Who do it, voodoo it? Something moved in the shadow of an alley across the street and I went over.

“Rotten detail?”

Toomey grunted. “Got to watch her, I suppose. Not that it’ll lead to anything.”

“The publisher with her?”

“Blalock? Yeah.”

“Blalock?”

“Ernest B. Blalock — Junior. I thought you and him got to be pals.”

“I keep telling him to call me by my first name.”

“Those things take time. You look bushed.”

“I’m past knowing.”

“Just feel restless, huh?”

“Unfulfilled. Or does that make me sound like a Beatnik?”

“I know what you mean. They sure can’t dump it on a jury with just your word against hers, in spite of your honest face.” He chuckled. “I supposed you’ll get sued for that, too.”

“Sued for what, too?”

“You missed the cheery news, huh? They’re going to slap papers on you for libel, slander, defamation of character— whatever his lawyers can think of. It’ll make the tabloids for six weeks straight, with pictures of the Hoerner babe looking sexier every day. Hell, I might even buy that book myself.”

I reached for a cigarette. “What’s my face got to do with it?”

“When those newspaper guys asked you what door you walked into — I just meant that Constantine might sue you also. If nothing comes of his end he might feel kind of sore that you called him a dirty name for publication. Although on the other hand I suppose you could prove a few things about him—”

“And his Vice Squad contacts who claimed they didn’t have any file on him last liiesday.” I was fumbling in a pocket. “You got a match?”

“They covered for the guy, huh? Yeah, here—”

He flicked a lighter, and my hand went toward his wrist. I never touched him.

“Jesus!” he said. “Oh, Jesus—”

We both broke into the gutter at the same time. I did not have a gun, but Toomey’s service revolver was in his hand before we had gone three strides. The roar of the gunshots was still reverberating.

They had been incredibly close together, muffled so that they had sounded almost like a single explosion. My brain told me it had counted four but I couldn’t be sure. We bolted around opposite ends of a parked Buick, getting across.

I was ahead of him on the stone steps. I yanked at the door handle once. Toomey pushed me aside, grabbing my arm for balance and slamming a foot against the lock. It gave with a splintering sound and I went through and then doubled over, clamping my jaws against the searing pain in my chest. I stumbled up the one flight after him and around to the front.

The door to the apartment held against his shoulder. He braced himself against the banister opposite it, then vaulted forward and took it with both heels. It rocketed inward.

I stopped dead, and my insides turned to stone.

Ernest Blalock was standing at the far side of the room. He was in his shirtsleeves. The shirt was white, but no whiter than his face. His stare was fixed on the low couch next to him.

She was sprawled hideously. Her head was twisted downward, and her golden hair was trailing along the floor. A trickle of blood had seeped out of her mouth, still gleaming, but I did not have to get over there to know that it would coagulate in a minute. Her eyes were gaping in their sockets.

She was still wearing the tweed skirt, but she’d taken off her blouse and put on that short bluejacket. The jacket was open. The flesh below her black brassiere was so severely charred that the gun had to have been held flush against her. There had been five shots, not four. I could have covered the entire tight grouping with a poker chip.

There were voices in the hall, and I got the door closed somehow. I was vaguely aware of Toomey racing in and out of Fern’s bedroom, and then into the one with the fire escape which had belonged to Josie Welch. He cursed once, reappearing, and I watched him take Blalock by the arm. “Tell it,” he snapped.

Blalock shuddered. His look was glazed. He buckled against the wall when Toomey swung him around.

“Damn it—”

“That — that — Ephraim Turk. We were in the kitchen. He—”

Toomey motioned toward the second bedroom. “He go that way?”

Blalock forced a nod. “Oh, dear God. He literally dragged her around by the hair, he—”

Toomey was already on his way to the phone, jamming the revolver back onto his hip. He dialed rapidly. “Toomey, Lou — get me the lieutenant, fast. Or Captain Brannigan if he’s still on it—”

Blalock had taken a faltering step toward him. He spun suddenly, plunging into the kitchen. “Sure, dead,” I heard Toomey say. “Looks like a forty-five. What the hell, he had half an hour to swipe one someplace, he’s had the habit. Right here, yes sir—”

He hung it up. I was looking at her again, smelling the burned powder and the burned flesh. I could hear Blalock being sick. Toomey frowned at me.

“Hey, fellow, not you too?”

“Too much,” I said. “I better get some air—”

“Yeah, yeah, I can see how you’d feel. It would be your word alone he’d killed her on, wouldn’t it?”

I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. I went back outside on legs that did not want to do anything but fold in half.

CHAPTER 32

There were people on the stairway to the next floor, all of them in bathrobes. “Say, did we hear—?”

“Police matter,” I managed, and then I heard Toomey telling them something behind me. I went down and through the smashed lower door, wincing at every step. I took hold of the concrete rail with both hands and hung there, swaying.

My word he’d killed her on. Sensitive, saintly little Ephraim. She won’t go to any cocktail parties. I should have known, dear Christ I should have known.

Audrey Grant and Josie Welch. Call girls, tramps who’d had nothing for him but scorn. One of them had married him as the most brutal kind of joke, the other had given herself to him once and then pretended it never happened. But Pete Peters had been right. In his warped life they had been the only two women who mattered, and I’d told him that Fern had murdered them both.

I’d told him. I’d been so sure, so damned sure. And so convincing that thirty minutes after he’d talked to me he’d not only gotten the gun but had already used five of the six bullets it probably held, and now he’d be… now… I heard the first distant wail of a siren in the darkness as I started to run.

Commerce Street, I’d seen the address in the paper. It took me three minutes to get over there, no more, sprinting through the wet mist with both hands clasped against my side. The building was ancient, brick, and its glass vestibule door was open. E. Turk, 3-EI lurched up the two flights. I stopped, gasping, just steps shy of the landing, fighting vertigo and pain and a dozen other things I could not have named.

“—Listen, listen, we ought to wait for the police—”

“—But time is passing, suppose he needs—”

“—Who’s this coming now? They couldn’t have gotten here so quick—”

Faces turned from a closed door as I dragged myself up the rest of the way. They might have been faces reflected in muddied water, for all I saw them. I staggered through the cluster to the knob. The apartment wasn’t locked.

“Hey, whore you? You ain’t supposed to—”

I turned my head. I must have looked like Raskolnikov on his way to get rid of the ax. I must have looked like Yorick when they dug him up. No one made anymore protest. I pulled the door after me.

There was only one room. It was close, disordered, filthy. He was on a narrow disheveled bed, on his back. One of his shoes was off, and there was a rip in the heel of his blue sock. The gun was still in his hand, although it had jerked out of his mouth at the recoil. A Ruger Blackhawk.

People don’t kill other people. People are good, people have beautiful souls. There had been about forty books on two metal shelves above an unpainted wood table. It didn’t seem that he would have had time, but he’d gotten his hands on each of them, rending bindings and shredding pages as if he’d decided that literature had been the cause of all his troubles. In a way, maybe it had been. The debris was scattered around the bare floor, except for a single page which lay near his shoulder. It could have been there by chance, but it was corny enough for the fanciful son of a gun to have meant it. It shook me, because of the foolishness I’d been quoting to myself before he’d hit me in that alley last night: