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It wasn't a strong drink urge and I never considered acting on it, but it putto have a drink I felt no compulsion to call her but decided to anyway I spent a dime and dialed her number from a booth around the corner from the main public library

Our conversation had traffic noises for coet around to telling her about Sunny's suicide I didn't mention the bottle of Wild Turkey, either

I read the Post while I ate dinner Sunny's suicide had had a couple of paragraphs in the News that , which is as ht sell papers, and their hook was that Sunny had the same pimp as Kio Nobody had been able to turn up a picture of Sunny so they ran the shot of Kih, couldn't fulfill the promise of the headlines All they had was a suicide and some airy speculation that Sunny had killed herself because of what she knew about Kis I'd broken But there was the usual cohout the paper I thought about what Ji up newspapers It didn't see up all that much

After dinner I picked upwith a phoneback to ask how things were going I said that they weren't, really He asked if I was going to keep at it

"For a while," I said "Just to see if it goes anywhere"

The cops, he said, had not been hassling hi funeral services for Sunny Unlike Kim, whose body had been shipped back to Wisconsin, Sunny didn't have parents or kin to claim her There was a question about when Sunny's body would be released froements to have a memorial service at Walter B Cooke's on West Seventy-second Street That would take place Thursday, he told me, at two in the afternoon

"I should have done the saht of it It's irls They're in a state, you know"

"I can i That business about death co about who's next"

I went tothe qualification that a week ago I'd been in a blackout, wandering around doing God knohat

"My naht Thanks"

When the uy followed me up the stairs to street level, then fell into step witha plaid lu hiht?" I allowed that it was "You like that story tonight?"

"It was interesting," I said

"You wanna hear an interesting story? I heard a story about a s That's soun was in my dresser drawer, all rolled up in a pair of socks The knives were in the saot cojones, you knohat I roin with one hand like a baseball player adjusting his jock "All the same," he said, "You don' wanna look for trouble"

"What are you talking about?"

He spread his hands "What do I know? I'e, tha's all I do So, but who her friends are is another Is not ie from?"

He just looked at ?"

"Followed you in, followed you out" He chuckled "That s, that was too ely devoted to a game of Follow the Fur

It started in that state that lies so and full consciousness I'd awakened fro a an with a falseher as she o, a cheap suitcase in one hand, a deni atwhile she toyed with the clasp at the throat of her fur jacket She was telling me that it was ranch mink but she'd trade it for the denim jacket she'd come to town in

The whole sequence played itself off andelse I was back in that alley in Harlem, except now er fro hiet them the hell out of there, perhaps to even the odds a little, and then a realization screas over the side ofoff into the corners of the mind where they live

It was a different jacket

I showered and shaved and got out of there I cabbed first to Kiain The lapin coat, the dyed rabbit Chance had bought her, was not the garer, it was fuller, it didn't fasten with a clasp at the throat It was not what she'd been wearing, not what she'd described as ranch mink and offered to trade for her old denim jacket

Nor was the jacket I remembered to be found anywhere else in the apartment

I took another cab to Midtown North Durkin wasn't on duty I got another cop to call hiot unofficial access to the file, and yes, the inventory of impounded articles found in the room at the Galaxy Doner included a fur jacket I checked the photos in the file and couldn't find the jacket in any of them

A subway took me don to One Police Plaza, where I talked to soh soot to one office just after the guy I was supposed to see left for lunch I hadless than a block away at St Andrew's Church, so I killed an hour there Afterward I got a sandwich at a deli and ate it standing up

I went back to One Police Plaza and finally got to examine the fur jacket Kim had had with her when she died I couldn't have sworn it was the one I'd seen in Ar's but it seemed to match my memory I ran my hand over the rich fur and tried to replay the tape that had run in ether This fur was the right length, the right color, and there was a clasp at the throat that her port-tipped fingerstold enuine ranch mink and that a furrier named Arvin Tannenbaum had made it

The Tannenbau on West Twenty-ninth, right in the heart of the fur district It would have si, but NYPD cooperation, official or otherwise, only went so far I described the jacket, which didn't help much, and I described Kim A check of their sales records revealed the purchase of a mink jacket six weeks previously by Kiht salesman and he re, atery blue eyes behind thick lenses He said, "Tall girl, very pretty girl You know, I read that na a bell but I couldn't think why Terrible thing, such a pretty girl"

She'd been with a gentleentleman who had paid for the coat Paid cash for it, he remembered And no, that wasn't so unusual, not in the fur business They only did a small voluarh of course anyone could walk in off the street and buy any garment in the place But mostly it was cash because the customer didn't usually want to wait for his check to clear, and besides a fur was often a luxury gift for a luxury friend, so to speak, and the customer was happier if no record of the transaction existed Thus payment in cash, thus the sales slip not in the buyer's name but in Miss Dakkinen's