatment during and after her illness, maybe none at all. By the time she came to me, the young woman was a candidate for open-heart surgery.”

“Did you ten her?”

“Of course,” Pelligrini said. “But the girl was an emotional cripple. When I told her my diagnosis, she went into a rage—said I was a quack, and a lot of other unpleasant things. In my opinion she was paranoiac.”

“Ever see her again, Doctor?”

Pelligrini shook his head. “Not after the few visits when I made some tests. As a matter of fact, I took it on myself to inquire about her after she failed to keep a subsequent appointment Mr. Chellarn said she’d moved away. Some man, it seems, had come and removed her things.”

“Probably Travers Proehl,” Chuck Baer said to Corrigan.

Corrigan nodded. “He’s a producer,” he said to the doctor. “Noreen Gardner appeared in some of his plays. Do you know Proehl?”

The doctor shook his head again. “I haven’t had time to look at a playbill in fifteen years. No, I don’t, but I wish I’d had the opportunity to meet him. If he was a friend of that girl, I might have been able to convince him that she was living on borrowed time. Maybe he could have convinced her.”

13

As Car 40 padded off East Houston Street to creep through the tenement jungle, Corrigan and Baer took stock.

“It’s getting clearer, Tim,” Chuck Baer said. “Added to all the other stuff, this thing about Noreen Gardner having had rheumatic fever as a child sure ties in with the picture of Nancy Gavin, the kid who was dragged up in poverty.”

“It’s still not proof,” Corrigan said, frowning. “But I’ll admit it’s a working hypothesis. Even so, how does that give us anything on the link between Nancy-Noreen and Bianca Lessard?”

“That damned Mayan ring.”

Corrigan pulled up at the curb. The car was instantly surrounded by a gang of lounging teenagers in T-shirts, tight pants, and boots. But they seemed more curious than belligerent, and Corrigan felt relieved. Anyway, he wasn’t going to leave the unmarked car to their tender mercies.

He and Baer looked up at the face of the tenement. It glowered over the dirty sidewalk like an architectural delinquent, unwashed, unkempt—a pile of decomposing materials. Even the windows reflected the afternoon sun dully, as if begrudging the light they were supposed to admit.

“I talked to the old woman at the morgue,” Corrigan said. “She might remember me. She’s never seen you, Chuck. Suppose you tackle her.”

“If it’s still in her head,” Baer said, opening the car door, “I’ll pick it out.”

He went up the stone steps outside, that had been ground down by the feet of decades, and entered a hallway so dark he had to grope his way. The sour stench made his stomach heave.

Inside, he climbed the decrepit stairs, past walls scribbled over and denuded to the bare laths, to the top floor. As he climbed the stench grew stronger—rat droppings, old bedding, garbage, unflushed toilets, cabbage soup.

The number was gone from Anna Gavin’s door, but its silhouette remained in the decaying paint.

Baer rapped.

He rapped again.

He heard the grind of bedsprings. A cracked old voice seeped through the door: “Who is it? Who’s there?”

“Miss Gavin,” Baer called, “I’ve come to pay my respects. I’m an admirer of your work.”

An eager rustle came through the door. It made him think of a crab creeping across sand.

The door opened. Watery eyes in a shriveled face peered up at him. She clung to the doorjamb for support.

“My poems? You’ve read them?”

“A lot of people have read your poems, Miss Gavin. May I come in?”

“Of course!” Her cackle was excited. “Though I wasn’t expecting company. You’ll have to forgive the untidiness.”

The understatement of the year, Baer thought as he gingerly stepped inside. Cracked blinds that had once been green were pulled down over the windows. Even so, he could make out a swaybacked bed, unmade; a scarred cripple of a dresser, one leg missing and half its tarnished mirror gone; a couple of mismatched rickety chairs; a heap of rags on a card table (good God, Baer thought, could that be her underclothing?); some bedcovers thrown on the floor, exposing a vermin-stained mattress.

She actually took Baer by the arm—he tried not to pull away from her claws—and led him to one of the chairs. Her eyesight seemed better here than in the darkness of the hall. She gave him a coy little push as he sat down.

“You’re a big, big man, aren’t you? I like big men.” She perched on the edge of the bed, leering at him. Baer felt his stomach turn over. “What’s your name, Mr.—?”

“Baer. Chuck Baer.”

“Lovely. Lovely. It suits you. It’s the name of a womanchaser. The only kind of man worth his giblets is the man who’s out for a tumble. Don’t you agree?”

For once in his life Baer was at a loss for words.

“I’d offer you a drink, Chuck,” the old woman said, “but I just happen to be out.” An aged little mouse of a tongue peered out of her toothless mouth and popped back in again. “There’s a package store on the corner. Wouldn’t a bottle of vino make this visit more friendly?”

“Why don’t I run down to the store when I get my breath back?” Baer said. He had the lungs of a whale. “It was a long climb up those stairs.”

She made a coquettish face, like a little girl pretending not to be disappointed.

“Are you publishing another volume soon?” He was finding himself childishly anxious to complete the mission and make his escape.

“Oh, certainly. I always have a volume on the hod.”

“Your last book was quite successful, I understand.”

“All my books are.” One claw patted the mattress. “Don’t you want to sit down here, by me?”

Baer swallowed. “I don’t think the bed would take my weight, Miss Gavin. But let’s get back to your books—”

It was incredible. She pouted. “You don’t like me.”

“Oh, but I do—”

Mercifully, she wandered off. She seemed bewildered suddenly. “It was so long ago.”

“What was?”

“My book. My last book.”

“You’re mistaken. Think back, Miss Gavin. Think hard.”

“My head hurts,” she whined. “I need a drink. Goddam it, are you going after that stinking bottle of wine or aren’t you?”

“Pretty soon,” said Baer. “Aren’t you feeling well?”

“Of course I’m feeling well.” She seemed suspicious. “Why shouldn’t I be feeling well?”

“The party was a little late breaking up.”

“What party?”

“Last night. The one to celebrate your book.”

Her eyes began to water again. He could see reasonably well now in the gloom. Tears were running down the sides of her nose. She felt her temples. He could have wept himself.

“Were you there?” she asked uncertainly.

“I couldn’t make it. I’m sorry.”

“But wasn’t that party a long time ago?”

He forced a chuckle. “That’s very good, Miss Gavin.”

She peered at him. “It is?”

“I suppose no poet takes time very seriously. That’s what you were expressing, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, yes. Of course! The party … I came home and dreamed. So many dreams. I dreamed time. Time passing.”

“Now you’re on the beam,” Baer said, hating himself.

“I left early for the party. I wore a lovely gown.”

“And all the men flocked around you?”

“Of course.” She touched her wiry gray hair, which looked like a nestful of snakes. “You men. You lusty men.”

“We’re something, all right,” said Baer. “I suppose it’s hard, having a daughter who envies her mother.”

“That mewling brat,” Anna Gavin snarled.

“Is Nancy feeling better?”

“Better?”

“That fever she had,” Baer said.

She paid no attention. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with her. She’s always puking around, hanging on to my skirt.”

“I understood Nancy had the fever.”

“Oh, a little cold. I gave her some aspirin and put her to bed, with a smack in the face to make her remember who I am. You’ve been listening to those nosy neighbors of mine. You know what that nervy bitch down the hall said to me? She said if I wouldn’t do it, she’d have her family doctor look at Nancy. Can you imagine?”

“What did she think was the matter with Nancy?” Baer was sitting very still.

