A Ticket To The Boneyard

Lawrence Block - Scudder 08 - A Ticket to the Boneyard (1990) For Lenore Nathan Block Rosenberg

Hi, Mom!

Several of nature's people

I know, and they know me;

I feel for them a transport

Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,

Attended or alone,

Without a tighter breathing,

And zero at the bone.

— EMILY DICKINSON,

"The Snake"

A bloody and a sudden end,

Gunshot or a noose,

For Death who takes what man would keep,

Leaves what men would lose.

He might have had my sister,

My cousins by the score,

But nothing satisfied the fool

But my dear Mary Moore;

None other knows what pleasures man

At table or in bed.

What shall I do for pretty girls

Now my old bawd is dead?

— WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS,

"John Kinsella's Lament for

Mrs. Mary Moore"

New York had a cold snap that year right around the time of the World Series .Oakland and the Dodgers were in it, so our weather didn't affect the outcome. The Dodgers surprised everybody and won it in five, with Kirk Gibson and Hershiser providing the heroics. The Mets, who'd led their division since Opening Day, were in it through seven playoff games. They had the power and the pitching, but the Dodgers had something more. Whatever it was, it carried them all the way.

I watched one of the games at a friend's apartment and another at a saloon called Grogan's Open House and the rest in my hotel room. The weather stayed cold through the end of October and there were speculative stories in the papers about long hard winters. On the local news shows, reporters took camera crews to farms in Ulster County and got rustics to point out the thick coats on the livestock and the woolly fur on the caterpillars. Then the first week of November Indian summer came along and people were out on the streets in their shirtsleeves.

It was football season, but the New York teams weren't showing much.Cincinnati and Buffalo and the Bears were shaping up as the power in the NFL, and the best Giants linebacker since Sam Huff drew a thirty-day suspension for substance abuse, which was the current euphemism for cocaine. The first time this had happened he'd told reporters that he had learned a valuable lesson. This time he declined all interviews.

I kept busy and enjoyed the warm weather. I was doing some per diem work for a detective agency, an outfit called Reliable Investigations with offices in the Flatiron Building at Twenty-third and Broadway.

Their clients ran heavily to attorneys representing plaintiffs in negligence suits, and my work consisted largely of tracing potential witnesses and getting preliminary statements from them. I didn't like it much, but it would look good on paper if I decided to get myself properly credentialed as a licensed private investigator. I wasn't sure that I wanted to do this, but I wasn't sure that I didn't, and in the meantime I could keep busy and earn a hundred dollars a day.

I was between relationships. I guess that's what they call it. I had been keeping company for a while with a woman named Jan Keane, and that had ended some time ago. I wasn't certain it was done forever, but it was done for now, and the little dating I'd done since had led nowhere.

Most evenings I went to AA meetings, and afterward I generally hung out with friends from the program until it was time to go home and to bed. Sometimes, perversely, I went and hung out in a saloon instead, drinking Coke or coffee or soda water. That's not recommended, and I knew that, but I did it anyway.

Then, on a Tuesday night about ten days into the warm weather, the god who plays pinball with my world turned a shoulder to the machine and lurched into it. And the Tilt sign came on, bright and clear.

I had spent most of the day finding and interviewing a ferret-faced little man named Neudorf, who had presumably witnessed a collision involving a Radio Shack delivery van and a bicycle. Reliable had been retained by the bicyclist's attorney, and Neudorf was supposed to be able to testify that the van's driver had thrown open the door of his vehicle in such a manner that the bicyclist could not avoid running right into it.

Our client was one of those ambulance chasers who advertise on television, and he made his money on volume. His case looked solid enough, with or without Neudorf's testimony, and it figured to be settled out of court, but in the meantime everybody had to go through the motions. I was getting a hundred dollars a day for my part in the dance, and Neudorf was trying to find out what he could get for his. "I dunno,"

he kept saying. "You spend a couple days in court, you got your expenses, you got your loss of income, and you wanna do the right thing but how can you afford to do it, you know what I mean?"

I knew what he meant. I knew, too, that his testimony was worth nothing if we paid him for it and not much more than that if he wasn't well motivated to supply it. I let him think he'd get paid off under the table when he testified in court, and meanwhile I got his signature on a strong preliminary statement that might help our client get the case settled.

I didn't really care how the case was resolved. Both parties looked to be at fault. Neither one had been paying sufficient attention. It cost the van a door, and it cost the girl on the bicycle a broken arm and two broken teeth. She deserved to get something out of it, if not the three million dollars her lawyer was asking for. As far as that went, maybe Neudorf deserved something, too. Expert witnesses in civil and criminal proceedings get paid all the time— psychiatrists and forensics experts, lining up on one side or the other and contradicting the experts on the other side. Why not pay eyewitnesses, too? Why not pay everybody?

I wrapped up Neudorf around three, went back to Reliable's offices and typed up my report. AA Intergroup has its offices in the Flatiron Building , so I stopped on my way out and answered phones for an hour.

People call there all the time, out-of-town visitors looking for a meeting, drunks who are beginning to suspect that something may not be working for them, and people coming off a bender and looking for help to get into a detox or rehab. There are callers, too, who are just trying to stay sober a day at a time and need someone to talk to. Volunteers work the phones. It's not dramatic, like the 911

command center at Police Plaza or the hotline at Suicide Prevention League, but it's service and it keeps you sober. I don't think anybody ever got drunk while he was doing it.

I ate dinner at a Thai place on Broadway, and at six-thirty I met a fellow named Richie Gelman at a Columbus Circle coffee shop. We sat over cups of coffee for ten minutes before a woman named Toni rushed in, apologizing for having lost track of the time. We went down into the subway and took a couple of trains, the second one a BMT line that let us off at Jamaica Avenue and121st Street . That's a good ways out in Queens, in a neighborhood called Richmond Hill . We asked directions at a drugstore and walked half a dozen blocks to a Lutheran church. In the large basement room there were forty or fifty chairs set up, and some tables, and a lectern for the speaker. There were two large urns, one with coffee and the other with hot water for tea or instant decaf. There was a plate of oatmeal cookies with raisins, and there was a table of literature.

There are two basic types of AA meetings in the New York area.

At the discussion meetings, a single speaker talks for twenty minutes or so, and then the meeting is open for general discussion. At speaker meetings, two or three speakers tell their stories, and that takes the entire hour. This particular group in Richmond Hill held speaker meetings on Tuesday nights, and this particular Tuesday we were the speakers.

Groups all over the city send members to speak at other groups; otherwise we'd hear the same people telling the same stories all the time, and the whole thing would be even more boring than it already is.

Actually it's pretty interesting a fair percentage of the time, and sometimes it's better than a night out at a comedy club. When you speak at an AA meeting you're supposed to tell what your life used to be like, what happened, and what it's like now. Not surprisingly, a lot of the stories are pretty grim— people don't generally decide to quit drinking because they've been hurting their sides laughing all the time. Still, the grimmest stories come out funny some of the time, and that's how it went that night inRichmond Hill .

Toni went first. She'd been married for a time to a compulsive gambler, and she told how he had lost her in a poker game and won her back several months later. It was a story I'd heard before, but it was especially funny the way she told it this time. She got laughs all through her talk, and I guess her mood was infectious, because I followed her and found myself telling stories from my days on the job, first as a patrolman and then as a detective. I was coming up with things I hadn't even thought of in years, and they were coming out funny.

