Editing Klute (section)

==Plot==
After Pennsylvania chemical company executive Tom Gruneman disappears, the police find an obscene letter in Gruneman's office addressed to a New York City [[call girl]] named Bree Daniels, who had received several such letters. After six months of fruitless police work, Peter Cable, a fellow executive at Gruneman's company, hires family friend and detective John Klute to investigate Gruneman's disappearance.

Klute rents an apartment in the basement of Bree's building, taps her phone and follows her as she turns tricks. Bree appears to enjoy the freedom of freelancing as a call girl while auditioning for acting and modeling jobs, but she reveals the emptiness of her life to her psychiatrist. Bree refuses to answer Klute's questions at first. After learning that he has been watching her, Bree says that she does not recognize Gruneman. She acknowledges having been beaten up by a [[Client (prostitution)|john]] two years earlier, but cannot identify Gruneman from a photo. She further admits to Klute that she is a nervous and [[Paranoia|paranoid]] person. Bree takes Klute to meet her former [[pimp]] Frank Ligourin, who had managed Jane McKenna, a prostitute who had referred the abusive client to Bree. McKenna has apparently committed suicide and their other colleague Arlyn Page has since become a drug addict and disappeared.

Klute and Bree develop a romance, although she tells her psychiatrist that she wishes their relationship would end because she felt more in control of herself when turning tricks. She tells Klute that she is paranoid that she is being watched. They find Page, who tells them that the photo of Gruneman is not that of the client, who was an older man. Page's body is later found in the river. Klute connects the apparent suicides of the two prostitutes, surmising that the client was using Gruneman's name. He also thinks the client killed Gruneman and might kill Bree next. Klute revisits Gruneman's acquaintances. By typographic comparison, the obscene letters are traced to Cable, to whom Klute has been reporting during his investigation. Klute asks Cable for money to buy the "[[Address book|black book]]" of McKenna's clients to learn the identity of the abusive client. He leaves enough [[Bread crumbs#In popular culture|bread crumbs]] to see whether Cable reveals his own complicity in the murders.

Cable follows Bree to a client's office and reveals that he sent her the letters. Cable tells her that after Gruneman accidentally found him physically abusing McKenna, Cable was worried that Gruneman would use the incident to sabotage Cable's career, so Cable tried to frame Gruneman by planting the letter in his office. After playing a [[Snuff film|snuff]] audiotape he recorded as he murdered Page, he attacks Bree. When he sees Klute rush in, Cable abruptly lurches backward, crashing through a window to his death.

Bree vacates her apartment with Klute's help. A [[Voice-over|voiceover]] conversation with her psychiatrist reveals her hesitancy to surrender her life of autonomy to enter into a traditional relationship with Klute, saying that she would lose her mind if she turned to a domestic lifestyle. She admits that although she will miss Klute, she is unable to tell him and jokes that the doctor will likely see her again the next week. As they leave the apartment, Bree receives a telephone call from a client and she informs him she is leaving New York and does not expect to return. She and Klute leave the apartment together.