“Oh, she said one of her kids once got rheumatic fever. She said the symptoms were just like Nancy’s. I told her to go to hell.” The old woman cackled.

Baer sat in silence, listening. It’s like something out of one of those foreign movies, he thought. But no Italian director could get the flavor of the scene. Not unless he had some way of conveying the smell. Rotten sour wine. The sweet stench of bugs and mice. Old underwear. I’ll have to go to a Turkish bath, he thought, to get the stink out. Burn my clothes.

He got up.

“It’s been a fine talk, Miss Gavin,” he said. “But I’m afraid I’ll have to be going.”

She jumped off the bed. Her spryness only added to the horror. Then she was clinging to him, her hands all over him. He jerked back and she almost fell. I’m going to throw up if I don’t get out of here fast, he thought. He edged toward the door. She ran after him, screaming.

“You walking out on me, you eunuch?” There was nothing young about her pretenses now. Her writhered face was all darkness and hell fumes. “Men don’t turn their backs on me, Mr. Baer! Not on Anna Gavin! I’ll bet you haven’t been able to get it up for years! Eunuch, eunuch, eunuch!”

She stopped, exhausted.

“I’m sorry you found it out, Miss Gavin,” Baer said. He could feel the sweat, hot as the old woman’s breath, crawling down his back. “Here.” He was all thumbs as he tried to get the wallet out of his breast pocket. “I won’t have time to stop for the wine. Why don’t you drop down yourself and pick it up? I’ll be glad to pay for it.”

He dropped the five-dollar bill into Anna Gavin’s hand and got out of there.

He piled into Car 40, exhaling hard, wiping his face. Corrigan was grinning.

“How did you like Miss Gavin, Chuck?”

“Damn you,” Baer growled. “You know what the old harpy called me? A eunuch.”

“Now that,” said Corrigan, “I know isn’t true.”

“I was glad! It took me off the hook.” The big man shuddered, “I’ll feel her hands on me in my nightmares.… Don’t ever ask me to do a job like that again, Tim.”

“I gather you got results, or you’d still be up there. Or would you?”

“I don’t know if I could have taken her five more seconds. As it happens, I got it out of her. Nancy Gavin seems to have had rheumatic fever as a kid—I can’t give you an M.D.’s affidavit, but a neighbor thought Nancy had it, and the neighbor’d had experience with a child of her own. Anna gave her aspirin for it. So there’s a confirmation of sorts. It was a good hunch.”

“More than a hunch, Chuck.” Corrigan started the car, and the teenagers began reluctantly to slide off the fenders. “Noreen’s sneak thievery, the way she gobbled her food, her vicious moods, her greed and slyness, her lack of any moral sense—her entire personality fitted in with how a Nancy Gavin would have developed, the way and where she was brought up. Then we see Nancy, the fifteen-year-old mistress of a creep, as a movie bug, living in a dream world, aping actresses. And Noreen winds up an actress. It all fits.”

“Maybe she’d have made it big,” Baer said, “if she’d had more time.” He shrugged his big shoulders. “So she winds up in the morgue.”

“A short life and an unhappy one.” Corrigan nodded. “I wish to hell I knew who put her there.”

His tone was thoughtful, and Chuck Baer looked at him.

“You’ve got another hunch,” Baer said. “Your voice tells me you’ve got another hunch.”

Corrigan tapped the horn to scatter a stickball game.

“We’ve got more pointers,” Corrigan said. “We’ve got Nancy-Noreen on the last night of her life keeping a date with a man who was going to do big things for her in the theater. We’ve got a group of people who use Frances Weatherly’s apartment as a public pad. In the group is a man whose theatrical past is shiny enough to make a little trout like Nancy-Noreen swallow the hook on the end of the line he’s handing her.”

“Carlton Ainsley.”

“Can you name another?”

“No,” Baer admitted. “Not unless by some fluke it was a man whose name we haven’t run across yet.”

Corrigan thought of Jean Ainsley. His face was bleak at the prospect of doing what he had to do.

14

Carlton Ainsley dined and returned to his borrowed apartment shortly before 9 P.M. As the actor entered the building, Corrigan slid out from behind the wheel. Chuck Baer remained in the police car.

Corrigan reached the second floor as Ainsley was keying open the Karam apartment. Corrigan moved silently along the deeply carpeted hallway. He came up behind Jean’s father.

“Evening, Mr. Ainsley.”

The actor jerked about, falling into a crouch. The planes of his youthful face were a little soggy from the drinks he had consumed. The flare of his eyes indicated something more than mere surprise.

Ainsley straightened up quickly. “Captain Corrigan. Do you always creep up on a man?”

“I wanted to have a talk with you.”

“I have an appointment as soon as I’ve freshened up. Can’t it wait?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Ainsley said stiffly, “Very well. Come in.”

It was a duplex apartment in the grand manner, furnished like a Hollywood set, with freakishly designed furniture and great swooping drapes to the high ceiling. Everything about it evoked a set designer, from the exotic bric-à-brac to the paintings on the walls. Some of them, Corrigan felt sure, were originals. He saw one that he thought was a Picasso, and another that could only have come from the brush of Jackson Pollock. There were few personal touches. It was the sterile way station of a rich and creative man who used it as a stopover in a life of constant travel.

“Drink?” Ainsley said as they stepped down into the sunken living room from the railed entrance balcony.

“No, thanks.”

Ainsley went over to a long chrome-and-plastic bar. The Scotch bottle chattered against the rim of the glass as he poured himself a stiff shot.

“Would you mind coming to the point, Captain? I’ll be late for my appointment.”

Corrigan stood there. “We’ve pinned down the background of Noreen Gardner.”

The actor’s eyes flicked away from Corrigan’s face as he raised the glass. “Why should that interest me?”

“She started life as the unwanted brat of an unknown father and a degenerate mother. Her name was then Nancy Gavin. At fifteen she ran away with a man three times her age. Does that interest you, Mr. Ainsley?”

“I can’t see how.” Ainsley drained his glass and turned away to pour himself another drink. His back told nothing.

Corrigan was annoyed. “I like the people I talk to to look at me. Would you mind?”

To his surprise, Ainsley turned around laughing. “I’m an actor, remember?”

“I remember. Nancy Gavin changed her name finally to Noreen Gardner and gravitated to the theater. The way it looks to me, her ambitions weren’t entirely to become a star. She was trying to bury Nancy Gavin in a make-believe world. Any character she played was better than the one she’d started life out in.”

“Is this supposed to mean something to me, Captain?”

“You’ve stolen my line,” said Corrigan. “Answer your own question.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say,” the actor said, smiling. “Would you mind putting it in words of one syllable for this poor old ham?”

“Well, let’s try this on for size. Shorly before her death Nancy-Noreen met some theatrical big shot who apparently impressed her enough to make her kick over Travers Proehl and lose interest in the new Frances Weatherly play. Does it fit, Mr. Ainsley?”

“Me?”

“You.”

“No,” Ainsley said shrilly. “I wasn’t the man.”

“She met you at Fran Weatherly’s. And she wasn’t too hard to take. Especially by an aging actor who’d spent five years in the pen and whose life had been filled with women—who needed women, and still does.”

“She met lots of people there. I hardly knew the girl.”