Then Richie finished out the hour. He'd run his own public-relations firm through years of blackout drinking, and some of his stories were wonderful. For years he had his first drink of the day every morning in a Chinese luncheonette onBayard Street . "I got off the subway, put a five-dollar bill on the counter, drank a double scotch neat, got back on the subway and rode to my office. I never said a word to them and they never said a word to me. I knew I was safe there, because what the hell did they know? And, more important, who would they tell?"

We had coffee and cookies afterward and one of the members gave us a lift to the subway. We rode back intoManhattan and uptown toColumbus Circle . It was past eleven by the time we got there, and Toni said she was hungry and asked if anybody wanted to get something to eat.

Richie begged off, saying he was tired and wanted to make an early night of it. I suggested the Flame, a coffee shop where a lot of the crowd from our home group generally winds up after a meeting.

"I think I'd like something a little more upscale," she said. "And more substantial. I missed dinner. I had a couple of cookies at the meeting, but aside from that I haven't eaten anything since lunch. Do you know a place called Armstrong's?"

I had to laugh, and she asked me what was so funny. "I used to live there," I said. "Before I got sober.

The place used to be onNinth Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth, which put it right around the corner from my hotel. I ate there, I drank there, I cashed checks there, I ran a tab there, I met clients there, Jesus, I did everything but sleep there. I probably did that, too, come to think of it."

"And now you don't go there anymore."

"I've tended to avoid it."

"Well, we can go someplace else. I didn't live around here when I was drinking so I just think of the place as a restaurant."

"We can go there."

"Are you sure?"

"Why not?''

The new Armstrong's is a block west, at Fifty-seventh and Tenth.

We took a table along the wall and I looked around while Toni made a pilgrimage to the ladies' room. Jimmy wasn't around, and there was no one in the joint I recognized, neither employees nor customers. The menu was more elaborate than it used to be, but the same sort of dishes were featured, and I recognized some of the photos and artwork on the walls. The general feel of the place had been upgraded and yuppified a notch, and the overall effect was more fern bar than saloon, but it wasn't all that different.

I said as much to Toni when she came back. She asked if they'd played classical music in the old days.

"All the time," I told her. "When he first opened up Jimmy had a jukebox, but he ripped it out and brought in Mozart and Vivaldi. It kept the kids out, and that made everybody happy."

"So you used to get drunk to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik?"

"It did the job."

She was a pleasant woman, a couple of years younger than I, sober about the same length of time. She managed a showroom for aSeventh Avenue manufacturer of women's wear, and she'd been having an affair for a year or two with one of her bosses. He was married, and for months now she'd been speaking up at meetings and saying she had to end the relationship, but her voice never carried much conviction and the affair survived.

She was a tall leggy woman, with black hair that I suspect she dyed and a squareness to her jawline and her shoulders. I liked her and thought her good-looking, but I wasn't attracted to her. Or she to me—

her lovers were always married and balding and Jewish, and I was none of the above, so that left us free to

be friends.

We were there well past midnight. She had a small salad and a plate of the black-bean chili. I had a cheeseburger, and we both drank a lot of coffee. Jimmy had always given you a good cup of coffee. I used to drink it laced with bourbon, but it was even good all by itself.

Toni lived at Forty-ninth and Eighth. I walked her home and dropped her at the lobby of her high-rise, then started back to my hotel.

Something stopped me before I'd gone more than a block. Maybe I was wired from speaking inRichmond Hill , or stirred up some from returning to Armstrong's after such a long absence. Maybe it was the coffee, maybe it was the weather, maybe it was the phase of the moon.

Whatever it was, I was restless. I didn't want to go back to my little room and its four walls.

I walked two blocks west and went to Grogan's.

I had no business there. Unlike Armstrong's, Grogan's is a pure ginmill. There's no food served, there's no classical music, and there are no pottedBoston ferns hanging from the ceiling. There's a jukebox, with selections by the Clancy Brothers and Bing Crosby and the Wolfe Tones, but it doesn't get much play.

There's a television set and a dart board, and a couple of mounted fish, and dark wood walls and a tile floor and a stamped-tin ceiling.

There's neon in the window advertising Guinness stout and Harp lager.

The Guinness is on draft.

Mick Ballou owns Grogan's, although someone else has his name on the license and ownership papers.

Ballou is a big man, a hard drinker, a career criminal, a brooding man of cold dark rage and sudden violence. Circumstance had thrown us together not too long ago, and some curious chemistry kept drawing me back. I hadn't figured it out yet.

The crowd was sparse, and Ballou himself wasn't there. I ordered a glass of club soda and sat at the bar with it. There was a movie playing on one of the cable stations, a colorized version of an old Warner Bros.

gangster movie. Edward G. Robinson was in it, and half a dozen others I recognized but couldn't name. Five minutes into the movie the bartender went over to the set and turned down the color-level knob, and the film was magically restored to its original black-and-white.

"Some things should be fucking left alone," he said.

I watched about half of the movie. When my club soda was gone I had a Coke, and when that was gone

I put a couple of dollars on the bar and went home.

* * *

Jacob was on the hotel desk. He's a mulatto, with freckles on his face and the backs of his hands, and curly red hair that's starting to go thin on top. He buys books of difficult crossword puzzles and Double-Crostics and works them in pen-and-ink, staying slightly buzzed all the while on terpin hydrate and codeine. The management has fired him a couple of times over the years for unspecified reasons, but they always hire him back.

He said, "Your cousin called."

"My cousin?"

"Been calling all night. Four, five calls, must of been." He plucked a sheaf of message slips from my pigeonhole, leaving the letters behind.

"One, two, three, four, five," he counted. "Says call her whenever you come in."

Someone must have died, and I wondered who. I wasn't even sure who was left. What family there was had long since scattered far and wide. Sometimes I got a card or two at Christmas, once in a great while a phone call if an uncle or cousin was in town and at loose ends. But what cousin did I have who would call more than once to make sure a message got to me?

Her, he'd said. Call her.

I reached for the handful of slips, scanned the top one. Cousin called, it read. Nothing else, and the time of the call was left blank.

"There's no number," I said.

"She said you'd know it."

"I don't even know who she is. Which cousin?"

He shook himself, straightened up in his chair. "Sorry," he said.

"Getting a little too relaxed here. I wrote her name on one of them slips.

I didn't write it each time. It was the same person over and over again."

I sorted the slips. Actually he'd written it twice, on what seemed to be the first two slips. Please call your cousin Frances, I read. And, on the other: Call cousin Frances.

"Frances," I said.

"That's it. That's the name."

Except I couldn't recall a Cousin Frances. Had one of my male cousins married a woman namedFrances

? Or wasFrances some cousin's child, a new cousin whose name I'd never managed to learn?

"You're sure it was a woman?"

" 'Course I'm sure."

"Because sometimes Francis is a man's name, and—"

"Oh, please. Don't you think I know that? It was a woman, said her name wasFrances . Don't you know your own cousin?"

Evidently I didn't. "She asked for me by name?"

"Said Matthew Scudder."

"And I was to call her as soon as I came in."

"That's right. Last time or two she called, it was already late, and that was when she stressed it. No matter how late, call her right away."

"And she didn't leave a number."

"Said you knew it."

I stood there, frowning, trying to think straight, and in a wink the years fell away and I was a cop, a detective attached to the Sixth Precinct. "Call for you, Scudder," someone was saying. "It's your cousin Frances."

"Oh, for God's sake," I said now.

"Something?"

"It's all right," I told Jacob. "I suppose it would have to be her. It couldn't be anybody else."

"She said—"

"I know what she said. It's all right, you got it straight. It just took me a minute, that's all."

He nodded. "Sometimes," he said, "it'll do that."

