They weren’t. It took me a few seconds in the renewed dark, coming into the main room. Someone had draped a rag over the one bulb. They were sitting on the floor in a scattered half circle, evidently all of them.

There was a chair out in the center, with Don McGruder standing on it. He was holding some papers, but I did not know how he expected to read from them in that gloom. Unless his inner glow would help him. His poetic flame. Maybe that was why he had all his clothes off, so that the glow would not be obstructed. He was naked as a new-dropped giraffe.

His voice came in a whisper. “My latest creation,” he said. “I hope it is worthy of its subject, which has so devastatingly moved us all. I call it, ‘An Ode to Josie, Cruelly Shot’—”

There were some sighs. It was way over my head, but then I’d never attended a poetry recitation before. For all I knew Emily Dickinson had reached immortality the same way. I went quietly along the wall. McGruder started speaking:

“Alas, poor waif, at savage rest, The deadly missile in thy breast— What immoral hand or eye Would scar thy soft virginity? — ”

I stopped long enough to plant the key. Two people were talking in undertones beyond the overhanging light outside. One of them was another of those uniformed witches from that weird sect.

“So I asked her,” the girl said, “how could I protest against social conformity if I wore what everyone else wears—”

This time my head did rattle, I was sure of it. Poor besotted sexy Dana, she was the only sane one in there. I would make it up to her one day. On a slow boat to Patagonia. Just thinking about it would sustain me.

Sure. I’d think about it the next time I treated a murder threat like a missing-persons case.

I told myself I couldn’t have known the clippings Grant got were a threat. Okay, I told myself, so you couldn’t have known. So it isn’t your fault that the girl is dead, but dead she is. Got any ideas, Kerouac?

Yeah, I got some ideas. Shut up and let me think.

I didn’t have time to think. The Chevy was still near the Blue Soldier, but the cab I grabbed at Bleecker Street got me across to East Tenth in five minutes. I found the address that Henshaw had given me for Dana and Audrey Grant, an ordinary brownstone but well enough kept up to be expensive. I read O’Dea-Grant next to a bell marked 2-A, used one of Dana’s keys on the outside door, climbed the one flight. The building was as quiet as a sunken ship.

I found 2-A. Dana’s second key was new and badly filed. It took me two or three turns to drop the tumblers, and then I could not twist the key out of the lock again. My hand was still working at it after I’d pushed back the door and stepped in.

It was my right hand. I do everything with my right hand except deal poker. Even if I could get a gun out with my left I couldn’t hit the Atlantic Ocean from Montauk Point.

Not that I had a gun to reach for anyhow. The woman inside did, naturally.

CHAPTER 17

It was more than just a gun. It was Italian-made, a Beretta Olympic. It had a barrel almost nine inches long, adjustable sights, a compensator at the muzzle. Two hundred dollars would buy it, but you would have to live close to the store if you expected to take a taxi home on your change.

It was a.22, which made it even more interesting. Not that I was in a position to do much about that at the moment. I gave my attention to the woman in back of it instead.

She demanded the attention anyway. She was a young thirty, and she had a head of incredibly wild orange hair which she had apparently not cut since pubescence. Her lipstick, her belt and her shoes matched the hair precisely, and everything else she had on was purple. Including the paint around her eyes, although the eyes themselves might have been green. It was not a cold night, but she was wearing one of those knitted coat sweaters. Its lowest buttons were closed at her knees. With the rest of it open and falling away from her she looked like some exotic hothouse hybrid, just about to blossom. She was as chic as next year’s best buy for the man who has everything.

Her voice curled out from behind the Beretta as idly as a wisp of smoke. “I think “I’ll ask you to step all the way inside, darling. You’ll find that agreeable, won’t you?”

“Surely,” I said.

I went past her into the middle of a living room. The gun nosed firmly into the small of my back. I heard the door close. “I’m sorry, but this does seem necessary. I’m sure you’ll be sensible enough not to move.”

I watched the bobbing of that rampant hair out of the corner of my eye while she frisked me. When she was satisfied that she was the only one who had thought to bring any artillery she backed off. She took my wallet with her.

“It can’t be robbery,” I said. “You forgot your mask.”

“And my bathing cap.” She laughed. “I’ll be happier if you’ll sit now, darling. On the couch, if you please—”

I went across. The place was just another furnished apartment, melancholy as a hand-me-down bathrobe. Overstuffed furniture, a threadbare maroon rug, listing floorlamps. A paperback book lay on the couch near me. By Lucien Vaulking, the dead writer Henshaw had connected with both girls who were now also dead.

My gift-wrapped redhead had perched herself on the arm of a chair near the door. Good calves, even though the stockings were tinted purple also.

She’d opened the wallet and was considering it, resting the Beretta along her thigh. After some seconds she considered me instead. Then she closed the wallet and tossed it across.

“Fannin,” she said casually. “That would make you the chap who found Josie the other evening. We read the first name as Henry.”

“The press is so dreadfully irresponsible these days.”

No smile. “How curious. And now you appear at Audrey’s. You will tell me why?”

“Nope.”

“I could make it difficult. There happens to be a considerable amount of money involved in this operation. I’m not down here for social purposes — surely you realize that?”

“I do now. Does Connie step out from behind the arras, or do we toddle off somewhere to meet him?”

She had small bright teeth. “Perhaps we’ll have to see him at that. Unless you wish to change your mind and tell me what you wanted with Audrey?”

I leered at her.

She lifted an eyebrow. “I rather doubt that. Meaning no offense, darling, but I don’t quite believe you could meet the going rate.” She stood, almost wearily. “You’ll pardon me if I’m so quickly bored — but then it’s not really being scintillating, is it? You don’t intend to answer my questions?”

I looked at her pleasantly. After a minute she reached below the chair and lifted a bulky black pocketbook, moving with all the graceful indifference of a lynx in a forest full of chipmunks. The pocketbook rested against her hip when she adjusted the strap across her right shoulder.

“The gun will be inside,” she said easily, “not obstructed in the least. I have an Austin Healy three doors up. You will drive, of course. I’m certain we understand each other.”

Cool, cool, like a Christmas window in Tiffany’s. So I shrugged, getting to my feet as if I really thought she might shoot holes in my head if I didn’t. Then I nodded in the general direction of her knees. “If we’re joining the maharajah, love, you really ought to hitch up that slip—”

It was so corny I was going to blush when I wrote it in my diary come bedtime. The edge of my left hand caught her at the inside of the wrist when she glanced down, and the gun went skidding noisily toward the base of a chair. She choked off an unfeminine sound, then broke after it.

I grabbed her around the waist. It was a nice waist, trim and girlish. I liked it, so I didn’t let go even when she jabbed a spiked heel into my shin. I hopped on one foot, lost my balance, went down on my seat. It hurt me more when the redhead went down on hers. My lap was under it.