A Stab in the Dark

That made it simpler. I kept turning, and I was facing him when he came off the wall with his eyes wide and his mouth open. He was my height but lighter in build, late teens or early twenties, uncombed dark hair and a face white as paper in the light of the streetlamps.

I moved in quick and hit him in the middle. He swung at me and I sidestepped the punch and hit him again an inch or two above his belt buckle. That brought his hands down and I swung my right forearm in an arc and hit him in the mouth with my elbow. He drew back and clapped both hands to his mouth.

I said, "Turn around and grab that wall! Come on, you fucker. Get your hands on the wall!"

He said I was crazy, that he hadn't done anything. The words came out muffled through the hands he was holding to his mouth.

But he turned around and grabbed the wall.

I moved in, hooked a foot in front of his, drew his foot back so that he couldn't come off the wall in a hurry.

"I didn't do nothing," he said. "What's the matter with you?"

I told him to put his head against the wall.

"All I did was ask you for a match."

I told him to shut up. I frisked him and he stood still for it. A little blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. Nothing serious. He was wearing one of those leather jackets with a pile collar and two big pockets in front. Bomber jackets, I think they call them. The pocket on the left held a wad of Kleenex and a pack of Winston Lights. The other pocket held a knife. A flick of my wrist and the blade dropped into place.

A gravity knife. One of the seven deadly weapons.

"I just carry it," he said.

"For what?"

"Protection."

"From who? Little old ladies?"

I took a wallet off his hip. He had ID that indicated he was Anthony Sforczak and he lived in Woodside, Queens. I said, "You're a long ways from home, Tony."

"So?"

He had two tens and some singles in his wallet. In another pants pocket I found a thick roll of bills secured by a rubber band, and in the breast pocket of his shirt, under the leather jacket, I found one of those disposable butane lighters.

"It's out of fluid," he said.

I flicked it. Flame leaped from it and I showed it to him. The heat rose and he jerked his head to the side. I released the thumbcatch and the flame died.

"It was out before. Wouldn't light."

"So why keep it? Why not throw it away?"

"It's against the law to litter."

"Turn around."

He came off the wall slowly, eyes wary. A little line of blood trailed from the corner of his mouth down over his chin. His mouth was starting to puff up some where my elbow had caught him.

He wouldn't die of it.

I gave him the wallet and the cigarette lighter. I tucked the roll of bills in my own pocket.

"That's my money," he said.

"You stole it."

"Like hell I did! What are you gonna do, keep it?"

"What do you think?" I flicked the knife open and held it so that the light glinted off the face of the blade. "You better not turn up in this part of the city again. Another thing you better not do is carry a blade when half the department's looking for the First Avenue Slasher."

He stared at me. Something in his eyes said he wished I didn't have that knife in my hand. I met his gaze and closed the knife, dropped it on the ground behind me.

"Go ahead," I said. "Be my guest."

I balanced on the balls of my feet, waiting for him. For a moment he might have been considering it, and I was hoping he'd make a move. I could feel the blood singing in my veins, pulsing in my temples.

He said, "You're crazy, you know? What you are is crazy," and he edged off ten or twenty yards, then half-ran to the corner.

I stood watching until he was out of sight.

The street was still empty. I found the gravity knife on the pavement and put it in my pocket. Across the street, Armstrong's door opened and a young man and woman emerged. They walked down the street holding hands.

I felt fine. I wasn't drunk. I'd had a day of maintenance drinking, nothing more. Look how I'd handled the punk. Nothing wrong with my instincts, nothing slow about my reflexes. The booze wasn't getting in the way. Just a matter of taking on fuel, of keeping a full tank. Nothing wrong with that.

Chapter 12

I came suddenly awake. There was no warm-up period. It was as abrupt as turning on a transistor radio.

I was on my bed in my hotel room, lying on top of the covers with my head on the pillow. I had piled my clothes on the chair but slept in my underwear. There was a foul taste in my dry mouth and I had a killer headache.

I got up. I felt shaky and awful, and a sense of impending doom hung in the air, as though if I turned around quickly I could look Death in the eye.

I didn't want a drink but knew I needed one to take the edge off the way I felt. I couldn't find the bourbon bottle and then I finally found it in the wastebasket. Evidently I'd finished it before I went to bed. I wondered how much it had contained.

No matter. It was empty now.

I held out a hand, studied it. No visible tremors. I flexed the fingers. Not as steady as Gibraltar, maybe, but not a case of the shakes, either.

Shaky inside, though.

I couldn't remember returning to the hotel. I probed gingerly at my memory and couldn't get any further than the boy scuttling down the street and around the corner. Anthony Sforczak, that was his name.

See? Nothing wrong with the memory.

Except that it ran out at that point. Or perhaps a moment later, when the young couple came out of Armstrong's and walked up the street holding hands. Then it all went blank, coming into focus again with me coming to in my hotel room. What time was it, anyway?

My watch was still on my wrist. Quarter after nine. And it was light outside my window, so that meant a.m. Not that I really had to look to be sure. I hadn't lost a day, just the length of time it took me to walk half a block home and get to bed.

Assuming I'd come straight home.

I stripped off my underwear and got into the shower. While I was under the spray I could hear my phone ringing. I let it ring. I spent a long time under the hot spray, then took a blast of cold for as long as I could stand it, which wasn't very long. I toweled dry and shaved. My hand wasn't as steady as it might have been but I took my time and didn't cut myself.

I didn't like what I saw in the mirror. A lot of red in the eyes. I thought of Havermeyer's description of Susan Potowski, her eyes swimming in blood. I didn't like my red eyes, or the mesh of broken blood vessels on my cheekbones and across the bridge of my nose.

I knew what put them there. Drink put them there. Nothing else. I could forget about what it might be doing to my liver because my liver was tucked away where I didn't have to look at it every morning.

And where nobody else could see it.

I got dressed, put on all clean clothes, stuffed everything else in my laundry bag. The shower helped and the shave helped and the clean clothes helped, but in spite of all three I could feel remorse settling over my shoulders like a cape. I didn't want to look at the previous night because I knew I wasn't going to like what I'd see there.

But what choice did I have?

I put the roll of bills in one pocket, the gravity knife in the other. I went downstairs and out, walking past the desk without breaking stride. I knew there'd be messages there but I figured they'd keep.

I decided not to stop at McGovern's but when I got there I turned in. Just one quick drink to still the invisible shaking. I drank it like the medicine it was.

Around the corner I sat in a rear pew at St. Paul's. For what seemed like a long time I didn't even think.

I just sat there.

Then the thoughts started. No way to stop them, really.

I'd been drunk the night before and hadn't known it. I'd probably been drunk fairly early in the day.

There were patches in Brooklyn that I couldn't remember clearly, and I didn't seem to have any recollection of the subway ride back to Manhattan. For that matter, I couldn't be sure I'd ridden the subway. I might have taken a cab.

I remembered talking to myself in a Brooklyn bar. I must have been drunk then. I didn't tend to talk to myself when I was sober.

Not yet, anyway.

All right, I could live with all that. I drank too goddamn much, and when you do that with consistency there are going to be times when you get drunk without wanting to. This wasn't the first time and I didn't suspect it would be the last. It came with the territory.

But I'd been drunk when I was playing Hero Cop on Ninth Avenue, drunk with the booze for high-octane fuel. My street-smart instincts that warned me about a mugging were less a source of pride the morning after.

Maybe he just wanted a match.

My gorge rose at the thought and I tasted bile at the back of my throat. Maybe he was just another kid from Woodside having himself a night on the town. Maybe he'd been a mugger only in my mind, my drunken mind. Maybe I'd beaten him and robbed him for no good reason at all.

But he'd asked for a match when he had a working lighter.

So? That was an icebreaker as old as tobacco. Ask for a match, strike up a conversation. He could have been a male hustler. He would hardly have been the first gay man to put on a bomber jacket.

He was carrying a gravity knife.

So? Frisk the city and you could stock an arsenal. Half the city was carrying something to protect it from the other half. The knife was a deadly weapon and he was breaking a law carrying it, but it didn't prove anything.

He knew how to grab that wall. It wasn't his first frisk.

And that didn't prove anything either. There are neighborhoods where you can't grow up without getting stopped and tossed once a week by the cops.

And the money? The roll of bills?

He could have come by it honestly. Or he could have earned it in any of innumerable dishonest ways and still not have been a mugger.

And my vaunted cop instincts? Hell, the minute he came out of the doorway I'd known he was going to approach me.

Right. And I'd also known his partner was moving in behind me, knew it as if I'd had eyes in the back of my head. Except there was nobody there. So much for the infallibility of instinct.

I took out the gravity knife, opened it. Suppose I'd been carrying it the night before. More realistically, suppose I'd still been carrying the icepick I'd bought in Boerum Hill. Would I have limited myself to a couple of body punches and a forearm smash to the face? Or would I have worked with the materials at hand?

I felt shaky, and it was more than the hangover.

I closed the knife and put it away. I took out the roll of bills, removed the rubber band, counted the cash. I made it a hundred and seventy dollars in fives and tens.

If he was a mugger, why didn't he have the knife in his hand? How come it was in his jacket pocket with the flap buttoned down?

Or was the flap buttoned?

Didn't matter. I sorted the money and added it to my own. On my way out I lit a couple of candles, then slipped seventeen dollars into the poor box.

At the corner of Fifty-seventh I dropped the gravity knife into a sewer.

Chapter 13

My cab driver was an Israeli immigrant and I don't think he'd ever heard of Rikers Island. I told him to follow the signs for LaGuardia Airport. When we got close I gave him directions. I got out at a luncheonette at the foot of the bridge that spans Bowery Bay and the channel of the East River that separates the island from the rest of Queens.

