Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1953

Dirge for a Nude by Jonathan Craig

Pleasant finding a naked girl in your car?

Not when she isn’t breathing...

It wasn’t exactly a new sound I was getting out of the little spinet, but it was a good sound — and the few customers left in this brand-new Village kick joint at three o’clock in the morning were at least hipped enough to know barrelhouse from outhouse. They sat around the stucco walls in twos and threes, and every time I’d hit a real gone figure they’d nod approvingly. Every now and then, when I got tired of this dead-pan approval, I’d sour a note or slide out of chord a little, just to watch them look pained and sympathetic.

I felt pretty good. I was knocking down good dough for this solo spot here in the Cavern Club, and while we wouldn’t be giving Nick’s and Eddie Condon’s any real competition for a while, it looked like we were going to do all right. The club was a natural for the tourists — all tricked up to look like a cave, with weird lighting and recesses in the stucco walls for tables and even a few stalactites scattered around here and there on the ceiling.

A real corny, jazzy place, where you could spend a buck and a half on a four-bit drink. It wasn’t a bad spot, outside of the echoes. The echoes were terrific. Even that frothy, delicate stuff in the treble sometimes came out like bricks rattling in a wash tub.

But the hat-check girl was beautiful, and I had a date with her at four o’clock. So everything was lovely.

I got a good ride rhythm going in the left hand and settled down to show off for the cognoscenti. If they liked their piano pure, then that’s what they were going to get.

That’s when Gloria Gayle came in — and from then on I was no longer the center of attraction. I watched her coming toward the piano and cussed a little and missed a couple of notes and had to cover up quick, like a cat. I needn’t have bothered. Nobody noticed sour notes when Gloria was around.

She draped her equipment over the top of the spinet and smiled at me and jiggled a little to show she was properly sent.

“Baby!” she said.

“Baby, hell,” I said. “Shove off.”

She had blue-black hair that shouldn’t be real, but was, and long sooty lashes and skin as smooth and white as a new piano key. She gave me a long slow sweep of the lashes and the smile got even brighter. Smiles like that they measure in kilowatts.

“Be nice to me, Marty,” she purred. “Or I’ll twist off your head.”

I riffed a little up high on the keyboard and grinned at her. A couple of months ago Gloria Gayle had made the world go round for me. That was before she gave me the heave-o for Al Prince, the guy the sports scribes called the Uncrowned Light-heavyweight Champ.

“The last name’s Bishop,” I said.

“Quit clowning,” she said. “I want to talk to you. Now.”

“I’ve still got this set and another one to go.”

She put both hands down flat on the piano and rocked it. It was that little. All at once I was playing in another key.

“Take a break,” she said.

I got up and walked around the spinet and took her arm and led her over to a table against the wall, next to the service bar. I held up two fingers to a waitress and sat down on the chair next to Gloria’s and said, “I hope this is going to be fast.”

She worked her chair over so that her thigh was pressed against mine and the side of her breast just accidentally brushed my arm every time either of us so much as moved.

“It is, darling,” she said in that sultry voice of hers. “We’re going to Mexico City. Just you and me. Tomorrow. Isn’t that exciting?”

I nodded. “It sure is. And what about Al Prince? And what will we use for money? And why don’t you see a psychiatrist?”

“I’ve ditched Al,” she said. “After you, darling, Al was like a sip of wine after a jolt of whiskey.” She brought up her hand to touch the taut bodice of her silk jersey dress. “And the money’s in here. There’s twelve thousand dollars in my bra, Marty.”

The drink-mixer on the service bar was making a terrific racket, almost in my ear. I was sure I’d misunderstood her. I’d thought she said twelve thousand dollars.

“How much?” I said.

She smiled at me and said it again. “Twelve thousand dollars.”

“Whose twelve thousand dollars?” I asked. I was looking past Gloria toward the check room. My four o’clock date, Julie Cole, was having an easy time of it, what with the hot weather. She was leaning on the counter, looking very hard away from me. A really luscious kid... I hoped this little session with Gloria wasn’t going to give cause for a post mortem. But Julie wouldn’t stay miffed long, I knew. Not when I gave her the bracelet I’d bought for her that afternoon and for which I’d plunked down four hundred bucks. She was a little girl who liked presents, was Julie, and she liked them small and bright and expensive.

