“This way for the Streets of Cairo!” a barker shouted as they passed a booth where several buxom girls dressed in shimmering veils and little else were gyrating suggestively. “One hundred and fifty Oriental beauties! The warmest spectacle on earth! See her dance the Hootchy-Kootchy! Anywhere else but in the ocean breezes of Coney Island she would be consumed by her own fire! Don’t rush! Don’t crowd! Plenty of seats for all!”

“I’ll wait if you want to go inside and see the show,” Mrs. Brandt offered with a sly grin.

“Oh, it’s perfectly respectable,” a man standing behind them said. “Don’t have to worry about taking the missus inside.”

Frank looked at him in amazement. In Frank’s experience, total strangers didn’t offer their opinions on such matters. In fact, total strangers didn’t speak to one another at all except perhaps to say excuse me.

He was a short, round man in a suit that had been bought when he weighed twenty pounds less. With him was a woman of equal girth, and both of them were smiling at Frank and his companion as if they were old friends.

“Sam’s right,” the woman offered. “You won’t be offended at all. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was how those girls could be so limber!”

Frank knew Mrs. Brandt must be offended at being addressed so familiarly by people she didn’t know, so he took her arm and steered her away. “He must be drunk.” he said by way of explanation when they were out of earshot.

She nodded, still looking as puzzled as Frank felt.

In the crowd, they came face-to-face with another couple, a tall lanky young man with a scraggly mustache and a girl with buckteeth who was holding a stuffed bear. “Hey, old man, you should try your hand over there. Ring the bell and win a prize for your wife. Big fellow like you shouldn’t have any trouble at all!”

Frank nodded as politely as he could and guided Mrs. Brandt around them. They passed an attraction at which a man was using a large hammer to strike the base of a tall tower in an attempt to drive a ball up and ring the bell on the top. The sign called it the HI-STRIKER MACHINE.

“People here are certainly friendly,” Mrs. Brandt observed.

“Or rude,” Frank offered.

Frank lived in two very different worlds in his life, and the rules for each of those worlds were strictly prescribed. Prostitutes spoke to strangers and strangers spoke to them-and did a lot more besides-without the formality of an introduction, but a respectable man didn’t so much as tip his hat at a respectable female unless they were acquainted.

Here, however, those rules seemed to have been forgotten. Since no one could possibly mistake Mrs. Brandt for a prostitute, there could be no other explanation. As Frank looked around, he quickly realized that everywhere strangers were meeting and conversing like old friends, then going on their way, never to meet again.

“I can see why young people like this place so much,” Mrs. Brandt observed. “No one seems to observe any of the rules of propriety. Strangers become friends in a moment, and there’s no chaperon looking over your shoulder to disapprove.”

“Why would you want to take up with a stranger?”

“To have some fun. The young men here are different and interesting, and they have money to spend. The girls’ lives would be horribly dull without a diversion like this.”

Frank was still of the opinion that the girls would be far better off with dull lives than with exciting deaths, but he didn’t bother to mention that to Mrs. Brandt. She probably agreed anyway.

“Oh, look, the carousel. Let’s ride it!” she said.

Frank would have protested, but she looked so excited, he didn’t have the heart to refuse her. Feeling like a consummate fool, he helped her up onto the platform and lifted her onto one of the gaily painted horses. She was a well-made woman, soft and round in all the right places, and Frank found himself oddly breathless after he’d settled her on her horse. Probably from the exertion, he told himself. She wasn’t exactly skinny.

“Oh, Malloy, at least try to have fun, won’t you?” she chided him.

He climbed up onto the horse beside her before anyone else could claim it and tried not to look unhappy. It was the best he could do.

The music was too loud, and Frank wasn’t fond of going around and around in a circle, but at least Mrs. Brandt didn’t encourage him to exert himself to catch the brass ring. That honor went to a young man in a derby hat whose accomplishment earned him the adoration of his female companion, a girl with a grating laugh who found everything hilarious.

When the ride stopped, Mrs. Brandt slid down from her horse herself without waiting for help, which suited Frank just fine. He had already decided he shouldn’t touch her again. He’d been alone for far too long, and he obviously couldn’t be trusted.

“Did riding the carousel help you figure out who killed Gerda Reinhard?” he couldn’t resist asking as they walked away.

“I didn’t expect to find the killer today,” she told him, not the least bit repentant. “But we need to understand what Gerda’s life was like those last days. That will help us figure out who might have killed her. Once we can narrow down the list of suspects, we’ll have a better chance of finding the killer.”

That was so reasonable, he almost said so. Fortunately, good sense prevailed. He couldn’t start complimenting Sarah Brandt. She was already way too confident as it was. Instead he said, “What do you mean by ‘we’? Has your friend Teddy appointed you to the police force?”

She didn’t like being reminded that Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt was a family friend. Or maybe she just didn’t like being reminded that women couldn’t be police officers. “No,” she admitted, “but maybe I could ask him to order Detective Sergeant Broughan to continue the investigation into Gerda’s death.”

“That’s not likely to help. All of Broughan’s attention would practically guarantee the killer is never found. You’re better off letting him ignore it and working on it yourself.

She widened her eyes at him in surprise, and he had to admit he’d surprised himself. What was he thinking to advise her to solve the case herself? On the other hand, she was going to try to do it anyway. He felt an obligation at least to prepare her, however.

“Look, Mrs. Brandt, solving a murder isn’t always as easy as it was with the VanDamm girl,” he said, referring to the case they’d worked on together last spring.

Now she just looked shocked. “You think solving that case was easy?”

“It got solved, didn’t it? A lot of them don’t. Oh, sometimes we know who the killer is five minutes after we find the body. Those are the easy ones. The killer’s standing over the body with a bloody knife still in his hand, all eager to tell you how he didn’t mean to do it. But the ones like this girl-”

“And the other girls,” she interjected.

“And the other girls,” he allowed grudgingly, “the killer’s been real careful to cover his tracks. Maybe he never even met the girls before that night. These girls go with strangers all the time, and even if they did know the man before, he’s only one of dozens they knew. The girls are no better than they should be, and if we arrested all the men who take advantage of girls like that and might be the killer, we’d have half the men in the city locked up.”

She didn’t look impressed. In fact, she’d set her chin at an angle he didn’t like at all. “I told you, Malloy, we can find out which men all the dead girls knew in common. That’s got to narrow down the suspects considerably.”

“If they even knew the men’s right names-or any name, for that matter.”

“The girls weren’t prostitutes, Malloy. They wouldn’t go with a complete stranger, no matter what you think. They have to pretend there’s a little romance involved and that the gifts are tokens of esteem, not payment for services rendered. They knew their killer, and he’d been wooing them for a while before they agreed to go with him that last time. I don’t think for a moment that it will be easy to find him, but I think it’s possible. Your friend Broughan might believe it’s too much trouble, but I’m willing to give some effort to the cause.”