to know?”

“Who was she sleeping with besides Donahue?”

“She didn’t say and I didn’t ask. And she never kept a diary.”

“She ever have men up here?”

“No.”

“She talk much about Donahue?”

“No.” She leaned over, stubbed out a cigarette. Her breasts loomed before my face like fruit. But it wasn’t purposeful sexiness. She didn’t play that way.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “I don’t feel like talking anymore.”

“If you could just—”

“I couldn’t just.” She looked away. “In fifteen minutes I have to be uptown on the West Side. A guy there wants to take some pictures of me naked. He pays for my time, Mr. London. I’m a working girl.”

“Are you working tonight?”

“Huh?”

“I asked if—”

“I heard you. What’s the pitch?”

“I’d like to take you out to dinner.”

“Why?”

“I’d like to talk to you.”

“I’m not going to tell you anything I don’t feel like telling you, London.”

“I know that, Miss Gorski.”

“And a dinner doesn’t buy my company in bed, either. In case that’s the idea.”

“It isn’t. I’m not all that hard up, Miss Gorski.”

She was suddenly smiling. The smile softened her face all over and cut her age a good three years. Before she had been attractive. Now she was genuinely pretty.

“You give as good as you take.”

“I try to.”

“Is eight o’clock too late? I just got done with lunch a little while ago.”

“Eight’s fine,” I said. “I’ll see you.”

I left. I walked the half block to my car and sat behind the wheel for a few seconds and thought about the two girls I had met that day. Both blondes, one born that way, one self-made. One of them had poise, breeding, and money, good diction and flawless bearing—and she added up to a tramp. The other was a tramp, in an amateurish sort of a way, and she talked tough and dropped an occasional final consonant. Yet she was the one who managed to retain a certain degree of dignity. Of the two, Ceil Gorski was more the lady.

At 3:30 I was up in Westchester County. The sky was bluer, the air fresher, and the houses more costly. I pulled up in front of a $35,000 split-level, walked up a flagstone path, and leaned on a doorbell.

The little boy who answered it had red hair, freckles, and a chipped tooth. He was too cute to be snotty, but this didn’t stop him.

He asked me who I was. I told him to get his father. He asked me why. I told him that if he didn’t get his father I would twist his arm off. He wasn’t sure whether or not to believe me, but I was obviously the first person who had ever talked to him this way. He took off in a hurry and a few seconds later Phil Abeles came to the door.

“Oh, London,” he said. “Hello. Say, what did you tell the kid?”

“Nothing.”

“Your face must have scared him.” Abeles’s eyes darted around. “You want to talk about what happened last night, I suppose.”

“That’s right.”

“I’d just as soon talk somewhere else,” he said. “Wait a minute, will you?”

I waited while he went to tell his wife that somebody from the office had driven up, that it was important, and that he’d be back in an hour. He came out and we went to my car.

“There’s a quiet bar two blocks down and three over,” he said, then added: “Let me check something. The way I’ve got it, you’re a private detective working for Mark. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’d like to help the guy out. I don’t know very much, but there are things I can talk about to you that I’d just as soon not tell the police. Nothing illegal. Just…Well, you can figure it out.”

I could figure it out. That was the main reason why I had agreed to stay on the case for Donahue. People do not like to talk to the police if they can avoid it.

If Phil Abeles was going to talk at all about Karen Price, he would prefer me as a listening post to Lieutenant Jerry Gunther.

“Here’s the place,” he said. I pulled up next to the chosen bar, a log-cabin arrangement.

Abeles had J&B with water and I ordered a pony of Courvoisier.

“I told that homicide lieutenant I didn’t know anything about the Price girl,” he said. “That wasn’t true.”

“Go on.”

He hesitated, but just a moment. “I didn’t know she had anything going with Donahue,” he said. “Nobody ever thought of Karen in one-man terms. She slept around.”

“I gathered that.”

“It’s