Gloria increased the pressure of her thigh against mine a little. “It’s my twelve G’s,” she said. “Al was very generous, if nothing else. When I ditched him, I turned all the things he’d given me into cash.”

I shook my head wonderingly.

“Don’t fret about it, darling,” she said. “The point is, I’ve got it. And I’ve got it where it’s all nice and soft and warm.”

Our drinks came. Gloria raised her glass and clicked it against mine. “To us, Marty,” she said. “To our finding each other again.”

I took a drag on my drink and put it down.

“I’ve got hot news for you,” I said. “We didn’t find each other again. It took me a while to get over you, maybe two or three days, but I did it. I want to keep it that way. Sorry, Gloria, but no Mexico City. No more dates. No nothing.”

She looked at me, half smiling, ready to turn on the full voltage if she saw I was kidding.

But I wasn’t kidding.

Color spread up into her face and the dark eyes looked as if they were going to shoot sparks.

“Why, you big, egotistical six-foot-two of... of nothing!”

“Please,” I said. “This is a hallowed place.” I was a little sorry for her. This was probably the first time in her fife that anything like this had ever happened to her. But this was the way it had to be.

She rose half way from her chair, then sank back down again.

“But why not?” she asked. “Just give me one good reason!”

“You, for one,” I told her. “And Al Prince for another. You gave me the brush for him — which was all right, this being a free country and all. But once was enough. More than enough.”

Her lips drew away from her teeth, and now she wasn’t quite so beautiful. “Damn you, Marty!” she said, her voice suddenly loud and shrill. “Who do you think you are?”

People were giving us the hard eye now. Especially Julie Cole. I saw the boss duck his head out of his cubbyhole. He glared at me, shuttled his eyes meaningfully between me and the piano, and pulled his head back in again.

“Got to go to work, Gloria,” I said. “First night in a new place. You know how it is.”

She shook her head. “We’re going to talk this out!”

“No,” I said.

She surprised me. She slapped me. And she slapped me hard. It made quite a noise.

I got up and turned toward the piano. But she was up beside me in an instant, her hands clutching my arm. “Damn you, Marty! I said we were going to talk this out!”

I thought of my date with Julie at four. I got off at three-thirty. I pushed Gloria’s hands off my arm and fished the keys to my Caddy out of my pocket and gave them to her.

“You know what my car looks like,” I said. “It’s parked in the mouth of that alley on Christopher Street, where I used to park it when I worked at the Gopher Hole. You remember?”

She nodded, her eyes blazing.

“Wait for me there,” I said.

“How long?”

“I’m off in fifteen minutes.”

She said something beneath her breath, gave me a go-to-hell look and started for the door. Every eye in the place followed that lithe, swivel-hipped walk of hers, even my own.

I went back to the spinet and started playing again. I glanced around at the cash customers, to see how they’d taken the free floor show — and that’s when I saw Al Prince. He was standing by the steps that led up to the street, and he was staring at me with the most open look of hatred I’d ever seen on a man’s face. He was blonde and handsome and big, almost as big as me, and I could almost swear he was so mad that he was trembling.

I hadn’t seen him come in, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been there all the time that Gloria was. It didn’t mean anything.

The boss came by and stopped and gave me a hard eye.

“Watch yourself, Bishop,” he said.

“Shove it, Dad,” I said. “Keep moving.”

He got a little red, but he kept moving.

A bunch of young kids, mostly girls, came down the steps into the club. Artists, if the fact that they were all barefooted meant anything. A new fad, brought back from the Left Bank in Paris. When the kids had cleared out of the way, Al Prince was gone. Maybe back outside. I couldn’t tell. I wondered if he’d be punk enough to lay for me out there. Could be.

Al was a flashy light-heavyweight who had been knocking on the throne room a lot of years now without ever getting a crack at the title. Money he had, and a lot of rugged good looks. But no savvy about women. He liked to get physical about things. Yeah... he’d probably be waiting.

