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.”