Lunch hour had come and gone and the place was mostly empty. A few men in work clothes were seated at the counter. About halfway down a man sat in a booth with a cup of coffee and looked up expectantly at my approach. I introduced myself and he said he was Marvin Hiller.

"My car's outside," he said. "Or did you want to grab a cup of coffee? The only thing is I'm a little bit rushed. I had a long morning in Queens Criminal Court and I'm supposed to be at my dentist's in forty-five minutes. If I'm late I'm late."

I told him I didn't care about coffee. He paid his tab and we went outside and rode his car over the bridge. He was a pleasant and rather earnest man a few years younger than I and he looked like what he was, a lawyer with an office on Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst. One of his clients, one who'd be contributing very little toward the rent on that office, was Louis Pinell.

I'd gotten his name from Frank Fitzroy and managed to get his secretary to beep him and call me at the hotel. I'd expected a flat turndown on my request for clearance to see Pinell and got just the reverse.

"Just so it's kosher," he had said, "why don't you meet me out there and we'll drive over together.

You'll probably get more out of him that way. He's a little more comfortable about talking with his lawyer present."

Now he said, "I don't know what you'll be able to get from him. I suppose you mostly want to satisfy yourself that he didn't kill the Ettinger woman."

"I suppose."

"I would think he's in the clear on that one. The evidence is pretty clear-cut. If it was just his word I'd say forget it, because who knows what they remember and what they make up when they're as crazy as he is?"

"He's really crazy?"

"Oh, he's a bedbug," Hiller said. "No question about it. You'll see for yourself. I'm his attorney, but between ourselves I see my job as a matter of making sure he never gets out without a leash. It's a good thing I drew this case."

"Why's that?"

"Because anybody crazy enough to want to could get him off without a whole lot of trouble. I'm going to plead him, but if I made a fight the State's case wouldn't stand up. All they've got is his confession and you could knock that out a dozen different ways, including that he was cuckoo at the time he confessed. They've got no evidence, not after nine years. There's lawyers who think the advocate system means they should go to bat for a guy like Lou and put him back on the streets."

"He'd do it again."

"Of course he'd do it again. He had a fucking icepick in his pocket when they collared him. Again between ourselves, I think lawyers with that attitude ought to be in jail alongside their clients. But in the meantime here I am, playing God. What do you want to ask Lou?"

"There was another Brooklyn killing. I might ask him a few questions about that."

"Sheepshead Bay. He copped to that one."

"That's right. I don't know what else I'll ask him. I'm probably wasting my time. And yours."

"Don't worry about it."

Thirty or forty minutes later we were driving back to the mainland and I was apologizing again for wasting his time.

"You did me a favor," he said. "I'm going to have to make another dentist's appointment. You ever have periodontal surgery?"

"No."

"You're a wise man. This guy's my wife's cousin and he's pretty good, but what they do is they carve your gums. They do a section of your mouth at a time. Last time I went I wound up taking codeine every four hours for a week. I walked around in this perpetual fog. I suppose it's worth it in the long run, but don't feel you took me away from something enjoyable."

"If you say so."

I told him he could drop me anywhere but he insisted on giving me a lift to the subway stop at Northern Boulevard. On the way we talked a little about Pinell. "You can see why they picked him up on the street,"

he said. "That craziness is right there in his eyes. One look and you see it."

"There are a lot of street crazies."

"But he's dangerous-crazy and it shows. And yet I'm never nervous in his presence. Well, I'm not a woman and he hasn't got an icepick. That might have something to do with it."

At the subway entrance I got out of the car and hesitated for a moment, and he leaned toward me, one arm over the back of the seat.

We both seemed reluctant to take leave of each other. I liked him and sensed that he held me in similar regard.

"You're not licensed," he said. "Isn't that what you said?"

"That's right."

"Couldn't you get a license?"

"I don't want one."

"Well, maybe I could throw some work your way all the same, if the right sort of thing came along."

"Why would you want to?"

"I don't know. I liked your manner with Lou. And I get the feeling with you that you think the truth is important." He chuckled. "Besides, I owe you. You spared me a half-hour in the dentist's chair."

"Well, if I ever need a lawyer-"

"Right. You know who to call."

* * *

I just missed a Manhattan-bound train. While I waited for the next one on the elevated platform I managed to find a phone in working order and tried Lynn London's number. I'd checked the hotel desk before I called Hiller, and there'd been a message from her the night before, probably wondering why I hadn't shown up. I wondered if she'd been the one who called during my shower. Whoever it was hadn't elected to leave a message. The desk man said the caller had been a woman, but I'd learned not to count too heavily on his powers of recollection.

Lynn's number didn't answer. No surprise. She was probably still in school, or on her way home. Had she mentioned any afternoon plans?

I couldn't remember.

I retrieved my dime, started to put it and my notebook away. Was there anyone else I should call? I flipped pages in my notebook, struck by how many names and numbers and addresses I'd written down, considering how little I'd managed to accomplish.

Karen Ettinger? I could ask her what she was afraid of. Hiller had just told me he sensed that I thought the truth was important. Evidently she thought it was worth hiding.

It'd be a toll call, though. And I didn't have much change.

Charles London? Frank Fitzroy? An ex-cop on the Upper West Side? His ex-wife on the Lower East Side?

Mitzi Pomerance? Jan Keane?

Probably still had the phone off the hook.

I put the notebook away, and the dime. I could have used a drink.

I'd had nothing since that one eye-opener at McGovern's. I'd eaten a late breakfast since then, had drunk several cups of coffee, but that was it.

I looked over the low wall at the rear of the platform. My eye fastened on red neon in a tavern window.

I'd just missed a train. I could have a quick one and be back in plenty of time for the next one.

I sat down on a bench and waited for my train.

I changed trains twice and wound up at Columbus Circle. The sky was darkening by the time I hit the street, turning that particular cobalt blue that it gets over New York. There were no messages waiting for me at my hotel. I called Lynn London from the lobby.

This time I reached her. "The elusive Mr. Scudder," she said. "You stood me up."

"I'm sorry."

"I waited for you yesterday afternoon. Not for long, because I didn't have too much time available. I suppose something came up, but you didn't call, either."

I remembered how I had considered keeping the appointment and how I'd decided against it. Alcohol had made the decision for me. I'd been in a warm bar and it was cold outside.

"I'd just spoken to your father," I said. "He asked me to drop the case. I figured he'd have been in touch with you to tell you not to cooperate with me."

"So you just decided to write off the Londons, is that it?" There was a trace of amusement in her voice.

"I was here waiting, as I said. Then I went out and kept my date for the evening, and when I got home my father called. To tell me he'd ordered you off the case but that you intended to persist with it all the same."

So I could have seen her. Alcohol had made the decision, and had made it badly.

"He told me not to offer you any encouragement. He said he'd made a mistake raking up the past to begin with."

"But you called me. Or was that before you spoke to him?"

"Once before and once after. The first call was because I was angry with you for standing me up. The second call was because I was angry with my father."

"Why?"

"Because I don't like being told what to do. I'm funny that way. He says you wanted a picture of Barbara. I gather he refused to give it to you. Do you still want one?"

Did I? I couldn't recall now what I'd planned to do with it. Maybe I'd make the rounds of hardware stores, showing it to everyone who sold icepicks.

"Yes," I said. "I still want one."

"Well, I can supply that much. I don't know what else I can give you. But one thing I can't give you at the moment is time. I was on my way out the door when the phone rang. I've got my coat on. I'm meeting a friend for dinner, and then I'm going to be busy this evening."

"With group therapy."

"How did you know that? Did I mention it the last time we talked?

You have a good memory."

"Sometimes."

"Just let me think. Tomorrow night's also impossible. I'd say come over tonight after therapy but by then I generally feel as though I've been through the wringer. After school tomorrow there's a faculty meeting, and by the time that's over- Look, could you come to the school?"

"Tomorrow?"

"I've got a free period from one to two. Do you know where I teach?"

"A private school in the Village, but I don't know which one."

"It's the Devonhurst School. Sounds very preppy, doesn't it?

Actually it's anything but. And it's in the East Village. Second Avenue between Tenth and Eleventh. The east side of the street closer to Eleventh than Tenth."

"I'll find it."

"I'll be in Room Forty-one. And Mr. Scudder? I wouldn't want to be stood up a second time."

I went around the corner to Armstrong's. I had a hamburger and a small salad, then some bourbon in coffee. They switch bartenders at eight, and when Billie came in a half-hour before his shift started I went over to him.

"I guess I was pretty bad last night," I said.

"Oh, you were okay," he said.

"It was a long day and night."

"You were talking a little loud," he said. "Aside from that you were your usual self. And you knew to leave here and make it an early night."

Except I hadn't made it an early night.

I went back to my table and had another bourbon and coffee. By the time I was finished with it, the last of my hangover was gone. I'd shaken off the headache fairly early on, but the feeling of being a step or two off the pace had persisted throughout the day.

Great system: The poison and the antidote come in the same bottle.

I went to the phone, dropped a dime. I almost dialed Anita's number and sat there wondering why. I didn't want to talk about a dead dog, and that was as close as we'd come to a meaningful conversation in years.

I dialed Jan's number. My notebook was in my pocket but I didn't have to get it out. The number was just right there at hand.

"It's Matthew," I said. "I wondered if you felt like company."

"Oh."

"Unless you're busy."

"No, I'm not. As a matter of fact, I'm a little under the weather. I was just settling in for a quiet evening in front of the television set."

"Well, if you'd rather be alone-"

"I didn't say that." There was a pause. "I wouldn't want to make it a late evening."

"Neither would I."

"You remember how to get here?"

"I remember."

* * *

On the way there I felt like a kid on a date. I rang her bell according to the code and stood at the curb.

She tossed me the key. I went inside and rode up in the big elevator.

