“Maybe he was afraid of what he might find. Maybe he did open the door an’ saw her from the doorway an’ got the hell out an’ let the uniforms find her for themselves. What the hell difference does it make? She was dead on the floor this mornin’, an’ she’d been dead for a while.”

“How long?”

“For the time bein’ I’m just guessin’, but say six or eight hours. She probably got herself killed sometime in the middle of the night.”

“When did you come into the picture, Ray?”

“Right away. Me an’ you are linked in the department’s computers, Bern. There’s a flag with my name on it that pops up anytime your name comes up. It didn’t take long for somebody to call me.”

I looked at my watch. “It took you a while to get here, though.”

“Yeah, it did. I figured, why hurry? I might as well wait an’ hear what the ME had to say. An’ I wanted to find out who she was, just in case you never managed to catch her name.”

I already had a pretty good idea, but I had to ask. “Who was she, Ray?”

“The name Karen Kassenmeier ring any kind of a bell?”

She’d been alive at four-thirty in the morning, I thought. Gloriously alive, making triumphant noises on the spread-covered bed in Room 303 at the Hotel Paddington. Then the guy had hustled her out of there and took her north and west to my apartment, where he stabbed her and left her for dead.

“ Bern?”

Unless she went up to my place on her own and met somebody else there. I had no way of knowing if the man she’d been with in Room 303 had killed her, or if it had been somebody else. And it didn’t make too much difference, since I didn’t know who he was. But why my place?

“Uh, Bern…”

Maybe because she knew where it was. Maybe she realized she was in danger, and thought I could save her.

“Hey, Bernie? Where’d you go?”

“I’m right here,” I said. “I was thinking, that’s all. Her name’s not Karen Kassenmeier.”

“Sure it is.”

“No, it’s not. As a matter of fact-”

The phone rang.

“Answer that,” Ray said. “An’ the hell that ain’t her name. It’s good solid police work turned it up, includin’ takin’ prints off her cold dead fingers an’ runnin’ ’ em by Washington. Karen Ruth Kassenmeier from-”

“ Oklahoma,” I said. “ Kansas City.”

“If it ain’t her, how come you know where she’s from? An’ whyntcha answer the phone, because it’s givin’ me a headache.”

“They all want the same thing,” I said. “You want me to answer it? Fine, I’ll answer it, and I’ll tell this one the same thing I told the other two. And then I’ll tell you the real name of the woman who’s been calling herself Karen Kassenmeier.”

I grabbed the phone.

“I don’t have the letters,” I snapped, “and I never will. And I’m a little busy right now.”

“Bernie? Is that you?”

“Uh,” I said.

“I guess I picked a bad time,” she said. “I’ll try you a little later.”

“Wait,” I said, but the line went dead. I looked at the receiver for a moment, but that never really accomplishes anything, and eventually I gave up and put it back in its cradle.

“Well,” he said, “let’s hear it.”

“Huh?”

“The name,” he said. “The real name of the dead dame on your floor.”

“She’s not still on my floor, is she? Don’t tell me they haven’t moved her.”

“Quit stallin’, huh? Who is she?”

“Karen Kassenmeier,” I said.

“That’s what I said. You were gettin’ ready to say somethin’ else.”

“No, not me.”

“Of course you were. I know what I said, an’ I know what you said, an’ what I’d like to know is what you almost said an’ why you decided not to say it.”

“Whatever it was,” I said, “that phone call just drove it straight out of my mind. That’s what you get for making me answer it.”

“ Bern -”

“Whatever it was,” I said, “I’m sure it wasn’t important. And if I ever remember it I’ll be sure to let you know.”

Her name’s Alice Cottrell-that’s what I’d been ready to tell him, and if the phone call hadn’t emptied my mind, it had certainly changed it.

Because that was Alice Cottrell on the phone.

“Here you go,” Ray said. “Take a look.”

“I hate this.”

“No kiddin’, Bern. You liked it, I’d have to start worryin’ about you. Nobody likes to look at dead bodies. Why do you think we bury ’em?”

“So we won’t have to look at them?”

“Reason enough,” he said. “Well? What do you think?”

I turned away. “I’ve never seen her before,” I said. “Can we go now?”

“I didn’t go home last night,” I said.

“Jeez, that comes as a shock to me, Bern.”

“I had a reason for saying I did.”

“Of course you did, an’ the reason’s you’re a liar. A guy lifts things for a livin’, you don’t hardly expect every word outta his mouth’s gonna be the truth. Half the questions I ask you, main reason I ask is to see what kind of a story you come up with.”

“You don’t expect the truth from me?”

“If I did,” he said, “it’d mean I ain’t learned a thing over the years, because you been tellin’ me lies since the day we met. An’ why should I hold it against you? We done each other a lot of good over the years, Bern.”

“That’s true.”

“Put a lot of dollars in our pockets. An’ I wound up makin’ a couple of righteous collars along the way, too.”

“Sometimes it was me you collared, Ray.”

“But nothin’ ever stuck, did it? You always came out okay.”

“So far.”

“You ever meet this Kassenmeier, Bernie?”

“No,” I said. “I thought I did. For a minute I thought she was someone else.”

“She looked familiar?”

I shook my head. “Earlier. Before I saw her, I thought the woman in my apartment might have been, uh, another woman.”

“And who would that be, Bern? Never mind, don’t strain yourself makin’ up a story. You changed your mind on that before you got anywhere near the morgue. If I was guessin’, I’d say that was her on the phone.”

He pulled up next to a hydrant-where would cops park without them?-and we walked around the corner to my store. Henry was ringing a sale as we entered. He’d returned from lunch around the time Ray started badgering me to take a look at the late Karen Kassenmeier, and I’d left him to mind the store.

I hadn’t introduced them before, so I did now. “This is Ray Kirschmann,” I said. “He’s a police officer. And this is Henry Walden. He used to own a clay factory.”

“I didn’t know clay was somethin’ you made in a factory,” Ray said. “I thought you just dug it up, like dirt.”

You did, Henry told him, but then you had to process it, which involved removing the impurities and adding compounds to keep it from drying out. Then you dyed it and packaged it and shipped it to the stores.

“An’ then people give it to their kids,” Ray said, “an’ the little bastards track it into the carpet, which you never get it out of. You workin’ for Bernie, Henry?”

“He lets me hang out here,” Henry said, “and I lend a hand when I can. It’s more interesting than making clay.”

“If you like books,” Ray said. Henry said he liked them a lot, and that he liked the kind of people you met in bookstores. You met all kinds, Ray agreed. Henry asked if I needed him for anything more, and I said no, that I’d be closing fairly soon. Henry said he’d most likely see me tomorrow, and stopped on his way out to give Raffles a pat.

“Nice enough fellow,” Ray said, when the door closed behind him. “Was he here the other day when I came by?”

“It’s hard to remember who was and who wasn’t. He’s been hanging around a lot.”

“Henry Clay. Wasn’t there somebody famous named Henry Clay?”

“He was the man who said he’d rather be right than be President.”

“There you go.”

“But his name’s not Henry Clay, Ray. It’s Henry Walden.”

“Same difference. What it did, it rang a bell. An’ so did his face, but then it didn’t. Like he was familiar at first glance, but at second glance you realized you were seeing him for the first time.”