He had the mixed grill and drank a couple of Carlsbergs with it. I ordered the chopped sirloin and drank black coffee with my meal. We talked a little about Sunny’s suicide but it didn’t carry us very far. He said, “If it wasn’t for the other one, the blonde, you wouldn’t even think to look at it twice. All the medical evidence fits in with suicide. The bruises, that’s easy. She was groggy, she didn’t know what she was doing, she fell and bumped into things. Same reason she was on the floor instead of the bed. There was nothing special about the bruises. Her prints were where they belonged—the bottle, the glass, the pill bottles. The note matches other samples of her handwriting. If we buy your guy’s story, she was even in a locked room when he found her. Locked from inside, the chain on. You figure that for the truth?”

“His whole story sounded true to me.”

“So she killed herself. It even fits with the Dakkinen death two weeks ago. They were friends and she was depressed by what happened to her friend. You see any way it was anything but suicide?”

I shook my head. “It’s the hardest kind of suicide to stage. What do you do, stuff the pills down her throat with a funnel? Make her take them at gunpoint?”

“You can dissolve the contents, let her take them without knowing it. But they found traces of the Seconal capsules in the stomach contents. So forget that. It’s suicide.”

I tried to remember the annual suicide rate in the city. I couldn’t even come up with an educated guess, and Durkin was no help. I wondered what the rate was, and if it was on the rise like everything else.

Over coffee he said, “I had a couple of clerks go through the registration cards at the Galaxy Downtowner since the first of the year. Pulling the block-printed ones. Nothing ties into the Jones registration.”

“And the other hotels?”

“Nothing that fits. A batch of people called Jones, it’s a common enough name, but they’re all signatures and credit cards and they look bona fide. Waste of time.”

“Sorry.”

“Why? Ninety percent of what I do is a waste of time. You were right, it was worth checking. If this had been a big case, front-page stuff, top brass putting pressure on, you can believe I’d have thought of it myself and we’d be checking every hotel in the five boroughs. How about you?”

“What about me?”

“You getting anywhere with Dakkinen?”

I had to think. “No,” I said, finally.

“It’s aggravating. I went over the file again and you know what got stuck in my throat? That desk clerk.”

“The one I talked to?”