“JACK BLAKE WAS DEAD,” I went on. “But this didn’t faze you much. You could live without him, but you weren’t going to let a big fat fish like Zucker wiggle off the hook. He was too profitable a source of income.

“Klugsman was anxious to give up. When Blake was rubbed out, Klugsman got nervous. He didn’t want to play blackmail games anymore. He wanted out. So you got in touch with him and offered him a fast five grand for the evidence on Zucker. That would put Klugsman out of the picture and give him a healthy piece of change for his trouble. He went for it. It looked like easy money.

“But it wasn’t,” I said. “Zucker’s hirelings were already onto Klugsman. They picked us up when I met him in Canarsie and they shot a million holes in Miltie Klugsman. They didn’t kill me. Maybe they didn’t care much at that point. They just wanted Klugsman.

“That left you in a bind. Zucker wanted to see you dead, too, because as long as you were alive he had a murder rap hanging over his head like a Sword of Damocles. You had to stay away from him and you had to get me to dig up Miltie’s package of evidence. You were too damned greedy to take your life and run with it. You couldn’t let go of that pile of dough.”

“It wasn’t like that—” she started.

“The hell it wasn’t. It was like that all across the board. And you never came close to leveling with me. You started out as the woman-of-mystery and when that fell in you shifted gears as smooth as silk and turned yourself into the damsel-in-distress.

“You let me go to Brooklyn last night and almost get killed. You let me go up against Phillip Carr this morning. You never put your cards on the table and you never gave up the idea of bleeding that money out of Zucker.” I paused. “You look great in a sweater. You look great out of one. And you put on one hell of an act in bed. But you’re just another deceitful crook, Rhona. Nothing more.”

Then it was quiet. Neither of us said a word. Finally, she blurted: “Ed—what now?”

“Now I call the police,” I said. “I don’t care what happens after that.”

She uncoiled from the couch like a serpent. She flowed toward me again, and her eyes were radiating sex once more. She turned the stuff on and off like a faucet.

“Ed,” she cooed. “Ed, I’m sorry.”

“Stow it,” I said.

“Ed, listen to me. I didn’t trust you. I should have, I know it. And I’m sorry. But you don’t have to call the police.”

I stared at her.

“Listen to me, Ed. I didn’t…didn’t hurt anybody. I never murdered anyone. It’s not my fault Klugsman was shot and I wasn’t the murderer. It was Zucker and the men he hired. I just thought I could find a way to make a quick dollar.

“Don’t you understand? Ed, I never killed anyone. I never hurt you—I lied to you but I never hurt you. And, Ed, when we were in bed together I wasn’t acting. I don’t care what you think of me. Maybe I deserve it—”

“Maybe?”

“I know I deserve it. But I wasn’t acting. Not in bed, not when we were making love—”

I wish someone had filmed all this. She would have won the Oscar in a walk.

“You could let me go,” she pleaded. “You could call the police and give them everything you want on Zucker and Carr and the rest of them. I’ll even help you. I’ll tell you what I know. With that much, the police won’t need Klugsman’s evidence. You can even tell them about me, Ed, if it will make you feel better. Just give me a few hours’ head start. In a few hours I can be out of town and they won’t ever find me. Just a few hours, Ed,” she pleaded.

“Ed, you owe me that much. We meant that much to each other, Ed.”

She was as persuasive as a loaded gun. “I’d have given you that much,” I told her. “Except for one thing.”

“What?”

“The dynamite,” I said. “Did you forget the dynamite, Rhona? You tried to kill me!”

That time I didn’t slap her. It would have been superfluous. She reacted as though someone had belted her but good.

“The dynamite,” I said. “It didn’t make any sense at the time. I couldn’t figure out why Zucker would use a cockeyed routine like that to get you out of the way, or how he knew where you were, or any of it. The dynamite had to be all your idea. Maybe you were afraid I would sell you out for Carr’s ten-grand reward. Maybe you thought I was guessing too much about you.

“Anyway, you decided to get rid of me. And you were cute about it, too. You knew I’d come over here sooner or later. You left the apartment, figuring I’d eventually wander over to the closet. Then the dynamite would go off and I’d be out of your hair.

“And you would be in the clear. You were subletting the place under a phony name, and once I blew myself to hell you would just disappear, rent another apartment somewhere else. Nobody could tie you to me. You’d be all alone in the clear.”

“Ed, I must have been crazy—”

“You still are if you think you can talk your way out of this, Rhona.”

“Ed, I’m sorry. Ed—”

She was making sexy movements, slithering toward me. But I saw what she was really doing, moving toward the table next to the couch, heading toward her purse. I could have stopped her then and there, but I wanted to give her more rope to hang herself.

She got her hands on the purse. She was talking but I wasn’t listening to a word she was saying. I watched her hands move behind her back, opening the purse, dipping inside.

