In the storybooks and the movies, I show him the door at this point. I explain belligerently that I don’t do divorce or bodyguard work or handle corporation investigations—that I only rescue stacked blondes and play modern-day Robin Hood. That’s in the storybooks. I don’t play that way. I have an apartment in an East Side brownstone and I eat in good restaurants and drink expensive cognac. If you can pay my fee, friend, you can buy me.

I asked him what it was all about.

“I’m getting married Sunday morning,” he said.

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” He looked at the floor. “I’m marrying a…a very fine girl. Her name is Lynn Farwell.”

I waited.

“There was another girl I…used to see. A model, more or less. Karen Price.”

“And?”

“She doesn’t want me to get married.”

“So?”

He fumbled for a cigarette. “She’s been calling me,” he said. “I was…well, fairly deeply involved with her. I never planned to marry her. I’m sure she knew that.”

“But you were sleeping with her?”

“That’s right.”

“And now you’re marrying someone else.”

He sighed at me. “It’s not as though I ruined the girl,” he said. “She’s…well, not a tramp, exactly, but close to it. She’s been around, London.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I’ve been getting phone calls from her. Unpleasant ones, I’m afraid. She’s told me that I’m not going to marry Lynn. That she’ll see me dead first.”

“And you think she’ll try to kill you?”

“I don’t know.”

“That kind of threat is common, you know. It doesn’t usually lead to murder.”

He nodded hurriedly. “I know that,” he said. “I’m not terribly afraid she’ll kill me. I just want to make sure she doesn’t throw a monkey wrench into the wedding. Lynn comes from an excellent family. Long Island, society, money. Her parents wouldn’t appreciate a scene.”

“Probably not.”

He forced a little laugh. “And there’s always a chance that she really may try to kill me,” he said. “I’d like to avoid that.” I told him it was an understandable desire. “So I want a bodyguard. From now until the wedding. Four days. Will you take the job?”

I told him my fee ran a hundred a day plus expenses. This didn’t faze him. He gave me $300 for a retainer, and I had a client and he had a bodyguard.

From then on I stuck to him like perspiration.

Saturday, a little after noon, he got a phone call. We were playing two-handed pinochle in his living room. He was winning. The phone rang and he answered it. I only heard his end of the conversation. He went a little white and sputtered; then he stood for a long moment with the phone in his hand, and finally slammed the receiver on the hook and turned to me.

“Karen,” he said, ashen. “She’s going to kill me.”

I didn’t say anything. I watched the color come back into his face, saw the horror recede. He came up smiling. “I’m not really scared,” he said.

“Good.”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” he added. “Maybe it’s her idea of a joke…maybe she’s just being bitchy. But nothing’s going to happen.”

He didn’t entirely believe it. But I had to give him credit.

I don’t know who invented the bachelor dinner, or why he bothered. I’ve been to a few of them. Dirty jokes, dirty movies, dirty toasts, a lineup with a local whore—maybe I would appreciate them if I were married. But for a bachelor who makes out there is nothing duller than a bachelor dinner.

This one was par for the course. The steaks were good and there was a lot to drink, which was definitely on the plus side. The men busy making asses of themselves were not friends of mine, and that was also on the plus side—it kept me from getting embarrassed for them. But the jokes were still unfunny and the voices too drunkenly loud.

I looked at my watch. “Eleven-thirty,” I said to Donahue. “How much longer do you think this’ll go on?”

“Maybe half an hour.”

“And then ten hours until the wedding. Your ordeal’s just about over, Mark.”

“And you can relax and spend your fee.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m glad I hired you,” he said. “You haven’t had to do anything, but I’m glad anyway.” He grinned. “I carry life insurance, too. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to die. And you’ve even been good company, Ed. Thanks.”

I started to search for an appropriate answer. Phil Abeles saved me. He was standing up again, pounding on the table with his fist and shouting for everyone to be quiet. They let him shout for a while, then quieted down.

“And now the grand finale,” Phil announced wickedly. “The part I know you’ve all been waiting for.”

“The part Mark’s been waiting for,” someone said lewdly.

“Mark better watch this,” someone else added. “He has to learn about women so that Lynn isn’t disappointed.”

More feeble lines, one after the other. Phil Abeles pounded for order again and got it. “Lights,” he shouted.

The lights went out. The private dining room looked like a blackout in a coal mine.

“Music!”

Somewhere, a record player went on. The record was “The Stripper,” played by David Rose’s orchestra.

“Action!”

