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known he wasn’t the only man in her life, which had been an impossible situation for him. He put both those affairs down to experience. Marylyn was different. He had quarreled with Marylyn at least four times, and yet he had gone back to her after staying away perhaps five days. At least four times he had asked Marylyn to marry him, but she didn’t want to marry just yet. “Maybe never, who knows? Marriage is an outmoded institution, don’t you know that?” She was hopeless with money. If she had twenty-eight dollars from a typing job, she would blow it the same day she got it—on a groovy coat from a thrift shop, a potted plant, or a couple of books. She seemed to pay her rent all right. Her money was her money, and Clarence didn’t mind how she spent it, but once he had seen a couple of dollar bills actually falling out of her raincoat pocket as she went down the stairs in front of him. She didn’t like billfolds. Now he slept more often at Marylyn’s apartment than on East 19th Street. This was not kosher by Police Department rules, Clarence supposed, but on the rare occasions when he might be summoned by an emergency call, he had taken the trouble to sleep in his own apartment. The emergency calls had never come, but one never knew.
    On the Sunday morning that Clarence was supposed to call on Edward Reynolds, he awakened in Marylyn’s bed on Macdougal Street. He had told her about his appointment with the man whose dog had been stolen. Clarence made a coffee and orange juice from a frozen tin, and brought it on a tray to Marylyn who was still in bed.
    “Working on Sunday,” Marylyn said in a sleep-husky voice, and yawned with a lazy hand over her mouth. Her long reddish-blond hair was all over the pillow like a halo. She had a few freckles on her nose.
    “Not working, darling. No one’s ordering me to see Mr. Reynolds.” As Clarence adjusted the tray so it wouldn’t tip on the bed, he caught a delicious hint of her perfume, of the warmth of the sheets that he had left a few minutes ago, and he would happily have plunged back into bed, and it even crossed his mind to do so, after ringing Mr. Reynolds and asking if he could come at noon instead of eleven. However, best to start off on the right foot. “I’ll be back before one, I’m sure.”
    “You’re free this afternoon—and tonight?”
    Clarence hesitated, briefly. “I’m on tonight at eight. New shift.” The shifts changed every three weeks. Clarence disliked the 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift, because it kept him from seeing Marylyn in the evenings. It was the third time he had had such a shift. Clarence sipped his coffee. Marylyn had given a slight groan at his news. She wasn’t fully awake yet. Clarence glanced at his wrist-watch, then at the straight chair in front of Marylyn’s dressing-table, half expecting to see his trousers and jacket there, but he had hung them up last evening, and over the chair-back now was a black bra, and on the seat of the chair a public library book open and face down. Marylyn was not very neat. But it could be worse, Clarence thought, she could be sharing the apartment with another girl, and then things would have been hell.
    Clarence took a shower in the small bathroom, shaved with the razor he kept there, and dressed in his ordinary clothes—a dark-blue suit, white shirt, a discreet tie, oxblood shoes of which he was especially fond and which he now wiped vigorously with a rag he found under the kitchen sink. Then Clarence combed his hair in Marylyn’s bathroom mirror. He had blue eyes that were a little pale. He kept his light-brown hair as unshort as possible, though the force was surprisingly lenient about that. His upper lip was almost as full as his lower—a pleasant, tolerant mouth, he liked to think. Seldom grim, anyway.
    “Want me to buy something for lunch, or want to go out?” Clarence seated himself, gently, on the edge of the bed.
    Marylyn had put the tray aside, on Clarence’s side of the bed, and