She was wearing a skirt and sweater and had doeskin slippers on her feet. We stood looking at each other for a moment and then I handed her the paper bag I was carrying. She took out the two bottles, one of Teacher's Scotch, the other of the brand of Russian vodka she favored.

"The perfect hostess gift," she said. "I thought you were a bourbon drinker."

"Well, it's a funny thing. I had a clear head the other morning, and it occurred to me that Scotch might be less likely to give me a hangover."

She put the bottles down. "I wasn't going to drink tonight," she said.

"Well, it'll keep. Vodka doesn't go bad."

"Not if you don't drink it. Let me fix you something. Straight, right?"

"Right."

It was stilted at first. We'd been close to one another, we'd spent a night in bed together, but we were nevertheless stiff and awkward with each other. I started talking about the case, partly because I wanted to talk to someone about it, partly because it was what we had in common.

I told her how my client had tried to take me off the case and how I was staying with it anyway. She didn't seem to find this unusual.

Then I talked about Pinell.

"He definitely didn't kill Barbara Ettinger," I said, "and he definitely did commit the icepick murder in Sheepshead Bay. I didn't really have much doubt about either of those points but I wanted to have my own impressions to work with. And I just plain wanted to see him. I wanted some sense of the man."

"What was he like?"

"Ordinary. They're always ordinary, aren't they? Except I don't know that that's the right word for it.

The thing about Pinell is that he looked insignificant."

"I think I saw a picture of him in the paper."

"You don't get the full effect from a photograph. Pinell's the kind of person you don't notice. You see guys like him delivering lunches, taking tickets in a movie theater. Slight build, furtive manner, and a face that just won't stay in your memory."

" 'The Banality of Evil.' "

"What's that?"

She repeated the phrase. "It's the title of an essay about Adolf Eichmann."

"I don't know that Pinell's evil. He's crazy. Maybe evil's a form of insanity. Anyway, you don't need a psychiatrist's report to know he's crazy. It's right there in his eyes. Speaking of eyes, that's another thing I wanted to ask him."

"What?"

"If he stabbed them all in both eyes. He said he did. He did that right away, before he went to work turning their bodies into pincushions."

She shuddered. "Why?"

"That was the other thing I wanted to ask him. Why the eyes? It turned out he had a perfectly logical reason. He did it to avoid detection."

"I don't follow you."

"He thought a dead person's eyes would retain the last image they perceived before death. If that were the case you could obtain a picture of the murderer by scanning the victim's retina. He was just guarding against this possibility by destroying their eyes."

"Jesus."

"The funny thing is that he's not the first person to have that theory. During the last century some criminologists believed the same thing Pinell hit on. They just figured it was a matter of time before the necessary technology existed for recovering the image from the retina.

And who knows that it won't be possible someday? A doctor could give you all sorts of reasons why it'll never be physiologically possible, but look at all the things that would have seemed at least as farfetched a hundred years ago. Or even twenty years ago."

"So Pinell's just a little ahead of his time, is that it?" She got up, carried my empty glass to the bar. She filled it and poured a glass of vodka for herself. "I do believe that calls for a drink. 'Here's looking at you, kid.' That's as close as I can come to an imitation of Humphrey Bogart. I do better with clay."

She sat down and said, "I wasn't going to drink anything today.

Well, what the hell."

"I want to go fairly light myself."

She nodded, her eyes aimed at the glass in her hand. "I was glad when you called, Matthew. I didn't think you were going to."

"I tried to get you last night. I kept getting a busy signal."

"I had the phone off the hook."

"I know."

"You had them check it? I just wanted to keep the world away last night. When I'm in here with the door locked and the phone off the hook and the shades down, that's when I'm really safe. Do you know what I mean?"

"I think so."

"See, I didn't wake up with a clear head Sunday morning. I got drunk Sunday night. And then I got drunk again last night."

"Oh."

"And then I got up this morning and took a pill to stop the shakes and decided I'd stay away from it for a day or two. Just to get off the roller-coaster, you know?"

"Sure."

"And here I am with a glass in my hand. Isn't that a surprise?"

"You should have said something, Jan. I wouldn't have brought the vodka."

"It's no big deal."

"I wouldn't have brought the Scotch, either. I had too much to drink last night myself. We could be together tonight without drinking."

"You really think so?"

"Of course."

Her large gray eyes looked quite bottomless. She stared sadly at me for a long moment, then brightened. "Well, it's too late to test that hypothesis right now, isn't it? Why don't we just make the best of what we have?"

We didn't do all that much drinking. She had enough vodka to catch up with me and then we both coasted. She played some records and we sat together on the couch and listened to them, not talking much.

We started making love on the couch and then went into the bedroom to finish the job.

We were good together, better than we'd been Saturday night.

Novelty is a spice, but when the chemistry is good between lovers, familiarity enhances their lovemaking. I got out of myself some, and felt a little of what she felt.

Afterward we went back to the couch and I started talking about the murder of Barbara Ettinger. "She's buried so goddamn deep," I said.

"It's not just the amount of time that's gone by. Nine years is a long time, but there are people who died nine years ago and you could walk through their lives and find everything pretty much as they left it. The same people in the houses next door and everybody leading the same kind of life.

"With Barbara, everybody's gone through a seachange. You closed the day-care center and left your husband and moved here. Your husband took the kids and beat it to California. I was one of the first cops on the scene, and God knows my life turned upside down since then. There were three cops who investigated the case in Sheepshead Bay, or started to. Two of them are dead and one left the force and his wife and lives in a furnished room and stands guard in a department store."

"And Doug Ettinger's remarried and selling sporting goods."

I nodded. "And Lynn London's been married and divorced, and half the neighbors on Wyckoff Street have moved somewhere or other.

It's as though every wind on earth's been busy blowing sand on top of her grave. I know Americans lead mobile lives. I read somewhere that every year twenty percent of the country changes its place of residence.

Even so, it's as though every wind on earth's been busy blowing sand on top of her grave. It's like digging for Troy."

" 'Deep with the first dead.' "

"How's that?"

"I don't know if I remember it right. Just a second." She crossed the room, searched the bookshelves, removed a slim volume and paged through it. "It's Dylan Thomas," she said, "and it's in here somewhere.

Where the hell is it? I'm sure it's in here. Here it is."

She read:

"Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter, Robed in the long friends,

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother, Secret by the unmourning water

Of the riding Thames.

After the first death, there is no other."

"London's daughter," I said.

"As in the city of London. But that must be what made me think of it. Deep with the first dead lies Charles London's daughter."

"Read it again."

She did.

"Except there's a door there somewhere if I could just find the handle to it. It wasn't some nut that killed her. It was someone with a reason, someone she knew. Someone who purposely made it look like Pinell's handiwork. And the killer's still around. He didn't die or drop out of sight. He's still around. I don't have any grounds to believe that but it's a feeling I can't shake."

"You think it's Doug?"

"If I don't, I'm the only one who doesn't. Even his wife thinks he did it. She may not know that's what she thinks, but why else is she scared of what I'll find?"

"But you think it's somebody else?"

"I think an awful lot of lives changed radically after her death.

Maybe her dying had something to do with those changes. With some of them, anyway."

"Doug's obviously. Whether he killed her or not."

"Maybe it affected other lives, too."

"Like a stone in a pond? The ripple effect?"

"Maybe. I don't know just what happened or how. I told you, it's a matter of a hunch, a feeling.

Nothing concrete that I can point at."

"Your cop instincts, is that it?"

I laughed. She asked what was funny. I said, "It's not so funny. I've had all day to wonder about the validity of my cop instincts."

"How do you mean?"

And so I wound up telling her more than I'd planned. About everything from Anita's phone call to a kid with a gravity knife. Two nights ago I'd found out what a good listener she was, and she was no worse at it this time around.

When I was done she said, "I don't know why you're down on yourself. You could have been killed."

"If it was really a mugging attempt."

"What were you supposed to do, wait until he stuck a knife into you? And why was he carrying a knife in the first place? I don't know what a gravity knife is, but it doesn't sound like something you carry around in case you need to cut a piece of string."

"He could have been carrying it for protection."

"And the roll of money? It sounds to me as though he's one of those closet cases who pick up gay men and rob them, and sometimes beat them up or kill them while they're at it to prove how straight they are. And you're worrying because you gave a kid like that a bloody lip?"

I shook my head. "I'm worrying because my judgment wasn't sound."

"Because you were drunk."

"And didn't even know it."

"Was your judgment off the night you shot the two holdup men?

The night that Puerto Rican girl got killed?"

"You're a pretty sharp lady, aren't you?"

"A fucking genius."

"That's the question, I guess. And the answer is no, it wasn't. I hadn't had much to drink and I wasn't feeling it. But-"

"But you got echoes just the same."

"Right."

"And didn't want to look straight at them, any more than Karen Ettinger wants to look straight at the fact that she thinks her husband might have murdered his first wife."

"A very sharp lady."

"They don't come any sharper. Feel better now?"

"Uh-huh."

"Talking helps. But you kept it so far inside you didn't even know it was there." She yawned. "Being a sharp lady is tiring work."

"I can believe it."

"Want to go to bed?"

"Sure."

BUT I didn't stay the night. I thought I might, but I was still awake when her breathing changed to indicate that she was sleeping. I lay first on one side and then on the other, and it was clear I wasn't ready to sleep. I got out of bed and padded quietly into the other room.

I dressed, then stood at the window and looked out at Lispenard Street. There was plenty of Scotch left but I didn't want to drink any of it.

I let myself out. A block away on Canal Street I managed to flag a cab. I got uptown in time to catch the last half-hour or so at Armstrong's, but I said the hell with it and went straight to my room.

I got to sleep eventually.

