“Ed.”
I stopped.
“Ed, do you get the Times?”
“Sure, but—”
“It can explain better than I can. I’ll hold the line. Get your newspaper and read the story. Check page 34 — that’s the second page of the second section. Go on — read it. Then you’ll see what I mean.”
I was too foggy to argue with him. I managed to get out of bed, found a robe on a hook in the closet, slipped it on. I padded barefoot from the bedroom through the living room to the door, opened the door and picked up the paper. I carried it inside, shut the door and got rid of the first section on the way back to the phone. I ran my eyes over page 34 until I came to the right story. The headline said:
The article ran seven paragraphs but the kicker was right there at the top in paragraph one. They had a make on the dead blonde, all right, but that was no reason for Jack to hand himself in at headquarters.
Not at all.
Because they had identified her as Alicia Arden, twenty-five, of 87 Bank Street in Greenwich Village. The identification was a pretty simple matter, too. Somebody sent her prints to the FBI’s Washington office. Her prints were on file there — Alicia Arden had a record. She’d been arrested in Santa Monica four years back on a disorderly conduct charge, had drawn a suspended sentence and had vanished from the area — at least as far as the police records show.
The story ran downhill from there on to the finish. The possible identity of the killer was unknown. Clues were conspicuously absent. Miss Arden had no friends or relatives. Her Village apartment was one room plus a bath, and nobody in her building knew the first thing about her.
The police were pursuing all angles of the case thoroughly, according to the Times reporter. I read between the lines and saw that they were getting ready to write the murder off as unsolvable. A detective sergeant named Leon Taubler was quoted as saying that, although the girl hadn’t been sexually molested, “It looks like a sex crime.”
All the unsolved murders in Manhattan look like sex crimes. It helps the police and the tabloids at the same time. One hand washes the other.
I picked up the phone again. Jack’s voice was hoarse. “You read the story? You see what I mean?”
I answered yes to both questions.
“I can’t believe it,” he said heavily. “They must have made a mistake.”
“No mistake.”
“But—”
“Fingerprints don’t make mistakes,” I said. “And even if they did, it’s a little too much to expect both gals to be missing at the same time. There’s no mistake, Jack.”
“It doesn’t seem possible.”
“It does to me. Sheila — Alicia — was living two lives at once. I more or less figured that much last night. A girl I know recognized her picture, met her once at a party. She was using the Alicia name at the time. So the newspaper story wasn’t as much of a shock to me as it was to you.”
“Why would she give me a wrong name?”
“She went to you because she thought she was pregnant,” I improvised. “She handed you a phony name automatically. Then she stayed with it. It was easier than admitting a lie.”
There was a long pause. “What’s disorderly conduct, Ed? What does it mean?”
“All things to all people. It’s like vagrancy — a handy catch-all for the police. The New York cops use it for prostitutes. Easier to prove. God knows what it means in Santa Monica. Anything from keeping bad company to walking the streets in a tight skirt.”
“You heard me talk about her. About the type of person she was. Did she sound like that newspaper story?”
“No.”
“That just wasn’t her, Ed. Maybe I didn’t know who she was or where she came from, but I certainly knew the sort of girl she was. And, damn it, she wasn’t a tramp!”
“Not when she was with you,” I said.
“She was still the same person, wasn’t she?”
“Not necessarily.” I got a cigarette going and talked through a mouthful of smoke. “Look at it this way. She was living two lives. Part of the time she was Bank Street’s Alicia Arden and the rest of the time she was your girl Sheila. She probably had two personalities, one to go with each name. You must have represented a better way of life to her, Jack. You told me about the first time you took her to lunch, how she stood there like a kid with her nose against a candy-store window. It wasn’t the luxury that excited her. It was the respectability.”
“Is it so damned respectable to be a mistress?”
“It is if you used to be a prostitute.”
“Ed—”
“Hang on a minute. You were a cushion, Jack. A security blanket. A nice decent guy with a nice clean safe apartment in the fabulous Fifties. She was a little girl up j to her neck in trouble with a batch of very unpleasant | people. Hell, she was in over her head — that’s why she j was killed. But when she was with you she could pin her hair up and relax. She could be calm and cool and cultured. She was in a very lovely dream world and life was j good to her. Naturally she was a different person in that world. You made her that way.”
“She seemed so honest, Ed.”
“She was honest enough,” I said. “She could have lied to you, could have invented a background for herself. Instead she left the past blank. That’s honest, isn’t it?”
“I suppose you’re right. It’s... hard to accept the whole mess, Ed. I still don’t know what’s happening. You know how I felt when I saw the story this morning? First I read the headline and thought the police would be breaking down my door any minute. Then I read the first paragraph and I thought: God, the girl was somebody else and Sheila is still alive. It took me a few minutes to come to my senses again.”
I didn’t say anything. Things were starting to take form in my mind and I wanted to get rid of Jack so that I could think straight. My human equation was setting itself up.
“You mentioned something about her being in over her head, Ed. Were you kidding?”
“No,” I said.
“What’s it all about?”
“I don’t know. Did she ever mention anything to you about a briefcase?”
“A briefcase?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” he said. “Never.”
“Ever see one around the apartment?”
“No. Why?”
“Just wondered,” I said. “Look, you’re free as green stamps now. If the police have her under one name they won’t look for another. If they’ve nailed her to one address they won’t worry about a missing girl on Fifty-first Street. You can stop worrying and start living. Like the books say.”
For a moment or two he said nothing. Then: “I see. What do I do now?”
I frowned at the phone. “You pretend you’re a family man,” I said. “You take good care of your wife and your kids. You remove a lot of appendixes and split a lot of fees and have a ball.”
“Ed—”
“Give my best to my sister,” I told him. “So long.”
I hung up on him before he could thank me or tell me anymore of his problems or do whatever he was going to do. He was out of it now and I was bored with him. He had his small fling, got into a mess, and I helped him get out of it smelling of roses — which was more than he deserved. And in return for that I was getting warned, shot at and generally annoyed.
I decided to send the bastard a bill.
I went down the street for breakfast because it was too damned early to try stomaching instant coffee. I read the rest of the Times with breakfast but couldn’t keep my mind on what I was reading. I had the names of all the characters now and things were setting themselves up.