The bills were secured by a doubled-up rubber band. I riffled them. There were thirty or forty, most of them hundreds with a sprinkling of fifties.

“Three or four thousand here,” I said.

“Three thousand. I counted.” I reached for the white envelope. “That’s the insurance.”

I opened it. The policy had been written by the Ohio Mutual Insurance Company. It had been drawn about a year and a half ago and the face amount was $50,000.

“You come into a lot of money,” I said.

“If I live to collect it.”

I opened the manila envelope. There were a dozen pictures inside, black and white glossies. The precise scenes varied in form but the game was the same in each. There were two persons in each photograph, a man and a woman. Both were nude and busy; and this photographic record of their activities would have sold well in the back room of a 42nd Street pornography shop. The prints were good and clear, the composition fine.

The girl was Jackie, and a look at her showed that the resemblance between the Baron sisters was just as striking when the girls were unclad. She was a dead ringer for her sister. A very dead ringer, now.

And the man was no stranger, either. When I had seen him he had clothes on, which constituted an improvement. He wasn’t beautiful. When I had seen him, for that matter, he had a sap in his hand and had been swinging it at my skull.

“The man,” I said, feeling my scalp. “I recognize him.”

“So do I,” Jill murmured.

EIGHT

I picked up my glass and drank the brandy. They do not stock fine cognac in the Sixth Avenue joints. But it went down anyway and the warmth spread.

“His name is Ralph,” Jill said. “That’s all I know.”

“A customer of Jackie’s?”

“Not a customer.” She lowered her eyes. “I think I told you she was seeing somebody. I couldn’t remember his name then. Seeing his picture, I remembered. His name is Ralph. I saw him with her…oh, maybe three times altogether. I never talked with him but I saw him. He came over to take her out. Where they went, I never knew.”

“When was this?”

“The first time was maybe two months ago, and then again two or three weeks after that.”

“Did she talk about him?”

“Not much. Jackie wasn’t that much of a talker.”

“What did she say?”

“That she had started seeing him. That he wasn’t a customer but a friend. The first time I got a little bitchy, I think. I don’t remember it very well. I was slightly stoned and I’m not too good at remembering things that happen when I drink.”

“Give it a try. It’s important.”

“I asked her if she was taking a pimp,” Jill said suddenly. “I remember now. And Jackie…slapped me. Not hard, but slapped me.”

“Did she say anything?”

“She said she was thinking about marrying him, but I don’t believe she really meant it.”

“Was this the first time you met him?”

“Yes.”

“Did she ever say anything about it again?”

“No. Maybe she felt I disapproved of the whole thing, I don’t know. I met him one more time, but we just said hello and passed like ships at night. She never mentioned him again, or marriage.” She paused. “He was the man in the apartment?”

I nodded.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “She might blackmail a customer. But her boyfriend—”

I thought about that and it started to make more sense than she thought it did. Jackie met Ralph, then either fell in love with him or pictured him as a good prospect for marriage and a way out of her debt-ridden state and call girl routine. She was in hock up to her eyeballs and she needed an out in the worst way—this made more sense than the love bit, which sounded out of character. So she played him hard, and she gave away something she usually sold at a good price.

And then some roof fell in on her. Maybe he had a wife somewhere. Maybe he wasn’t interested in marrying her. One way or another, she turned out to be the sucker and she had the money worries without any help from Ralph in the offing. So she decided to make him pay through the nose for the free samples. She set up a date, rigged a camera or hired a cameraman, and took a flock of pictures. Then she used them to put the squeeze on Ralph.

That was a mistake. It changed everything, turned the whole world upside down. Ralph paid her off—this