“You were the man, Ainsley. Admit it.” Corrigan might have been talking about yesterday’s weather. And, as always, he felt sorry for his victim. He deliberately let himself remember what the rats had left in the sewer.… He had seen and handled killers by the score, proved killers, and he had never been able to keep himself from feeling sorry for them. He had often felt the killing urge himself; he knew how little it took to snuff out a life. Most police officers felt otherwise. Like the eye-patch, it made him stand apart from the other men in Centre Street.… He introduced an ugly note into his voice, and took a step forward. “Admit it!”

“I didn’t kill her,” Ainsley chattered. “I took her to bed but I didn’t kill her.” Then he saw the light in Corrigan’s eye, and seized his head in both hands. “Oh, God, you didn’t know. You weren’t sure.…”

“I am now,” Corrigan said in a tired voice. “We’d better have a talk downtown.”

Ainsley backed up against the bar. He was plainly in panic. “No.… Not where the windows have bars.…”

“Just a talk downtown,” Corrigan said, closing in on him.

“No, no! I didn’t kill Noreen, I tell you—I can’t stand those cell bars.”

“Let’s get it on the record, Ainsley. If you didn’t kill her, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Corrigan touched Ainsley’s left biceps. And then the actor swept up a heavy beaten-silver icebucket from the bar with his right hand. The bucket arced savagely. Corrigan jerked his head aside, but he was an instant too late. The bucket struck him above the left ear. He went down. The other side of his head struck against the face of the bar. It felt like lightning. He pitched onto his back as darkness closed in.

After a while he became aware of muscle tremors and the ache in his head. He pulled himself over and struggled to his hands and knees. A wave of nausea washed over him. He crouched there for a few seconds, on all fours, until it went away. Then he groped for a bar stool, touched its seat, and pulled himself to his feet All the while he was pulling himself up a cold voice was saying in his ringing ear, That’s what comes of feeling sorry for them. And he’s Jean’s father. I ought to get a demotion for this.…

He gripped the back of the chair until the room settled down. Then he turned around. The door on the balcony was wide open.

Carlton Ainsley had made a run for it.

Corrigan was pressing a bloody handkerchief to his head when he reached the lobby. The doorman stared at him.

“Did you see Mr. Ainsley come down?”

“Yes, sir. You’re hurt, sir? There’s a doctor in the building across the street.”

“It’s nothing. Which way did he go?”

“He started to leave by the front door here. He must have seen something on the street that changed his mind, because he didn’t go out that way.”

Baer and Car 40. “Where did he go?” Corrigan asked through his teeth.

“He headed toward the service entrance, sir. He looked kind of wild—”

“Which way is the service entrance? Hurry up, man!”

The doorman said hastily, “That last door on the left.”

“Did he go back up? Or out of the building?”

“Out. He looked so queer that I followed him and asked him if anything was wrong. He said no. I knew something was wrong—I’m paid to protect the security of this building—and I was about to check the Karam apartment when you came down. Is there anything you want me to do, Captain?”

“No,” Corrigan said. “Did you notice which way Ainsley went?”

“He started east. Unless he changed directions, he should be on Lexington Avenue by this time.”

Corrigan stuffed his handkerchief in his pocket and hurried out to the black car.

“Slide over, Chuck; take the wheel. Our boy panicked, flattened me, and got out of the building. He’s heading for a cab or the subway.”

“That powder puff flattened you?” Baer said incredulously.

“With an icebucket. Step on it, Chuck, will you?”

There were few people on the street in the midevening lull. Corrigan’s eyes kept raking the sidewalks. He did not spot Ainsley, and he reached for the microphone. At Lexington, Baer hesitated. Corrigan was talking fast, putting out the radio alert to pick up Ainsley. As he hung up, Baer said, “Where to now?”

“If he wasn’t lucky enough to spot an empty taxi, he probably headed for the nearest subway entrance. Turn, Chuck.”

Street yardage slid past as Corrigan examined the flow of light and shadow.

“There he is!”

“Where, Tim?”

“He just ducked down into the subway. Pull up here!”

Baer curbed the car near the subway entrance, and they both jumped out and made a dive for the stairs.

On the platform below they pulled up. Only three other people were waiting at the local stop. And there was Ainsley, one of them, a little way down the platform, his toes projecting over the tracks. He was glaring at Corrigan with animal fear.

“Don’t come near me!” the actor screamed. “Or I’ll jump onto the third rail!”

The other two people, a man and a woman, ran back toward the turnstiles, collided trying to get through and away. They finally straightened themselves out and vanished up the stairway.

Ainsley uttered a wild laugh.

The tunnel began filling with the roar of an approaching train.

“You circle him, Chuck,” Corrigan said. “Take it easy, though. He’s gone off his rocker.”

“Or it’s an act.”

“No act. Not with that kind of exit.”

He was moving quietly forward, a few inches at a time. Baer began to circle.

I mustn’t lose him, Corrigan was thinking. She’d curse the day she ever laid eyes on me.

“Hold it!” Ainsley shrieked above the rising noise. “Not another step, Corrigan, or I swear I’ll do it!”

“I’d think about it,” Chuck Baer said. He was widening the spread between him and Corrigan, approaching on Ainsley’s left. “It’s one of those things you don’t get a second chance to think about.”

Baer had the actor’s attention. Corrigan moved in another yard. The roar of the nearing train swelled.

“Stay back, stay back!” Ainsley screamed at Baer.

Baer stopped. He had so maneuvered that Ainsley had to turn away from Corrigan to keep an eye on him.

“Okay, pal,” Baer said in a soothing voice. “Let’s talk this over.…”

Ainsley jerked around like a rabbit.

Corrigan saw the despair in the actor’s eyes as he threw himself forward. Ainsley opened his mouth, but whatever he was shouting was drowned in the thunder of the train. He batted at Corrigan’s reaching hands, trying to twist away. He was teetering on the edge of the platform when Corrigan enveloped him like a blanket.

He was in time by a layer of molecules between his back and the side of the train. The cars rushed past in a hellish wind, and Corrigan threw his weight away from them and onto Ainsley. He managed to flip the struggling actor onto his back. Then Baer fell on them both, and it was over.

“What in hell did they do to him in that pen?” Chuck Baer grunted as he pulled Corrigan off and sat down on Ainsley’s chest.

“Whatever it was, he didn’t care for it,” Corrigan said, brushing himself off. “It’s all right, Chuck, the fight’s out of him. Get off him.”

Between them they hauled the mumbling actor to his feet and half carried him up the subway stairs. They had to drag him to Car 40. Corrigan got in the rear seat with him, and Baer took the wheel.

Ainsley sat with his shoulders caved in, his chin on his chest His face was gray and old.

“I don’t feel well,” he said dimly.

“Can you hang on till we get to your apartment?” Corrigan asked him.

Even Baer was surprised. Ainsley’s head jerked up. “You’re not taking me to prison?”

“Not now.”

“Thank you, thank you!”

“Are you all right?”

“I think I can make it. I’ll try not to mess up your car.” The actor swallowed, hard. He swallowed again. Corrigan nodded to Chuck Baer, and Baer started the car and headed it back.

“I want to thank you again, Captain Corrigan,” Ainsley muttered. “I can’t tell you the horrors I get in a place with bars on it. I can hardly bear to go into a bank. You wouldn’t know what a thing like that feels like. You’ve got guts. I haven’t I need some, badly.”

“You damn well do,” Corrigan said. He reached over and took the two-way mike. He told Communications that he had the actor and was returning him to his apartment, and hung up. “You damn well do, Ainsley,” he repeated.

“I didn’t even have the guts to throw myself under that train.”

“I wasn’t referring to that.”

Ainsley stared at him, bewildered.

