I didn’t want to leave her on the bench. There is something ineffably discordant about a lone corpse left to cool and stiffen on a park bench. But I turned and walked back around the edge of the pond and down the path. I stopped once to look back at her. She did not look dead from a distance. She looked like a young girl sitting quietly, waiting to meet a suitor.
I walked to Fifth Avenue, down to 86th Street, east toward home. There was a bar on Madison. I stopped there to use the phone booth. I dialed Centre Street Police Headquarters.
“There’s a body in Central Park, a dead girl,” I said, and quickly gave him the location. He kept trying to interrupt, to get my name, to find out more. But I had said everything I wanted to say.
The day had started off with an unreal quality to it. Private detectives do not get mysterious phone calls from anonymous people. They do not keep unexplained rendezvous with nameless voices in secluded parts of Central Park. It had all seemed a game staged by some more or less harmless lunatic, and I had gone through the paces like a dutiful clown.
The corpse changed all of that. The girl, so neatly shot, posed so unobtrusively on the park bench, was a jarring coda to the symphony of annoyance that began with a phone call’s interruption of romance. I had made my call to the police without giving my name and, consequently, was not involved. I had gone through the motions and had stumbled on the death of a prospective client who had not lived long enough to pay me a retainer. I had gone to her aid without believing she really existed, and when I had found her she was dead, and I never had the chance to become involved.
But I still felt involved.
At 5:30 I was still nursing my drink. Time dragged. Outside, the street was still bright. Then a buzzer sounded: someone was downstairs in my vestibule. I got up slowly, drink in hand, and pressed the answering buzzer that would open the downstairs door. I waited and listened to footsteps on the staircase. The footsteps halted in front of my door. There was a knock.
I finished the cognac and went to the door. I turned the knob and flung open the door—to look into the face of the girl I had found dead in Central Park. I saw the blue eyes, the blond hair, the button nose. I saw everything but the little hole in the middle of the forehead.
“You’re Ed London,” she said.
“You’re not you!” I exclaimed stupidly as she stepped inside my apartment.
“I don’t understand.”
I took a deep breath and stammered, “B-but I just saw you, in Central Park, where I was supposed to meet you. Only somebody else met you first and you were dead. Shot between the eyes.”
It sounded idiotic now—her standing beside me, a living, breathing doll. But she made her way through the maze of my meaningless words and something soaked in. Her mouth fell open and she gasped like a fish on a line. Her eyes bugged. She said, “Oh no! Good God,” and gave a shrill little scream and fell into my arms and cried her eyes out…
THREE
I held the girl until she got a half-nelson on herself, then eased her into one of the twin leather chairs that give my living room the air of a British men’s club. She stayed in the chair and finished her crying while I poured cognac into a glass for her.
I made her drink the cognac.
After a long time she said, “I can’t believe it, Mr. London. I can’t believe Jackie’s dead.”
“Jackie?”
“Jacqueline Baron,” she said. “She was my sister.” She broke down again, suddenly regained her composure. “Not my twin sister. She was a year older. But we looked enough alike to pass for twins. My parents named her Jackie and me Jill. Jackie and Jill. Like the nursery rhyme. They thought it was cute.”
“Who called me? You or Jackie?”
“She did.”
“Because she was afraid?”
“Because we were both afraid,” Jill said. She held the glass of cognac in her hand, stared at it a moment, then drained it. “This is very good,” she said. “What is it?”
“Cognac.”
“Oh. It tastes good, makes me feel warm. But I still feel cold inside. Somebody killed Jackie and now they’re going to kill me. Oh, God, I’m scared.”
She started to cry again.
After a while she calmed down again. I asked if she knew who had been trying to kill Jackie and her. She said she didn’t know. I asked why anyone would want them dead. She didn’t know that either.
“We’d better take this from the top,” I said. “When did it all start?”
“Three days ago, I think.”
“What happened?”
“There was a phone call. Jackie answered. We share an apartment—shared an apartment,” she added morosely. “Jackie answered it. She listened for a minute, looked frightened, and slammed the phone down.”
“Who was it?”
“She wouldn’t say. Wouldn’t tell me anything about it. Then, the next day, someone in a truck tried to run us both down. It was so frightening. We were crossing the street and a truck came speeding at us from out of nowhere. He missed us by inches. Luckily, we got across in time.”
“Did you get a look at the truck?”
She shook her head. “No, I was too frightened. And I thought—then—it was just accidental. But Jackie was worried. I could tell something was wrong. When I prodded her, she told me about the phone call. Someone was going to kill us both.”
