I didn’t know what to say or do to calm him down. But Abby did. “Come on now, baby,” she cooed, slowly rising from her chair and then planting her gorgeous self in his path. She was using the voice of a mother, but the body language of a harem girl. “Don’t get your sweet keester in a kink. Paige is just fine, you dig? A few shin bumps and knee scratches never hurt anybody. She’ll be fit as a philharmonic fiddle in no time.”

Blocked from continuing his stomping rampage, Terry slumped toward Abby and gave her a look of pure anguish. “How can you say that? She was almost killed.”

This was my cue. “But I wasn’t!” I said, in what I hoped was a composed and stalwart tone. “And that’s the main thing, Terry. Almost doesn’t count.”

“Oh, yes it does!” he insisted, aiming his anguished eyes at me. “Whoever tried to kill you is sure to try it again. What if they almost fail?”

He had me there. And instead of feeling stalwart, I suddenly felt as weak as the runt in a litter of kittens.

Seeing that my determination was melting away, that I was on the verge of a moral collapse, Abby threw up her hands and hollered, “Stop it! Both of you! Stop sniveling and face the facts. It’s too late for Paige to pull out now. The murderer knows who she is and where she lives-probably even where she works-and there’s not a goddamn thing we can do about that.” She walked back to the table, sat down, and gave me a piercing stare. “Oh, you could change your name and quit your job and move to South America,” she said, “but is that what you want to do?”

“No!” I declared, surprised by my own vehemence. Some stalwartness must have snuck back into my spine when I wasn’t looking.

“Good,” Abby said, “because even that wouldn’t guarantee your safety. The killer still wants the diamonds, don’t forget, and I have a feeling he’d follow you to the ends of the earth to get them.”

Finally, the light bulb lit. “That’s it!” I cried, electrified. “That’s why Lenny’s lunchbox was stolen!”

My friends were gaping at me again. “What the hell’re you talking about now?” Terry grumbled. His endurance was wearing a little thin. He returned to his chair at the table and tossed down the rest of his drink.

I explained who Lenny was, and why I had bought him a lunchpail for Christmas, and how I’d been carrying the wrapped gift to work that morning in a shopping bag. “Why didn’t I think of it before?” I stammered. “The devil who pushed me onto the subway tracks must have thought the diamonds were stashed in the jewelry box-sized package in my shopping bag!”

“Now you’re talkin’!” Abby crowed. “That would explain everything. I couldn’t figure it before, but now I can.”

“What do you mean?” Terry asked, exasperated. “What the hell couldn’t you figure?” He was looking a lot like Ricky does when he’s unwittingly caught up in one of Lucy and Ethel’s outrageous schemes.

“I couldn’t understand why the murderer would try to kill Paige now,” Abby said to Terry, “before he’d gotten his hands on the diamonds. See, as far as any of our prime suspects could possibly know, you and Paige are the only two people who might have knowledge of the jewelry’s actual whereabouts. And since nobody has any idea where you are, Whitey, Paige is the murderer’s only hope of finding the diamonds right now. So why would he try to kill her before he knew where the trinkets were? That would be plain crazy-unless, that is, he had reason to believe that the diamonds were concealed in the gift-wrapped container buried in the shopping bag he so greedily snatched from Paige’s unwary hand just seconds before he pushed her in front of a train.”

Grinning like a cream-fed Cheshire, Abby leaned back in her chair and lit up a cigarette. “Whew!” she said, exhaling loudly. “That was a mouthful.”

“But it makes perfect sense!” I said, excited by Abby’s new slant on the situation. “And the fact that the diamonds were not in Lenny’s lunchbox,” I added, heaving an inner swoosh of relief, “is a kind of protection for me. Could be I’m not in so much danger anymore.”

“Right!” Abby agreed.

“Wrong!” Terry argued, giving me an intensely paternal, admonishing look. “The killer will still be following you around, Paige, looking for a way to trap you and make you tell him where the diamonds are. And then he’ll kill you.”

Parade canceled due to rain.

“Well, at least I’ll have some advance notice,” I said, looking for a rainbow, however small. “That should boost my odds of survival.” I couldn’t believe I was sitting there at Abby’s round oak dining table, calmly discussing my own death as if it were the next course on the menu.

“Oh, don’t be such a shlemiel!” Abby heckled. “Why settle for a puny, almost nonexistent advantage when you can beat the odds altogether? Whitey and I will help you. If we pool our resources we can bust this case wide open!” She reminded me of Ethel Merman belting out the title song of her new movie, There’s No Business Like Show Business. “And when you think about it,” Abby added, curving her blood red lips in a sweetly sardonic smile, “there’s really only one teensy little thing we have to do.”

“What’s that?” I asked, though I knew too darn well what her answer was going to be.

“Catch the killer before he catches you.”

ABBY MADE ANOTHER BATCH OF BOURBON smashes and Terry ran across the street to get a pizza pie, which we devoured the minute he got back-while it was still hot enough to burn our tongues off. And as soon as we finished the pizza, we consumed the leftover cake and cookies I’d brought from the office. Then, sucking on cigarettes and slurping our smashes, we put our three heads together and got down to business.

We needed a plan of attack, we decided, so we reviewed what we knew about Judy’s life up to the murder, the details of the murder itself, and everything we’d found out since. We made a list of the people we still hadn’t talked to, and the ones we felt we should talk to again. We made some very calm and careful decisions about when and where and how the new round of interviews should be conducted, and then we fought like cats and dogs over who should interrogate whom.

Abby and I thought Terry should stay out of sight, not let his whereabouts be known to anybody-the police or the murderer. We figured that would force the killer to focus all his attention on me-which would not only keep me on my toes, but would allow us to anticipate (maybe even control) his impending actions more easily.

Well, Terry had a flying fit when he heard that idea. There was “no way on earth” he was going to “hide out” in Abby’s apartment-like a “gutless soldier cowering in a foxhole”-while I risked life and limb to find the “bastard” who had killed his sister. If anything, he wanted to make himself the target-reveal himself to the murderer (and even to the police, if need be), in the hope that “all the goddamn future catastrophes in this case” would happen to him instead of me.

I appreciated Terry’s solicitude. Actually, I was quite moved he was being so protective. But I still didn’t like the idea of him prancing around out in the open, calling attention to himself, maybe getting himself arrested by the tenacious (when he wanted to be!) Detective Hugo Sweeny. If Terry got thrown in jail, it would screw up our entire investigation. Not only would he be useless to us behind bars, but then we’d have to turn the diamonds over to the police-thereby losing our prime lure, not to mention my only form of life insurance.

And then Dan would find out about the case. And learn the details of my secret but total involvement. And then all hell would break loose. And I feared Dan’s final retributions as much as I did the murderer’s. (Okay, okay! So that’s a slight exaggeration. I’d rather have lost my lover than my life… I guess.)