“Do you still say you didn’t kill Noreen?”

“I didn’t kill her.”

Corrigan said nothing more until Car 40 pulled up before the apartment building. He got out and yanked Ainsley out after him, holding on to his arm.

“Chuck, locate Jean Ainsley and bring her here, will you?”

Baer looked at him. “Sure thing,” was all he said.

Corrigan seemed to feel a need to explain.

“It may be a little easier on her than a ride in a squad car.”

“Sure it will,” the private detective said, and he drove the black Ford away.

15

Carlton Ainsley slumped in the plastic chair in the Karam living room. Corrigan came back from the bar carrying a straight shot.

“Drink this.”

Ainsley cupped the glass with both trembling hands.

Corrigan waited patiently until the actor set the glass down empty.

“I want it from the top,” Corrigan said. “And I want it straight. I warn you you don’t have to talk here. But if you refuse, I’ll have no choice. I’ll have to take you downtown.”

“I understand.” Ainsley shivered. “I’ll tell you anything I can. What do you want to know?”

“The truth.”

“All right.”

“And don’t try to be noble. If others are involved, I want to know that, too. Maybe there are extenuating circumstances. Give yourself a break.”

“There are—a few.”

“Noreen Gardner. Why did you murder her?”

Ainsley stared, hollow-eyed. Then he began to laugh. “You never give up, do you, Captain? I’ve told you over and over—I didn’t kill her. I don’t know how to make you believe me, except to keep saying it.”

“You didn’t kill her,” Corrigan said thoughtfully.

“I’m a gutless wonder, remember? I couldn’t kill a human being. I couldn’t kill a chicken.”

“Her body was found in a sewer main not far from here.”

Ainsley squeezed his eyes shut. “I know.”

“She went out on the night of her death with a man who said he could do things for her in the theater. That man was you, Ainsley.”

“Yes,” Ainsley whispered.

“I’d prefer you to keep your eyes open when we talk.” Ainsley opened his eyes. Looking into them, Corrigan regretted his command. “She did keep the date?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

“In my own way?”

“Any way you want.”

“The evening began promisingly. She was greedy and sly, but she was also quite attractive—if you’re an old stud with waning powers that need special stimulation.

“You see, Captain, we had at least one rare thing in common, Noreen Gardner and I. We were honest. Each of us knew exactly what the other was after, and we struck a tacit bargain. We were both sincere about delivering. For my part, I really could have furthered her career. I still know a few people.”

“You brought her here? To this apartment?”

“Yes. She enjoyed this place—as she put it, it has class. We had a few drinks. We went out to dinner. Then to a small nightclub. She wanted to drop in at a discothèque, and we stopped at still another place afterward. It was quite late when we got back here.”

“Just you two? You didn’t pick up any freeloaders on the way?”

“Quite alone, Captain.” Carlton Ainsley paused. Then he said, “To the moment of her death.”

“But you didn’t kill her.”

“When the old stud was approaching the high point of the evening, Captain?” Ainsley’s delicate hands went to his temples. “I wanted her very much alive, believe me.

“We were both pretty well oiled. We went into the master bedroom with our arms around each other; it kept us from falling. She flopped onto the bed and I went to the closet and took out a nightgown I’d bought for her with some of the money Dmitri—Mr. Karam—had been kind enough to stake me to before he left for Europe. It was something, Captain. Apricot color—not quite apricot, no; I can’t describe it. But it’s the whoriest thing you ever saw. And sheer, just sheer enough to suggest without revealing. A real teaser’s garment. I’d spent two hours finding just the thing I wanted.”

Corrigan was silent. Ainsley had forgotten he was there. He was reliving the past like a psychiatrist’s subject under the truth drug, eyes wide open, pale, breathing slowly, unconscious of his surroundings.

“I showed her the nightgown. She tumbled off the bed and went for it, squealing like a little girl. While she held it up, uttering little cries, I undressed her. It was a … a sweet moment. So sweet. She suddenly put her mouth up to mine and kissed me. ‘I’ll make myself nice for you, Carlton,’ she said. They were her last words on earth.”

The actor fell into a reverie. Corrigan let him sit there for a long time before he said softly, “Go on.”

“She went into the bathroom,” Ainsley said with a start. “I went after her. As far as the doorway. She ran the tub full. Poured in bath salts. Chose a cake of French soap from the cabinet—very expensive soap; Karam has a thing about soap. Then she climbed into the tub and slid under the water and the bubbles came up to her chin and she smiled at me and I went out.”

“Where did you go?”

“Back in here to get a couple of drinks ready.”

“Not to undress?”

“I was saving that for later. I was … holding back the moment.” Ainsley began to breathe rapidly. “Savoring it. I kept thinking of what was coming. I drank one of the drinks while I waited.”

He closed his eyes and after a moment shuddered. “Then I began to chafe. She was taking so long. What was keeping her? Wasn’t she as impatient as I was? I told myself to let her take her time. Maybe it was the tub—she’d never seen a sunken tub in her life, I’m sure, so big, made of pure marble. Like something out of ancient Rome. I made another drink for myself.”

“While she was dying?” Corrigan said. He had no doubt whatever that the actor was telling the truth. But habit made him put a barb into his voice, a stinger.

“While she was dying.” Ainsley opened his eyes. His face was death’s color, as if to suit what he was saying. “I finished my second drink. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I went to the bathroom and I couldn’t see her. Just the bath water with the soap bubbles on it. I remember feeling completely disoriented. How was it possible? Had I dreamed the whole thing? Then the bubbles started disappearing and I saw her face. It was underwater, of course. And her mouth was open. And her eyes. But it was her mouth that fascinated me. It was open—underwater. And there were no air bubbles coming up.”

Ainsley shifted in the chair. Corrigan went quietly to the bar and poured another shot and brought it to him and thrust it in his hand. The actor did not drink. He sat there with the glass in his hand, staring.

“I can’t describe how I felt, Captain. I must have been in shock. Looking at the tub. Telling myself I was seeing things, that I’d had too much to drink and this was all an alcoholic illusion. I remember praying that that was what it was, illusion. I don’t know how much time passed with her dead body in the tub and me standing over her like a dummy, like some damned ventriloquist’s dummy with his master away!”

His voice was beginning to rise. Corrigan recognized the symptoms. He forced the man’s hand with the glass to the quivering lips, forced him to swallow. Ainsley choked and pawed the air. But a little color came into his face.

“Take your time, Ainsley,” Corrigan said. “We have plenty of time. I know this isn’t pleasant for you, but it’s important for your sake as well as for the sake of others.” And this time he got his voice into a friendly groove, quiet and sensible and sympathetic, and it did the trick. When Ainsley spoke again, it was in his normal voice.

His recollections of what had happened then were vague in spots, sharp in others, like a badly edited film. He remembered pulling the girl out of the tub, turning her over, laying her over a bath stool, trying to squeeze the bathwater out of her, turning her over again, trying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. How long this went on Ainsley had no idea. But in time he knew his efforts were useless, that she was irrevocably dead, and that he had a terrible problem on his hands.

The next thing he remembered was walking the streets.

“The whole world had caved in on me,” the actor said. “I’d survived the wreckage of my life in California, I’d survived those horrible years at San Quentin, through the friendship of Dmitri Karam I had been given the chance to pick up the pieces of my life and put them together again, to launch a new career. And up here in Dmitri’s apartment was the dead body of a naked girl.