Chapter 14

I had a night of dreams and shallow sleep. The dog, Bandy, turned up in one of the dreams. He wasn't really dead. His death had been faked as part of some elaborate scam. He told me all this, told me too that he'd always been able to talk but had been afraid to disclose this talent. "If I'd only known," I marveled, "what conversations we could have had!"

I awoke refreshed and clearheaded and fiercely hungry. I had bacon and eggs and home fries at the Red Flame and read the News.

They'd caught the First Avenue Slasher, or at the least had arrested someone they said was the Slasher. A photograph of the suspect bore a startling resemblance to the police artist's sketch that had run earlier.

That doesn't happen too often.

I was on my second cup of coffee when Vinnie slid into the booth across from me. "Woman in the lobby," he said.

"For me?"

He nodded. "Young, not bad-looking. Nice clothes, nice hair. Gave me a couple of bucks to point you out when you came in. I don't even know if you're comin' back, so I figured I'd take a chance, look here and there and see if I could find you. I got Eddie coverin' the desk for me.

You comin' back to the hotel?"

"I hadn't planned to."

"What you could do, see, you could look her over and gimme a sign to point you out or not point you out. I'd just as soon earn the couple of bucks, but I'm not gonna go and retire on it, you know what I mean? If you want to duck this dame-"

"You can point me out," I said. "Whoever she is."

He went back to the desk. I finished my coffee and the paper and took my time returning to the hotel.

When I walked in Vinnie nodded significantly toward the wing chair over by the cigarette machine, but he needn't have bothered. I'd have spotted her without help. She looked utterly out of place, a well-groomed, well-coiffed, color-coordinated suburban princess who'd found her way to the wrong part of Fifty-seventh Street. A few blocks east she might have been having an adventure, making the rounds of the art galleries, looking for a print that would go well with the mushroom-toned drapes in the family room.

I let Vinnie earn his money, strolled past her, stood waiting for the elevator. Its doors were just opening when she spoke my name.

I said, "Hello, Mrs. Ettinger."

"How-"

"Saw your picture on your husband's desk. And I probably would have recognized your voice, although I've only heard it over the phone."

The blonde hair was a little longer than in the picture in Douglas Ettinger's photo cube, and the voice in person was less nasal, but there was no mistaking her.

"I heard your voice a couple of times. Once when I called you, once when you called me, and again when I called you back."

"I thought that was you," she said. "It frightened me when the phone rang and you didn't say anything."

"I just wanted to make sure I'd recognized the voice."

"I called you since then. I called twice yesterday."

"I didn't get any messages."

"I didn't leave any. I don't know what I'd have said if I reached you. Is there someplace more private where we can talk?"

I took her out for coffee, not to the Red Flame but to another similar place down the block. On the way out Vinnie tipped me a wink and a sly smile. I wonder how much money she'd given him.

Less, I'm sure, than she was prepared to give me. We were no sooner settled with our coffee than she put her purse on the table and gave it a significant tap.

"I have an envelope in here," she announced. "There's five thousand dollars in it."

"That's a lot of cash to be carrying in this town."

"Maybe you'd like to carry it for me." She studied my face, and when I failed to react she leaned forward, dropping her voice conspiratorially. "The money's for you, Mr. Scudder. Just do what Mr.

London already asked you to do. Drop the case."

"What are you afraid of, Mrs. Ettinger?"

"I just don't want you poking around in our lives."

"What is it you think I might find there?" Her hand clutched her purse, seeking security in the presumptive power of five thousand dollars. Her nail polish was the color of iron rust. Gently I said,

"Do you think your husband killed his first wife?"

"No!"

"Then what have you got to be afraid of?"

"I don't know."

"When did you meet your husband, Mrs. Ettinger?"

She met my eyes, didn't answer.

"Before his wife was killed?" Her fingers kneaded her handbag.

"He went to college on Long Island.

You're younger than he is, but you could have known him then."

"That was before he even knew her," she said. "Long before they were married. Then we happened to run into each other again after her death."

"And you were afraid I'd find that out?"

"I-"

"You were seeing him before she died, weren't you?"

"You can't prove that."

"Why would I have to prove it? Why would I even want to prove it?"

She opened the purse. Her fingers clumsy with the clasp but she got the bag open and took out a manila bank envelope. "Five thousand dollars," she said.

"Put it away."

"Isn't it enough? It's a lot of money. Isn't five thousand dollars a lot of money for doing nothing?"

"It's too much. You didn't kill her, did you, Mrs. Ettinger?"

"Me?" She had trouble getting a grip on the question. "Me? Of course not."

"But you were glad when she died."

"That's horrible," she said. "Don't say that."

"You were having an affair with him. You wanted to marry him, and then she was killed. How could you help being glad?"

Her eyes were pitched over my shoulder, gazing off into the distance. Her voice was as remote as her gaze. She said, "I didn't know she was pregnant. He said … he said he hadn't known that either. He told me they weren't sleeping together. Having sex, I mean. Of course they slept together, they shared a bed, but he said they weren't having sex. I believed him."

The waitress was approaching to refill our coffee cups. I held up a hand to ward off the interruption.

Karen Ettinger said, "He said she was carrying another man's child.

Because it couldn't have been his baby."

"Is that what you told Charles London?"

"I never spoke to Mr. London."

"Your husband did, though, didn't he? Is that what he told him? Is that what London was afraid would come out if I stayed on the case?"

Her voice was detached, remote. "He said she was pregnant by another man. A black man. He said the baby would have been black."

"That's what he told London."

"Yes."

"Had he ever told you that?"

"No. I think it was just something he made up to influence Mr.

London." She looked at me, and her eyes showed me a little of the person hidden beneath the careful suburban exterior. "Just like the rest of it was something he made up for my sake. It was probably his baby."

"You don't think she was having an affair?"

"Maybe. Maybe she was. But she must have been sleeping with him, too. Or else she would have been careful not to get pregnant.

Women aren't stupid." She blinked her eyes several times. "Except about some things. Men always tell their girlfriends that they've stopped sleeping with their wives. And it's always a lie."

"Do you think that-"

She rolled right over my question. "He's probably telling her that he's not sleeping with me anymore,"

she said, her tone very matter-of-fact. "And it's a lie."

"Telling whom?"

"Whoever he's having an affair with."

"Your husband is currently having an affair with someone?"

"Yes," she said, and frowned. "I didn't know that until just now. I knew it, but I didn't know that I knew it. I wish you had never taken this case. I wish Mr. London had never heard of you in the first place."

"Mrs. Ettinger-"

She was standing now, her purse gripped in both hands, her face showing her pain. "I had a good marriage," she insisted. "And what have I got now? Will you tell me that? What have I got now?"

Chapter 15

I don't suppose she wanted an answer. I certainly didn't have one for her, and she didn't hang around to find out what else I might have to say. She walked stiffly out of the coffee shop. I stayed long enough to finish my own coffee, then left a tip and paid the check. Not only hadn't I taken her five thousand dollars, but I'd wound up buying her coffee.

It was a nice day out and I thought I'd kill a little time by walking part of the way to my appointment with Lynn London. As it turned out I walked all the way downtown and east, stopping once to sit on a park bench and another time for coffee and a roll. When I crossed Fourteenth Street I ducked into Dan Lynch's and had the first drink of the day. I'd thought earlier that I might switch to Scotch, which had once again spared me a hangover, but I'd ordered a shot of bourbon with a short beer for a chaser before I remembered my decision. I drank it down and enjoyed the warmth of it. The saloon had a rich beery smell and I enjoyed that, too, and would have liked to linger a while. But I'd already stood up the schoolteacher once.

I found the school, walked in. No one questioned my entering it or stopped me in the corridors. I located Room 41 and stood in the doorway for a moment, studying the woman seated at the blond oak desk. She was reading a book and unaware of my presence. I knocked on the open door and she looked up at me.

"I'm Matthew Scudder," I said.

"And I'm Lynn London. Come in. Close the door."

She stood up and we shook hands. There was no place for me to sit, just child-sized desks. The children's artwork and test papers, some marked with gold or silver stars, were tacked on bulletin boards. There was a problem in long division worked out in yellow chalk on the blackboard. I found myself checking the arithmetic.

"You wanted a picture," Lynn London was saying. "I'm afraid I'm not much on family memorabilia.

This was the best I could do. This was Barbara in college."

I studied the photo, glanced from it to the woman standing beside me. She caught the eye movement.

"If you're looking for a resemblance," she said, "don't waste your time. She looked like our mother."

Lynn favored her father. She had the same chilly blue eyes. Like him she wore glasses, but hers had heavy rims and rectangular lenses.

Her brown hair was pulled back and coiled in a tight bun on the back of her head. There was a severity in her face, a sharpness to her features, and although I knew she was only thirty-three she looked several years older. There were lines at the corners of her eyes, deeper ones at the corners of her mouth.

I couldn't get much from Barbara's picture. I'd seen police photos of her after death, high-contrast black and whites shot in the kitchen on Wyckoff Street, but I wanted something that would give me a sense of the person and Lynn's photograph didn't supply that, either. I may have been looking for more than a photograph could furnish.

She said, "My father's afraid you'll drag Barbara's name through the mud. Will you?"

"I hadn't planned on it."

"Douglas Ettinger told him something and he's afraid you'll tell it to the world. I wish I knew what it was."

"He told your father that your sister was carrying a black man's child."

"Holy Jesus. Is that true?"

"What do you think?"

"I think Doug's a worm. I've always thought that. Now I know why my father hates you."

"Hates me?"

"Uh-huh. I wondered why. In fact I wanted to meet you mostly to find out what kind of man would inspire such a strong reaction in my father. You see, if it weren't for you he wouldn't have been given that piece of information about his sainted daughter. If he hadn't hired you, and if you hadn't talked to Doug-you did talk to Doug, I assume?"