I didn't know the number. I had known it, of course. I had known it well for many years, but I hadn't called it in a while and couldn't summon it up from my memory. It was in my address book, though. I had recopied my address books several times since I'd last had occasion to call that number, but I must have known I'd want to call it again, because each time I'd chosen to preserve it.

Elaine Mardell, I had written. And an address onEast Fifty-first Street . And a phone number that was familiar to me once I saw it.

I have a phone in my room, but I didn't go upstairs to use it.

Instead I crossed the lobby to the pay phone, dropped a quarter in the slot, and made the call.

An answering machine picked up on the second ring, and Elaine's recorded voice repeated the phone number's final four digits and advised me to leave a message at the sound of the tone. I waited for it and said,

"This is your cousin returning your call. I'm home now, and you have the number, so—"

"Matt? Let me turn this thing off. There. Thank God you called."

"I was out late, I just got your message. And for a minute or two there I couldn't remember who my cousin Frances was supposed to be."

"I guess it's been a while."

"I guess it has."

"I need to see you."

"All right," I said. "I'm working tomorrow, but it's not something I can't find a free hour in. What's good

for you? Sometime in the morning?"

"Matt, I really need to see you now."

"What's the problem, Elaine?"

"Come on over and I'll tell you."

"Don't tell me history's repeating itself. Did someone go and blow a main fuse?"

"God. No, it's worse than that."

"You sound shaky."

"I'm scared to death."

She had never been a woman who scared easy. I asked if she was still living in the same place. She said she was.

I said I'd be right over.

As I left the hotel an empty cab was cruising by on the other side of the street, heading east. I yelled at him and he stopped with a squeal of brakes and I trotted across and got in. I gave him Elaine's address and settled back in my seat, but I couldn't stay settled back. I rolled down the window and sat on the edge of the seat and looked out at the passing landscape.

Elaine was a hooker, a classy young prostitute who worked out of her own apartment and got along just fine without a pimp or a mob connection. We got to know each other back when I was a cop. I met her for the first time a couple of weeks after I made detective. I was at an after-hours in the Village, feeling

very good about the new gold shield in my pocket, and she was at a table with three European manufacturers and two other working girls.

At the time I noted that she looked a good deal less whorish than her sisters, and a lot more attractive.

A week or so after that I met her in a bar onWest Seventy-second Street called Poogan's Pub. I don't know who she was with, but she was at Danny Boy Bell's table, and I went over to say hello to Danny Boy.

He introduced me to everyone there, Elaine included. I saw her once or twice after that around town, and then one night I went to the Brasserie for a late bite and she was at a table with another girl. I joined the two of them. Somewhere down the line the other girl went off on her own, and I went home with Elaine.

For the next several years I don't suppose there was a week when I didn't see her at least once, unless one or the other of us was out of town.

We had an interesting relationship, and one which seemed to serve us both. I was a sort of protector for her, usefully supplied with cop skills and cop connections, someone she could lean on, someone who could push back hard if anybody tried to lean on her. I was, too, the closest thing she had or wanted to a boyfriend, and she was as much of a girlfriend or mistress as I could have handled. Sometimes we went out—

for a meal, to a fight at the Garden, to a bar or an after-hours. Sometimes I dropped in on her for a quick drink and a quick bounce. I didn't have to send flowers or remember her birthdays, and neither of us had to pretend we were in love.

I was married then, of course. The marriage was a mess, but I'm not sure I realized it at the time. I had a wife and two young sons living in a mortgaged house out onLong Island , and I more or less assumed the marriage would last, just as I assumed I would stay on with the NYPD

until departmental regulations forced me to retire. I was drinking with both hands in those days, and while it didn't seem to get in my way any it was having a subtler effect all along, making it remarkably easy for me to turn a blind eye on the things in my life I didn't want to look at.

Ah, well. What Elaine and I had was a nonmarriage of convenience, I suppose, and we were hardly the first cop and hooker to have found this particular way to do each other some good. Still, I doubt it would have lasted so long or suited us so well if we hadn't liked each other.

She had become my cousin Frances so that she could leave messages for me without arousing suspicion.

We didn't use the code often because there wasn't much need for it; our relationship was such that it was usually I who called her, and I could leave whatever message I wanted. When she called me, it was generally either to break a date or because of an emergency.

One such emergency had come to mind while I was talking to her, and I'd alluded to it, recalling when someone had blown a main fuse.

The someone in question had been a client, an overweight patent attorney with offices way downtown onMaiden Lane and a home up in Riverdale. He'd been a regular

john of Elaine's, showing up two or three times a month, never giving her any grief until the afternoon he picked her bed as the site for what a medical examiner later called a massive myocardial infarction.

It's high on every call girl's list of nightmares, and most of them have given a little thought to what they'll do if it happens. What Elaine did was call me at the station house, and when they said I was out she told them to get word to me, that it was a family emergency, that I should call my cousin Frances.

They couldn't reach me, but I called in myself within the half hour and they gave me the message. After I spoke with her I found an officer I could trust and we rode up to her apartment. With Elaine's help, we got the poor bastard into his clothes. He'd been wearing a three-piece suit, and we dressed him up all right, knotting his tie, tying his shoes, hooking his cuff links. My buddy and I each looped one of his arms over our shoulders, and we walked him out to the freight elevator, where one of the building's porters had the car waiting. We told him our friend had had too much to drink. I doubt that he bought it— the guy we were dragging looked a lot more like a stiff than a drunk— but he knew we were cops and he remembered the kind of tips Miss Mardell passed out at Christmas, so if he had any reservations he kept them to himself.

I was driving a department vehicle, an unmarkedPlymouth sedan. I brought it around to the service entrance and we wrestled the dead lawyer into it. By the time we had him in the car it was past five o'clock, and by the time we fought our way down to the Wall Street area the offices were closed and most of the workers on their way home. We parked across the entrance to a narrow alley offGold Street

, maybe three blocks from the man's office, and we left him in the alley.

His appointment book had the notation "E.M.— 3:30" under that day's date. That seemed cryptic enough, so I returned the book to his breast pocket. I checked his address book, and she wasn't listed under the M's, but he had her number and address with the E's, listed by her first name only. I was going to tear out the page, but I noticed other female first names listed here and there, and I couldn't see any reason to inflict all that on the widow, so I stuck the address book in my pocket and ditched it later on.

He had a lot of cash in his wallet, close to five hundred dollars. I took all of it and split it with the cop who was helping me out. I figured it was just as well to let it look as though someone had rolled our friend.

Besides, if we didn't take it the first cops on the scene would, and look at all we'd done to earn it.

We got out of there without attracting any attention. I drove us up to the Village and bought my buddy a couple of drinks, and then we called it in to Headquarters anonymously and let them route it to the local precinct. The ME didn't miss noticing that the deceased had died elsewhere, but death itself was clearly a result of natural causes, so nobody had any reason to make waves. The old whoremaster died with his reputation unbesmirched, Elaine stayed out of trouble, and I got to be a hero.

I've told that story a couple of times at AA meetings. Sometimes it comes out funny, and other times it's

anything but that. It depends, I guess, on how it's told, or how you listen.

* * *

Elaine lived on Fifty-first between First and Second, on the sixteenth floor of one of those white brick apartment buildings that went up all over town in the early sixties. Her doorman was a West Indian black, very dark-skinned, with perfect posture and the build of a wide receiver. I gave him her name and mine and waited while he spoke on the intercom. He listened, looked at me, said something, listened again, and handed me the phone. "She wants to talk to you," he said.

I said, "I'm here. What's up?"

"Say something."