“I was trapped. If the story got out, even though I was absolutely innocent of Noreen’s death—even at the time I could only surmise that she had had a heart seizure in the tub, gone unconscious, slid under, and drowned; or maybe the heart attack killed her before she slid under, I didn’t know—if the story got out, I was finished for good. I couldn’t hope to count on Dmitri’s friendship this time. He would have his own career to think of. He would have to wash his hands of me. It was unthinkable that he might go through with his plans for me. It would ruin him. Even if it didn’t ruin him, he could never pull it off. No television show with me in it—after this—would have a chance of airing. I was through, all right.

“Unless—somehow—I could conceal the whole thing.”

That figured, Corrigan thought. That was the way a desperate man’s mind would work. This was the McCoy, all right. He found himself sighing and wondered why. Then he knew. His brain was giving off warnings. His cop’s brain. Was this an act? it was saying. Carlton Ainsley is a first-class actor. Was this the top performance of his career?

Corrigan shook his head. He would have staked his shield on this. The thought was a cop’s reflex. Ainsley was telling the exact truth.

Ainsley was going on. He had begun to rationalize; his head was clearing. Desperation made him keen. He wanted to believe that he could still save himself. The girl was dead. There was nothing he could do about that. Could he save himself?

“I found myself thinking: How can I dispose of a body in the middle of New York City?”

And then, as he was crossing a street, he found the answer. He stubbed his toe and looked down. He had stumbled over a manhole cover in the middle of the street. A manhole … a sewer.…

“What did you use,” asked Corrigan, “the service stairs?”

“Yes. I dried her body, wrapped it in a sheet, carried her down to the garage in the basement. It was very late; the doorman had long since gone off duty; there wasn’t a soul around. I put her in Dmitri’s town car, on the floor, below the rear seat. I was in a fever to get it over with. I felt that I couldn’t go on with it unless I did it quickly. I don’t know where I got the strength to do what I did. But, somehow, I did it. Somehow I pried the manhole cover up—I think I used a tool from the car, but I’m not sure—somehow I mustered the fortitude to drop the body in and cover the hole and get out of there. And no one saw me. There wasn’t a soul in the streets.…”

His voice dribbled off, and he began to cry.

Corrigan blessed the buzzer that took him to the door.

It was Jean Ainsley and Chuck Baer. Jean’s face was as white as the plastic covering the bar. She ran in and went to her father and knelt by him and took out a handkerchief as he clung to her, and tried to dry his eyes.

“What did you do to him?” she cried to Corrigan.

“He’s done it to himself, Jean,” Corrigan said. “He’ll be all right now. Give him a minute or two.”

Jean rose helplessly. Her father cowered in the chair, avoiding her eyes. But then he drew a deep breath and sat up straight, so that he looked like a man again. He got up and went to the bar and poured himself a drink, a small drink, and threw his head back; and when he set the glass down he remained with his back to them, his elbows on the bar, staring at his nightmare without fear.

“He’s guilty of the illegal disposal of a dead body,” Corrigan said to Jean in a low voice. “No more, no less. The girl died by accident. Her heart carried the scars of rheumatic fever contracted when she was a child, and never treated. Traces of a French milled soap were found in her lungs. Between what our technicians found and your father’s story, it’s clear that she must have fainted, gone under the water—she was taking a bath—and drowned. Your father panicked and carried her down to that manhole to the sewer. That’s the story of how Noreen Gardner-Nancy Gavin came to an end.”

“Will he have to go to prison?” Jean asked, but she was looking at her father’s back.

“I doubt it. The D.A. is a reasonable man, and I’m ready to testify to what Mr. Ainsley told me, and how he told it if they’ll let me go into that. I believe his story to the letter. I’m pretty sure he’ll pull a suspended sentence, if he’s charged at all. What he has to worry about are the headlines.”

“And they’ll cook his goose.”

Corrigan shrugged.

The girl walked over to her father and put her hand on his arm. At her touch he started violently. But then he turned around and saw who it was, and he even smiled.

“Forgive me, Jeanie,” Carlton Ainsley said. “Forgive me. If you don’t, I don’t know what I’ll do. I have no one else.”

“Daddy. You have yourself. Of course you have me, but this is something you’re going to have to face, because I can’t face it for you.”

“But, Jeanie, what am I going to do?”

“You have a choice of a great many things. You have charm, and personality, and you’re articulate. You could write insurance, sell real estate, work behind the counter of a haberdashery. You can do almost anything you try to do. But you’ll have to swallow your pride. You’ll have to find the courage to look the world in the face, after a lifetime of having them look at you. Do you think you can do it?”

“I don’t know,” he muttered.

“Neither do I, Daddy. You’ll have to find out. And—who knows? Maybe in two or three years, after everybody’s forgotten all this, you’ll get a chance to go back into show business. Others have done it. And, after all, you haven’t done anything so awful.”

“Jeanie.”

They fell into each other’s arms.

As they stood aside, watching father and daughter, Chuck Baer said, “Well, where do we go from here?”

“What do you mean?”

“This cleans up the Noreen-Nancy foul-up. But—excuse me for bringing it up again, Captain—where is Bianca?”

“I have an idea—” Corrigan began.

“I’m glad somebody has. What idea?”

“—that that Mayan ring is going to give us the answer to the question.”

“How?”

“If I knew that, Chuck,” Corrigan said savagely, “would I be wasting my time standing here talking to the likes of you?”

16

Corrigan was at his desk early the next morning. Morning mail. Morning report. His own report to Inspector in Charge, MOS.

“Recommend,” his report concluded, “that security measures continue in this case. Formal charges against Carlton Ainsley will temporarily pend to keep his name and full details of the death of Nancy Gavin, alias Noreen Gardner, from appearing immediately in the public record. The press will be briefed at the proper time. Meanwhile, Carlton Ainsley will be under close surveillance.

“The reason for these measures stems from the Mayan ring taken from the body of ‘Noreen Gardner.’ Mrs. Bianca Fielding Lessard was wearing this same ring at the time she disappeared, approximately seventy-two hours prior to the death of ‘Noreen.’

“It is possible, therefore, that a person unknown is following the case carefully to ascertain whether or not we can pinpoint the time and place of the transfer of the Mayan ring.”

Corrigan was sliding the report into a manila envelope when Baer walked into the office. Corrigan dropped the report into the. OUT basket, Interdepartmental, for delivery by police messenger.

“I am freshly come from my esteemed client, Vincent Lessard,” the big man announced, dropping into a chair. “Wouldst have the scoop?”

“Is he ready to file a formal complaint on his wife’s disappearance?”

“Not yet. His excuse, Tim, is that the Fielding name would grab too much publicity, which might not set well with Bianca when she shows up.”

“When she shows up?” Corrigan said.

He and Baer looked at each other for a moment.

“Let’s add it up again,” Corrigan said. “This is the morning of the nineteenth. Bianca Fielding Lessard accused her husband of adultery and ran out on him the night of the eighth. Nancy-Noreen, wearing Bianca’s Mayan ring, died on the night of the eleventh or in the small hours of the twelfth. Her body was dropped into the sewer by Ainsley, and it was discovered by a sanitation worker on the evening of the fifteenth. Record of the unidentified body crossed my desk in the morning report of the sixteenth. On that date—the six-teenth—your client identified the body as that of his wife Bianca on the basis of the Mayan ring.”

Baer’s craggy face screwed up as he winked. “Is this what you’re getting at? That if Anna Gavin and Peggy Simpson had never turned up to dispute the ID, the body in the morgue might have been buried as Bianca Fielding Lessard, victim of some unknown mugger?”