"I met him. At the store in Hicksville."

"If you hadn't, he wouldn't have told my father something my father emphatically did not want to be told. I think he'd prefer to believe that both of his daughters are virgins. Well, he may not care so much about me. I had the temerity to get divorced so that makes me beyond redemption. He'd be sick if I got into an interracial romance, because after all there's a limit, but I don't think he cares if I have affairs.

I'm already damaged goods." Her voice was flat, less bitter than the words she was speaking. "But Barbara was a saint. If I got killed he wouldn't hire you in the first place, but if he did he wouldn't care what you found. With Barbara it's a different story altogether."

"Was she a saint?"

"We weren't that close." She looked away, picked up a pencil from the desk top. "She was my big sister. I put her on a pedestal and wound up seeing her feet of clay, and I went through a period of holier-than-thou contempt for her. I might have outgrown that but then she was killed, so I had all that guilt over the way I'd felt about her." She looked at me. "This is one of the things I've been working on in therapy."

"Was she having an affair while she was married to Ettinger?"

"She wouldn't have told me if she had been. The one thing she did tell me was that he was playing around. She said he made passes at their friends and that he was screwing his welfare clients. I don't know if that was true or not. He never made a pass at me."

She said that last as if it was one more item on a long list of resentments. I talked with her for another ten minutes and didn't learn anything beyond the fact that Barbara Ettinger's death had had an impact on her sister's life, and that wasn't news. I wondered how different Lynn had been nine years ago, and how different she might have turned out if Barbara had lived. Perhaps it was all there already, all locked in place, the bitterness, the emotional armor. I wondered-although I could probably have guessed-what Lynn's own marriage had been like. Would she have married the same man if Barbara had been alive? Would she have divorced him if she did?

I left there with a useless photograph and a head full of irrelevant-or unanswerable-questions. I left, too, glad to escape from the woman's cramped personality. Dan Lynch's bar was just a couple blocks uptown, and I turned toward it, remembering the dark wood, the warmth, the boozy, beery aroma.

They were all afraid I'd dig her up, I thought, and it was impossible because she was buried impossibly deep. The bit of poetry Jan had read came to mind and I tried to recall just how it went. Deep with the first dead? Was that right?

I decided I wanted the exact wording. More than that, I wanted the whole poem. I had a vague recollection of a branch library somewhere around there on Second Avenue. I walked a block north, didn't find it, turned around and walked downtown. There was indeed a library, right where I'd remembered it, a squarish three-story building with a nicely ornamented marble facade. A sign in the door gave the hours, and they were closed on Wednesdays.

All of the branch libraries have cut back on their hours, added closed days. Part of the financial pinch.

The city can't afford anything, and the administration goes around like an old miser closing off unused rooms in a sprawling old house. The police force is ten thousand men below what it used to be.

Everything drops but the rents and the crime rate.

I walked another block and hit St. Marks Place and knew there'd be a bookstore around, and one that would most likely have a poetry section. The busiest commercial block of St. Marks Place, and as trendy a block as the East Village possesses, runs between Second and Third Avenues. I turned right and walked toward Third, and two-thirds of the way down the block I found a bookstore. They had a paperback edition of the collected poems of Dylan Thomas. I had to go through it a couple of times before I spotted the poem I was looking for, but it was there and I read it all the way through. "A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London" was the title. There were parts I didn't think I understood, but I liked the sound of them anyway, the weight and shape of the words.

The poem was long enough to discourage me from trying to copy it into my notebook. Besides, maybe I'd want to look at some of the other poems. I paid for the book and slipped it into my pocket.

FUNNY how little things nudge you in one direction or another. I had tired myself with all the walking I'd done. I wanted to catch a subway home, but I also wanted a drink and I stood for a moment on the sidewalk in front of the bookstore, trying to decide what to do and where to go. While I was standing there, two patrolmen walked by in uniform.

Both of them looked impossibly young, and one was so fresh-faced his uniform looked like a costume.

Across the street, a shop sign read "Haberman's." I don't know what they sold there.

I thought of Burton Havermeyer. I might have thought of him without having seen the cop or having my memory jostled by a name not unlike his. In any event I thought of him, and remembered that he had once lived on this street, that his wife still lived here. I couldn't remember the address, but it was still in my notebook. 212 St. Marks Place, along with the telephone number.

There was still no reason to go look at the building she lived in. He wasn't even part of the case I was working on, because my meeting with Louis Pinell had satisfied me that the little psychopath had killed Susan Potowski and had not killed Barbara Ettinger. But Havermeyer's life had been changed, and in a way that interested me, a way not unlike that in which mine had been changed by another death.

St. Marks Place starts at Third Avenue and the numbers get higher as you go eastward. The block between Second and First was more residential and less commercial. A couple of the row houses had ornate windows and letterboards near the entrance to indicate that they were churches. There was a Ukrainian church, a Polish Catholic church.

I walked to First Avenue, waited for the light, walked on across. I made my way down a quiet block, its houses less prepossessing and in poorer repair than on the preceding block. One of a group of parked cars I passed was a derelict, stripped of tires and hubcaps, the radio pulled out, the interior gutted. On the other side of the street three bearded and longhaired men in Hell's Angels colors were trying to get a motorcycle started.

The last number on the block was 132. The street deadended at the corner, where Avenue A formed the western boundary of Tompkins Square Park. I stood there looking at the house number, then at the park, first at one and then at the other.

From Avenue A east to the river are the blocks they call Alphabet City. The population runs to junkies and muggers and crazies. Nobody decent lives there on purpose, not if they can afford to live anywhere else.

I dragged out my notebook. The address was still the same, 212 St.

Marks Place.

I walked through Tompkins Square and across Avenue B. On my way through the park, drug dealers offered to sell me dope and pills and acid. Either I didn't look like a cop to them or they just didn't care.

On the other side of Avenue B, the numbers started at 300. And the street signs didn't call it St. Marks Place. It was East Eighth Street there.

I went back through the park again. At 130 St. Marks Place there was a bar called Blanche's Tavern. I went in. The place was a broken-down bucket of blood that smelled of stale beer and stale urine and bodies that needed washing. Perhaps a dozen of the bodies were there, most of them at the bar, a couple at tables. The place went dead silent when I walked into it. I guess I didn't look as though I belonged there, and I hope to God I never do.

I used the phone book first. The precinct in Sheepshead Bay could have made a mistake, or Antonelli could have read the number to me wrong, or I could have copied it incorrectly. I found him listed, Burton Havermeyer on West 103rd, but I didn't find any Havermeyers listed on St. Marks Place.

I was out of dimes. The bartender gave me change. His customers seemed more relaxed now that they realized I had no business with them.

I dropped a dime in the slot, dialed the number in my book. No answer.

I went out and walked a few doors to 112 St. Marks Place. I checked the mailboxes in the vestibule, not really expecting to find the name Havermeyer, then went back outside. I wanted a drink but Blanche's wasn't where I wanted to have it.

Any port in a storm. I had a straight shot of bourbon at the bar, a top-shelf brand. To my right, two men were discussing some mutual friends. "I told her not to go home with him," one of them was saying. "I told her he was no good and he'd beat her up and rip her off, and she went anyhow, took him on home, and he beat her up and ripped her off.

So where's she get off coming and crying to me?"

I tried the number again. On the fourth ring a boy answered it. I thought I'd misdialed, asked if I had the Havermeyer residence. He told me I did.

I asked if Mrs. Havermeyer was there.

"She's next door," he said. "Is it important? Because I could get her."

"Don't bother. I have to check the address for a delivery. What's the house number there?"

"Two twelve."

"Two twelve what?"

He started to tell me the apartment number. I told him I needed to know the name of the street.

"Two twelve St. Marks Place," he said.

I had a moment of the sort I have now and then had in dreams, where the sleeping mind confronts an impossible inconsistency and breaks through to the realization that it is dreaming. Here I was talking to some fresh-voiced child who insisted he lived at an address that did not exist.

Or perhaps he and his mother lived in Tompkins Square Park, with the squirrels.

I said, "What's that between?"

"Huh?"

"What are the cross streets? What block are you on?"

"Oh," he said. "Third and Fourth."

"What?"

"We're between Third and Fourth Avenues."

"That's impossible," I said.

"Huh?"

I looked away from the phone, half-expecting to see something entirely different from the interior of Blanche's Tavern. A lunar landscape, perhaps. St. Marks Place started at Third Avenue and ran east.

There was no St. Marks Place between Third and Fourth Avenues.

I said, "Where?"

"Huh? Look, mister, I don't-"

"Wait a minute."

"Maybe I should get my mother. I-"

"What borough?"

"Huh?"

"Are you in Manhattan? Brooklyn? The Bronx? Where are you, son?"

"Brooklyn."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure." He sounded close to tears. "We live in Brooklyn.

What do you want, anyway? What's the matter, are you crazy or something?"

"It's all right," I said. "You've been a big help. Thanks a lot."

I hung up, feeling like an idiot. Street names repeated throughout the five boroughs. I'd had no grounds to assume she lived in Manhattan.

I thought back, replayed what I could of my earlier conversation with the woman. If anything, I might have known that she didn't live in Manhattan. "He's in Manhattan," she had said of her husband. She wouldn't have put it that way if she'd been in Manhattan herself.

But what about my conversation with Havermeyer? "Your wife's still in the East Village," I'd said, and he'd agreed with me.

Well, maybe he'd just wanted the conversation to end. It was easier to agree with me than to explain that there was another St. Marks Place in Brooklyn.

Still …

I left Blanche's and hurried west to the bookstore where I'd bought the book of poems. They had a Hagstrom pocket atlas of the five boroughs. I looked up St. Marks Place in the back, turned to the appropriate map, found what I was looking for.