"What do you want me to say?"

"You just mentioned a man who blew a fuse. What was his name?"

"What is this, a test? Can't you recognize my voice?"

"This thing distorts voices. Look, humor me. What was the fuse man's name?"

"I don't remember his name. He was a patent lawyer."

"Okay. Let me talk to Derek."

I handed the thing to the doorman. He listened for a moment while she assured him I was okay, then motioned me to the elevator. I rode up to her floor and rang her bell. Even after the ritual over the intercom, she checked the judas peephole before opening the door for me.

"Come in," she said. "I apologize for the dramatics. I'm probably being silly, but maybe not. I don't know."

"What's the matter, Elaine?"

"In a minute. I feel a lot better now that you're here, but I'm still a little shaky. Let me look at you. You look terrific."

"You look pretty good yourself."

"Do I? That's hard to believe. I've had some night. I couldn't stop calling you. I must have called half a dozen times."

"There were five messages."

"Is that all? I don't know why I thought five messages would be more forceful than one, but I kept picking up the phone and dialing your number."

"Five messages may have been better," I said. "They made it a little harder to ignore. What's the problem?"

"The problem is I'm scared. I feel better now, though. I'm sorry for the inquisition before but it's impossible to recognize a voice over my intercom. Just for your information, the patent attorney's name was Roger Stuhldreher."

"How could I ever have forgotten it?"

"What a day that was." She shook her head at the memory. "But I'm being a terrible hostess. What can I

get you to drink?"

"Coffee, if you've got some."

"I'll make some."

"It's too much trouble."

"It's no trouble at all. You still like it with bourbon in it?"

"No, just black."

She looked at me. "You stopped drinking," she said.

"Uh-huh."

"I remember you were having some trouble with it the last time I saw you. Is that when you stopped?"

"Around then, yes."

"That's great," she said. "That's really great. Give me a minute and I'll get some coffee made."

The living room was as I remembered it, done in black-and-white with a white shag rug and a chrome-and-black leather couch and some matte black mica shelving. A couple of abstract paintings provided the room's only color. I think they were the same paintings she'd had before, but I couldn't swear to it.

I went over to the window. There was a gap between two buildings that afforded a view of the East River, and the borough ofQueens on the other side of it. I'd been over there a matter of hours earlier, telling funny stories to a bunch of drunks inRichmond Hill . It seemed ages ago now.

I stayed at the window for a few minutes. I was in front of one of the paintings when she came back with two cups of black coffee. "I think I remember this one," I said. "Or did you just get it last week?"

"I've had it for years. I bought it on impulse at a gallery on Madison Avenue. I paid twelve hundred dollars for it. I couldn't believe I was paying that kind of money for something to hang on the wall. You know me, Matt. I'm not extravagant. I always bought nice things, but I always saved my money."

"And bought real estate," I said, remembering.

"You bet I did. When you're not handing it to a pimp or sucking it up your nose, you can buy a lot of houses. But I thought I was crazy, paying all that money for a painting."

"Look at the pleasure it's brought you."

"More than pleasure, honey. You know what it's worth now?"

"A lot, evidently."

"Forty thousand, minimum. Probably more like fifty. I ought to sell it. Sometimes it makes me nervous, having fifty grand hanging on the wall. For Christ's sake, when I first hung it I got nervous having twelve hundred dollars on my wall. How's the coffee?"

"It's fine."

"Is it strong enough?"

"It's fine, Elaine."

"You really look great, you know that?"

"So do you."

"How long has it been? I think the last time we saw each other must have been about three years ago, but we haven't really seen anything much of each other since you left the police department, and that must be close to ten years."

"Something like that."

"You still look the same."

"Well, I've still got all my hair. But there's a little gray there if you look closely."

"There's a lot of gray in mine, but you can look as close as you like and you won't see it. Thanks to modern science." She drew a breath.

"The rest of the package hasn't changed too much, though."

"It hasn't changed at all."

"Well, I've kept my figure. And my skin's still good. I'll tell you, though, I never thought I'd have to put so much work into it. I'm at the gym three mornings a week, sometimes four. And I watch what I eat and drink."

"You were never a drinker."

"No, but I used to drink Tab by the gallon, Tab and then Diet Coke. I cut out all of that. Now it's pure

fruit juice or plain water. I have one cup of coffee a day, first thing in the morning. This cup's a concession to special circumstances."

"Maybe you should tell me what they are."

"I'm getting there. I have to sort of ease into it. What else do I do? I walk a lot. I watch what I eat. I've been a vegetarian for almost three years now."

"You used to love steak."

"I know. I didn't think it was a meal unless there was meat in it."

"And what was it you used to have at the Brasserie?"

"Tripes à la mode deCaen ."

"Right. A dish I never liked to think about, but I had to admit it was tasty."

"I couldn't guess when I had it last. I haven't had any meat in close to three years. I ate fish for the first year, but then I dropped that, too."

"Ms. Natural."

"C'est moi."

"Well, it agrees with you."

"And not drinking agrees with you. Here we are, telling each other how good we look. That's how you know you're old, isn't that what they say? Matt, I was thirty-eight on my last birthday."

"That's not so bad."

"That's what you think. My last birthday was three years ago. I'm forty-one."

"That's not so bad either. And you don't look it."

"I know I don't. Or maybe I do. That's what somebody told Gloria Steinem when she turned forty, that she didn't look it. And she said, 'Yes I do. This is what forty looks like now.' "

"Pretty good line."

"That's what I thought. Sweetie, you know what I've been doing?

I've been stalling."

"I know."

"To keep it from being real. But it's real. This came in today's mail."

She handed me a newspaper clipping and I unfolded it. There was a photograph, a head shot of a middle-aged gentleman. He was wearing glasses and his hair was neatly combed, and he looked confident and optimistic, an expression that seemed out of keeping with the headline. It ran across three columns, and it said, area businessman slays wife, children, self. Ten or twelve column inches of text elaborated on the headline. Philip Sturdevant, proprietor of Sturdevant Furniture with four retail outlets inCanton andMassillon , had apparently gone berserk in his home in suburban Walnut Hills. After using a kitchen knife to kill his wife and three small children, Sturdevant had called the police and told them what he had done. By the time a police cruiser arrived on the scene, Sturdevant was dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.

I looked up from the clipping. "Terrible thing," I said.

"Yes."

"Did you know him?"

"No."

"Then—"

"I knew her."

"The wife?"

"We both knew her."

I studied the clipping again. The wife's name was Cornelia, and her age was given as thirty-seven. The children were Andrew, six; Kevin, four; and Delcey, two. Cornelia Sturdevant, I thought, and no bells rang.

I looked at her, puzzled.

"Connie," she said.

"Connie?"

"Connie Cooperman. You remember her."

"Connie Cooperman," I said, and then I remembered a bouncy blond cheerleader of a girl. "Jesus," I said. "How in the hell did she wind up in— where was this, anyway?Canton ,Massillon , Walnut Hills.

Where are all these places?"

"Ohio. Northern Ohio, not far fromAkron ."

"How did she get there?"

"By marrying Philip Sturdevant. She met him, I don't know, seven or eight years ago."

"How? Was he a john?''

"No, nothing like that. She was on vacation, she was up at Stowe on a ski weekend. He was there, he was divorced and unattached, and he fell for her. I don't know that he was rich but he was comfortably well-off, he owned furniture stores and made a good living from them.

And he was crazy about Connie and he wanted to marry her and have babies with her."

"And that's what they did."

"That's what they did. She thought he was wonderful and she was ready to get out of the life and out ofNew York . She was sweet and cute and guys liked her, but she was hardly what you'd call a born whore."