Corrigan said, “And Vincent Lessard would have been an overnight millionaire widower.”

“But he came to me. He put a private detective on his wife’s trail.”

“If he was sure the case would go down as an unsolved mugging, what better way to cover his own guilt?”

“You’re charging the man with murder, Tim.”

“I’m not charging him with anything yet. He’s an unprincipled heel whose wife was about to declare him an adulterer in a divorce court and take all that Fielding bread away from him. I’m just assessing what we have. We have a body, that of Nancy-Noreen, but no murder. In the light of Bianca’s continued absence I’m convinced the contrary may be true. We may have a murder, but no body.”

“If Lessard was slick enough to cover it, Tim, he’ll be tough to break.”

“Fine,” Corrigan grinned. “The tougher they are, the worse they fracture.”

Corrigan reached for the telephone.

It began for Vincent Lessard with an ordinary-looking man standing idly across the street. Lessard noticed the man at mid-morning.

An hour later Lessard made a call from his living room to the office of Fielding Theatrical Realty. He happened to glance through the front window while he waited for the switchboard girl to put him through to Jean Ainsley. The same man occupied the same position on the same sidewalk.

Funny, Lessard thought. The police were quick to discourage loungers in this high-rent neighborhood.

Lessard spoke to Jean Ainsley about the Kansas City land-use contract. He had difficulty focusing on the matter. Finally he told Jean he would call her back, and he hung up.

He went to the second floor of the town house, telling himself he was being a fool. Still, he made for the tall arched window at the end of the hall. He drew the drape back and scanned the street. A chilling certainty invaded his mind. The house was being watched. And the watcher was obviously a policeman, or he would have been chased away long ago.

Lessard hurried into the Louis XVI bedroom, stripped off his smoking jacket, and hustled into a sports jacket. Then he strode to the front door. Here he paused, warning himself to act natural.

He stepped out into the sun and strolled along the sidewalk, keeping the stakeout within view. He saw the man lift his hand from his thigh. Could it be a signal?

Lessard looked toward the corner. Another ordinary-looking man was standing there. This man started to walk at a pace that would permit Lessard to overtake him.

The sun began to feel very warm.

Lessard strolled on for several blocks. Pedestrian traffic thickened. He paused at the window of a shoe store and stole a glance in the direction from which he had come. For a moment he enjoyed the thought that he had been imagining things. The second man was no longer behind him. He studied the passersby and the sidewalk beyond to make sure. Relieved, he turned to continue his walk.

But he did not take a step. There was the bird dog, ahead of him, looking innocently into the window of a tobacconist’s shop.

Lessard felt a curious panic. He dodged over to the curb, almost stepped into the path of the cars rushing by. He had to fight himself with long breaths, saying silently, Take it easy. This may be nothing. Don’t commit an act of folly.…

When he re-entered the Fielding house, he stood for a moment behind the closed door, panting. Damn them! What right did they have to put detectives on his trail?

He pecked at lunch, finally abandoning it. During the afternoon he tried to amuse himself at the billiard table, a relic of the old days of Grandfather Fielding, who, according to Bianca, had been a pool shark, one of his many accomplishments. But the balls refused to roll true. The cue kept slipping and skidding. Once it slipped and ripped a six-inch tear in the felt.

Lessard made frequent trips to the window. The first man was still at his station. “Sonofabitch,” Lessard mumbled, and returned to the table and savagely scattered the balls. Finally he threw down the cue and left the house.

He hailed a taxi and drove to a midtown bar. Here he hunched on a barstool, sipping his Scotch and water tastelessly. Follow me in, you goddam fuzz, and gape all you want.…

Nevertheless, he kept watching the door. The detective did not appear. Lessard gulped the rest of his drink. They’d given up, thank God.

Smiling at his anxieties, Lessard dropped a dollar on the bar and got off the stool. He was halfway to the entrance when he heard a voice that was at once sharp and stealthy say behind him, “Hold it, barkeep. I’ll pay for the glass. Police business.”

Lessard felt the old panic again. He contrived a complicated maneuver, turning toward the mirror on the wall opposite the bar and running his hand over his jaws as if to speculate whether he needed a shave or not. In the mirror he had a view of the bar, with its mirror; and he saw a new man standing at the bar and dropping a handkerchief over the glass he had just handled. They had switched detectives on him!

Lessard watched the man wrap the glass carefully, slip it into his pocket, toss a bill on the bar, and walk out without a side or backward glance.

What was going on? Lessard found himself leaning against the wall. What the hell was going on? If they wanted his fingerprints, why didn’t they haul him down to headquarters and take them? Unless.… A man could excercise his constitutional rights at headquarters. This was the easier way. Damned stupid cops! They were so eager that their third man hadn’t taken the elementary precaution of waiting until his victim had left the premises.

During the night Lessard suddenly awoke. He was in a profound sweat. He tossed and turned, trying to get back to sleep. Finally he got out of bed and went to the bathroom for some water.

He silently cursed his own weakness. Why should he give a damn whether they were out there or not? He returned to the bedroom with angry strides. But he merely sat down on the edge of the bed, gripping the mattress. After a while he got up and went to the window. He had begun to hate the window.

On the street below, under a street lamp, a lone man sat patiently in an unmarked black car.

Lessard fled from the window, bumping into a chair and barking his shin. He swore, rubbing the shin. What were the bastards after? What were they trying to pin on him?

He shuffled to the bathroom, yanked the medicine cabinet open. He took down a bottle and shook out two sleeping pills. He hurled them into his mouth, chased them down with tepid tap water.

Lessard awoke groggily the next morning. He had some difficulty clearing his head. He reared from the bed and went to the hated window.

The stakeout was still there, standing across the street like a monument that neither time nor weather could influence.

Frances Weatherly met him for lunch at the Algonquin. Rubbing shoulders with the writers and wits of New York failed for once to stimulate him. He hardly spoke to Fran. He kept watching the newcomers.

“What’s the matter with you?” Frances asked peevishly.

“I’ve a headache,” Lessard said. “I think I’ll go home and lie down. Please excuse me, Fran.”

“Go and be damned to you. You’re lousy company today. I’ll see you this evening.” Fran stared after him, frowning.

When he got home, Lessard was met by the manservant. “Any calls for me?”

“No, Mr. Lessard, but the repairman was here.”

“Repairman?”

“To fix the telephone, sir.”

“I ordered no repairs. You should never have let him in!”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Get the hell out of here!”

When he was alone, Lessard sank into a chair and pressed his hands to his temples. Now they had bugged his phone.

17

Corrigan rocked back in his chair as Lessard shoved into the office and slammed the door.

“Mr. Lessard,” Corrigan said innocently. “You look all excited. Is something wrong?”

Lessard pressed against Corrigan’s desk. He was angry white to the tip of his nose. “The tap on my phone was too much. You want to defend a lawsuit for invasion of privacy?”

“Is anyone invading your privacy?”

“You know damned well you are. Putting detectives on my trail. Bugging my phone. Keeping me under surveillance day and night!”

“Without prejudice,” Corrigan smiled, “and without witnesses, I’ll admit we’re keeping an eye on you.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“Sit down,” Corrigan said with an abrupt change of tone.

“I tell you I won’t take any more of this, Corrigan!” But Lessard took his hands off Corrigan’s desk and sank into a chair. “What do you want of me?” he asked weakly.

“The true story about your wife.”