St. Marks Place, in Brooklyn as in Manhattan, extends for only three blocks. To the east, across Flatbush Avenue, the same street continues at an angle as St. Marks Avenue, stretching under that name clear to Brownsville.

To the west, St. Marks Place stops at Third Avenue-just as it does at an altogether different Third Avenue in Manhattan. On the other side of Third, Brooklyn's St. Marks Place has another name.

Wyckoff Street.

Chapter 16

It must have been around three o'clock when I spoke with the boy.

It was between six thirty and seven by the time I mounted the stoop of his building on West 103rd. I'd found things to do during the intervening hours.

I rang a couple of bells but not his, and someone buzzed me in.

Whoever it was peered at me from a doorway on the third floor but didn't challenge my right to pass. I stood at Havermeyer's door and listened for a moment. The television was on, tuned to the local news.

I didn't really expect him to shoot through the door but he did wear a gun as a security guard, and although he probably left it in the store each night I couldn't be sure he didn't have another one at home. They teach you to stand to the side of a door when you knock on it, so I did. I heard his footsteps approach the door, then his voice asking who it was.

"Scudder," I said.

He opened the door. He was in street clothes and probably left not only the gun but the entire uniform at the store each night. He had a can of beer in one hand. I asked if I could come in. His reaction time was slow but at length he nodded and made room for me. I entered and drew the door shut.

He said, "Still on that case, huh? Something I can do for you?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'll be glad to help if I can. Meantime, how about a beer?"

I shook my head. He looked at the can of beer he was holding, moved to set it down on a table, went over and turned off the television set. He held the pose for a moment and I studied his face in profile.

He didn't need a shave this time. He turned slowly, expectantly, as if waiting for the blow to fall.

I said, "I know you killed her, Burt."

I watched his deep brown eyes. He was rehearsing his denial, running it through his mind, and then there was a moment when he decided not to bother. Something went out of him.

"When did you know?"

"A couple of hours ago."

"When you left here Sunday I couldn't figure whether you knew or not. I thought maybe you were going cat-and-mouse with me. But I didn't get that feeling. I felt close to you, actually. I felt we were a couple of ex-cops, two guys who left the force for personal reasons. I thought maybe you were playing a part, setting a trap, but it didn't feel like it."

"I wasn't."

"How did you find out?"

"St. Marks Place. You didn't live in the East Village after all. You lived in Brooklyn three blocks away from Barbara Ettinger."

"Thousands of people lived that close to her."

"You let me go on thinking you lived in the East Village. I don't know if I'd have had a second thought about it if I'd known from the beginning that you had lived in Brooklyn. Maybe I would have. But most likely I wouldn't. Brooklyn's a big place. I didn't know there was a St. Marks Place in it so I certainly didn't know where it was in relation to Wyckoff Street. For all I knew, it could have been out in Sheepshead Bay near your precinct. But you lied about it."

"Just to avoid getting into a long explanation. It doesn't prove anything."

"It gave me a reason to take a look at you. And the first thing I took a look at was another lie you told me. You said you and your wife didn't have any kids. But I talked to your boy on the phone this afternoon, and I called back and asked him his father's name and how old he was. He must have wondered what I was doing asking him all those questions. He's twelve. He was three years old when Barbara Ettinger was killed."

"So?"

"You used to take him to a place on Clinton Street. The Happy Hours Child Care Center."

"You're guessing."

"No."

"They're out of business. They've been out of business for years."

"They were still in business when you left Brooklyn. Did you keep tabs on the place?"

"My ex-wife must have mentioned it," he said. Then he shrugged.

"Maybe I walked past there once.

When I was in Brooklyn visiting Danny."

"The woman who ran the day-care center is living in New York.

She'll remember you."

"After nine years?"

"That's what she says. And she kept records, Burt. The ledgers with the names and addresses of students and their parents, along with the record of payments. She packed all that stuff in a carton when she closed the business and never bothered to go through it and throw out the things she didn't need to keep anymore. She opened the box today.

She says she remembers you. You always brought the boy, she said. She never met your wife but she does remember you."

"She must have a good memory."

"You were usually in uniform. That's an easy thing to remember."

He looked at me for a moment, then turned and walked over to the window and stood looking out of it.

I don't suppose he was looking at anything in particular.

"Where'd you get the icepick, Burt?"

Without turning he said, "I don't have to admit to anything. I don't have to answer any questions."

"Of course you don't."

"Even if you were a cop I wouldn't have to say anything. And you're not a cop. You've got no authority."

"You're absolutely right."

"So why should I answer your questions?"

"You've been sitting on it a long time, Burt."

"So?"

"Doesn't it get to you a little? Keeping it inside all that time?"

"Oh, God," he said. He went over to a chair, dropped into it. "Bring me that beer," he said. "Could you do that for me?"

I gave it to him. He asked me if I was sure I didn't want one for myself. No thanks, I said. He drank some beer and I asked him where he got the icepick.

"Some store," he said. "I don't remember."

"In the neighborhood?"

"I think in Sheepshead Bay. I'm not sure."

"You knew Barbara Ettinger from the day-care center."

"And from the neighborhood. I used to see her around the neighborhood before I started taking Danny to the center."

"And you were having an affair with her?"

"Who told you that? No, I wasn't having an affair with her. I wasn't having an affair with anybody."

"But you wanted to."

"No."

I waited, but he seemed willing to leave it there. I said, "Why did you kill her, Burt?"

He looked at me for a moment, then looked down, then looked at me again. "You can't prove anything," he said.

I shrugged.

"You can't. And I don't have to tell you anything." A deep breath, a long sigh. "Something happened when I saw the Potowski woman," he said. "Something happened."

"What do you mean?"

"Something happened to me. Inside of me. Something came into my head and I couldn't get rid of it. I remember standing and hitting myself in the forehead but I couldn't get it out of my mind."

"You wanted to kill Barbara Ettinger."

"No. Don't help me out, okay? Let me find the words by myself."

"I'm sorry."

"I looked at the dead woman and it wasn't her I saw on the floor, it was my wife. Every time the picture came back to me, the murder scene, the woman on the floor, I saw my wife in the picture. And I couldn't get it out of my head to kill her that way."

He took a little sip of beer. Over the top of the can he said, "I used to think about killing her. Plenty of times I thought that it was the only way out. I couldn't stand being married. I was alone, my parents were dead, I never had any brothers or sisters, and I thought I needed somebody. Besides, I knew she needed me. But it was wrong. I hated being married. It was around my neck like a collar that's too small for you, it was choking me and I couldn't get out of it."

"Why couldn't you just leave her?"

"How could I leave her? How could I do that to her? What kind of a man leaves a woman like that?"

"Men leave women every day."

"You don't understand, do you?" Another sigh. "Where was I?

Yeah. I used to think about killing her. I would think about it, and I would think, sure, and the first thing they'd do is check you inside and out, and one way or another they'll hang it on you, because they always go to the husband first and ninety percent of the time that's who did it, and they'll break your story down and break you down and where does that leave you? But then I saw the Potowski woman and it was all there.

I could kill her and make it look like the Icepick Prowler had one more on his string. I saw what we did with the Potowski killing. We just bucked it to Manhattan South, we didn't hassle the husband or anything like that."

"So you decided to kill her."

"Right."

"Your wife."

"Right."

"Then how does Barbara Ettinger come into this?"

"Oh, God," he said.

I waited him out.

"I was afraid to kill her. My wife, I mean. I was afraid something would go wrong. I thought, suppose I start and I can't go through with it?

I had the icepick and I would take it out and look at it and-I remember now, I bought it on Atlantic Avenue. I don't even know if the store's still there."

"It doesn't matter."

"I know. I had visions of, you know, starting to stab her and stopping, of not being able to finish the job, and the things that were going through my mind were driving me crazy. I guess I was crazy. Of course I was."

He drank from the beer can. "I killed her for practice," he said.

"Barbara Ettinger."

"Yes. I had to find out if I could do it. And I told myself it would be a precaution. One more icepick killing in Brooklyn, so that when my wife got murdered three blocks away it would be just one more in the string. And it would be the same. Maybe no matter how I did it they'd notice a difference between it and the real icepick killings, but they would never have a reason to suspect me of killing some stranger like the Ettinger woman, and then my wife would be killed the same way, and-but that was just what I was telling myself. I killed her because I was afraid to kill my wife and I had to kill someone."

"You had to kill someone?"

"I had to." He leaned forward, sat on the edge of his chair. "I couldn't get it out of my mind. Do you know what it's like when you can't get something out of your mind?"

"Yes."

"I couldn't think who to pick. And then one day I took Danny to the day-care center and she and I talked the way we always did, and the idea came to me. I thought of killing her and the thought fit."

"What do you mean, 'the thought fit'?"

"She belonged in the picture. I could see her, you know, on the kitchen floor. So I started watching her.

When I wasn't working I would hang around the neighborhood and keep tabs on her."

She had sensed that someone was following her, watching her.

And she'd been afraid, ever since the Potowski murder, that someone was stalking her.

"And I decided it would be all right to kill her. She didn't have any children. Nobody was dependent upon her. And she was immoral. She flirted with me, she flirted with men at the day-care center. She had men to her apartment when her husband was out. I thought, if I screwed it up and they knew it wasn't the Icepick Prowler, there would be plenty of other suspects. They'd never get to me."

I asked him about the day of the murder.

"My shift ended around noon that day. I went over to Clinton Street and sat in a coffee shop at the counter where I could keep an eye on the place. When she left early I followed her. I was across the street watching her building when a man went into it. I knew him, I'd seen him with her before."

"Was he black?"

"Black? No. Why?"

"No reason."

"I don't remember what he looked like. He was with her for a half-hour or so. Then he left. I waited a little while longer, and something told me, I don't know, I just knew this was the right time. I went up and knocked on her door."

