“I see you colored the hair around the back of his neck, too,” I added. “What did you use for that?”

“A toothbrush and a tin of brown shoe polish.”

I patted her on the back and gave her an enormous grin. “It’s the consummate costume, Abby. Perfect in every way. Edith Head would die of envy!”

“Well, I’m glad you like it,” Terry growled, squaring his shoulders as if for a fight, “but I think it’s god-awful. I feel like a total jerk dressed this way. These frilly things hanging down the sides of my face are annoying and embarrassing, and this ratty old beard smells like a sweaty gym sock.”

Abby tossed her head and shot him a haughty glare. “Would you rather spend one afternoon breathing into a smelly beard, or several months suffocating in the smelly slammer?”

“Good point,” Terry said, shuffling his feet and relaxing his shoulders. I think he was smiling, too, but it was hard to tell since you couldn’t see his mouth for all the hair.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Abby crowed, reeling toward the door. “It’s almost two-thirty! I’ll get my coat! Let’s get this show on the road!” I’d never seen her so aroused-except on those all-too-frequent occasions when she was gearing up to make a move on one of her half-dressed male models.

“Hey, hold on a second!” I cried. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What?!!” she snorted, with a rather impatient huff.

“The diamonds,” I said, with a huff of my own. “Call me crazy, but I think it would be safer if you hid them away in your purse, or under Terry’s hat, instead of flaunting them all around town, strung all over your body like a batch of blinking Christmas lights.”

“Oh,” she said, finally remembering that she still had the jewelry on. She gave me a sheepish look, then reluctantly took it off, piece by glittering piece, putting it back down on the kitchen table. “I didn’t like it anyway,” she said, with a dramatic flick of her diamond-braceletless wrist. “It made me look too snooty.”

We all had a good laugh over that one. Then Abby carefully wrapped the diamonds up in their original tissue paper package and handed them to Terry, who stuck them deep in the pocket of his long black overcoat. “Are you ready, Whitey?” she asked, politely deferring (finally!) to his rightful authority in the situation.

“Yeah, let’s go right now,” he said, “before I change my mind and rip this moldy carpet off my face.”

TWO SECONDS AFTER THEY LEFT, I snatched up the phone and dialed the Midtown South Precinct. Dan’s precinct.

Look, I knew it wasn’t proper for an emotionally undone woman to call the office of the man who’d undone her-unless she happened to be his wife (and even then it was considered overbearing!). But I wasn’t exactly the proper type. And I had a very strong suspicion that if I waited until I became Dan’s wife to give him a personal call, I’d never speak to him again.

And what harm could one teeny-weeny phone call do? All I wanted was to hear the sound of his luscious voice and talk to him for a minute or two, ask him to forgive me for the way I had acted last night. (Last night? Was it only last night that he’d flown into a rage and walked out on me? With everything that had happened to me since, it felt more like a month ago.)

The man who answered the phone told me Dan wasn’t there. “Street’s out on the street,” was all he said.

I hung up and smoked a cigarette, giving myself a phony pep talk, working like the devil to keep my soul from sagging to the floor. Dan or no Dan, I couldn’t afford to let my energies fall. I had a lot on my plate that day, and there was only one way to deal with it all. Stay hungry.

Chapter 15

THE CHELSEA REALTY OFFICE WAS ON THE ground floor of a three-story brownstone. The large hand-painted sign in the front window showed the name in bold black letters above a bed of orange-yellow flowers with dark centers. Looked like black-eyed Susans to me. It was odd to see them rising from a windowsill heaped with snow. The company logo appeared again on the entrance door to the office-gold letters with black outlines. Just the name, no posies.

I pushed the buzzer but I didn’t hear it ring. Thinking the bell was out of order, I knocked lightly on the door and waited for somebody to let me in. Nothing happened, so I tried the knob. To my great surprise the door clicked open, and I cautiously stepped inside.

At first I thought the place was deserted. There was nobody sitting up front at either of the two old wooden desks that-along with the bank of tall wooden filing cabinets-practically filled the long, narrow room. As I stood there, however, listening to my own jumpy heartbeat and looking around at the pale green walls, dying potted plants, and badly scuffed bare wood floor, I realized I wasn’t alone. There was somebody in the back room. A man. I couldn’t see him through the half-open door between the two rooms, but I could hear him plainly.

“So what the hell’re you tellin’ me, Lily? It’s not over yet? Haven’t you had enough? Jesus H. Christ! I did what you wanted. Give it up already!” His voice was extremely loud, and he sounded very angry. Since there was a long silence after he spoke, and no audible reply, I figured he was talking on the phone. To somebody named Lily. (Am I a masterful detective, or what?)

I stood perfectly still in the front office, trying not to make a sound, straining both ears toward the half-open door. If the man in the back room had anything further to say, I wanted to hear every word.

Big mistake. “Screw you!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “I’m through! Go find yourself another stooge!” There was a loud crash, made-I assumed-by the collision of the receiver with the body of the phone, and then a harsh string of curse words I’d rather not repeat. (Use your wildest imagination, and you still won’t come close.)

By this time I was feeling kind of scared. I mean, this guy was going off his rocker in there! There were sounds coming out of that room that brought to mind the breaking of human bones and the gnashing of vicious tiger teeth. Not wanting to meet the madman face-to-face, or madden him further with my surprise appearance, I decided to flee the Chelsea Realty office and come back later, when he was feeling better.

Good plan-bad timing.

I had just opened the front door to leave when the man came storming out of the back room, growling obscenities and flailing his fists against every wall and piece of furniture in reach. He looked like he wanted to kill somebody. And his murderous demeanor became even more pronounced when he saw me.

“What the…?!! Who the hell are you? What the hell are you doing here?” His mean little eyes were blazing and his short, wiry body was poised to attack. And I may have been hallucinating, but I would swear that two big streams of fire were shooting out of his nostrils.

“I’m sorry!” I sputtered, backing away from the heat. “I rang and knocked, but nobody answered, so I came on in. The door was open.”

He banged his fist on the closest file cabinet. “I’m gonna fire that stupid girl! She never locks up when she leaves the office!” He looked at his watch and cried, “Goddamn it! It’s three-thirty already! I sent the brat to show some office space over an hour ago and she’s still not back!” He gave me a closer look and then an overt head-to-toe once-over. “Hey, can you type? You want a job?”

“Uh, no. No, thank you, sir,” I said. “I’ve already got one.”

My rejection angered him even more. He shoved his fingers through his coarse brown hair and glared at me, screwing his long skinny pockmarked face into an ugly scowl. “Then what’re you here for, sister?” he barked. “Out with it! I haven’t got all day!”