Like Love

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The woman on the ledge was wearing a nightgown. It was only three-thirty in the afternoon, but she was dressed for sleep, and the brisk spring breezes flattened the sheer nylon fabric against her body so that she looked like a legendary Greek figure sculptured in stone, immobile, on the ledge twelve stories above the city street.

The police and the fire department had gone through the whole bit-they had seen this particular little drama a thousand times in the movies and on television. If there was anything that bored civil service employees, it was a real-life enactment of an entertainment cliché. So the firemen spread their nets in the street below, and got their loudspeakers going, and the policemen roped off the block and sent a couple of detectives up to the window where spring flattened the girl against the brick wall of the building.

She was a pretty girl, a young girl in her early twenties, with long blond hair caught by the April breeze and whipped furiously about her face and head. Andy Parker, one of the sweet-talkers sent over by the 87th Squad was wishing the girl would come in off the ledge so he could get a closer look at the full breasts beneath the sheer nightgown. Steve Carella, the other detective, simply didn’t think anyone should die on such a nice spring day.

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