We finished our drinks. On cue we turned to each other. Her face was flushed from the drink and her lips tasted of it. She snuggled up against me and whispered sweet somethings.

The bedroom was neat and clean, the bed turned down. She moved to turn off the light. I told her to leave it on.

“You want to see me naked, Ed?” A narcissistic smile showed I had scored one hundred percent with an apt remark.

“Yes, from head to toe.”

“I’m glad,” she murmured. “I like that.”

We kissed. She undressed slowly, sensuously. We stretched out on the bed. She lay back, her eyes closed, her arms at her sides. A nude goddess, waiting.

I touched her cheek, her shoulder. My hand moved over silken flesh. My finger touched the strawberry birthmark on the side of her thigh and she quivered beneath my touch.

The birthmark. The one that had been scratched from the negatives of the pornographic photographs. The one that was nowhere to be seen on the body in the morgue!

Her eyes opened and she looked at me. There was the shadow of a question on her face but she kept it back, waiting. I took my hands away from her body.

“It was a nice try, Jackie,” I said. “It almost worked.”

Her mouth made an O and her eyes bugged. She was already out of her clothes. Now she jumped out of her skin.

ELEVEN

She wasn’t talking. She lay naked on the bed with beads of sweat already starting to emerge upon her forehead. Her eyes were trying to say that she didn’t know what I was talking about. Their message didn’t convince me.

“I’ve been calling you Jill,” I said. “But you’re not Jill. Jill’s in the morgue. She’s there because you put a gun to her forehead and killed her!

“You’re not Jill. You’re Jackie. And some of the things you told me about Jackie were true. Jackie had money worries. Jackie was a gambler and Jackie owed a lot of tabs around town. Jill had money in the bank but Jackie didn’t. Jackie owed money.”

I stopped for a breath. “So Jackie killed Jill,” I said. “You needed money, fast. A long time ago you and Jill took out policies naming each other as beneficiaries. If Jill was eliminated, then you got the money you needed in a hurry. So you thought it all out and decided to kill your sister.”

“You’re insane—”

“No. You figured it all out and somewhere along the line you saw a way to do it better. It was one thing to kill Jill—then you got the money and paid your debts. But it was even neater to kill her and assume your sister’s identity. Then your debts would be written off completely. You could start fresh with no one mad at you. You could be Jill.”

I looked at her coldly. “Probably Jill was a nicer girl, anyhow.”

The room was quiet. I looked at her naked body and looked quickly away. Flesh in and of itself is no stimulant. She kindled no desire, not after I’d proved to myself that she had killed her own sister, and Ralph Traynor.

“There was more to it than that,” I went on. “You might have had a lot of trouble figuring out a good way to kill Jill. But it became infinitely easier when you made it look as though Jackie had been murdered. Jill didn’t have any reason to work a blackmail dodge. Jill had money in the bank. But you had plenty of reason to be a blackmailer, and if you made your sister look like a blackmailer nobody would look your way if she got herself murdered. They would just look for the person she had been blackmailing.

“You probably started to play a little blackmail at the beginning. Figured on squeezing some money out of Ralph Traynor. Hell, you’re not the sentimental type. You wouldn’t have put Traynor on the free list because you liked his looks. You started seeing him because you thought you could blackmail him. You had a set of blackmail pics taken and were ready to start showing them to him; but then you realized he couldn’t come up with the big money you needed.”

Jackie had a pack of cigarettes on the night table. I took one and lit it. “That was one thing I wondered about,” I continued. “Traynor made a good living but he wasn’t rich. I could see him coming up with three thousand dollars in a pinch, but I couldn’t see how you figured on getting any more than that from him. But you never blackmailed him at all. You had the pictures taken, and when you saw the prints and thought about the money you needed, you got the idea of killing Jill.

“And you went right ahead with it after you put a pile of money and the pictures in your safe-deposit box. That set the stage. Jill never suspected a thing. Maybe she noticed you were a little nervous. Probably not. You’re a good actress, Jackie.”

She looked at me. Her face showed no expression whatsoever, as though she was waiting patiently for me to finish spouting my nonsense and to return to reality.

“A damned good actress. Maybe you have to be a good actress to be a good whore. Anyway, yesterday morning you got away from Jill and called me. You were all mystery on the phone. You were willing to risk my writing the whole thing off as a gag because you wanted things to work out just right. And you wanted to make sure you had me playing ball with you. If I didn’t call you back, you’d just postpone the murder a day or two and phone some other private eye.

“But I cooperated. You were there when I called you back and you arranged a meeting with me at four-thirty. Then, about an hour ahead of time, you took Jill for a walk in the park. She thought the two of you were just going out for some fresh air. You went to the spot where you were supposed to meet me, took the automatic from your purse, and blew your sister’s brains out.”