"And she let you in?"

"I showed her my shield. And I reminded her that she knew me from the day-care center, that I was Danny's father. She let me in."

"And?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Are you sure of that?"

I guess he thought it over. Then he said, "We were in the kitchen.

She was making me a cup of coffee, she had her back to me, and I put one hand over her mouth and jabbed the icepick into her chest. I wanted to get her heart right away, I didn't want her to suffer. I kept stabbing her in the heart and she collapsed in my arms and I let her fall to the floor."

He raised his liquid brown eyes to mine. "I think she was dead right then," he said. "I think she died right away."

"And you went on stabbing her."

"When I thought about it before I did it, I always went crazy and stabbed over and over like a maniac. I had that picture in my mind. But I couldn't do it that way. I had to make myself stab her and I was sick, I thought I was going to throw up, and I had to keep on sticking that icepick into her body and-" He broke off, gasping for breath. His face was drawn and his pale complexion was ghostly.

"It's all right," I said.

"Oh, God."

"Take it easy, Burt."

"God, God."

"You only stabbed one of her eyes."

"It was so hard," he said. "Her eyes were wide open. I knew she was dead, I knew she couldn't see anything, but those eyes were just staring at me. I had the hardest time making myself stab her in the eye. I did it once and then I just couldn't do it again. I tried but I just couldn't do it again."

"And then?"

"I left. No one saw me leave. I just left the building and walked away. I put the icepick down a sewer. I thought, I did it, I killed her and I got away with it, but I didn't feel as though I got away with anything.

I felt sick to my stomach. I thought about what I had done and I couldn't believe I'd really done it.

When the story was on television and in the papers I couldn't believe it. I thought that someone else must have done it."

"And you didn't kill your wife."

He shook his head. "I knew I could never do something like that again. You know something? I've thought about all of it, over and over, and I think I was out of my mind. In fact I'm sure of it.

Something about seeing Mrs. Potowski, those pools of blood in her eyes, those stab wounds all over her body, it did something to me. It made me crazy, and I went on being crazy until Barbara Ettinger was dead. Then I was all right again, but she was dead.

"All of a sudden certain things were clear. I couldn't stay married anymore, and for the first time I realized I didn't have to. I could leave my wife and Danny. I had thought that would be a horrible thing to do, but here I'd been planning on killing her, and now I'd actually killed somebody and I knew how much more horrible that was than anything else I could possibly do to her, like leaving."

I led him through it again, went over a few points. He finished his beer but didn't get another. I wanted a drink, but I didn't want beer and I didn't want to drink with him. I didn't hate him. I don't know exactly what I felt for him. But I didn't want to drink with him.

HE broke a silence to say, "Nobody can prove any of this. It doesn't matter what I told you. There are no witnesses and there's no evidence."

"People could have seen you in the neighborhood."

"And still remember nine years later? And remember what day it was?"

He was right, of course. I couldn't imagine a District Attorney who'd even try for an indictment. There was nothing to make a case out of.

I said, "Why don't you put a coat on, Burt."

"What for?"

"We'll go down to the Eighteenth Precinct and talk to a cop named Fitzroy. You can tell him what you told me."

"That'd be pretty stupid, wouldn't it?"

"Why?"

"All I have to do is keep on the way I've been. All I have to do is keep my mouth shut. Nobody can prove anything. They couldn't even try to prove anything."

"That's probably true."

"And you want me to confess."

"That's right."

His expression was childlike. "Why?"

To tie off the ends, I thought. To make it neat. To show Frank Fitzroy that he was right when he said I just might solve the case.

What I said was, "You'll feel better."

"That's a laugh."

"How do you feel now, Burt?"

"How do I feel?" He considered the question. Then, as if surprised by his answer, "I feel okay."

"Better than when I got here?"

"Yeah."

"Better than you've felt since Sunday?"

"I suppose so."

"You never told anybody, did you?"

"Of course not."

"Not a single person in nine years. You probably didn't think about it much, but there were times when you couldn't help thinking about it, and you never told anybody."

"So?"

"That's a long time to carry it."

"God."

"I don't know what they'll do with you, Burt. You may not do any time. Once I talked a murderer into killing himself, and he did it, and I wouldn't do that again. And another time I talked a murderer into confessing because I convinced him he would probably kill himself if he didn't confess first. I don't think you'd do that I think you've lived with this for nine years and maybe you could go on living with it. But do you really want to? Wouldn't you rather let go of it?"

"God," he said. He put his head in his hands. "I'm all mixed up," he said.

"You'll be all right."

"They'll put my picture in the papers. It'll be on the news. What's that going to make it like for Danny?"

"You've got to worry about yourself first."

"I'll lose my job," he said. "What'll happen to me?"

I didn't answer that one. I didn't have an answer.

"Okay," he said suddenly.

"Ready to go?"

"I guess."

On the way downtown he said, "I think I knew Sunday. I knew you'd keep poking at it until you found out I did it. I had an urge to tell you right then."

"I got lucky. A couple of coincidences put me on St. Marks Place and I thought of you and had nothing better to do than see the house where you used to live. But the numbers stopped at One-three-two."

"If it wasn't that coincidence there would have been another one. It was all set from the minute you walked into my apartment. Maybe earlier than that. Maybe it was a sure thing from the minute I killed her.

Some people get away with murder but I guess I'm not one of them."

"Nobody gets away with it. Some people just don't get caught."

"Isn't that the same thing?"

"You didn't get caught for nine years, Burt. What were you getting away with?"

"Oh," he said. "I get it."

AND just before we got to the One-Eight I said, "There's something I don't understand. Why did you think it would be easier to kill your wife than to leave her? You said several times that it would be such a terrible thing to leave a woman like her, that it would be a contemptible act, but men and women leave each other all the time. You couldn't have been worried about what your parents would think because you didn't have any family left. What made it such a big deal?"

"Oh," he said. "You don't know."

"Don't know what?"

"You haven't met her. You didn't go out there this afternoon, did you?"

"No."

("I never see him … I never see my former husband … I don't see my husband and I don't see the check. Do you see? Do you?")

"The Potowski woman, with her eyes staring up through the blood.

When I saw her like that it just hit me so hard I couldn't deal with it. But you wouldn't understand that because you don't know about her."

("Perhaps he has a phone and perhaps it's in the book. You could look it up. I know you'll excuse me if I don't offer to look it up for you.") The answer was floating out there. I could very nearly reach out and touch it. But my mind wouldn't fasten onto it.

He said, "My wife is blind."

Chapter 17

It turned out to be a long night, although the trip to Twentieth Street was the least of it. I shared a cab down with Burton Havermeyer.

We must have talked about something en route but I can't remember what. I paid for the cab, took Havermeyer to the squad room and introduced him to Frank Fitzroy, and that was pretty much the extent of my contribution. I, after all, was not the arresting officer. I had no official connection with the case and had performed no official function.

I didn't have to be around while a stenographer took down Havermeyer's statement, nor was I called upon to make a statement of my own.

Fitzroy slipped away long enough to walk me down to the corner and buy me a drink at P. J. Reynolds.

I didn't much want to accept his invitation. I wanted a drink, but I wasn't much more inclined to drink with him than with Havermeyer. I felt closed off from everyone, locked up tight within myself where dead women and blind women couldn't get at me.

The drinks came and we drank them, and he said, "Nice piece of work, Matt."

"I got lucky."

"You don't get that kind of luck. You make it. Something got you onto Havermeyer in the first place."

"More luck. The other two cops from the Six-One were dead. He was odd man in."

"You could have talked to him on the phone. Something made you go see him."

"Lack of anything better to do."

"And then you asked him enough questions so that he told a couple lies that could catch him up further down the line."

"And I was in the right place at the right time, and the right shop sign caught my eye when the right pair of cops walked in front of me."

"Oh, shit," he said, and signaled the bartender. "Put yourself down if you want."

"I just don't think I did anything to earn a field promotion to Chief of Detectives. That's all."

The bartender came around. Fitzroy pointed to our glasses and the bartender filled them up again. I let him pay for this round, as he had paid for the first one.

He said, "You won't get any official recognition out of this, Matt.

You know that, don't you?"

"I'd prefer it that way."

"What we'll tell the press is the reopening of the case with the arrest of Pinell made him conscience-stricken, and he turned himself in.

He talked it over with you, another ex-cop like himself, and decided to confess. How does that sound?"

"It sounds like the truth."

"Just a few things left out is all. What I was saying, you won't get anything official out of it, but people around the department are gonna know better. You follow me?"

"So?"

"So you couldn't ask for a better passport back onto the force is what it sounds like to me. I was talking to Eddie Koehler over at the Sixth. You wouldn't have any trouble getting 'em to take you on again."

"It's not what I want."

"That's what he said you'd say. But are you sure it isn't? All right, you're a loner, you got a hard-on for the world, you hit this stuff-" he touched his glass "-a little harder than you maybe should. But you're a cop, Matt, and you didn't stop being one when you gave the badge back."

I thought for a moment, not to consider his proposal but to weigh the words of my reply. I said,

"You're right, in a way. But in another way you're wrong, and I stopped being a cop before I handed in my shield."

"All because of that kid that died."

"Not just that." I shrugged. "People move and their lives change."

"Well," he said, and then he didn't say anything for a few minutes, and then we found something less unsettling to talk about. We discussed the impossibility of keeping three-card monte dealers off the street, given that the fine for the offense is seventy-five dollars and the profit somewhere between five hundred and a thousand dollars a day. "And there's this one judge," he said, "who told a whole string of them he'd let

'em off without a fine if they'd promise not to do it again. 'Oh, Ah promises, yo' honah.'

To save seventy-five dollars, those assholes'd promise to grow hair on their tongues."

