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was a kid, before they shortened the habits. I don’t even know if they’re manufactured anymore, but I thought of them from your description … holes for the eyes and mouth, but you didn’t see any runs where they’d been cut out and the stocking stretched. Right?”
    “I think that’s right. And I couldn’t see through the material. But you can buy panty hose like that, the cheaper the heavier.”
    “But it’s the runs I’m thinking about. I was talking about it with my wife last night. We experimented with an old pair of hers. Zip—runs up and down. Then she called her friend Mary Ryan—you know Mrs. Ryan—and went over and got a real strong pair from her.”
    Everybody on stage, Julie thought. She said, “Support hose.”
    “They didn’t support much when we cut holes in them.”
    “I could be wrong about the runs,” Julie said, becoming wildly impatient.
    “And the doll?”
    “I would not recognize it if I saw it again,” she snapped.
    “I don’t blame you for being uptight. Just the same, it’s the little things that work when the big ones don’t. You know that from your own experience.”
    “Yeah,” Julie said. Rare praise from a professional for an amateur detective. Sheer cajolery.
    “Remember a black street girl named May Weems?”
    “Yes.” May Weems had been an acquaintance of a young prostitute Julie had tried to help. “Is she still in the life?”
    “She’s got so many arrests, so many collars now, we call her Ring-Around.”
    The other detectives were amused. Julie waited. Everything he’d said so far, she felt, had been leading up to this.
    “These days she’s hustling down in the thirties. I talked to her—about the bag lady. I think she’s seen her, but there’s no way that girl is going to cooperate with the police.” He paused. Then: “She might talk to you, Julie.”

SEVEN
    T HEY WANTED HER TO go after May Weems, Julie reasoned, and she wasn’t going to do it. Russo had conveniently forgotten how he had used her to lure Weems out of hiding back then. Julie had listened to the young prostitute’s life story, buying her breakfast at six in the morning, gaining her confidence. May had wanted to be the first black ice-skating star. “How about that, Friend Julie?” Russo had picked May up as soon as she stepped outside Friend Julie’s shop. No, sir, Julie decided, she was not going out to look for May Weems. She was going out to look for news fit to print in a gossip column.
    “ YOU’RE A BORN PSYCHIC !” Reggie Bauer cried when she walked into the Actors’ Forum. He kissed her on both cheeks. “I just left a message with your service.” Reggie was slight and blond and difficult to cast, but everybody at the Forum said he was a good actor. What Julie knew of him was his natural ability to pick up a story that might make her kind of news.
    “What’s the message?”
    “Guess who’s coming to the session this morning.”
    “Mother Jones,” Julie said. “Reggie, I’m a poor guesser.”
    “Richard Garvy … Mike Bowen of ‘Seventeen Orchard Terrace.’”
    “I know who Richard Garvy is,” Julie said. The television series “17 Orchard Terrace” had gone off the air that spring after ten fabulous years. You could still turn on a rerun at almost any hour of the day. The main character, Mike Bowen, was the owner of a garage in a New York suburb, a volunteer fireman, small-town politician, embattled family man whose kids were sometimes proud and sometimes ashamed of him. As he was of his children. “How come the Forum? Business or pleasure?”
    “Somebody said he has a play he wants to do.”
    “Here?”
    “Oh, my pet,” Reggie said. “With his ego even Broadway is too small a grave. Actually, he’s a friend of our esteemed director. It could be a scouting expedition. That’s such stuff as dreams are made on around here this morning. Will you stay? I’ll get you coffee.”
    “Coffee, yes, thank you.” Julie did not like to attend the acting