“Did she say why?”
“She didn’t know.”
“No idea?”
“Nothing she told me about…But there’s more. Yesterday, someone tried to kill me. Right on Park Avenue. A car whizzed by and somebody shot at me. Whoever it was missed. I was petrified.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“It’s…We couldn’t.”
“And this morning Jackie called me. She wouldn’t call the police either, but she called me. That doesn’t make much sense.”
She didn’t answer.
“Look at me,” I said. “This is no game. Somebody shot your sister. Killed her in cold blood. Right now the police are picking her body up from Central Park and trying to figure out who the hell she is. You can’t afford to sit around deciding how much you can tell me and how much you can keep to yourself. You either open up or I’ll pick up the phone and call the police and you can tell it to them. Which is probably a fairly good idea at this stage.”
“No, don’t.”
“Then you’d better start talking.”
“Yes,” she said. “I guess you’re right.”
She started talking. Jill and Jacqueline Baron lived together in an expensive apartment on East 58th Street off Park. They were self-employed. They earned a good living.
They were call girls.
“We were going to be models,” she said. “You know, everybody starts out to be a model. Only we never did make it.
“But we did all right,” Jill said. Her eyes turned hard, bitter. “We had all the qualifications for our chosen work…I’m not bad to look at, am I?”
She was wearing a green sheath dress that hid her figure as effectively as Saran wrap. She had long legs, and they were crossed at the knee now so that I could see their shape, which was fine. Her breasts pushed out at me in a way that would keep her out of bounds for the fashion photographers but undeniably in bounds for any red-blooded man between the ages of eighteen and eighty. And she was beautiful to boot.
“Pretty,” she said. She rolled the word on her tongue and her eyes clouded. “Our looks were our downfall. It’s an easy life for a lazy girl, with looks and a figure, Ed. It doesn’t take any talent at all. The men come and they tell their friends about you and pretty soon you have a date every night, and every date is at least a fifty-dollar bill and maybe a hundred, and no income tax out of that, either…Would you pay me fifty, Ed?”
She laughed softly. She was playing Little Miss Desirable now, running her tongue over her lower lip, pouting a little, arranging herself in the chair to make herself appear the personification of commercial lust. The act drained away her sorrow, and her fear. She got caught up in it and part of the reality of Jackie’s death left her for the moment.
“It was handy,” she said. “Jackie and I had good times together. We were closer than sisters, Ed. You…well, you say how much we looked alike. We’ve always been able to pass for twins. That was an asset in business, you know.”
“Why?”
“Because we could cover each other’s dates.” She smiled, remembering. “If Jackie had two dates at the same time and I was free, I would take one of them and pretend I was Jackie. The tricks never knew the difference. They couldn’t even tell us apart in bed.”
“Handy.”
“Uh-huh. Sometimes we would take a trick together. You know, a man would want to go to bed with both of us at once. A real sister act.” She closed her blue eyes. “Men get their kicks in funny ways. Some need two girls in order to get their jollies. Men are all sick, Ed.”
“You get a distorted picture.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. You just meet the men who pay you. The straight ones, the sane ones, they’re home with their wives in front of a television set with a can of beer close by. But you don’t get to see that kind.”
Her eyebrows went up a notch. “And you? Have you got a wife, Ed London?”
“I don’t even have a television set. But let’s forget my sex life for the time being.
“Let’s take it from the top,” I said. “You’re both call girls and you live together. That is, lived together. Someone is trying to kill you and you don’t know who or why. Any ideas at all?”
“None.”
“Were you blackmailing anyone?”
“No.”
“Was Jackie?”
“If she was, she didn’t tell me about it.”
“Okay. How about men? Any boyfriends?”
“The only men in my life are customers, Ed.”
It was a sort of hopeless line of questioning. All she knew was that her sister had been shot and she was next in line.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” I asked Jill Baron.
“You should know that by now. Call girls don’t look for help from the law. The police leave you alone if you live a quiet life and stay out of trouble, but if you draw them a map of who you are and where you live and how you earn your living, you might as well hang out a sign. The crooked cops come with their hands out and the honest ones haul you off to jail.”
She worked on her coffee. “Jackie didn’t even want to call in a private detective. She said you couldn’t trust them. But your name had been mentioned somewhere, and I heard you were honest. So I insisted we call you.”
“Well, now’s a good time to go to the police, Jill. Whoever is after you is playing for keeps.”
She shook her head. “But they’ll just ask me questions,” she said. “Questions, questions, questions, and I don’t know any of the answers that count. So what good will it do me?”
