I gave her my best rueful smile.

“You mean you don’t want it?”

“Maybe later, huh? As soon as we find Audrey.”

She was pouting. “Just don’t understand. Don’t understand ‘tall. Not drunk. Won’t accept generous’st offer I can make. What do you do for kicks, anyway?”

In her soused way she was seriously troubled. I had to grin at her.

It took a minute. Then her eyes lit up. She giggled absurdly.

“Well, crying out loud, why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

I grinned some more. “We can go now, can’t we?”

“Crying out loud. Never thought of it. How do you like that?” She pursed her lips. Then she nodded decisively. “Well, by golly, nobody’s going to say Dana ‘Dea’s no sport. No, sir, nobody’s going to say that. You just don’t go ‘way and I’ll—”

This time she was a step ahead of me. She lurched downward, pawing at the hem of her skirt, and came up with two handfuls of it. There was no slip under there to hamper the friendly little impulse. She laughed in delight, crossing her arms as she straightened, and then yanked upward. Her head disappeared in a twisted red tangle.

She got stuck, squirming like something trying to work its way out of a cocoon, and her voice came merrily out of the depths. “Well, where’d you go? Crying out loud, have to give a poor girl some help—”

She needed as much help as Lady Chatterley. She was stumbling toward the cot, bent from the hips. I was probably going to regret it on cold winter nights in the future. I knew I was. The girl had a pair of thighs that could have sent the Crusades wandering off down the wrong roadway. I gave her a swift whack where her bright orange girdle was stretched most memorably and sent her sprawling.

She let out a startled little cry, skidding across the mattress with her arms flung outward and her calves flailing. I headed for the door.

I stopped again. I wasn’t sure why, except that the incident should have merited some inane comment or other, and she hadn’t made any. She had scampered to her knees and was staring into the gap between the cot and the wall. The dress had unfurled a bit, but she was still going to catch half a cold. She turned toward me, grinning stupidly.

“Told you,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t believe me. Said I’d find old Audrey.”

I had taken out a cigarette. Dana frowned then, but not because I dropped it.

“Don’t understand. Lots of swell beds around. Why would she sleep on the floor?” She shook her head. “And how do you suppose she went and got all bloody that way?” she said.

She was down there, all right. Her skin was warm and pliant, but there was no trace of a pulse.

I hadn’t expected one. The knife was still sticking out of her breast, like a pencil out of a sharpener.

I turned fast because of Dana. She was on her feet, beginning to get it. She was standing lopsidedly, missing a shoe. A minute earlier it would have made her fall on her face.

“Is she — is she—?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes widened. Her mouth opened again but this time it made only some small gurgling sounds, like a clogged toilet. She spun, breaking for the door.

The dress was still knotted around her hips. I caught a fistful of it. Something tore when I jerked her back.

“Kiss me!” I told her.

She looked at me as if I were mad. I was mad as a loon, but I knew enough to keep her away from that mob out front. She was still gaping when I brought up a short right and tagged her on the point of her gorgeous chin.

I got an arm around her before she could fall. It was like carrying a Volkswagen, but I got her onto the mattress.

It left me light-headed. It also left me with a corpse on the floor and an unconscious girl on the bed. I had a remote idea that the situation called for some firm, decisive action.

So I raised Dana’s hips and pulled her dress down.

Middle-class morality is primeval. There was a key in the door and I got myself over there to turn it. I came back and eased the cot farther from the wall. The body rolled onto its spine.

Audrey Grant. She had on that T-shirt that had made Hen-shaw rhapsodic. The blade had slashed through it just below the heart. A thin red stream had traced itself onto the waist of her green skirt, but it had not been a prolonged bleeding. It could not have taken her much more than six or eight seconds longer to die than it had taken Josie Welch.

I had told Ulysses Grant there did not have to be any connection between the two girls. Astute, discerning Fannin. I probably would have told Alexander Graham Bell he’d never make a connection either.

Audrey Grant. Why? I didn’t know why. It was 11:18. Less than six hours ago Grant had been in my office. That was why.

Now what the hell did that mean, exactly? Nothing, nothing at all. Fannin was just raving, in lieu of thought. Worry about it tomorrow, Scarlett, when your brains stop palpitating.

She had been a pretty girl. She had been tall, but a daughter of Grant’s would have to be. She was leggy, and she had almost too much bosom for her slight shoulders and long neck. There was a tiny gold chain around the neck, twisted now so that the locket lay on the outside of the shirt. I didn’t open it. There would be a picture of Philo Vance inside, sticking his tongue out at me. I kept staring at the knife instead.

That did it. I had simply not been conditioned to come suddenly upon the violently dead. Even when my hand lifted to my pocket it didn’t register immediately. The knife was an exact duplicate of the one I’d taken from Ephraim.

I didn’t have any knife in my pocket.

So I’d lost it when I’d been hit. Any one of fifty people could have picked it up.

There was a deduction for you.

Td talked to Henshaw right after the brawl. No, first to McGruder. Henshaw had said Ivan Klobb was back in the corridor. Had Fern still been with him? Where had Ephraim and Peters gone?

The next question has several parts, Mr. Fannin. Name all the National League batting champions from 1900 to the present, in chronological order, with their averages. You have thirty seconds in the isolation booth.

Zen Boothism. I went to the telephone. There was a book lying under it. The Subterraneans, by Jack Kerouac. I got Central, then the desk at the local precinct. The man said DiMaggio was out. He said Toomey was out also. “You 11 have to do,” I told him.

“Sure, and for what? Just who might this be?”

“My name is Kerouac. Max Kerouac. Take this down.” I gave him McGruder’s address. “It’s a basement, entrance in the rear through an alley. Drinking going on. There’ll be a key under the plank steps where you come in. The key is for the second bedroom door in the right-hand corridor. You got that?”

“That I have, but just what is it we’re to do with it, Mr. Carraway? What is it we’re to find in this locked room?”

“Well, the body. You want me to drag it out front and spoil the party?”

I hung it up. I dug out a pencil and a spiral notebook, tore off a sheet, wrote: Sgt. DiMaggio knows me. Girl knocked out so would not scream. Will call here. I signed the right name this time, then propped the note on an uncovered pillow next to Dana’s head.

There was a small slash pocket on Dana’s left hip. There was a folded five-dollar bill in the pocket, and there were two keys on a rubber band. I left the money.

She didn’t move when I touched her. Young Molly Bloom. She was boozed up enough so that she would be snoring contentedly when the cops arrived. I resisted a moronic impulse to kiss her on one of those creamy shoulders. I decided I was still goofy.

There was no one in the corridor. I was locking the door again when I realized that there was no sound either, not from anywhere in the apartment. No talk, no music. That stopped me cold. One sporty suggestion from the right nitwit and the whole pack of them could have been in a caravan of stolen cars on their way to Denver.