A spotlight illuminated the pair of doors at the far end of the room. The doors opened. Two bored waiters wheeled in a large table on rollers. There was a cardboard cake on top of the table and, obviously, a girl inside the cake. Somebody made a joke about Mark cutting himself a piece. Someone else said they wanted to put a piece of this particular wedding cake under their pillow. “On the pillow would be better,” a voice corrected.

The two bored waiters wheeled the cake into position and left.

The doors closed. The spotlight stayed on the cake and the stripper music swelled.

There were two or three more lame jokes. Then the chatter died. Everyone seemed to be watching the cake. The music grew louder, deeper, fuller. The record stopped suddenly and another—Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March”—took its place.

Someone shouted, “Here comes the bride!”

And she leaped out of the cake like a nymph from the sea.

She was naked and beautiful. She sprang through the paper cake, arms wide, face filled with a lipstick smile. Her breasts were full and firm and her nipples had been reddened with lipstick.

Then, just as everyone was breathlessly silent, just as her arms spread and her lips parted and her eyes widened slightly, the whole room exploded like Hiroshima. We found out later that it was only a .38. It sounded more like a howitzer.

She clapped both hands to a spot between her breasts. Blood spurted forth like a flower opening. She gave a small gasp, swayed forward, then dipped backward and fell.

Lights went on. I raced forward. Her head was touching the floor and her legs were propped on what remained of the paper cake. Her eyes were open. But she was horribly dead.

And then I heard Mark Donahue next to me, his voice shrill. “Oh, no!” he murmured. “…It’s Karen, it’s Karen!”

I felt for a pulse; there was no point to it. There was a bullet in her heart.

Karen Price was dead.

TWO

Lieutenant Jerry Gunther got the call. He brought a clutch of Homicide men who went around measuring things, studying the position of the body, shooting off a hell of a lot of flashbulbs, and taking statements. Jerry piloted me into a corner and started pumping.

I gave him the whole story, starting with Wednesday and ending with Saturday. He let me go all the way through once, then went over everything two or three times.

“Your client Donahue doesn’t look too good,” he said.

“You think he killed the girl?”

“That’s the way it reads.”

I shook my head. “Wrong customer.”

“Why?”

“Hell, he hired me to keep the girl off his neck. If he was going to shoot a hole in her, why would he want a detective along for company?”

“To make the alibi stand up, Ed. To make us reason just the way you’re reasoning now. How do you know he was scared of the girl?”

“Because he said so. But—”

“But he got a phone call?” Jerry smiled. “For all you know it was a wrong number. Or the call had been staged. You only heard his end of it. Remember?”

“I saw his face when he took a good look at the dead girl,” I said. “Mark Donahue was one surprised hombre, Jerry. He didn’t know who she was.”

“Or else he’s a good actor.”

“Not that good. I can’t believe it.”

He let that one pass. “Let’s go back to the shooting,” he said. “Were you watching him when the gun went off?”

“No.”

“What were you watching?”

“The girl,” I said. “And quit grinning, you fathead.”

His grin spread. “You old lecher. All right, you can’t alibi him for the shooting. And you can’t prove he was afraid of the girl. This is the way I make it, Ed. He was afraid of her, but not afraid she would kill him. He was afraid of something else. Call it blackmail, maybe. He’s getting set to make a good marriage to a rich doll and he’s got a mistress hanging around his neck. Say the rich girl doesn’t know about the mistress. Say the mistress wants hush money.”

“Go on.”

“Your Donahue finds out the Price doll is going to come out of the cake.”

“They kept it a secret from him, Jerry.”

“Sometimes people find out secrets. The Price kid could have told him herself. It might have been her idea of a joke. Say he finds out. He packs a gun—”

“He didn’t have a gun.”

“How do you know, Ed?”

I couldn’t answer that one. He might have had a gun. He might have tucked it into a pocket while he was getting dressed. I didn’t believe it, but I couldn’t disprove it either.

Jerry Gunther was thorough. He didn’t have to be thorough to turn up the gun. It was under a table in the middle of the room. The lab boys checked it for prints. None. It was a .38 police positive with five bullets left in it. The bullets didn’t have any prints on them, either.

“Donahue shot her, wiped the gun, and threw it on the floor,” Jerry said.

“Anybody else could have done the same thing,” I interjected.

“Uh-huh. Sure.”

He grilled Phil Abeles, the man who had hired Karen Price to come out of the cake. Abeles was also the greenest, sickest man in the world at that particular moment.

Gunther asked him how he got hold of the girl. “I never knew anything about her,” Abeles insisted. “I didn’t even know her last name.”

“How’d you find her?”