He took his head out of the quilt then. “Yeah? You getting trigger-happy in your old age or did somebody dump it on your doorstep?”

“Doorstep is close enough. It’s Cathy, Dan.”

“Oh, no, Harry—”

I could hear him telling Helen. We had spent ten or a dozen evenings together the year before. I heard Helen cry out.

“Listen, Dan—”

“Right here. Where are you?”

“Home. Look, I’m going out on it. The girl she’d been living with just called me, worried about her. That’s all I’ve got.”

“You want me to take it from over there?”

“Right. Everything^’ll be just the way it happened. Roughly 3:30, give or take five. Somebody knifed her on the street but she made it up. Give me an hour or so and then try to get Nate Brannigan at Homicide. Rouse him up if he’s off, his home number’s in the book on my desk. He’ll ride with me longer than most. I’ll call you when I get a chance. Up till then you don’t know where I am.”

“You haven’t told me anyhow.”

“And, Dan, if you see anything that doesn’t look kosher, you might square it away before they start pulling up the floor boards.”

“Harry, you haven’t been seeing her lately?”

I didn’t answer him. He knew better than that.

“Delete that,” he said then. “Be on my way in six minutes. You going to leave it open?”

“I’ll stick an extra set of keys under the mat in the outside hall.”

“Right. And Harry—”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry, fella. If there’s anything else you want me to do? Or Helen maybe—”

“Thanks, Dan. Nothing. I’ll leave the lights on. You’ll trip over her if you’re not looking.”

I cradled it, went back into the living room, glanced at everything except Cathy. The two bourbons I’d poured were still sitting on the stand next to the chair. It would be a dumb sort of thing to have to explain, pouring one of them for an unidentified female sot who took five or seven minutes getting up the stairs and then turned out dead. I carried them into the kitchen, dumped them, washed the glasses. The bottle was still out but the cops would find that quick enough anyhow.

I took the extra set of keys out of the desk. It had been Cathy’s set. I looked at her then, thinking it was probably for the last time. It was all there again. I bit down hard on it and went out.

It followed me down. She’d be stiff before Dan got there. I was thinking about that and I was outside before I remembered I was holding the extra keys. I told myself to quit it. I turned back, opened the outside door and edged the two keys under the rubber.

It was twenty-five minutes since I’d spoken to Sally Kline. It would probably take the night man ten more to unshuffle my Chevy from the loft in the garage around the corner, and I did not see a cab. I had promised the girl I’d be there in forty. I wondered if Mr. Adam Moss of West 113th Street would mind if I borrowed the MG. I wondered who Mr. Adam Moss was. I expected to find out soon.

I was just contorting my hundred and ninety-seven pounds below the low wheel when she came around the corner. I got out again, fast, because this time it wasn’t any drunk’s mating call I heard. The cry was sick with agony or horror or both.

She started to run toward me. She was an old woman and her hair was disheveled and it didn’t matter to her that her housecoat was flapping loose from the flimsy white nightgown she wore under it. She lost a slipper but she couldn’t bend for it, not with what she was carrying pressed against her breast.

It was swaddled in a white blanket. The blanket had blood on it.

I jerked open the door on the sidewalk side of the MG. “Here!” I told her. “Quick!”

“Oh, thank the Lord, thank the Lord! Any hospital, any hospital at all. She fell out of the window. On the fourth floor. She—”

There was no movement in the blanket, no sound. “She what?”

The woman had started to get into the car. “Why, she’s always out there at night,” she said. “She was just playing. She—”

I had taken her by the elbow. I eased her around firmly before she could get seated and lifted a corner of the blanket. The cat was an expensive angora. Its head was bloodied up some but it had a good seven or eight other lives ahead of it. I kept propelling the woman around until I could swing the door shut. Then I ducked around to the other side of the car.

“But—” The woman was gaping at me. “You mean you won’t—” She was sputtering. I choked the car and she was shocked. When I released the handbrake she was outraged.

New York at night. You think anybody sleeps? The loonies in Bellevue, maybe they sleep.

The woman stuck her tongue out at me. “Get a rickshaw at the corner, lady,” I told her. I heard the cat yowl once and then saw it racing along the sidewalk as I pulled out. I went over to Second Avenue and straight down.

Around midtown I remembered Cathy’s mother and sister.

That did not make the night any better. Someone was going to have to tell them and I didn’t much want it to be any tactful plainclothes cop working overtime with a hangover.

I liked them both. Mrs. Hawes was over sixty and stone deaf. She had taken to me and had been broken up when things did not work out for us. She had not understood Cathy, but then who had?

Estelle was thirty-six or so. She taught grammar school and you wouldn’t mistake her for Moll Flanders in the darkest bedroom in town. She wore steel-rimmed glasses and straight plain dresses that had gone out with the N.R.A. I had always suspected that buried under that Iowa-spinster get-up she had a shape something like Cathy’s, but she did as much with it as a baker does with last Tuesday’s bagels. It was as if she had given up all hope of ever getting a man and did not much care. Or probably she was frigid and had found that out somewhere along the line and did not care about that either. But she worried about Cathy and I was not ecstatic knowing I would have to break it to her and the old woman.

I cut across 14th and then down again. I left the MG in front of a Sanitary Valet shop on 11th, just off Seventh Avenue. It was 4:28.1 walked the single short block down to Perry and then the block and a half across. I walked jauntily, tossing my keys as if I made book for every widow in the neighborhood. I did not see anyone to have to convince, however, either on the street or in the alley across from Sally Kline’s number. There were no lighted windows in her building, a three-story brownstone.

I rang five, where the card said Kline — Hawes. I had intended to ring three at the same time, so that the light would go on in another front apartment, but with no one outside I didn’t bother. I glanced at my watch again. I was a half-minute overdue on my promise.

I was about to ring again when the hall door finally buzzed.

I went in. There was a wide stairway that was well carpeted and softly lighted and I climbed the two flights. The place was as quiet as a prairie in the moonlight. I saw Five ahead of me at the front end of the top corridor and I went down and tapped on the door.

Nothing happened. I waited six or eight seconds, tapped again, then tried the handle.

It turned. I eased the door inward several inches, seeing only darkness. I had just decided to unsheath the Luger when someone else’s gun nosed through the crack and parked itself cordially against my navel.

CHAPTER 5

It was not a very nice gun. It was home-made, of the sort that enterprising young high-school boys put together in machine shops when teacher is preoccupied with the bottle in the cloakroom. I stared at it, giving it about C-minus for sloppy craftsmanship.

There was a voice behind it somewhere. “Okay, Jack,” it told me. “Inside.”

The voice was not particularly nice either, nor was it Sally Kline’s. Hormones, my dear Watson. Two sexes, don’t you know? Elementary. Sure. So meanwhile what do we do now?