Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

Her doorman rang upstairs to announce me, and she met me at the door with a drink. I don’t remember what she was wearing, but I’m sure she looked good in it. She always did.

She said, “I would never call you at home. But it’s business.”

“Yours or mine?”

“Maybe both. I got a call from a client. A Madison Avenue guy, maybe an agency vice president. Suits from Tripler’s, season tickets for the Rangers, house in Connecticut.”

“And?”

“And didn’t I say something about knowing a cop? Because he and some friends were having a friendly card game and something happened to one of them.”

“Something happened? Something happens to a friend of yours, you take him to a hospital. Or was it too late for that?”

“He didn’t say, but that’s what I heard. It sounds to me as though somebody had an accident and they need somebody to make it disappear.”

“And you thought of me.”

“Well,” she said.

She’d thought of me before, in a similar connection. Another client of hers, a Wall Street warrior, had had a heart attack in her bed one afternoon. Most men will tell you that’s how they want to go, and perhaps it’s as good a way as any, but it’s not all that convenient for the people who have to clean up after them, especially when the bed in question belongs to some working girl.

When the equivalent happens in the heroin trade, it’s good PR. One junkie checks out with an overdose and the first thing all his buddies want to know is where did he get the stuff and how can they cop some themselves. Because, hey, it must be good, right? A hooker, on the other hand, has less to gain from being listed as cause of death. And I suppose she felt a professional responsibility, if you want to call it that, to spare the guy and his family embarrassment. So I made him disappear, and left him fully dressed in an alley down in the financial district. I called it in anonymously and went back to her apartment to claim my reward.

“I’ve got the address,” she said now. “Do you want to have a look? Or should I tell them I couldn’t reach you?”

I kissed her, and we clung to each other for a long moment. When I came up for air I said, “It’d be a lie.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Telling them you couldn’t reach me. You can always reach me.”

“You’re a sweetie.”

“You better give me that address,” I said.

I retrieved my car from the bus stop and left it in another one a dozen or so blocks uptown. The address I was looking for was a brownstone in the East Sixties. A shop with handbags and briefcases in the window occupied the storefront, flanked by a travel agent and a men’s clothier. There were four doorbells in the vestibule, and I rang the third one and heard the intercom activated, but didn’t hear anyone say anything. I was reaching to ring a second time when the buzzer sounded. I pushed the door open and walked up three flights of carpeted stairs.

Out of habit, I stood to the side when I knocked. I didn’t really expect a bullet, and what came through the door was a voice, pitched low, asking who was there.

“Police,” I said. “I understand you’ve got a situation here.”

There was a pause. Then a voice — maybe the same one, maybe not — said, “I don’t understand. Has there been a complaint, officer?”

They wanted a cop, but not just any cop. “My name’s Scudder,” I said. “Elaine Mardell said you could use some help.”

The lock turned and the door opened. Two men were standing there, dressed for the office in dark suits and white shirts and ties. I looked past them and saw two more men, one in a suit, the other in gray slacks and a blue blazer. They looked to be in their early to mid forties, which made them ten to fifteen years older than me.

I was what, thirty-two that year? Something like that.

“Come on in,” one of them said. “Careful.”

I didn’t know what I was supposed to be careful of, but found out when I gave the door a shove and it stopped after a few inches. There was a body on the floor, a man, curled on his side. One arm was flung up over his head, the other bent at his side, the hand inches from the handle of the knife. It was an easy-open stiletto and it was binned hilt-deep in his chest.

I pushed the door shut and knelt down for a close look at him, and heard the bolt turn as one of them locked the door.

The dead man was around their age, and had been similarly dressed until he took off his suit jacket and loosened his tie. His hair was a little longer than theirs, perhaps because he was losing hair on the crown and wanted to conceal the bald spot. Everyone tries that, and it never works.

I didn’t feel for a pulse. A touch of his forehead established that he was too cold to have one. And I hadn’t really needed to touch him to know that he was dead. Hell, I knew that much before I parked the car.

Still, I took some time looking him over. Without looking up, I asked what had happened. There was a pause while they decided who would reply, and then the same man who’d questioned me through the closed door said, “We don’t really know.”

“You came home and found him here?”