For the first time, she shuddered. It was a momentary reaction, a quivering of the upper lip, a brief outbreak of gooseflesh over her naked body. It passed quickly.

“You stuck the gun back in your purse and left the park, Jackie. Maybe you hung around long enough to make sure I discovered the body. Maybe not. Either way, you had plenty of time to double back to my apartment and wander in like a little lost lamb. You staged that part beautifully. You hadn’t told me anything about sisters over the phone and as far as I knew there was only one of you, and that one was dead on a park bench. You came into my arms with a whole load of shock value working for you, and then you let yourself fall apart in tears when I told you your sister was dead. You played the scared act to the hilt and made it look as though you were in a hell of a lot of danger.”

She sat speechless—mouth agape, looking ludicrous in her nudity.

“And that worked, too. If the nonexistent blackmail victim had only been after your sister, I would have taken the whole thing straight to the police and they would have picked it to pieces. But the killer was supposed to be after you, too—and I had to catch him and keep you in the clear at the same time. I stowed you at Maddy’s, and you got busy setting up a frame for Traynor.

“You were cute about it,” I went on. “You never did get around to blackmailing Traynor, so he still thought he was your loving boyfriend. As soon as I left Maddy’s you got on the phone and called him, told him to get over to your apartment. Or maybe he was there all along—it’s the same either way. You told him some pest was on his way over and that he should knock the pest out and leave him there.

“Traynor didn’t know anything about murder. All he knew was that he was crazy about you, the poor fool. So he waited in the dark until I came in, and he slugged me. Then he turned your apartment upside down to make it look as though it had been searched. I don’t know what you told him to get him to go along with that. It must have been good.”

She laughed. “Ralph would do anything for me,” she said. “He didn’t need a reason.”

“Sure. Anyway, he knocked me out and gave me a good look at him in the process. I believed your story right off the bat, but this made it perfect. The whole blackmail pattern was fixed now. I had to believe in Traynor because he damn well existed and I had an aching head to prove it. I went back to Maddy’s with my head in a sling and you let me coax a little more information out of you. About Jackie being in debt, and about Jackie having a boyfriend—all of that. If you gave me all of it at once I would have tried to pick holes in it, but you were too smart for that. You made me pry it out of you and I swallowed it whole.”

“You said I was a good actress, Ed.”

She was smiling now. I had her pegged and she knew it, but she could still manage a smile. God knows how.

“I didn’t get a chance to look for holes in your story, not that night,” I said. “You kept me busy in bed. More acting, Jackie.”

“That wasn’t all acting.”

I ignored the line. “A repeat performance in the morning,” I said. “And then the safe-deposit box—hell, that was something. You let me talk you into impersonating Jackie, and what it amounted to is that you impersonated yourself. No wonder you didn’t have any trouble with the signature. It was your own signature.

“You did a good job there, you know. You had to look uncertain enough to make me think you were Jill and confident enough not to make the guard suspicious. You got the money and the pictures from the box and you were home free, or close to it.”

She moved a little on the bed, a coldly calculated but subtle and seductive maneuver that made her breasts jut out. She wanted to make me conscious of her body, but didn’t want to act whorish about it.

She could have saved herself the trouble. Her body was now about as exciting to me as Jill’s, stretched out on a slab in the morgue. She stretched like a cat and ran her tongue over her lower lip and not a single spark flew.

“We went to the bar and looked at the pictures, Jackie,” I continued. “Then you got up to make a phone call. You didn’t call your answering service. You called Traynor, told him to get to your apartment right away. I don’t know what reason you gave him, but you pulled the strings and he performed on schedule. You worked a stall act at the bar to give him time to get there, dawdled in the john, all of that. Then we got to your apartment to look for Jackie’s address book. You made me wait downstairs. What would have happened if I went up with you?”

“I knew you wouldn’t, Ed.”

“The hell you did. You hoped I wouldn’t but you had it all figured out if I did. I was lucky I stayed downstairs.”

Her eyes went innocently wide.

“Because you would have killed me. You would have used your gun on me and then you would have used my gun on Traynor to make it look as though we shot each other. That would have been a little tricky to pull off but you would have done it if necessary. Then with both of us dead you could try your story on the police.

“It might have worked too. But it wasn’t as sure a thing as it could have been, and that was why you wanted me to stay downstairs to back you up. However, you would have made your play either way.”

“Oh, no, Ed. That’s not true!” She put her heart into it. “I never could have killed you, Ed.”

“No?”

“Ed, I—”

I told her to save it. “You went upstairs and let yourself in,” I continued. “Traynor came over to kiss you and you screamed your head off. His face must have been something to see just then. You had him running around in circles anyway, and a good loud scream must have rattled the hell out of him. But he didn’t have much time to worry about it. You took out the gun and shot him. Then you gave out with another scream.