I walked home through the rain, and I couldn't see the moon to check whether it had a haze around it. When I got back to my building, the usually stolid Armand greeted me by name. He had managed to ignore me when I'd come in earlier, and when I'd left for the restaurant. He and Felix are quite a pair, one more lethargic than the other, while the third doorman, the guy who works midnight to eight, makes it a rule never to appear sober in public. Somebody ought to send the three of them up to Eighty-ninth and Riverside for six weeks of basic training.

As I crossed the lobby, a woman got up from the floral-pattern wing chair. She looked to be around twenty-eight. A mane of loose black curls fell a few inches past her shoulders. Her face was an inverted triangle, tapering past a small mouth to a sharp chin. Her mouth was glossy with scarlet lipstick, her eyes deeply shadowed, and if her lashes were natural she must have stimulated their growth with heavy doses of chemical fertilizers.

She said, "Mr. Rhodenbarr? I got to see you."

Well, that explained Armand's greeting. It was his subtle way of fingering me. I hoped he'd been richly rewarded for this service, because he'd just managed to work his way off my Christmas list.

"Well," I said.

"It's kind of important. Would it be okay if we went upstairs? Like to your place?"

She batted her improbable lashes at me. Above them, two narrow curved lines replaced the brows God had given her. If thine eyebrow offend thee, pluck it out.

She looked like a masochist's dream as interpreted by the fevered pen of an adolescent cartoonist. Spike-heeled black shoes with ankle straps. Black wet-look vinyl pants that fitted like paint. A blood-red blouse of some shiny synthetic fabric, tight and clingy enough to prevent one's forgetting even momentarily that human beings are mammals.

A rolled red-and-black umbrella. A black wet-look vinyl purse, a perfect match for the pants. Gold teardrop earrings. The emeralds we'd taken from Colcannon and sold to Abel might look splendid dangling from those little lobes, I thought, and wondered if she'd like me to go back and fetch them for her.

"My place," I said.

"Could we?"

"Why not?"

We ascended in the elevator, and in its confined space I got a full dose of her perfume. There was a lot of musk in it, and some patchouli, and the effect was at once erotic and cheap. I couldn't dismiss the notion that she wasn't really wearing perfume, that she had been born smelling like that.

The elevator reached my floor. The door opened. We walked down the narrow hallway and I imagined that all my neighbors were at their doors, eyes pressed to their peepholes, for a glimpse of what the resident burglar had brought home for the night. As we passed Mrs. Hesch's door, I fancied I could hear her going tssst-tssst in reproach.

We hadn't talked in the elevator and we didn't talk in the hallway. I felt like showing off by opening my door without a key. I restrained myself and unlocked my several locks in the conventional fashion. Inside, I bustled around switching on lamps and wishing I'd changed the sheets since Denise's visit. Not that my guest looked likely to object to rolling around in a bed where another woman had lately lain, but-

"How about a drink?" I suggested. "What can I fix you?"

"Nothing."

"Cup of coffee? Tea, either herb tea or tea tea?"

She shook her head.

"Well, have a seat. Might as well make yourself comfortable. And I don't think I know your name."

I don't think I've ever felt less suave but there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it. She was tacky and obvious and completely irresistible, and I couldn't recall ever having been so thoroughly turned on in my life. I had to fight the urge to get down on my hands and knees and chew the carpet.

She didn't sit down, nor did she tell me her name. Her face clouded for an instant, and she lowered her eyes and reached into her purse.

Her hand came out with a gun in it.

"You son of a bitch," she said. "Stay right where you are, you son of a bitch, or I'll blow your fucking head off."

I stayed right where I was, and she stayed right where she was, and the gun stayed right where it was. In her hand, wobbling a little but not a lot, and pointed straight at me.

It didn't look like a cannon. The guns that get pointed at fictional detectives always look like cannons, and the holes in their muzzles are said to resemble caverns. This gun was undeniably small, just the right size proportionally for her small hand. The latter, I noted now, was a well-shaped hand, its fingernails painted the exact shade of her blouse and her lipstick. And the gun, of course, was black, a flat black automatic pistol with no more than a two-inch barrel. Everything about this lady was red or black. Her favorite birds, I felt certain, were the red-winged blackbird and the scarlet tanager. Her favorite author would have to be Stendhal.

The phone rang. Her eyes flicked toward it, then returned to me. "I'd better answer that," I said.

"You move and I shoot."

"It might be someone important. Suppose it's Dialing for Dollars?"

Was it my imagination or had her finger tightened on the trigger? The phone went on ringing. She was done looking at it, though, and I was incapable of looking at anything but the gun.

I don't like guns. They are cunning little machines crafted exclusively for the purpose of killing people, and it is a purpose I deplore. Guns make me nervous and I do what I can to avoid them, and consequently I don't know a great deal about them. I did know that revolvers have cylinders, which makes them suitable for Russian roulette, whereas automatics, of which my guest's was an example, are generally fitted with safety catches. When engaged, such a device prevents one from depressing the trigger sufficiently to fire the gun.

I could see what might have been a safety catch toward the rear of the gun's muzzle. And I had read enough to know that persons unfamiliar with guns sometimes forget to disengage the safety catch. If I could tell whether the safety was on or off, then perhaps-

"It's loaded," she said. "In case that's what you're wondering."

"I wasn't."

"You're wondering something," she said. Then she said, "Oh," and flicked the safety catch with her thumb. "There. Now don't you try anything, you understand?"

"Sure. If you could just point that thing somewhere else-"

"I don't want to shoot somewhere else. I want to be able to shoot you."

"I wish you wouldn't say that." The phone had stopped ringing. "I don't even know you. I don't even know your name."

"What difference does it make?"

"I just-"

"It's Marilyn."

"That's a step." I tried my winningest smile. "I'm Bernie."

"I know who you are. You still don't know who I am, do you?"

"You're Marilyn."

"I'm Marilyn Margate."

"Not the actress?"

"What actress?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. The way you said your name I thought you expected me to recognize it. I don't. Do you suppose it's possible you've got the wrong Bernard Rhodenbarr? I know it's not a very common name but there might be more than one of us. My name is Bernard Grimes Rhodenbarr, Grimes was my mother's maiden name, like Bouvier or Flanders, so-"

"You son of a bitch."

"Did I say something wrong?"

"You bastard. Bouvier. Flanders. You killed Wanda." This time it wasn't my imagination; her finger definitely tightened on the trigger. And the thing was finally beginning to look like a cannon, and its mouth like the black hole of Calcutta.

"Look," I said, "you're making a terrible mistake. I've never killed anybody in my life. It bothers me to step on a cockroach. I'm the guy who taught Gandhi how to be nonviolent. Compared to me, Albert Schweitzer was a mad-dog killer. I-"