I got up a little shakily and checked out the rest of the apartment. There were two bedrooms branching off a hallway, one Jackie’s, the other Jill’s. Each came equipped with a huge bed, which more or less figured. Each had been searched, and was a mess. I gave the rubble a quick once-over, pawing through mounds of lacy underwear that would have given a fetishist a quick thrill. I didn’t find anything very interesting. I didn’t expect to.
It was beginning to look more and more like blackmail. My man was systematic, I reasoned. He had somehow trailed Jackie to the meeting place in the park, then got close enough to her to put a gun to her forehead and shoot. Then he had doubled back to the girls’ apartment for a crack at Jill. Jill wasn’t there, of course, so he’d jimmied the door and rifled the rooms for the pictures or tapes or whatever it was that she was holding on him.
He might have found them and he might not—I couldn’t say. But it was an odds-on bet that, if he didn’t find them, they weren’t around. The place had been turned upside down.
It was too late to search the place. My friend had already taken care of that. But it made sense to straighten up a little. The way things stood, anybody who stumbled into the apartment for one reason or another was going to figure out that things were not according to Hoyle. A maid or a janitor might wander in and call the cops, and that would fix up their body-identification problem for them.
The longer it took the police, the more time I had to work. So I went through the apartment like somebody’s maid, putting the books back in the bookcase, fluffing up cushions and placing them where they belonged, stuffing clothes into drawers and closets. I didn’t go overboard. The place did not have to pass muster, just so long as it lost the aftermath-of-a-hurricane look.
There was a bottle of scotch in one of the closets. This slowed me down a little.
At which point the doorbell rang.
I sat down softly on an overstuffed chair and waited. Maybe they would go away. Maybe they would come back tomorrow. A feeble hope at best, but somehow I couldn’t see myself going to the door, opening it, and saying hello to a couple of detectives from Homicide. They might get upset.
“Hey,” someone yelled. “Hey, open up in there, willya?”
I got up reluctantly, walked to the door.
“Hey, Jackie,” the voice yelled again. “Open up, Jackie. What the hell, open the door!”
This was no cop.
“Who’s there?” I said.
“It’s Joe Robling, dammit, and where the hell is Jackie?”
A customer. A drunk customer, from the sound of things. I dug my wallet out of a pocket, opened the door, flipped open the wallet, and shoved it in the man’s face. He blinked and I pulled the wallet back and buried it once more in my pocket. I had given him a quick look at my driver’s license but he didn’t know the difference.
“Crawley, Vice Squad,” I said. “Who the hell are you, chum?”
His eyes clouded, then turned crafty. He was sad because Jackie was not available and scared because I was there, holding him by the arm. “I—I made a mistake,” he stammered. “I must have the wrong apartment.”
“You know where you are?”
“Sure.”
“This place is a cathouse, chum. You know that?”
He tried hard to look shocked. He didn’t manage it at all. He looked lost and comical but I didn’t laugh at him.
“Maybe I better be going,” he said.
I gave him ten minutes to disappear completely, then turned off all the lights and left the Baron girls’ apartment. The hallway was clear this time. I walked down carpeted stairs, through the vestibule, and out to the street. There was no one around. I walked two blocks without spotting a tail, stepped into a hotel lobby on Central Park South, and came out on Fifth Avenue without anyone behind me.
SIX
Jill Baron drew back when she saw me. “You look terrible,” she said. “What happened?”
We sat on Maddy’s couch and I told her. Outside, the night was soundless. We were in a business neighborhood and the businesses had all shuttered their doors long ago.
“Did he hurt you badly, Ed?” she asked.
“I’ll live.” I described him again, the hulking mass of him, the bulldog chin, the once-broken nose. “Try to get a picture of him, Jill. Think. Any bells ring?”
She screwed up her face and shook her head, “No bells, Ed. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing?”
“I could probably think of a hundred men who fit that description. I might know the man if I saw him, but this way—” She spread her hands. “A better description might help. If you could tell me about his appendectomy scar—”
“I wouldn’t be in a position to know about that.”
“But I might,” she said. Her face brightened. “You know, I would have given a thousand dollars for a look at Joe Robling’s face. Was he very frightened?”
“A little.”
“I ought to be angry at you,” she said. “He was a good customer. Generally drunk, but a hundred-dollar trick who never got rough and never complained.”
“He asked for Jackie.”