“But I’ve told you everything there is to tell! And I’ve hired a private detective to find her, as you very well know. What more can I do?”

“You can come clean. Let me tell you something, Lessard. We don’t need a formal complaint on your part. We can move any time we feel there’s enough evidence that a crime has been committed.”

The man seemed startled. “You’ve uncovered evidence? If you have, I’m entitled to know what it is. Bianca was my wife—”

“Was?”

“I mean … she may be in Mexico City divorcing me at this moment.”

“If she is,” Corrigan said, “she must have teleported herself out of New York. This private detective, Chuck Baer, is a thorough operator. He’s run down every possible lead—travel agents, ticket sellers, cab drivers, people she’s met since returning from the sanitorium. He even made a trip to Adirondacks Hall and talked personally with the staff and others up there. No trace of your wife has turned up. Can you explain her continued absence, Lessard?”

“With men following me, watching every move I make and listening to every word I say?” Lessard hesitated. Then he burst out, “You’ve even had one of your men sneak my fingerprints from a bar glass. My God, Captain, you’re treating me as if you suspected me of having murdered Bianca, or something!”

“Did you?”

“No!”

“We have your record,” Corrigan said. “We know who and what you’ve been, Lessard. And a sordid story it is.”

Lessard was silent. Then he said, “All right, Captain. I made a living out of lonely women. But I gave service for my take. I brought romance into their lives. They were glad to pay the tab. Is that why you’re persecuting me?”

“We’re interested in only one thing: What happened to your wife. And what part, if any, you played in it.”

“Captain, I swear I’ve leveled with you. Bianca walked out unharmed the night we had the Donnybrook. And I haven’t seen or heard from her since.”

“Nor submitted to a shakedown by Noreen Gardner?”

Lessard shrank. The anger that had carried him to the office had long since left him. “The girl in the morgue … Noreen … Bianca’s ring.… You think because Noreen was wearing Bianca’s ring.…”

Corrigan had risen. The quiet brown eye regarded Lessard steadily.

“I think your wife is dead, Lessard. I think she was murdered. I think her body has been expertly disposed of.

“The Mayan ring puts Noreen Gardner at the scene of Bianca’s death. It’s inconceivable that a sensitive woman like your wife would have given a cherished possession like that ring to a girl she hardly knew. Noreen Gardner had to come into possession of that ring after Bianca was beyond having anything to say in the matter.”

“You’ve got to believe me, Captain! Noreen was nowhere near our house the night Bianca walked out. I hardly said a dozen words to Noreen in the next few days. I don’t think I said more than hello to her the last time I saw her.”

“When was that?”

“The night she.… The night before her body was found. I had a dinner engagement with Frances Weatherly. When I got to Fran’s place, Noreen was coming out of the building. We spoke as we passed. Noreen had a smug look on her face. When I got upstairs, I found out why.”

Lessard paused to seek a cigarette. Corrigan gave him one, and he lit it with trembling hands.

“Noreen had stopped by earlier while Fran was out shopping,” Lessard continued. “She let herself in and waited for Fran, so she could tell Fran she wasn’t going to be available for the new play. Noreen was on her way to keep a date with big-name-in-the-theater. She told Fran he was going to do things for her that would make a Weatherly play look like a high school play in Dubuque. Of course, it upset Fran, and Noreen got a big kick out of it.”

Corrigan stood still for a moment. Then he put his hand on Lessard’s shoulder with force. “We’re going for a ride,” he said. “You, and I, and Chuck Baer.”

In the kitchenette of Frances Weatherly’s apartment, Travers Proehl nursed a nearly cold cup of coffee. His bulk threw a heavy shadow against the wall. He set the cup down on the dinette table, painfully aware of the woman watching him.

He swung about, looking at the light on her straight hair, the prominent cheekbones, the sensual mouth, the wide-apart eyes.

“You’ll find another producer, Fran,” Proehl rumbled. “I hate to think of leaving New York, of the plays we might have done together. But all things have to end.”

“You won’t change your mind?”

“No,” he said. “I’m leaving. I’m tired. I’m sick of the rat race. And all these cops.”

The buzzer made a demanding sound. Frances Weatherly went out, the door swinging shut behind her.

Proehl reached to pour the last cup of coffee he intended to slurp in New York. Then his hand withdrew from the coffee maker, with a sort of stealth, as he heard the voices in the living room.

Captain Corrigan’s voice was saying, “You look pooped, Miss Weatherly.”

“I’m not feeling well.” Fran glanced from Corrigan to Vincent Lessard. Lessard was pale, washed-out looking. A pulse became visible in her throat above the shapeless shift “I’m also busy, Captain. Can you come back another time?”

“This won’t wait,” Corrigan said.

Fran hesitated. “Very well,” she said, and stepped aside. “Just what’s on your mind?”

Corrigan and Lessard followed her into the long, barren room. With its vaulted ceiling and enormous fireplace, the room looked like an abandoned ruin.

“You lied to me,” Corrigan said.

She hesitated again. “I won’t ask you to sit down,” she said. “Not after that crack. How did I lie to you?”

“You told me that Noreen Gardner han’t been here for more than a week before her death. Mr. Lessard pinpoints the girl here on the night she died. She was leaving the building as he came in, he says.”

Fran obliterated Lessard with a look. “Really? Could be. It was so unimportant it slipped my mind.”

“It was so important,” Corrigan said, “that you lied about it. Noreen got in here while you were out shopping. The building super knew her as your friend, and she had no trouble gaining entry. She yielded to her old greedy habits while she waited. She was all through with you—she no longer cared what you thought of her. So she lifted a few trinkets—whatever she could lay her hands on. One of them has to have been a Mayan ring. And a few hours later she was dead. When did you first discover that Noreen Gardner had helped herself to Bianca Lessard’s ring, Miss Weatherly?”

Lessard refused to meet her eyes.

“Vincent has been warned to keep his mouth shut while we’re here,” Corrigan said. “You won’t have the chance to hatch up a story with lover boy.”

“You’re guessing,” Frances Weatherly said.

“Educated guesswork is the heart of my job,” Corrigan said. “Let me guess some more. Bianca Fielding Lessard came straight here after she had that fight with her husband. Why do I say that? Because Vincent told me, in his story about the quarrel, that Bianca had said to him before she walked out that he and you deserved each other, that she wanted you both to know it.”

The woman said to Lessard, “You made that up, Vincent How could you remember every word she said?”

“Talk to me, Miss Weatherly,” Corrigan said. “There’s no trick in remembering the conversation of an evening when a man sees a few million dollars walking out on him. If I had to make another guess, it’s that he also regretted—as he still does—having ever climbed into your bed.”

“You can’t bait me with insults, Captain!”

“How can you be insulted with a fact?” Corrigan said. “But let’s get back to the outraged wife. Bianca was as good as her word, I think. She came here, to your apartment, that night to tell you to your face that you could have her husband for keeps—minus the Fielding dough, of course.”

“Suppose she did come here,” Frances Weatherly said carefully. “It doesn’t prove a thing. She might have gone on from here to anywhere.”

“The ring, Miss Weatherly, the ring,” Corrigan said. “That Mayan ring says otherwise. That Mayan ring says that Bianca Lessard was in no condition to go from here under her own steam; that ring was a keepsake she never took from her finger. That means it was taken from her, and it doesn’t require a genius to figure out that it had to be taken from her while she was unconscious, dying, or dead.

