They were driving toward the address in Charlie Nichols’s book. Judy Jordan’s address. Judy Jordan who was also Helen Parrish whose dear dead daddy was Charlie Nichols. In the bar last night, Helen Parrish had told him she was thirty-two years old. Which was about right if the picture in Charlie’s study had been taken fifteen years ago and if she’d been seventeen at the time. It was very cold outside, driving alfresco this way. The dashboard clock wasn’t working, which came as no surprise in a convertible with a broken top-mechanism. Michael waited to look at his watch until they stopped for a traffic light on a corner under a street lamp. It was almost ten o’clock.
He was very eager to see Miss Helen Parrish again.
The fake Miss Parrish, who was in reality—
Well, that wasn’t necessarily true.
It was possible that Judy Jordan was now married, although in that bar last night Helen Parrish had told him she wasn’t married, wasn’t divorced, she was just single. Well, she’d told him a lot of things. But if she was married, and if Helen Parrish was indeed her real name now, which she’d have been crazy to have given him, then her maiden name could have been Judy Jordan, the girl with the long brown—
But no.
Charlie Nichols was her father.
Isn’t that what she’d written on the photo?
To My Dear Daddy.
Then why had she signed her name Judy Jordan?
“What I’d like to know,” Connie said, “is if Judy Jordan is Helen Parrish, then how come she’s not Judy Nichols if Charlie Nichols is or was her father?”
“I love you,” Michael said, and kissed her fiercely.
The Amalgamated Dwellings, Inc., were cooperative apartments at 504 Grand Street, but the entrance to the complex was around the corner on a street called Abraham Kazan, no relation. You went down a series of low brick steps and into an interior courtyard that might have been a castle keep in England, with arches and what looked like turrets and a snow-covered little park with shrubs and trees and a fountain frozen silent by the cold.
The lettered buildings—A, B, C, and so on —were clustered around this secret enclave. Judy Jordan lived in E. The name on the mailbox downstairs was J. Jordan.
“Women who do that are dumb,” Connie said.
“Using an initial instead of a name. You do that, and a rapist knows right off it’s a woman living alone. You can bet I don’t have C. Kee on my mailbox.”
“What do you have?”
“Charlie Kee.”
“That’s a very common name in this city,” Michael said. “Charlie.”
“Which is why I put it on my mailbox,” Connie said, and nodded.
“Why?”
“So a rapist would think it was a common man named Charlie Kee up there.”
“How about the postman?”
“Mr. Di Angelo? A rapist? Don’t be ridiculous!”
“I mean, how will he know where to deliver mail addressed to Connie Kee?”
“That’s his worry,” Connie said.
Michael looked at the name on the mailbox again.
J. Jordan.
“I’ll go up alone,” he said. “You go back to the car.”
“If this blonde is as beautiful as you say she is …”
“She may also be dangerous.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Connie, please go wait in the car for me, okay?”
“I’ll give you ten minutes,” she said.
“If you’re not back by then, I’m coming up after you.”
“Okay. Good.”
He kissed her swiftly.
“I still think I ought to go with you,” she said. But she was already walking out of the courtyard. Michael pressed the button for Judy Jordan’s apartment.
“Yes?” a woman’s voice said.
He could not tell whether the voice was Helen Parrish’s or not. As a matter of fact, he’d completely forgotten what Helen Parrish had sounded like.
“Miss Jordan?” he said.
“Yes?”
“Charlie Nichols sent me,” he said.
“Look,” she said, “this is an inconvenient time. I was just dressing to …”
“I’d like to talk to you, Miss Jordan, if …”
“Oh, well, all right, come on up,” she said, and buzzed him in.
He climbed to the third floor, found her apartment just to the left of the stairwell, and was about to ring the bell set in the doorjamb when he hesitated.
If Judy Jordan did, in fact, turn out to be Helen Parrish, or vice versa, then the woman inside this apartment was the person who’d set the whole scheme in motion, the MacGuffin as she might be called in an Alfred Hitchcock film. Was he going to simply knock on the door and wait for the MacGuffin to answer it, perhaps to do him more harm than she’d already done? Michael did not think that was such a good idea. He reached into the right-hand pocket of his new bomber jacket, and took out the .32 he had appropriated from Arthur Crandall. He flipped the gun butt-side up, and rapped it against the door. Twice. Rap. Rap. And listened.
“Who is it?” a woman said. Same voice that had come from the speaker downstairs.
“Me,” he said.
“Who’s me?”
“I told you. Charlie sent me.”
“If it’s about the money, I still haven’t got it,” the woman said from somewhere just inside the door now. There was a peephole set in the door at eye level. She was probably looking out at him. He still couldn’t tell whether the voice was Helen Parrish’s.