"Is that what you are?"

"No, I'm not. I was a lot like Connie actually, we were both a couple of NJGs who drifted into it. I turned out to be good at it, that's all."

"What's an NJG?"

"A neurotic Jewish girl. It's not just that I turned out to be good at it. I turned out to be capable of living

the life without getting eaten up by it. It grinds down an awful lot of girls, it erodes what little self-esteem they started out with. But it hasn't hurt me that way."

"No."

"At least that's what I think most of the time." She gave me a brave smile. "Except on the occasional bad night, and everybody has a few of those."

"Sure."

"It may have been good for Connie early on. She was fat and unpopular in high school, and it did her good to find out that men wanted her and found her attractive. But then it stopped being good for her, and then she got lucky and met Philip Sturdevant, and he fell for her and she was crazy about him, and they went to Ohio to make babies."

"And then he found out about her past and went nuts and killed her."

"No."

"No?"

She shook her head. "He knew all along. She told him from the jump. It was very brave of her, and it turned out to be the absolute right thing to do, because it didn't bother him and otherwise there would have been that secret between them. He was a pretty worldly guy, as it turned out. He was fifteen or twenty years older than Connie, and he'd been married twice, and while he'd lived all his life inMassillon he'd traveled a lot. He didn't mind that she'd spent a few years in the life. If anything I think he got a kick out of it, especially since he was taking her away from all that."

"And they lived happily ever after."

She ignored that. "I had a couple of letters from her over the years," she said. "Only a couple, because I never get around to answering letters, and when you don't write back people stop writing to you. Most of the time I would get a card from her at Christmas. You know those cards people have made up with pictures of their children? I got a few of those from her. Beautiful children, but you would expect that. He was a good-looking man, you can see that from the newspaper photo, and you remember how pretty Connie was."

"Yes."

"I wish I had the last card she sent. I'm not the kind of person who keeps things. By the tenth of January all my Christmas cards are out with the garbage. So I don't have one to show you, and I won't be getting a new one next month because—"

She wept silently, her shoulders drawn in and shaking, her hands clasped. After a moment or two she caught hold of herself, drew in a deep breath, let it out.

I said, "I wonder what made him do it."

"He didn't do it. He wasn't the type."

"People surprise you."

"He didn't do it."

I looked at her.

"I don't know a soul inCanton orMassillon ," she said. "The only person I ever knew there was Connie, and the only person who could have known she knew me was Philip Sturdevant, and they're both dead."

"So?"

"So who sent me the clipping?"

"Anybody could have sent it."

"Oh?"

"She could have mentioned you to a friend or neighbor there.

Then, after the murder and suicide, the friend goes through Connie's things, finds her address book, and wants to let her out-of-town friends know what happened."

"So this friend clips the story out of the paper and sends it all by itself? Without a word of explanation?"

"There was no note in the envelope?"

"Nothing."

"Maybe she wrote a note and forgot to put it in the envelope.

People do that sort of thing all the time."

"And she forgot to put her return address on the envelope?"

"You have the envelope?"

"In the other room. It's a plain white envelope with my name and address hand-printed."

"Can I see it?"

She nodded. I sat in my chair and looked at the picture that was supposed to be worth fifty thousand dollars. Once I'd come very close to emptying a gun into it. I hadn't thought about that incident in a long time. It looked as though I'd be thinking of it a lot now.

The envelope was as she'd described it, five-and-dime stuff, cheap and untraceable. Her name and address had been block-printed in ballpoint. No return address in the upper-left corner or on the back flap.

"New Yorkpostmark," I said.

"I know."

"So if it was a friend of hers—"

"The friend carried the clipping all the way toNew York and put it in the mail."

I stood up and walked over to the window. I looked through it without seeing anything, then turned to face her. "The alternative," I said, "is that someone else killed her. And her kids. And her husband."

"Yes."

"And faked it to look like murder and suicide. Faked a call to the cops while he was at it. And then waited until the story was printed in the local paper, and clipped it, and brought it back toNew York and put it in the mail."

"Yes."

"I guess we're thinking of the same person."

"He swore he'd kill Connie," she said. "And me. And you."

"He did, didn't he."

" 'You and all your women, Scudder.' That's what he said to you."

"A lot of bad guys say a lot of things over the years. You can't take all that crap seriously." I went over and picked up the envelope again, as if I could read its psychic vibrations. If it held any, they were too subtle for me.

I said, "Why now, for God's sake? What's it been, twelve years?"

"Just about."

"You really think it's him, don't you?"

"I know it is."

"Motley."

"Yes."

"James Leo Motley," I said. "Jesus."

James Leo Motley. I'd first heard the name in that same apartment, but not in the black-and-white living room. I'd called Elaine one afternoon, dropped by shortly thereafter. She fixed bourbon for me and a diet cola for herself, and a few minutes later we were in her bedroom.

Afterward I touched the tip of one finger to a discolored area alongside her rib cage and asked her what happened.

"I almost called you," she said. "I had a visitor yesterday afternoon."

"Oh?"

"Someone new. He'd called, said he was a friend of Connie's.

That's Connie Cooperman. You met her, remember?"

"Sure."

"He said she gave him my number. So we talked, and he sounded all right, and he came over. I didn't like him."

"What was wrong with him?"

"I don't know exactly. There was something weird about him.

Something about his eyes."

"His eyes?"

"The way he looks at you. What is it Superman's got? X-ray vision? I felt as though he could look at me and see clear through to the bone."

I ran a hand over her. "You'd miss a lot of nice skin that way," I said.

"And there was something very cold about it. Reptilian, like a lizard watching flies. Or like a snake.

Coiled, ready to strike without warning."

"What's he look like?"

"That may have been part of it. He's kind of strange-looking. A very long narrow face. Mouse-colored hair, and a lousy haircut, one of those soup-bowl jobs. It made him look like a monk. Very pale skin.

Unhealthy, or at least that's how it looked."

"Sounds charming."

"His body was strange, too. He was completely hard."

"Isn't that something you strive for in your line of work?"

"Not his cock, his whole body. Like every muscle was tense all the time, like he never relaxed. He's thin, but he's very muscular. What you call wiry."

"What happened?"

"We went to bed. I wanted to get him into bed because I wanted to get him out of here as soon as possible. Also, I figured once I got him off he'd be calmer and I wouldn't be as nervous. I already knew I wasn't going to see him again. In fact I would have asked him to leave without taking him to bed, but I was afraid of what he might do. He didn't exactly do anything, but he was an unpleasant trick."

"Was he rough?"

"Not exactly. It was the way he touched me. You can tell a lot from the way a man touches you. He touched me like he hated me. I mean, who needs that shit, you know?"

"How'd you get the bruise?"

"That was after. He got dressed, he wasn't interested in taking a shower and I didn't suggest it because I wanted him O-U-T. And he gave me this look, and he said we'd probably be seeing a lot of each other from now on. That's what you think, I thought, but I didn't say anything.

He was on his way out, and he hadn't given me any money, or left anything on the dresser."

"You didn't get money in front?"

"No, I never do. I don't discuss it ahead of time, not unless the man brings it up, and most of the time they don't. A lot of men like to pretend to themselves that the sex is free and the money they give me is a present, and that's fine. Anyway, he was ready to walk out without giving me anything, and I came this close to letting him go."

"But you didn't."

"No, because I was angry, and if I was going to have to trick a shitheel like that I was at least going to get paid for it. So I gave him a smile and said, 'You know, you're forgetting something.'

