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interesting.”
    “The part about Mahon and Jean Clark was a little bit surprising,” Quinn continued, being unusually talkative for a detective on a case. “She was always the quiet one of the pair—the older sister in every sense. Cathy on the other hand was as wild as they come, running with the hotrodders when she wasn’t busy at fraternity beer parties.”
    “Strange,” I said, “she didn’t impress me that way at all.”
    “She was a girl of many moods. That’s what makes this case so difficult right from the beginning. It might have been one of the college crowd that shot her, or one of this hotrod gang, or somebody else entirely.”
    “It said in the paper that she hadn’t been raped.”
    He shook his head. “Not even touched. But for all of that she was no virgin.”
    “Pregnant?”
    “No, but no virgin. Not a surprising bit of news, really.”
    But it was surprising to me in my innocence. I always thought of promiscuous women as the other ones, the ones I did not know. All unmarried girls were virgins to my mind, and I still remembered the shocked surprise I’d felt in high school when the cute blonde kid down the street had left school three months before graduation to have her illegitimate baby in some private hospital fifty miles away. I’d never seen her again, and I’d spent endless weeks afterward speculating on which of my classmates had been guilty of the deed. Some years later I learned that any one of six boys could have been responsible, and that only added to the sense of shock.
    And it was somewhat the same feeling that was inside me now—not that I’d really known Cathy Clark that well, because of course I hadn’t. But, maybe, it was just that somehow she reminded me of that lost blonde girl from my youth. Lost, and never found again.
    “You think the killer will turn up here?” I asked. “You think it was one of her boy friends?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, his voice carrying a trace of that eternal pessimism that seemed the lot of all true policemen. “Maybe a boy, maybe a jealous girl, maybe a wandering hobo no one will ever see again. Sometimes, as hard as we try, these things stay unsolved.”
    Simon Ark murmured something I didn’t catch, and Quinn gave him an odd look. He put the pipe in his mouth for a thoughtful moment, then removed it and asked, “What did you say your name was?”
    Simon scowled and told him. “Ark. Simon Ark, sir.”
    “Simon Ark. You knew the girl too?”
    “I never met her.”
    “You people from New York?” His policeman’s suspicions were being awakened now. “You come all the way up to see this girl you hardly know?”
    “Did I say we were from New York?”
    “You talk like New Yorkers. Not Mr. Ark, maybe, but you sure do. I like to study people’s speech habits. Mr. Ark here is foreign, though I’d guess he’s been in this country a long time.”
    “A long time,” Simon agreed with a smile.
    George Quinn leaned back against the wall, chewing thoughtfully on the pipe stem. “Baine City is an odd place. We like visitors, especially New York visitors. We appreciate your interest in this poor dead girl. We’re friendly—you can see that. But all the same …”
    “All the same what?” I asked.
    “All the same, don’t go playin’ detective or anything like that. I get paid to catch murderers—you don’t.”
    “You get paid whether you catch them or not.”
    There was a tiny flicker of steel in his eyes. “I’ll get the man who killed Cathy Clark,” he said quietly, and I knew he meant it. The face behind the pipe relaxed quickly into the familiar smile and he slid back the folding doors. “Anyway, thanks for listening to me,” he concluded. “Sorry to take up your time.”
    “Not at all,” Simon said. I followed him back into the room with the casket and the jumbled mountains of flowers. He paused for a moment and I thought he might be praying. Then we left the place and walked across the street to a little