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.”