"He said, 'What am I forgetting?' 'I'm a working girl,' I said. He said he knew that, that he could tell a whore when he saw one."

"Nice."

"I didn't react to it, but I did say I got paid for what I did.

Something like that, I forgot how I put it. And he gave me this very cold look, and he said, 'I don't pay.'

"And then I was stupid. I could have let it go, but I thought maybe it was just an ego thing, a matter of terms, and I said I didn't expect him to pay, but maybe he'd like to give me a present."

"And he hit you."

"No. He walked toward me, and I backed off, and he kept coming until I was backed up against the wall there. He put his hand on me. I was dressed, I had a blouse on. He put his hand right here and he just pressed with two fingers, and there must be a nerve there or some kind of pressure point, because it hurt like fury. There was no mark then. That didn't show up until this morning."

"It'll probably be worse tomorrow."

"Great. It's sore now, but it's not terrible. While he was doing it, though, the pain was incredibly intense.

I went weak in the knees and I swear I couldn't see. I thought I was going to black out."

"He did that pressing with two fingers."

"Yes. Then he let go of me and I was holding on to the wall for support and he fucking grinned at me.

'We'll see a lot of each other,' he said, 'and you'll do whatever I tell you to do.' And then he left."

"Did you call Connie?"

"I haven't been able to reach her."

"If this clown calls again—"

"I'll tell him to shit in his hat. Don't worry, Matt, he's never getting in the door again."

"You remember his name?"

"Motley. James Leo Motley."

"He gave you his middle name?"

She nodded. "And he didn't ask me to call him Jimmy, either.

James Leo Motley. What are you doing?"

"Writing it down. Maybe I can find out where he lives."

"InCentral Park , under a flat rock."

"And I might as well see if we've got a sheet on him. From your description, it wouldn't surprise me."

"James Leo Motley," she said. "If you lose your memo book, just call me. It's a name I'm not likely to forget."

I couldn't find an address for him, but I did pull his yellow sheet.

He had a string of six or seven arrests, most of them for assaults upon women. In each case the victim withdrew the complaint and charges were dropped. Once he'd been in a traffic accident, a fender-bender on the Van Wyck Expressway, and he'd given the driver of the other vehicle a serious beating. That case got to court, with Motley charged with first-degree assault, but eyewitness testimony suggested that the other driver may have started the fight, and that he'd been armed with a tire iron while Motley had defended himself with his bare hands. If so, he'd been good enough with those hands to put the other man in the hospital.

Six or seven arrests, no convictions. All of the charges involving violence. I didn't like it, and I was going to call Elaine and let her know what I'd found out, but I didn't get around to it.

A week or so later she called me. I was in the squad room when she called, so she didn't have to identify herself as CousinFrances .

"He was just here," she said. "He hurt me."

"I'll be right over."

She had reached Connie. Connie had been reluctant to talk at first, finally admitting that she'd been seeing James Leo Motley for the past several weeks. He'd gotten her number from someone, she wasn't sure who, and his first visit had been not unlike the first visit he paid to Elaine. He told her he wasn't going to pay her, and that she'd be seeing a lot of him. And he hurt her— not badly, but enough to get her attention.

Since then he'd been turning up a couple of times a week. He'd started asking her for money, and he'd continued to brutalize her, hurting her both during and after the sex act. He told her repeatedly that he knew what she liked, that she was a cheap whore and she needed to be treated like what she was. "I'm your man now," he told her. "You belong to me.

I own you, body and soul."

The conversation upset Elaine, understandably enough, and she'd been meaning to tell me about it, just as I'd intended to let her know about Motley's record. She'd let it go, waiting until she saw me, knowing that she wasn't in any danger because she wasn't going to see the son of a bitch again. When he did call, the day after her conversation with Connie, she told him that she was busy.

"Make time for me," he said.

"No," she said. "I don't want to see you again, Mr. Motley."

"What makes you think you have any choice?"

"You asshole," she said. "Look, do us both a favor, will you? Lose my number."

Two days later he called again. "I thought I'd give you a chance to change your mind," he said. She told him to drop dead and hung up on him.

She told all three doormen not to send anyone up without calling first. That was standard policy anyway, but she impressed them with the need for extra security. She turned down a couple of dates with new clients, wary that they might be fronting for Motley. When she left her apartment she had the feeling that she was being followed, or at least observed. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and she didn't go out unless she had to.

Then a few days passed and she didn't hear further from him, and she started to relax. She meant to call me, and she meant to call Connie again, but she didn't call either of us.

That afternoon she got a call. A man she knew was in town from the Coast, a studio executive she'd see every few months. She got in a cab and spent an easy hour and a half in his suite at the Sherry-Netherland. He told her all sorts of movie-biz gossip, made love to her twice, and gave her a hundred or two hundred dollars, whatever it was. More than enough to cover the cabs.

When she got back to her apartment Motley was sitting on the leather couch, not quite smiling at her.

She tried to get out the door but she'd locked it and put the chain on the minute she came in, before she saw him, and he had hold of her before she could get the door open. Even if she hadn't had to screw around with the locks, she figured he would have caught her. "At the elevator," she said, "or I'd have tripped on the hall carpet, or something.

I wasn't going to get away. He wasn't going to let me get away."

He hauled her into the bedroom, ripped her clothes getting them off of her. He hurt her with his hands.

The bruise he'd inflicted the first time was faded now, but his fingers went right to the spot and the pain was like a knife. There was another spot he found, on the inside of her thigh, that produced a pain so intense she honestly thought she was going to die from it.

He went on hurting her with the simple pressure of his fingers until all her will was gone, all her capacity to resist. Then he flung her facedown on the bed, dropped his pants, and forced himself into her anal passage.

"I don't do that," she said. "It's painful, and I think it's disgusting anyway, and I never liked it. So I don't do it. I haven't done it in years.

But it actually wasn't that bad this time because the pain was nothing compared to what he'd been doing to me with his fingertips. And anyway by this time I was sort of detached from it all. I was afraid he was going to kill me, and I was detached from that, too."

While he sodomized her, he talked to her. He told her she was weak and stupid and filthy. He told her she was only getting what she deserved, and what she secretly wanted. He told her she liked it.

He told her he always gave his women what they wanted. Most of them wanted to be hurt, he told her.

Some of them wanted to be killed.

"He said he wouldn't mind killing me. He said he'd killed a girl a while ago who'd looked a lot like me.

He killed her first, he said, and then he fucked her. He said a dead girl was as good a fuck as a living one, maybe even better. If you got her while she was still warm, he said. And before she started to stink."

Afterward he went through her purse and took all her cash, including the money she'd just earned at the Sherry. She was one of his women now, he told her. She'd have to pull her weight. That meant he expected her to have money for him when he came to see her. And it meant she would never again refuse to see him, and she would certainly never again mouth off at him, or call him bad names. Did she understand that? Yes, she said. She understood. Was she sure she understood? Yes, she said. She was sure.

He half smiled at her, and ran a hand over that funny cap of hair, then stroked his long chin. "I want to make sure you understand," he said, and he clapped one hand over her mouth and used the other to find the spot on her rib cage. This time she did pass out, and when she came to he was gone.

The first thing I did was take her over to the Eighteenth Precinct.

The two of us sat down with a cop named Klaiber and she filed a complaint, charging Motley with assault and battery and forcible sodomy.

"There'll be more charges after he's picked up," I said. "He took money from her purse, so that's robbery or extortion or both. And he got into her apartment in her absence."

"Any signs of forced entry?"

"Not that I could spot, but it's still illegal entry."

"You already got forcible sodomy," Klaiber said.