I played straight through until three-thirty, modulating from one number to another without a break in rhythm and without fluffing a single figure. When I got up, the crowd gave me a hand, which surprised me. Up till now, they’d been pretty cold-fish.

At the check room I waited a moment for Julie Cole to finish talking to somebody on the wall telephone at one side of her tiny alcove.

She hung the phone back on its hook and came over to me and leaned on the counter and winked one big blue eye. She had shoulder length auburn hair and dimples, and there were those who thought she might be stretching it a little when she claimed she was nineteen. Just looking at her gave me a real charge, and there was a rich, ripe female smell to her that took over where the looks left off.

“You can sure pick them,” she said, laughing. “I’m fuming.”

“I’ve got to go out for a couple minutes, Julie,” I told her. “I’ll be back at four, right on the button. Okay?”

She tilted her head; the blue eyes measured me. “Maybe there won’t be much left of you by then.”

“Forget it,” I said. “This is strictly business.”

“Of course,” she said. “Business. Well, have fun — just the same.”

I shrugged and went up the steps to the street and walked along toward the alley where I’d parked the Caddy. There weren’t many people cruising the Village tonight, and what few there were seemed pretty well lushed. Tourists, mostly. But one of the drunks who passed me was no tourist. He shambled by without looking at me, and I almost didn’t recognize him. His name was Ed Farr. He’d been a top-drawer song-writer once, a handsome guy with a lot of friends. But not now. Now the hooch had got him.

The hooch and Gloria Gayle.

She’d been singing with Tony Schuyler’s band when Ed met her. Just another beautiful body with a so-so voice. But she had a phenomenal memory for words and music, and when Ed had played and sung a new song for her, she’d lost no time in swiping it for her own. Those things happen, and they happen easy. She simply peddled it to a notorious Tin Pan Alley pirate who beat Ed Farr to the copyright. Just like that. Ed had been on the thin edge of alcoholism anyhow, and when the stolen song made the Hit Parade, he’d slipped all the way under.

I tried not to think of Ed. Liquor was my trouble too; it’s a sort of occupational disease in the music business.

I kept an eye out for Al Prince, a little surprised that he hadn’t been waiting for me outside the club. Surprised, and glad. I’m big, and reasonably healthy, but I’m no pro fighter.

Gloria Gayle wasn’t sitting in the Caddy, and she was nowhere near it. I stood there in the mouth of the alley and leaned up against the car and lit a cigarette. I felt relieved. The cool morning air was good to breath after the smoke and perfume and liquor fumes in the club.

I wondered if Al Prince had caught up with Gloria outside and talked her into going off with him. Or maybe she had talked him into going off with her, to keep him from bouncing me up and down on the sidewalk.

Either way, it was fine with me. And then I remembered that she had the keys to the Caddy.

I reached down to try the door handle, figuring that she might have passed the car and had had enough consideration to leave them in the dash.

My hand stayed on the door handle a long time. I couldn’t have moved it if I’d wanted to.

Because, lying sprawled there on the front seat in the dim reflected light of a street lamp, was the naked body of Gloria Gayle.

I don’t know how long I stood there. A full thirty seconds, maybe. At last I got back enough presence of mind to yank the door open and say her name. There was no answer. Not that I’d expected any. She was dead, and I’d known that the first instant I saw her. No living person looked like that. Dead bodies are always different, somehow.

I reached out and put my hand flat against the flesh just beneath the left breast long enough to confirm what I already knew. There was no heartbeat. The skin against my palm was still warm and a little moist. So far as I could see, there wasn’t a mark on her any place.

I heard footsteps coming along the street and I closed the door and walked around behind the car until they passed the mouth of the alley.

It was coming to me — in pieces. But the pieces were coming fast. And every one of them was like a kick in the belly.

It had to be Al Prince. I would have bet my life on it. Here in Greenwich Village, anything can happen, sure — she might even have been murdered by a passerby. Somebody who saw a pretty girl sitting in a car alone in the mouth of an alley and decided to take advantage of it. Maybe rape, maybe robbery. Maybe both. But I didn’t think so. The odds on Al Prince were far too heavy.