She never managed to point her gun at me. My timing was too good. She dragged it out of the purse and I slapped it out of her hand and it sailed across the room and bounced around on the carpet. A .22, a woman’s gun. They can kill you too.

Then she was beaten, and she knew it. I took out my own gun and pointed it at her, but I didn’t even need it. She stayed put while I picked up the phone. It was too late to get Jerry Gunther at Headquarters. I called him at his home.

“Call downtown,” I said. “Tell them to get a pickup order out for Phillip Carr and Abe Zucker. And get over here”—I gave him the address—“and make an arrest of your own.”

He whistled softly.

“This is going to get a lot of unsolved ones off your books,” I said. “Maybe I’ll let you do the buying during our next vital conference.”

He said something unimportant. I hung up. Then I stood pointing the gun at Rhona while we waited for him.

ELEVEN

It was Thursday, and I was having dinner at McGraw’s, a favorite steakhouse of mine. I wasn’t eating alone. There was a girl across the table from me, a girl named Sharon Ross.

She chewed a bit of steak, washed it down with a sip of Beaujolais, and looked up at me with wide eyes.

“The girl,” she said. “Rhona. What’s going to happen to her, Ed?”

“Not enough.”

“Will she go to jail?”

“Probably,” I said. “It’s hardly a sure thing, though. She was a blackmailer, and there’s a law against that sort of thing, but she’s in a position to turn state’s evidence and help them nail the lid on Zucker and his buddies. And, as she said, she never killed anyone. Only tried.”

I shrugged. “And she’s a girl. A pretty one. That still makes a difference in any case where you have trial by jury. The worst she can look forward to is a fairly light sentence. She could even get off clean, if she has an expensive lawyer.”

“Like Phil Carr?”

“Like him, but not Carr. He won’t be practicing much law anymore. He’ll be in jail for everything the D.A. can make stick. And Zucker will stand trial, too.”

I’D CALLED SHARON A DAY OR TWO after the whole thing was wrapped up, and after she had cooled off from the broken-date routine. And, over our steaks, I had filled her in on most of the story. Not all of it, of course. She got the expurgated version. You never tell one girl about the bedroom games you played with another girl. It’s not chivalrous. It’s not even especially intelligent.

“I guess I forgive you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For breaking our date, silly. Brother, was I mad at you! You didn’t sound like a man with business on his mind, not when you called me. You sounded like a man who had just crawled out of bed with someone pretty. And I was steaming.”

I looked away. Hell, I thought. When I called her I had just crawled out of bed with something pretty. But I didn’t know you could tell over the phone.

“Ed?”

I looked up.

“Where do you want to go after dinner?”

“A little club somewhere on the East Side,” I said. “We’ll listen to atonal jazz and drink a little too much.”

She said it sounded good. It did. We would listen to atonal jazz and drink a little too much, and then we would go back to her place for a nightcap. She wouldn’t be a secretive blackmailer with a closet full of dynamite. She would just be a soft warm girl, and that was enough.

There might be explosions. But dynamite wouldn’t cause them, and I wouldn’t mind them at all.

STAG PARTY GIRL

ONE

Harold Merriman pushed his chair back and stood up, drink in hand. “Gentlemen,” he said solemnly, “to all the wives we love so well. May they continue to belong to us body and soul.” He paused theatrically, “And to their husbands—may they never find out!”

There was scattered laughter, most of it lost in the general hubbub. I had a glass of cognac on the table in front of me. I took a sip and looked at Mark Donahue. If he was nervous, it didn’t show. He looked like any man who was getting married in the morning—which is nervous enough, I suppose. He didn’t look like someone threatened with murder.

Phil Abeles—short, intense, brittle-voiced—stood. He started to read a sheaf of fake telegrams. “Mark,” he intoned, “don’t panic—marriage is the best life for a man. Signed, Tommy Manville”…He read more telegrams. Some funny, some mildly obscene, some dull.

We were in an upstairs dining room at McGraw’s, a venerable steakhouse in the East Forties. About a dozen of us. There was Mark Donahue, literally getting married in the morning, Sunday, tying the nuptial knot at 10:30. Also Harold Merriman, Phil Abeles, Ray Powell, Joe Conn, Jack Harris, and a few others whose names I couldn’t remember, all fellow wage slaves with Donahue at Darcy & Bates, one of Madison Avenue’s rising young ad agencies.

And there was me. Ed London, private cop, the man at the party who didn’t belong. I was just a hired hand. It was my job to get Donahue to the church on time, and alive.

On Wednesday, Mark Donahue had come to my apartment. He cabbed over on a long lunch hour that coincided with the time I rolled out of bed. We sat in my living room. I was rumpled and ugly in a moth-eaten bathrobe. He was fresh and trim in a Tripler suit and expensive shoes. I drowned my sorrows with coffee while he told me his problems.

“I think I need a bodyguard,” he said.