“He always asked for Jackie,” she said, a wry smile breaking through her generally somber mood. “But I took him a few times, now and then, if Jackie was busy. He never knew the difference. You don’t think you scared him off for good, do you?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
She looked at me and pouted. “Oh, stop it,” she said. “For heaven’s sake, don’t go moral on me, Ed. You know what I am and I know what I am, and if we can’t relax and accept it, there’s something wrong with us.
“You don’t want to talk about my business,” she said.
“No, I don’t.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Your sister.”
“Oh.” The somber mien returned.
“You didn’t see that apartment after our unidentified friend got through with it. Either you or Jackie had something he wanted badly. If it wasn’t you—”
“It wasn’t, Ed.”
“—then it must have been Jackie. She had something or knew something and it got dangerous for her. And now it’s dangerous for you, too.”
She frowned. “I don’t know, Ed. Suppose it was just some…well, some nut. You meet them in my business. I know you don’t want to talk about the world’s oldest profession, but that much is true. The oddballs you meet!”
She closed her eyes, reminiscing. “Why couldn’t it be like that? What if one of them, some man who was a customer, what if he got it into his head to kill us? A Jack-the-Ripper type.”
“It doesn’t add.”
“Why not?”
“Look, a psycho might have his own reasons for wanting to kill a couple of hookers, I’ll grant you that. But a psycho wouldn’t play it so cool. He might come after you with a knife, might bust down your door and try to beat your brains in or shoot you or whatever. But I doubt if he would carefully trail Jackie to Central Park and put a neat little bullet in her forehead and then methodically search the apartment.
“He might go on a destructive rampage, just trying to rip up everything he could get his hands on. But that isn’t what our boy did. He gave the place a thorough search and let it go at that. He’s got a reason, Jill.” I stopped for breath. “It looks like blackmail to me.”
“But Jackie—”
“Tell me about her, Jill.”
“She—” She stopped there, and then grimaced.
She took a deep breath, and tried again. “She liked good clothes, fancy restaurants, expensive furniture. She hated nightclubs but sometimes she had to go to them on dates. She liked the Museum of Modern Art and modern jazz—”
“Men?”
“She didn’t have a sweet man. Neither of us did. I think she was seeing someone, not business, but I don’t remember his name. I’m not sure if she ever told me his name.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“I don’t think so. Is he important?”
“I don’t know yet. Keep talking. Was Jackie having money troubles?”
She stood up, walked across the room. Her dress was snug on her professional body. She lit a fresh cigarette, stood at the window, blew out smoke. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “but you’re wrong. She couldn’t be a blackmailer, she couldn’t. She was my sister. We had differences, but she was still my sister, and I can’t believe that of her—”
“Tell me about those differences, Jill.”
“What’s there to tell? The usual minor spats over nothing.”
“How about money?”
“No problem at all. We kept separate bank accounts. No community property. What was mine was mine and what was Jackie’s was Jackie’s. I don’t know what she had in the bank. I’ve got ten or fifteen thousand saved, and she certainly earned as much as I did, except…”
“Except what?”
“I don’t know. Something was bothering her. She had a weakness for horses, phoned in bets every morning from our apartment. Possibly she was a heavy player.”
“And got in deep?”
“Maybe. She didn’t talk about it, but I think she owed a little money here and there. She dressed well, I told you that, and of course we both had charge accounts and credit cards and all that. She may have run up some fairly heavy tabs around town, and owed her bookmaker.”
She paused, then said, “This is guesswork, Ed. A guess I don’t particularly like to make. My sister was no more of a saint than I am, but I hate to think…”
Her voice trailed off. She leaned over and ground out her cigarette in one of Maddy’s ashtrays. “I would have loaned her the money. I would have been glad to.”
“Did she ever ask?”
“No. Never.” She narrowed her eyes, remembering. “But there was something. She mentioned how nice it would be if a pile of money fell into her lap. We always talked like that; it was nothing special. But if I had only thought to offer her money, if I had only asked her—”
“Don’t blame yourself, Jill.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” Her voice nearly broke, but she controlled it.
I stood up, took her arm. “Jackie was riding for a fall,” I told her. “If you had bailed her out this time, she would have gotten in over her head some other time. Blackmail’s an easy out in your line of work. You must have thought of it yourself once or twice.”
“Not seriously.”
“But for all you knew Jackie did think of it—seriously. She might have tried to squeeze somebody before. But this time she picked on the wrong man and he squeezed back. There was nothing you could do about it, Jill.”
She drew close to me and her perfume was heady. I felt the warmth of her before her body actually touched mine. Her head was tilted and her eyes were misty and half-closed. “You’re good for me,” she sighed. I was holding her arm, and she drew even closer to me.