I went around to the driver’s side and opened the door and lifted Gloria’s head and got beneath the wheel. The keys were in the dash, where she had put them. Then, with her head on my lap, I backed the Caddy up the alley to the darkest shadows I could find. I got the small flashlight out of the glove compartment and flicked it over her body.

I turned her completely over twice. She was a small girl, but it was cramped in the seat, and she was a little slippery. Her clothes, except for stockings and spike-heels, were nothing but a pile of shredded cloth on the floorboard. There was no money.

I felt the wound before I saw it — a tiny crescent-shaped cut on her left temple where it had been hidden by her hair. There was a bad bruise beneath it, and when I put my hand down on the upholstery it came away sticky with what I knew had to be blood.

It looked to me as if Gloria had been killed with a hammer.

Then another thought came to me, and I started the motor again and gunned the Caddy out of there. I didn’t stop until I was a dozen blocks away, down another dark alley. I was a patsy, I knew, and whoever had made me one would sure as hell tip the cops the moment he knew the frame-up was exactly right. And I knew who “whoever” was — Al Prince.

He’d done a beautiful job of it. New York cops were the best in the world, sure, but what good was that going to do me in this situation? A man and a girl have a stormy affair and break up — and then the girl slaps the guy in a cellar jive joint, and fifteen minutes later the girl’s dead and naked in the guy’s car. Beautiful. A certain number of patsies are fried and hanged and gassed every year — a statistical fact.

I don’t know why, but I didn’t think of Ed Farr, the song writer, just then. There’s no good reason; I just didn’t.

I got out of the car and lugged Gloria’s body to the back seat and put it down on the floorboard. I didn’t like to do it, you understand. I just didn’t have any choice. I put her shredded dress over her and covered her as best I could with the small lap robe I keep in the back seat, and that was all I could do.

For the first time since I’d bought it, I was glad the Caddy wasn’t a convertible. At least no onlookers would know I had a dead girl in there, unless they opened the back door. And if they got that far, I was cooked anyhow.

I had a date with Al Prince. Only he didn’t know it. He’d need no alibi himself, of course, and the best place he could be when the police came calling — if they even bothered — was at home.

I had about as much chance as an ice cube in a blast furnace. I didn’t have a gun, and didn’t know where I could get one. But I had a knife. And I knew how to use it. You remember those things, after four years in the Marines.

Al Prince’s apartment house was a converted brownstone front in the west seventies, scabby on the outside but plush on the inside. I’d been there a couple of times just after he hit the big time. I rang the buzzer beside his mailbox, and after a while the lock on the door clicked and I climbed the stairs to the second floor and knocked on the door of his apartment.

I let half a minute go by, and then I knocked again. Loud. I knew he was in there because he’d tripped the lock on the downstairs door. I knocked a third time.

Behind me a voice said, “You want something, Marty?”

I whirled around. Al was grinning at me with those pale yellow eyes of his. I didn’t see his fist. I only felt it. It wasn’t calculated to knock me out. It stunned me, the way he’d meant for it to, and for a moment the lights in the corridor swung around in lazy circles and the floor tilted and swayed beneath my feet. I felt one of my arms jerked behind me in a hammerlock, and in another few seconds Al had got the door open and walked me three-fourths of the way across the room.

“I saw you coming from the window,” Smuggy said pleasantly. “I knew you weren’t up to any good — not at this time of the morning. I waited for you on the back stairs.” He yanked my arm up another couple of inches. “Now what the hell do you want?”

The room had stopped spinning. It was a big room, sound proof, I remembered, with full-length French windows. There were several large photographs on the walls — all of them of Al Prince, and most of them in fight poses. I thought of the knife in my pocket: a hell of a lot of good that was going to do me.

He jerked my arm up again. It was like having someone ram a red-hot ice pick into your shoulder.

“I asked you what the hell you wanted,” he said, still pleasantly. “You come over here about Gloria?”

Was he kidding? “You’re damn right,” I choked out over the pain in my shoulder. “What’d you think?”

