The Blonde Died Dancing by Kelley Roos Page B

be reunited. But either the door was too thick or Steve was in trouble. I was beginning to wonder how much longer I should wait for him.
    Then I heard a sound, but it hadn’t come from behind Anita’s door.
    It had come from behind me.
    I started to turn toward it, and there was a sudden rush of motion. I flung back my right hand. It hit something… and something hit me, a walloping blow on the side of my head…
    Before I knew anything else, I knew that Steve was with me. I could hear his voice. At first it was far away, very far away, then it came closer and closer. That made me feel some better. When I opened my eyes and saw Steve’s face near mine, felt his arms around me, the dimness of my view toward life in Greenwich Village’s Rhinebeck Place began to lessen.
    “I think I can stand up,” I said.
    “Take your time.”
    “I can manage…”
    With Steve’s help, I got to my feet. My surroundings began to register on me. We were in a living room. On the table a lamp was burning…
    “Steve!” I said, “the light! Someone will see…”
    “It’s all right. There’s only a skylight in this room. The window I came through is in the bedroom. Connie, what made you pass out?”
    “Pass out? You think I fainted?”
    “Well…”
    “Steve, somebody knocked me out!” I felt my head; a lump was in its ascendency. “I got sandbagged!”
    “Who…”
    “I don’t know. I didn’t see him, I just felt him. He came up behind me in the hall.”
    “He was waiting there in the hall?”
    “No, there was no one there…”
    “Wait.”
    Steve went through a door. I followed him just far enough to see that he was going into a small kitchen. In a moment he was back.
    He said, “There’s a service door in there. Someone could have got through it out into the hall. He must have heard me climbing the fence or breaking in the window.”
    “Yes, he must have been in here. Jack Walston? Wendell Kipp?”
    “You think it was a man who hit you?”
    “I don’t know. When I heard the sound I swung out my arm… backwards… like this…” I showed Steve how I had swung out my arm. “And then…”
    I stopped, staring at my right hand. On my glove was a smear of vivid orange lipstick. I looked at Steve.
    “It was a woman,” I said. “I hit her in the face.”
    “Dottie Harris?”
    “Maybe, but I don’t think so. She’s so short. I have the feeling it was someone taller.”
    “Someone else,” Steve said slowly. “Dottie Harris, Jack Walston, Wendell Kipp. And now… still another person. What is it that’s so damned fascinating about this apartment?”
    We looked around. The living room took up most of the apartment. It was a large, rather narrow room. The long side wall that held the door to the corridor was lined with waist-high book shelves, decorated with a series of camera studies of New York City. The opposite end was broken by doors into two bedrooms, one into the kitchen. Between the two bedroom doors was a long, lush modern couch, flanked by modern end tables.
    Still examining the room, I sat on the edge of the couch; I needed a little more rest. The end wall to my right was centered by a combination desk and table. To its right was an easy chair, beside it a telephone on a low circular table. The wall at the other end was filled mostly with the giant-sized cabinet of a radio-phonograph. On each side of it was a straight-backed, matching chair. All in all, it was a very pleasant place for a bachelor girl to live.
    I looked at Steve and found him staring at the end table at the right of the couch. I stared at it, too. There was a crystal ash tray on it, a cigarette box, a lighter, and that was all… nothing really to stare at. I looked back at Steve. Now his attention was focused on the couch’s other end table. It held a lamp, a squat cylinder of pottery with a square wooden base. There was an ash tray, too, and an aluminum dish filled with books of matches.
    “Connie,” Steve said, “wouldn’t you