"So?"

"Forcible sodomy and illegal entry, you put them both down and you get a jury confused. They figure it's two ways of saying the same thing." When Elaine excused herself to go to the bathroom he leaned forward and said, "She a girlfriend or something, Matt?"

"Let's say she's been the source of a lot of useful leads over the past few years."

"Fine, we'll call her a snitch. She's on the game, right?"

"So?"

"So I don't have to tell you how hard it is to make an assault charge stand up when the complainant is a prostitute. Let alone rape or sodomy.

Far as your juror's concerned, all she did was give away what she usually sold."

"I know that."

"I figured you did."

"I don't expect a pickup order's going to accomplish anything, anyway. His last known address is aTimes Square hotel, and he hasn't lived there in a year and a half."

"Oh, you've been looking for him."

"A little bit. He's probably in another midtown flophouse or living with a woman, and either way he'll be hard to find. I just want her complaint on file. It can't hurt further on down the line."

"Got it," he said. "Well, no problem, then. And we'll put out a pickup order just in case he happens to walk into our arms."

I called Anita and told her I'd be staying in the city around the clock for the next few days. I told her I was on a case I couldn't break away from. I'd done this before, sometimes legitimately, sometimes because I hadn't felt like going out toLong Island . As always, she believed me, or pretended to. Then I cleared all of my own cases, dropping some and shunting others off on other people. I didn't want anything else on my plate. I wanted to get James Leo Motley, and I wanted to get him right.

I told Elaine we'd have to trap Motley and she'd have to be the bait.

She wasn't crazy about the idea, didn't really ever want to be in the same room with him again, but she had a nice tough core to her and she was willing to do what had to be done.

I moved in with Elaine and we waited. She canceled all her bookings and told everyone who called that she had the flu and wouldn't be available for a week. "This is costing me a fortune," she complained.

"Some of these guys may never call back."

"You're just playing hard to get. They'll want you all the more."

"Yeah, look how well that worked with Motley."

We never left the apartment. She cooked once, but the rest of the time we ordered in. We pretty much lived on pizza and Chinese food.

The liquor store delivered bourbon, and she got the guy at the corner deli to send over a case of Tab.

Two days into it, Motley called. She answered in the living room and I picked up the extension in the bedroom. The conversation went something like this:

Motley: Hello, Elaine.

Elaine: Oh, hello.

Motley: You know who this is.

Elaine: Yes.

Motley: I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to make sure you were all right.

Elaine: Uh-huh.

Motley: Well? Are you?

Elaine: Am I what?

Motley: Are you all right?

Elaine: I guess so.

Motley: Good.

Elaine: Are you—

Motley: Am I what?

Elaine: Are you coming over?

Motley: Why?

Elaine: I just wondered.

Motley: Do you want me to come over?

Elaine: Well, I'm all alone. It's sort of lonesome here.

Motley: You could go out.

Elaine: I haven't felt like it.

Motley: No, you've been staying home all the time, haven't you?

Are you afraid to go out?

Elaine: I guess so.

Motley: What are you afraid of?

Elaine: I don't know.

Motley: Speak up. I can't hear you.

Elaine: I said I don't know what I'm afraid of.

Motley: Are you afraid of me?

Elaine: Yes.

Motley: That's good. I'm glad to hear that. I'm not coming over now.

Elaine: Oh.

Motley: But I'll be over in a day or two. And I'll give you what you need, Elaine. I always give you what you need, don't I?

Elaine: I wish you would come over.

Motley: Soon, Elaine.

When he'd hung up I went back to the living room. She was on the leather sofa and she looked exhausted. She said, "I felt like a bird charmed by a snake. I was acting, of course. Trying to make him think he'd broken my spirit and he really did own me, body and soul. Do you think he bought it?"

"I don't know."

"Neither do I. It sounded as though he did, but maybe he was acting, too, playing my game with me. He knows I haven't left the apartment. Maybe he's watching it."

"It's possible."

"Maybe he's perched up somewhere with a pair of binoculars, maybe he can see in my fucking windows. You know something? I was pretending, but I wound up half convincing myself. It's like the rapture of the depths, it would be so goddamned easy to let go of my will and just drown. You know what I mean?"

"I think so."

"How do you suppose he got in? The other day, when I was fucking Whatsisname at the Sherry. He got past the doorman and then he got in the door. How did he do that?"

"It's not that hard to get past a doorman."

"I know, but they're pretty good here. And what about the door?

You said there weren't any signs of forced entry."

"Maybe he had a key."

"How would he get a key? I for sure didn't give him one, and I'm not missing any."

"Did Connie have a key to your place?"

"What for, to water the plants? No, nobody had a key. You don't even have a key. You don't, do you?

I never gave you one, did I?"

"No."

"I certainly never gave one to Connie. How did he get in? I've got a good lock on that door."

"Did you lock it with the key when you left?"

"I think so. I always do."

"Because if you didn't engage the deadbolt he could have loided his way with a credit card. Or maybe he picked up your key long enough to make an impression in wax or soap. Or maybe he picks locks."

"Or maybe he just used his fingertips," she offered, "and pushed the door open."

My fourth night there, the phone rang at a quarter to four. I'd gone to sleep some two hours earlier, my

gut full of Early Times and my whole system ragged with cabin fever. I heard the phone ring and willed myself awake, but my will wasn't strong enough to push through the fog. I thought I was awake but my body stayed in Elaine's bed and my mind in some sort of dream, and then Elaine was shaking me and urging me awake, and I threw back the covers and got my legs over the side of the bed.

"That was him on the phone," she said. "He's coming over." I asked what time it was and she told me. "I said give me an hour, a girl wants to look her best. He said half an hour, that should be plenty of time for me. He's on his way, Matt. What do we do now?"

I had her call the doorman and let him know she was expecting a guest. Send Mr. Motley right up, she told him, but be sure to ring and tell her he was on his way. She hung up and went into the bathroom, stood under the shower for two minutes, toweled off and started to get dressed. I don't remember what she chose, but she tried on a couple of different outfits, complaining about her own indecision all the while.

"This is crazy," she said. "You'd think I was getting ready for a date."

"Maybe you are."

"Yeah, a fucking date with destiny. Are you all right?"

"I'm a little slow off the mark," I admitted. "Maybe you could get some coffee going."

"Sure."

I got dressed, putting on the clothes I'd taken off two hours ago, the clothes I'd been wearing for the better part of a week. I generally wore a suit on the job in those days— I still do, more often than not—and I put it on. I had trouble getting my tie tied right and made two attempts before the inanity of it struck me and I pulled the tie out from under my collar and tossed it on a chair.

I had the .38 the city issued me in a shoulder holster. I drew it once or twice, then took off the jacket and the holster and wedged the gun under my belt, the butt nestled in the small of my back.

The bourbon bottle was on the table next to the bed. It was a fifth, and there was maybe half a pint left in it. I uncapped it and took a short pull straight from the bottle. Just a quick one, to get the old heart started.

I called to Elaine but she didn't answer. I put my suit jacket back on and practiced drawing the gun. The movement felt awkward, which can happen with any movement when you rehearse it to death. I moved the gun to the left side of my abdomen and practiced a crosshanded draw, but I liked that even less, and I thought about trying the shoulder holster again.

Maybe I wouldn't have to draw it. Maybe I could just keep the thing in my hand. We hadn't choreographed this show yet, hadn't decided where I was going to be when she let him in. I thought the simplest thing might be if I waited behind the door when she opened it, then stepped out with a drawn gun once he was inside. But maybe it made more sense to give him a little time alone with her first, while I waited in the kitchen or the bedroom for the right moment. There looked to be a psychological advantage in that, but there was more room in the script for something to go wrong. Her anxiety might tip him off, say, or he might just decide to do something weird. Crazy people, after all, are apt to do crazy things. It's their trademark.