He pushed me ahead of him to a sofa. I barked my shins on a heavy bronze cocktail table. He liked that. He laughed softly and forced me down on the sofa, my face twisted around toward the back of it.

“You came over to tell me she belongs to you again, eh, Marty? You got the decision, eh?”

Another couple of inches and he was going to twist my arm right out of its socket. “Ease up, you punk,” I said. “There’s a bone in that arm.”

I might as well have talked to a wall.

“I saw her come out of that crummy dive you play in,” Al said. “A big bruiser like you, playing a little piano like that. That’s real funny. And her going for a guy like you — a damn piano player! That’s even funnier.” He put some more pressure on my arm. I yelled. I had to.

“Holler all you want,” he laughed. “Nobody’s going to hear you. Not with these walls. Go on! Holler, you bastard!” And then he laughed. It was the kind of laugh you hear only in a nut-house. Damn it, the guy was crazy! He’d taken too many punches, or Gloria had knocked him off his rocker, or something. But he was nuts. Plain simple nuts.

“You know something?” he said. “I can’t see why she’d think you were so hot in bed. She used to keep harping on that, all the time — about what a hell of a good lover you were. Sometimes, right in the middle of it even, she’d tell me she wished I was you.”

“For God’s sake, Al,” I said. “Let go my—”

“Shut up! Do you know how it is. Can you imagine how it is? She’s up here, see? Right on this damn couch. And she’s moaning and sweating and crying sort of, and all at once she starts biting you on the face and digging her fingernails in your shoulders and saying, ‘Marty, Marty — Marty!’ It’s me, see, but all the time she’s pretending it’s you, and wishing it was you. You think that made me feel good? You think that didn’t make me feel like killing you, you son of a bitch?”

I couldn’t even breathe. My lungs were all up in my throat. I tried to jab at him with my free elbow, and he jerked my other arm up so hard the pain almost took the top of my head off.

“You know what I’m going to do?” he said. “I’m going to fix you so you can’t ever put your hands on her again. I’m going to give you the same treatment that small-town cops give pickpockets. You ever hear about that? They break the pickpocket’s fingers, so he can’t ever get his hooks on somebody else’s property again. They mash his hands real good so that when they heal up they aren’t anything but stiff claws.”

He got down behind me on the sofa, and now I felt his hand clench around mine like a vise. I struggled, I struggled like hell, but I couldn’t break his hold.

“You loved to get your hands on her, didn’t you, you bastard?” he said. He was excited now, almost giggling. “She was warm and soft, and she liked it too, didn’t she? But no more. I’m going to crush your hands one at a time. You’ll never put them on Gloria again.

“And nobody will ever laugh at you because you’re such a big man to be playing a piano, either. You won’t be able to use your filthy hands for anything.”

The pain in my shoulder had been bad, but it was nothing compared with the pain in my hand as Al tightened his grip. He could crush it, and that was for sure.

My eyes were blurring again, but I saw the glare of a passing auto’s headlights against the French windows — and I got the only good flash I’d ever had when I really needed it.

I bent my leg and carefully put my foot against the edge of the heavy cocktail table and sent it streaking for the French windows. It hit with an unholy crash, like an explosion in a fruit jar factory.

They could hear me outside now, I knew, and I let out a yell to wake the dead. Prince shoved me so hard that I went headlong to the floor, and then he was on his feet and diving toward an open door that I knew led to his bedroom.

I started to scrabble up and started after him. And then it struck me that my shoulder and arm were damn near paralyzed, and in the same instant I realized that he was going for a gun.

I didn’t wait to find out. In ten seconds flat I was out of the apartment and down the stairs and sprinting along the street to where I’d left the Caddy. My shoulder might be numb but there was nothing wrong with my legs which they proved by some fancy running.

Al had flipped, and that was for sure. But he hadn’t known about Gloria’s murder. No matter how wacky he was now, he couldn’t have reacted the way he had if he’d known she was dead. His acting wasn’t that good.

Which made things worse, because I was still the patsy, there was still a murdered girl in my back seat — and time was running out. Whoever had made me a patsy had almost certainly tipped the cops by this time.