We had a third round of drinks, and I let him pay for that round, too, and then he went back to the station house and I caught a cab home.

I checked the desk for messages, and when there weren't any I went around the corner to Armstrong's, and that's where it got to be a long night.

But it wasn't a bad one. I drank my bourbon in coffee, sipping it, making it last, and my mood didn't turn black or ugly. I talked to people intermittently but spent a lot of time replaying the day, listening to Havermeyer's explanation. Somewhere in the course of things I gave Jan a call to tell her how things had turned out. Her line was busy. Either she was talking to someone or she had the phone off the hook, and this time I didn't get the operator to find out which.

I had just the right amount to drink, for a change. Not so much that I blacked out and lost my memory.

But enough to bring sleep without dreams.

BY the time I got down to Pine Street the next day, Charles London knew what to expect. The morning papers had the story. The line they carried was pretty much what I'd expected from what Fitzroy had said. I was mentioned by name as the fellow ex-cop who'd heard Havermeyer's confession and escorted him in so he could give himself up for the murder of Barbara Ettinger.

Even so, he didn't look thrilled to see me.

"I owe you an apology," he said. "I managed to become convinced that your investigations would only have a damaging effect upon a variety of people. I thought-"

"I know what you thought."

"It turned out that I was wrong. I'm still concerned about what might come out in a trial, but it doesn't look as though there will be a trial."

"You don't have to worry about what comes out anyway," I said.

"Your daughter wasn't carrying a black baby." He looked as though he'd been slapped. "She was carrying her husband's baby. She may very well have been having an affair, probably in retaliation for her husband's behavior, but there's no evidence that it had an interracial element. That was an invention of your former son-in-law's."

"I see." He took his little walk to the window and made sure that the harbor was still out there. He turned to me and said, "At least this has turned out well, Mr. Scudder."

"Oh?"

"Barbara's killer has been brought to justice. I no longer have to worry who might have killed her, or why. Yes, I think we can say it's turned out well."

He could say it if he wanted. I wasn't sure that justice was what Burton Havermeyer had been brought to, or where his life would go from here. I wasn't sure where justice figured in the ordeal that was just beginning for Havermeyer's son and his blind ex-wife. And if London didn't have to worry that Douglas Ettinger had killed his daughter, what he'd learned about Ettinger's character couldn't have been monumentally reassuring.

I thought, too, of the fault lines I'd already detected in Ettinger's second marriage. I wondered how long the blonde with the sunny suburban face would hold her space in his desk-top photo cube. If they split, would he be able to go on working for his second father-in-law?

Finally, I thought how people could adjust to one reality after another if they put their minds to it.

London had begun by believing that his daughter had been killed for no reason at all, and he'd adjusted to that. Then he came to believe that she had indeed been killed for a reason, and by someone who knew her well. And he'd set about adjusting to that. Now he knew that she'd been killed by a near-stranger for a reason that had nothing much to do with her. Her death had come in a dress rehearsal for murder, and in dying she'd preserved the life of the intended victim. You could see all that as part of some great design or you could see it as further proof that the world was mad, but either way it was a new reality to which he would surely adjust.

Before I left he gave me a check for a thousand dollars. A bonus, he said, and he assured me he wanted me to have it. I gave him no argument. When money comes with no strings on it, take it and put it in your pocket. I was still enough of a cop at heart to remember that much.

I tried Jan around lunchtime and there was no answer. I tried her again later in the afternoon and the line was busy three times running. It was around six when I finally reached her.

"You're hard to get hold of," I said.

"I was out some. And then I was on the phone."

"I was out some myself." I told her a lot of what had happened since I'd left her loft the previous afternoon, armed with the knowledge that Havermeyer's boy Danny had attended the Happy Hours Child Care Center. I told her why Barbara Ettinger had been killed, and I told her that Havermeyer's wife was blind.

"Jesus," she said.

We talked a little more, and I asked her what she was doing about dinner. "My client gave me a thousand dollars that I didn't do a thing to earn," I said, "and I feel a need to spend some of it frivolously before I piss the rest of it away on necessities."

"I'm afraid tonight's out," she said. "I was just making myself a salad."

"Well, do you want to hit a couple of high spots after you finish your salad? Any place but Blanche's Tavern is fine with me."

There was a pause. Then she said, "The thing is, Matthew, I have something on tonight."

"Oh."

"And it's not another date. I'm going to a meeting."

"A meeting?"

"An A.A. meeting."

"I see."

"I'm an alcoholic, Matthew. I've got to face the fact and I've got to deal with it."

"I didn't have the impression that you drank that much."

"It's not how much you drink. It's what it does to you. I have blackouts. I have personality changes. I tell myself I'm not going to drink and I do. I tell myself I'm going to have one drink and the next morning the bottle's empty. I'm an alcoholic."

"You were in A.A. before."

"That's right."

"I thought it didn't work for you."

"Oh, it was working fine. Until I drank. This time I want to give it a chance."

I thought for a minute. "Well, I think that's great," I said.

"You do?"

"Yes, I do," I said, and meant it. "I think it's terrific. I know it works for a lot of people and there's no reason why you can't make it work. You're going to a meeting tonight?"

"That's right. I was at one this afternoon."

"I thought they only had them at night."

"They have them all the time, and all over the city."

"How often do you have to go?"

"You don't have to do anything. They recommend ninety meetings in the first ninety days, but you can go to more. I have plenty of time. I can go to a lot of them."

"That's great."

"After the meeting this afternoon I was on the phone with somebody I knew when I was in the program last time. And I'm going to a meeting tonight, and that'll get me through today, and I'll have one day of sobriety."

"Uh-huh."

"That's how it's done, you see. You take it one day at a time."

"That's great." I wiped my forehead. It gets warm in a phone booth with the door closed. "When do those meetings end? Ten or ten thirty, something like that?"

"Ten o'clock."

"Well, suppose-"

"But people generally go out for coffee afterward."

"Uh-huh. Well, suppose I came by around eleven? Or later, if you figure you'll want to spend more than an hour over coffee."

"I don't think that's a very good idea, Matthew."

"Oh."

"I want to give this a fair shot. I don't want to start sabotaging myself before I even get started."

I said, "Jan? I wasn't planning to come over and drink with you."

"I know that."

"Or in front of you, as far as that goes. I won't drink when I'm with you. That's no problem."

"Because you can stop anytime you want to."

"I can certainly not drink when we're together."

Another pause, and when she spoke I could hear the strain in her voice. "God," she said. "Matthew, darling, it's not quite that simple."

"Oh?"

"One of the things they tell us is that we're powerless over people, places and things."

"I don't know what that means."

"It means to avoid those elements that can increase our desire to drink."

"And I'm one of those elements?"

"I'm afraid so."

I cracked the phone booth door, let a little air in. I said, "Well, what does that mean, exactly? That we never see each other again?"

"Oh, God."

"Just tell me the rules so I'll understand."

"Jesus, God. I can't think in terms of never again. I can't even think in terms of never having a drink again. I'm supposed to take it a day at a time, so let's do this in terms of today."

"You don't want to see me today."

"Of course I want to see you today! Oh, Jesus. Look, if you want to come over around eleven-"

"No," I said.

"What?"

"I said no. You were right the first time and I shouldn't be doing a number on you. I'm like my client, that's all. I've just got to adjust to a new reality. I think you're doing the right thing."

"Do you really?"

"Yes. And if I'm somebody you ought to stay away from, I think that's what you'd better do for the time being. And if we're supposed to get together later on, well, it'll happen."

A pause. Then, "Thank you, Matthew."

For what? I got out of the booth and went back upstairs to my room. I put on a clean shirt and tie and treated myself to a good steak dinner at the Slate. It's a hangout for cops from John Jay College and Midtown South, but I was lucky enough not to see anyone that I knew. I had a big meal all by myself, with a martini in front and a brandy afterward.

I walked back to Ninth Avenue and passed St. Paul's. The church itself was closed now. I descended a narrow flight of steps to the basement. Not the big room in front where they have Bingo a couple nights a week, but a smaller room on the side where they have the meetings.

When you live in a neighborhood you know where different things are. Whether you have any interest in them or not.

I stood in front of the door for a minute or two. I felt a little light-headed, a little congested in the chest.

I decided that was probably from the brandy. It's a powerful stimulant. I'm not used to it, don't drink it often.

I opened the door and looked in. A couple dozen people sitting in folding chairs. A table holding a big coffee urn and a few stacks of Styrofoam cups. Some slogans taped to the wall-EASY DOES IT, KEEP

IT SIMPLE. The fucking wisdom of the ages.

She was probably in a room like this downtown. Some church basement in SoHo, say.

Best of luck, lady.

I stepped back, let the door shut, walked up the stairs. I had visions of the door opening behind me, people chasing after me and dragging me back. Nothing like that happened.

The tight feeling was still there in my chest.

The brandy, I told myself. Probably be a good idea to stay away from it. Stick to what you're used to.

Stick to bourbon.

I went on over to Armstrong's. A little bourbon would take the edge off the brandy rush. A little bourbon would take the edge off almost anything.

THE END

About the Author

The prolific author of more than fifty books and numerous short stories, Lawrence Block is a Mystery Writers of American Grand Master, a four-time winner of the Edgar Allan Poe and Shamus Awards, and the recipient of literary prizes from France, Germany, and Japan.

Block is a devout New Yorker who spends much of his time traveling.

Louis Pinell, the recently apprehended "Icepick Prowler," freely admits to having slain seven young women nine years ago-but he swears it was a copycat who killed Barbara Ettinger. Matthew Scudder believes him. But the trail to Ettinger's true murderer is twisted, dark and dangerous … and even colder than the almost decade-old corpse the p.i.

is determined to avenge.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17