“The way it happened, I think, was that you saw her walking out of your and Vincent’s life, taking her fortune with her. But you weren’t the gutless wonder Vincent is, Miss Weatherly. You had this guy under your thumb. The Fielding fortune could be yours, or at least the opportunites it opened up. It could mean a hundred theaters for a hundred Weatherly plays. Not to mention a few miles of mink, the bit on the Riviera, a palace in exchange for this mausoleum.”

“You’re making the stupid charge that I killed Bianca Lessard?” Fran Weatherly said.

“I am. I say you didn’t permit her to leave this apartment alive. Then you stripped her, probably to prevent identification if the body were ever found, which would explain how the Mayan ring came to be here for Noreen to steal. Then you disposed of the body.”

A white nimbus had formed about the Weatherly woman’s lips. Nevertheless, she managed to keep her voice steady. “Quite a job for a woman.”

“You therefore had help. Travers Proehl, by his own statement, was here the night Bianca left Vincent.”

Corrigan had her immobilized now by the flat conviction of his tone. She was staring at him as if he were a snake.

“None of this, of course, was preplanned—you couldn’t have known Bianca was coming, unless Vincent here phoned you after she walked out on him, which I doubt; he must have been sick of what you had cost him. No, I think it was a murder of impulse, Miss Weatherly. I think you saw her walking out of your—and your lover’s—life with all her money and the goodies it would buy you, and I think you grabbed the fireplace poker and let her have it.

“Even the fact that Proehl was present on the scene served your purpose. You needed an accomplice to dispose of Bianca, and you had a built-in hold on Proehl now that Bianca was dead and Lessard held her power-of-attorney. You made Proehl see that your survival meant a lot to him—unlimited play-production financing, above all. It was too much for Mr. Proehl to turn down, even with the risks involved. All he had to do was sneak the body from the premises and plant it where it would never be found. She would eventually be crossed off as just another woman who had been foolish enough to walk down a dark street, or—with her history as an emotional cripple—as having gone off her rocker and killed herself, or suffered an amnesia seizure and wandered into limbo. Even if there were suspicions that she had been murdered for personal reasons, the obvious suspect was her husband; and since he had absolutely nothing to do with her murder, no harm would come to anyone involved. Certainly you didn’t think suspicion would ever fall on you, with Vincent Lessard innocent.”

“You can’t bring guesswork into court, Captain Corrigan,” Frances Weatherly said. Corrigan could only admire her fortitude. She was a tough number. “And I’m ready to swear that I don’t know where Bianca Lessard is, dead or alive. And nobody can ever prove that I do.”

“That may well be true,” Corrigan said, unmoved. “You may have left the whole problem of disposal to Proehl, preferring not to know the details against just such a position as you now find yourself in. I wouldn’t put it past you. You’re a shrewd cookie.

“Which means that Mr. Travers Proehl and I have some chinning to do,” Corrigan went on. “For instance, I’m going to ask him why the andirons are missing from the fireplace in this room.

“It’s my opinion that Proehl slipped her out of this house, carted her away in his car, weighted her body with the andirons, and dropped her into the East River, or the Hudson, or maybe some Jersey marsh. At least that’s the theory we’re working on, and it might interest you to learn that we’re already operational on it.

“We’ll find Bianca’s remains, Miss Weatherly, sooner or later; we’ll wind up with a bundle of evidence that’s going to delight the D.A.’s heart. I assure you we won’t quit this case until we can stamp a CLOSED on the file.”

“Is that all you have to say, Captain Corrigan?”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“I have nothing to say,” Frances Weatherly said calmly, “beyond this: I don’t know what you’re talking about. I deny every charge and innuendo you’ve made. I.…”

Her hesitation and his reflexes saved Corrigan’s life. He whirled and saw Travers Proehl’s heavy face and shoulders. Beyond Proehl the kitchenette door was still quivering on its spring hinges.

Proehl had the fireplace poker over his head. It came down.

Corrigan made rubber of his body, crumpling to one side. The poker missed his head and bounced off his shoulder. He went down, caught off balance. The back of his head struck the uncarpeted floor and he was momentarily stunned.

Vincent Lessard, bleating, was bolting toward the door. Proehl leaped on him. “Damn you, shut up! If anyone hears you.…” He caught up with Lessard at the apartment door, struck once, twice.

Bianca’s husband fell heavily, blood spurting from his skull. Proehl jumped back toward Corrigan as if he were half his weight, the bloody poker raised. His heavy lips were parted, emitting wheezes; his eyes were fixed in an expressionless glare.

Corrigan knew a berserker when he saw one. He rolled, digging for his Police Positive. As Proehl’s blow missed, Corrigan took deliberate aim and placed a shot in the arm that held the poker. The bulky man squealed, the poker dropped, the sleeve reddened swiftly. Then Proehl was lunging for the doorknob. Somehow he got it open as Corrigan scrambled to his feet. He could have shot the producer in the back, but he wanted Proehl alive. Frances Weatherly had been right in one respect: he had nothing on her that could be taken to court. But her confederate in a panicky state would make an ideal wedge for the D.A. That Proehl would talk he took for granted, and Proehl couldn’t talk if he were dead.

So Corrigan let him go. Besides, he had his flank protected.

Frances Weatherly was saying, “The fool. The fat fool,” with more feeling than she had permitted herself to show during Corrigan’s interrogation. She knew what Corrigan had with a live Proehl. The producer was the seal on her fate.

The satisfying sounds of a scuffle drifted up to Corrigan. They they were stilled, and Chuck Baer’s cheerful growl said, “I’ve got him, Tim. The fight’s out of him.” Baer appeared, dragging the heavy producer as if he were a sack of potatoes. Proehl left a trail of blood from his hanging arm. He looked unconscious.

Corrigan was kneeling beside Vincent Lessard.

“Lover boy is dead,” he announced, and rose. “Now we’ve got a real lever with Proehl, Miss Weatherly. Are you ready to level?”

Miss Weatherly leveled.

When she had finished, Corrigan said, “One more question. Why, when you stripped Bianca before getting rid of her body, did you hang on to her Mayan ring?”

“Yeah,” Chuck Baer said, never taking his eyes from the recumbent Proehl. “That bugs me, too. For an intelligent idiot, that was pretty stupid.”

Fran Weatherly said, “I was simply waiting for a chance to slip it in among her things in the Fielding apartment. But before I could do that, Noreen lifted it. Damn Noreen!”

The steaks were a lingering memory. Over his cognac Corrigan kept looking at the face across from him.

“Can you afford dinners like this on a policeman’s salary?” Jean Ainsley smiled at him. Her hazel eyes reflected the candlelight in the restaurant like a lazy cat’s.

“That sounds like a leading question,” Corrigan said. “Are you setting me up?”

“You go to hell,” Jean said. “The day I have to set up a man! I have some pride.”

“I never knew a woman who didn’t have marriage on her mind,” Corrigan said.

“Not with you,” she retorted. “I know your type, Corrigan. Love ’em and boot ’em. I wouldn’t stand a chance of getting anything but hurt.”

They smiled at each other across the table.

“Shall we dance?” Jean said.

“Modern or old-fashioned?”

“Old-fashioned,” Jean said.

“Me, too,” Corrigan said, scraping his chair back. “There’s no substitute for bodily contact. Miss Ainsley?”

“Captain Corrigan?”

They danced. She made a warm little package in his arms. Corrigan knew it was going to work out fine.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1966 by Ellery Queen

Copyright renewed by Ellery Queen

Cover design by Kat Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1993-4

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