And there would be a few cops at Al’s apartment, to see what the fracas was about. Al was bitter, and vindictive — he’d cook up something to put them on my tail, and the cops would believe him because he was a contender, everybody’s hero.

It was hard to figure Ed Farr for a murderer — but the choice had narrowed down. I still couldn’t buy the idea of Gloria’s killer being some passing thug who’d taken advantage of an easy mark.

By the time I reached the Caddy, I was drenched with sweat and breathing heavily. But my arm and shoulder were better now, and I knew I’d be able to drive in spite of the aches.

But drive where? I didn’t know where Ed Farr lived. From what I’d heard, he didn’t live anywhere in particular. A couple of times he’d even been picked up as a vag and brought to the station.

So Ed Farr was out — unless I wanted to cruise the Village streets looking for him. Which I didn’t. Not in a place where I knew so many people, and not with a naked corpse in the back seat. It might look a little peculiar.

I eased the car out onto the street and cut over to Broadway and headed back downtown. I felt the urge to keep moving, even if I didn’t have any place to go.

For some reason I started thinking about Julie Cole and the date I was supposed to have had with her. I glanced at my wristwatch. It didn’t seem possible, but it still lacked a few minutes of being five o’clock.

I tried to think in a straight line, but it was no good. My mind was spinning, and it wouldn’t stop. I was a cooked goose, and I knew it — but I couldn’t help trying to figure out a way to save my skin.

There wasn’t any way I could hide Gloria’s body, but there was still the blood on the seat, and I couldn’t get rid of it. The cops would have me cold. Sooner or later, no matter what I did, no matter how far I ran, they were going to get me. They would find out, follow me, and get me.

I became possessed with an almost frantic need to know if the cops were after me yet. Sooner or later, sure — but were they right now? If they were, they would have been to the Cavern Club. It was supposed to close at four o’clock — almost an hour ago — but this was opening night, and it was customary for other night spot owners to drop by a new place after they’d closed their own doors and wish the new guy luck. The chances were better than good that there’d still be someone there. Someone would answer.

I stopped at the next all-night drug store and dialed the number. The phone range twice.

When Julie Cole’s voice answered, I was so surprised I almost dropped the receiver. I started to hang up — until I realized I didn’t have anything to lose.

If the cops had already been there, she’d probably say so. And if she didn’t, I could probably tell what I wanted to know from the sound of her voice. A musician develops an incredible ear for tone and inflection.

“Marty, Julie,” I said, and waited anxiously.

There was a long pause. Then, “I thought we had a date.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, as levelly as I could. “I couldn’t help it, believe me.”

“Where are you? Why didn’t you come back?” A little of the ice was melting from her voice now.

She sounded distant, but I was sure now that the cops hadn’t been there. She was miffed because I’d stood her up, but there was nothing about her young girl’s voice that sounded suspicious, only jealous.

“Anybody ask for me, Julie?”

“No. The boss said he was going to can you, but that’s all.” Her voice was in its natural pitch.

“Have we still got a date?” It popped out; I hadn’t meant to say that at all. But maybe it wasn’t a bad idea. I needed dough, and I needed it right away. No matter what I did from here on in, it was going to be expensive. If Julie had a few bucks to loan me — fine. I wasn’t in any mood to weigh ethics or morals.

“Well...” she said. She was talking rather softly, so that I could scarcely understand her over the babble of voices and the whirring sound of the drink-mixer. And somebody was hammering away at the piano, which didn’t make it any easier. The piano was making noise but no music.

“Talk louder,” I said.

“All right, Marty — it’s still a date. I really shouldn’t, though...” I was relieved. I’d heard that cool script before. She just had a few seconds to go on her mad, and then she’d get around to being sweet again.

“About ten minutes,” I said. “Okay?”

“All right. I’ll wait for you in front. Then you won’t have to find a place to park.”

“Fine,” I said, and hung up.

I walked out to the Caddy and started for Greenwich Village.

