Free Girl Watcher's Funeral by Hugh Pentecost

the fact his shrewd eyes aren’t ever missing a trick. “Speak to you alone a moment—?”
    â€œI don’t admire your timing,” I said. I stood up and walked a few steps away from the table with him.
    â€œBoss wants you,” Jerry said. “Someone took a dive from the nineteenth floor.”
    â€œA dive?”
    â€œThey’re swabbing down the sidewalk now,” Jerry said.
    â€œWho was it?”
    â€œSome newspaper dame,” Jerry said. “Name of Rosemary Lewis.”

Part Two

1
    I REMEMBER THE TRAPEZE started to revolve slowly around me. It was nightmarish. I was acutely aware of the smells of perfume and tobacco and liquor and food. A raspberry blonde stared at me through a kind of fog, puzzled that I was walking away from her in the middle of her best offer. Voices sounded loud and harsh.
    I was grateful for Jerry Dodd’s firm grip on my arm. My legs felt like rubber hose.
    â€œI just left her—not forty-five minutes ago,” I heard myself saying to Jerry in a voice that wasn’t mine.
    â€œIt only takes seconds to hit the sidewalk from nineteen floors up,” Jerry said. It was callous. It was like cold water being thrown in my face. I realized afterward that was exactly what he meant it to be like.
    We managed to cross the Trapeze, in and out of tables, and reach the hall outside opposite a bank of elevators. I was aware that people watched us curiously. They must have thought Jerry was helping a drunk out of the place. I wondered why we didn’t just climb the one flight of stairs to Chambrun’s office.
    â€œHe’s in her room,” Jerry told me.
    The elevator took us up, my stomach turning over in the swift ascent. I found myself hanging onto the little handrail in the car. I’d known her for less than an hour, but she’d seemed so alive, so competent, so basically decent. “I’m a big girl,” she’d said, so sure of herself. I closed my eyes, fighting nausea, as I thought of that fine, healthy body hurtling through space to be smashed into unrecognizable bits on the cement sidewalk.
    â€œDo you have any idea who did it?” I asked Jerry as we walked along the corridor to 1919, her room.
    â€œWho did what?” he asked in his flat, unemotional voice.
    â€œShe didn’t jump!” I said, facing him.
    â€œWho says?”
    â€œI say!” I said, as certain of that as I was of tomorrow’s rising sun.
    â€œLet’s see,” Jerry said. He rang the doorbell outside 1919.
    The door was instantly opened by Joe Cameron, Jerry’s top assistant on the security force. Joe is an affable redhead, Brooks Brotherish in clothes, looking more like a young Madison Avenue executive than a special cop. He’d been a modern language major at Columbia and he was valuable at the Beaumont, with all the U.N. people we had and other foreign guests.
    Beyond Cameron in the room I saw Chambrun, standing in the center of the rug, chin sunk forward on his chest. The room smelled like woman, the perfume painfully familiar, although I’d known Rosey for less than an hour.
    Then I felt myself sucking for breath. On the dressing table just beyond Chambrun was Rosey’s tawny blond messy hair. It was on a little round stand, the shape of her head. Cameron must have sensed my reaction.
    â€œSmart women wear wigs half the time,” he said. “She had a couple more in the closet—one red, for red-haired fanciers, I imagine.”
    The room was neat. There were no signs of any hasty clothes-changing; certainly no sign that Rosey had put up any kind of a fight. The two windows were shut tight, and I was aware of the soft purring of the air conditioner fitted into one of them.
    I started, trancelike, toward the window. Nineteen stories to the street!
    â€œDon’t touch anything,” Chambrun said sharply. He looked at me and his face was rock-hard. “You brought her up here?”
    I