When she finally swerved over to the curb it was in front of a tree-sheltered riverside apartment building where the rents would be as high as any you could pay in New York, or in the world. She left the motor running for a dignified, elderly doorman who wished her good evening by name. I followed her under a canopy and through a richly mirrored lobby, then waited while she pressed for an elevator. The elevator made as much noise coming down as a wounded moth. Its operator was as old and courtly as the doorman. They were both retired bank presidents, supplementing their pensions. He took us up three flights, and then we stepped into a private foyer instead of a corridor.

That meant the Constantines had at least half a floor. Mrs. Constantine discarded her coat across the carved mahogany arm of a towering antique chair, then led me stiff-lipped through an ornate archway into a living room.

King Farouk would have a bigger one. It ran about seventy feet back to where you would see the water, and that whole wall was glass, partly obscured by ungathered drapes. There were tall ferns, and there was a lot of whatever kind of furniture it was. Only one small lamp was burning, and everything was luxurious and dark and furry, like vespers at a mink farm. She stopped in the middle of it all.

Her eyes were still giving off sparks, but I didn’t grin. Maybe it was the sight of all that indulgence, but she wasn’t funny anymore.

“My husband has a slight cold. If you’ll wait, it will be a minute.”

I nodded, watching that orange mane disappear through another arch. I supposed hubby would have a study in there. Sure. He’d be camped in a contour chair in front of a twenty-inch screen, with a nasal spray in one hand and a notebook fall of Johns in the other. I went across to the windows. Dutiful Margaret would stroke his hot little forehead before she told him about the nasty mans out front. Poor darling, has it been a trying evening with the runny nose? Would baby like a hot toddy before he works out the girls’ schedules for tomorrow night? I looked down at the black sweeping river, but it only made me choleric to think of the sort of people who could afford to run it through their back yards.

So all of a sudden I was getting righteous. I was a Puritan. So the lady was wrong, I didn’t do divorce cases. So what? What business was it of mine where the Constantines got the dough to pay the ice man?

Anyhow, I already knew how Mrs. Constantine paid the ice man. There was a bar in a corner to my left, with a single bottle of Chivas Regal on its mosaic top, and I started over that way.

I hadn’t gotten across when he came striding into the room behind me. He was bellowing.

“Harry Fannin! Harry! Why, you old son of a gun, no wonder I never made the connection. The goddam papers said Henry—”

I must have stared at him witlessly for the first second or two. He was my height, but he would have weighed in at close to sixty pounds more than I did. That meant he had put on at least thirty in the dozen years since I had seen him. Oliver Constantine, left tackle.

“Harry, you old renegade! Why, if fid known you were in New York I would have looked you up years ago!” He was pumping my right hand with his own, which was the size of a catcher’s mitt, and his left was crushing my shoulder. “The best damned halfback in that whole crop of sophomores. Why, by George, I remember one time in scrimmage you ran right over me. Took me out so hard I almost didn’t start the Illinois game. Well, I’ll be damned—”

I got rid of the hands, shaking my head. We weren’t quite long lost brothers, since I’d never really said more than two hundred words to the man. “I never thought of it either,” I told him. “You made second-string All-Conference that year.”

“Ah!” He waved it aside. “Should have made first. I mopped up the field with that big Swede from Minnesota they picked.” He lumbered around the bar. He had a face like a chunk of scarred sandstone under a quarter-inch blond crew cut, and he was wearing a dark blue dressing gown with an ascot. “Boy, those were the days, weren’t they, fellow? What’s your poison, Harry?”

I gestured toward the Scotch, watching him dully. He came up with an ice bucket and two old-fashioned glasses, and he poured two drinks. “Yes, sir, best sophomore on the club. Drink up, Harry. To old Michigan—” He tossed off the whisky, grinning at me. “Old Fannin himself, the boy who was going to make them forget Tom Harmon until that knee went sour. Well, hey, hey, you’re not drinking—”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek, nodding. He had been a harmless buffoon at college, but I had had to respect him as an athlete. I remembered a game in which he had played almost sixty full minutes when he was injured badly enough to have been in the infirmary. I was also remembering that Josie Welch had been nineteen years old.

Cotton Mather Fannin. “Ill drink to Michigan,” I said.

“Well, for crying out loud—” He had been looking at me in amazement. “Why, you old son of a gun, you don’t like my business. You really don’t! A private cop. A divorce-case peeper and he’s got a moral streak—”

I shrugged. “I never had to pay for a woman.”

“Ha! Now you’re talking. Listen, fellow, listen — there’s half a million paunchy old men in this town, fat slobs who never got a cheek pinched in their lives except by their fat wives. They dial the right number, all of a sudden they’re free-wheeling downhill on a bright red scooter. Well, they’re going to buy the scooter whether I supply it or somebody else does. I like it better when the scratch turns up in my pocket.” He poured himself another drink, motioning me to the bottle. “Ha! Or am I talking too much, being too defensive? What the hell, Harry, what the hell — to Tom Harmon, eh, boy? Drink up. To old Ninety-Eight!”

I drank to Harmon, then shook loose a cigarette. “I’d like to bat the breeze, Connie—”

“Yeah, yeah, sure. Brother, this mess. That Josie was a nice kid. But listen, listen, Margaret says you came sprinting into Audrey’s place like you were trying to get back into shape—”

“The Grant girl’s dead also.”

“Huh?”

I told him about it briefly. It was obviously news, and I decided it was a fair exchange for anything he could give me in turn. When I finished he blew his nose in a yellow silk handkerchief, turning away. I had not expected that, but I couldn’t think of any valid reason why I shouldn’t have. “You haven’t got any idea what gives?” he asked me.

“There be any chance one of your customers got mixed up with the pair of them?”

“Nah, never happen. Hell, the girls know better than to give out their home addresses.”

He threw down what was left of his second Scotch, then wiped his mouth with the back of one of those meaty hands. “Boy, this can fix me, but good. Even without a tie-in, all I need is one wrong cop getting wind of it being two of my stable.” The hand reached to my sleeve abruptly. “Hey, fellow, you’re not going to have to mention my name—”

I used up the rest of my whisky, not saying anything.

“Hey, now, Harry, we played on the same squad, remember? All right, you can’t promise — hell, I know how you can get hung up with bulls — but you’ll do your best, eh, fellow?”

“Let’s leave it there, Connie. I’ll see what comes up.”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure—”

“Where do you get the girls?” I asked him. “Not the ones who hang around the clubs — kids like these two from downtown.”

He was staring at the bottle, preoccupied. “Got a contact, painter named Klobb. I give him half a grand whenever one of them works out.”

I made a face. “Your wife down there for some special reason tonight?”

“Just looking for Audrey. We couldn’t get hold of her all week — the girl she lives with kept saying she was out.”

“Mrs. Constantine always use a gun when she’s herding up absentees?”