Twenty minutes later I was sitting beside Julie on the sofa in her one-room apartment. I still hadn’t worked around to asking her for a loan, and I couldn’t think of any way to lead up to it. But I needed money.

Julie had her slim legs drawn up beneath her. I’ll never forget her shoes: tiny suede shoes with four-inch heels. I was staring at them, wondering what it was that seemed somehow wrong with them.

It was the heels. The spike heel of one of Julie’s shoes was a dull satiny suede — the way it should be. But the heel of the other shoe had a sort of slick look, as if it had recently been scrubbed very hard with soap and water.

There was something else. Julie wore round garters, I knew very well, always rolled very high on her thighs. Just where the top of her stocking would be, there was a small oblong bulge.

And suddenly I knew who had murdered Gloria Gayle. And I knew, too, that I no longer need worry about finding Ed Farr.

I didn’t like what I was going to do, but it had to be done.

I put my arm around Julie and drew her close to me. She murmured something and snuggled up, and then I slipped my hand around beneath her arm and fumbled with the buttons at the top of her dress. They held tightly.

“Wait a minute, baby,” she whispered. She reached up and undid the first two buttons and settled back again. Her body against me was tense, expectant.

I brought my forearm across her, just beneath her breasts and pinned her against me. Quickly, then, I put my free hand under the hem of her skirt and whipped it up and twisted out the thing that had been making the tiny bulge in her garter.

A tight roll of bills.

I pushed Julie away from me and fanned the money out with my fingers.

There was a lot of it, and all the bills were big.

Julie didn’t make a sound. She sat staring at me as if she had been stunned. Her wide blue eyes were sick with fear.

I didn’t have to count the money to know that there was at least twelve thousand dollars in that roll.

“How?” Julie breathed finally. “How did you...?”

She wasn’t the only one who was stunned, and she wasn’t the only one who was sick.

“You killed Gloria Gayle, Julie,” I said. “There are weird acoustics in the Cavern Club. When I called you a while ago I could hear the drink-mixer just as clearly as I heard your voice. If I could hear it over the phone in your check room, that means that you could have overheard Gloria and me talking. You heard her tell me that she had twelve thousand dollars, and you heard me tell her to wait for me in my car, and where it was parked.”

Her lips moved, but there was no sound. The tip of a pink tongue came out to wet her lips, and stayed there. I could see the pupils of her eyes contract.

“It was easy,” I said. “You followed her to the car and hit her a hell of a blow on the temple with your spike heel. You tore her clothes off to make it look like the murderer had been a man. The heel of your shoe left a crescent-shaped cut, and got blood on your heel. You had to get it off, and then you couldn’t remove the signs of having scrubbed the suede.” I stared at her.

“Jesus, I knew from the way you were always plugging for gifts that you’re money-hungry, but I never figured you for anything like this...”

My mouth was dry from talking, and still she hadn’t said another word. She had scarcely even moved. The dress was still hiked up around her hips. She shut her eyes and pressed her lips tightly together, and I could see the cords begin to stand out on her neck.

She sat like that for almost a full minute.

And then suddenly she screamed and sprang off the sofa and darted past me to the open window. I lunged after her, but I was half a second too late. I stabbed for her ankle, felt it graze my palm, and she was gone.

I took a deep breath and let it out very slowly, and then I looked down into the street.

She was there. A white blob on the pavement six stories straight down.

Cars were stopping in the street. Two of them. Men got out of them and ran toward her. A man’s voice floated up to me.

“My God!” I heard him say. “She’s still alive!”

I leaned up against the bathroom wall and was very sick. And then I threw cold water on my face and went out into the living room to wait for the police.

There was nothing I could do for Julie Cole now, absolutely nothing.

Julie lived for almost forty-eight hours. She knew she had no chance, and she told the homicide cops exactly how it was. I’d been beside her hospital bed when she did it. She’d wanted to see me, the cops had said, and after they’d taken her declaration they left me alone with her.

She looked at me and smiled and tried to say something. But she didn’t make it. She was dead before the words passed her lips.

And since then I’ve always wished there weren’t so many thousands of tiny spike-heel shoes in New York. Every single pair of them reminds me of Julie Cole.