I called her name again but evidently she had the water running and didn't hear me. I put the gun under my belt again, then drew it out and walked down the short hallway to the living room carrying it in my hand. I wanted coffee, if it was ready, and I wanted to work out how we were going to play the scene.

I walked into the living room and turned toward the kitchen and stopped in my tracks, because he was standing there with his back to the window and Elaine at his side and a little in front of him. He had one hand on her arm, just above the elbow, and with the other he was gripping her wrist.

He said, "Put the gun down. Now, right this minute, or I'll break her arm."

The gun wasn't pointed at him, and I wasn't holding it right, I didn't have my finger anywhere near the trigger. I was holding it in my hand the way you'd hold a plate of hors d'oeuvres.

I put the gun down.

She had described him well, the long angular body, spare of flesh but tight as a coiled spring, the narrow face, the eccentric haircut.

Someone had used a clippers on everything outside the perimeter of the soup bowl, and his hair perched on his head like a skullcap. His nose was long, and fleshy at the tip, and his lips were quite full. His forehead sloped back, and beneath it his eyes were set deep under a prominent ridge of brow. The eyes were a sort of muddy brown, and I couldn't read anything in them.

His features and his hairstyle combined to give him a faintly medieval look, like an evil friar, but his clothes didn't fit the part. He wore an olive corduroy sport jacket with leather piping at the cuffs and lapels and tooled leather patches on the elbows. His pants were khaki, with a knife-edge crease, and he was wearing lizard boots with one-inch heels and silver caps on their pointed toes. His shirt was western style, with snaps instead of buttons, and he had one of those string ties with a turquoise slide.

"You must be Scudder," he said. "The pimping cop. Elaine wanted to let you know I was here, but I thought it would be nicer to surprise you. I told her I was sure you were a man who enjoyed surprises. I told Elaine not to make a sound, and so she didn't make a sound, not even when I hurt her. She does what I tell her. Do you know why?"

"Why?"

"Because she's beginning to realize I know what's best for her. I know what she needs."

His pallor was such that he didn't look to have any blood in his body. Beside him, Elaine was a matching shade; the blood had drained out of her face, and her strength and resolve looked to have gone with it.

She looked like a zombie in a horror movie.

"I know what she needs," he said again, "and what she doesn't need is a dull-witted cop to pimp for her."

"I'm not her pimp."

"Oh? What are you then? Her lawfully wedded husband? Her demon lover? Her twin brother, separated from her at birth? Her long-lost bastard son? Tell me what you are."

It's funny what you notice. I kept looking at his hands. They still gripped her arm at the wrist and above the elbow. She'd told me how much strength he had in his hands, and I didn't doubt her word, but they didn't look that strong. They were large hands and his fingers were long, and knobby at the knuckle joints. The fingernails were short, clipped clear to the quick, and they had well-defined moons at their bases.

"I'm her friend," I said.

"I'm her friend," he said. "I'm her friends and her family." He paused for a moment, as if to relish the sound of that statement. He looked as though he liked it well enough. "She doesn't need anyone else.

She certainly doesn't need you." He smiled just enough to show his prominent front teeth. They were large and slightly bucked. Horse teeth.

Briskly he said, "Your services are no longer required. Your period of employment is terminated. You're out on your ass, you piece of shit. She doesn't want you around. Don't just stand there, with your face hanging out like bloomers on a tenement washline. Go. Scat!"

"Well, I don't know," I said. "I'm here at Elaine's invitation, not yours. Now if she wants me to leave—"

"Tell him, Elaine."

"Matt—"

"Tell him."

"Matt, maybe you'd better go."

I looked at her, trying to cue her with my eyes. "Do you really want me to leave?"

"I think you'd better."

I hesitated for a beat, then shrugged. "Whatever you say," I said, and moved toward the table where I'd

set the gun down.

"Hold it! What do you think you're doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing? I'm getting my gun."

"I can't allow that."

"Then I don't see how the hell I can leave," I said, reasonably.

"That's my service revolver, and I'd be in shit up to my ears if I left it here."

"I'll break her arm."

"I don't care if you break her neck. I'm not going anywhere unless the gun goes with me." I thought for a moment. I said, "Look, I'll pick it up by the barrel. I'm not looking to shoot anybody with it. I just want to walk out of here with it."

While he worked it out I took another two steps and reached out to take the gun by the barrel. I kept the gun within his field of vision, so that he could see it was no danger to him. I couldn't have shot him anyway; he had Elaine positioned between us, and his fingers looked to be digging into her flesh. If she was in pain, I don't think she was aware of it. All that showed in her face was a mix of fear and despair.

Gun in hand, I angled forward and to my right. I was getting closer to him, but moving to put the coffee table between us. It was a flattened cube, of plywood I suppose, clad in white Formica. As I walked, I said,

"I got to hand it to you, you made me look stupid. How did you get past the doorman?"

He just smiled.

"And through the door," I said. "That's a good lock there, and she swore you didn't have a key. Or did you? Or did she open it for you?"

"Put the gun away," he said. "And go."

"Oh, this? It bother you?"

"Just put it away."

"If it bothers you," I said, "here." And I tossed it at him.

He was holding her arm too hard, that was his mistake. It slowed his reaction time. He had to let go before he could do anything else, and instead his hands tightened reflexively and she cried out. He let go then, snatching at the gun, but by then I had a foot out to kick the coffee table at him, and I did, hard. It caromed into his shins even as I was launching myself over it and into him. The two of us sailed into a wall— we didn't miss the window by much— and the impact took the breath out of him.

He wound up on his back and I wound up on top of him, and when I'd scrambled free he was still on the floor. I hit him on the chin, hard, and his eyes glazed. I grabbed him by the lapels and slammed him back against the wall and hit him three times in the middle. He was all muscle and all hard, but I put a lot into my punches and they got through. He sagged, and I swung a forearm and put my whole shoulder into it, and my elbow got him in the chin and put his lights out.

He lay on the floor like a rag doll, his head and shoulders propped against the white wall, one leg drawn up, one fully extended. I stood there, breathing hard, staring down at him. One of his hands lay on the floor, the fingers splayed. I remembered the look of the fingers gripping Elaine's arm, and I had the urge to move my foot a few inches so that it covered that hand, then lean my weight onto that foot and see if that didn't take some of the strength out of those steel fingers.

Instead I retrieved my piece and wedged it under my belt, then turned to Elaine. Some of the color had returned to her face. She didn't look wonderful, but she looked a lot better than she had when he was holding her arm.

She said, "When you said you didn't care if he broke my neck—"

"Oh, come on. You had to know I was setting him up."

"Yes, and I knew you must have something planned. But I was afraid it wouldn't work. And I was afraid he might break my neck, just out of curiosity, just to see whether you cared or not."

"He's not going to break anybody's neck," I said. "But I've got to figure out what to do with him."

"Aren't you going to arrest him?"

"Sure. But I'm afraid he'll walk."

"Are you kidding? After all this?"

"It's a tough case to prosecute," I told her. "You're a hooker, and juries tend not to get concerned about violence toward prostitutes. Not unless the girl dies."

"He said he killed a girl."

"Maybe he was just talking. Even if it's true, and I think it might be, we don't even know who she was or when he killed her, let alone have a case against him for it. We've got resisting arrest and assault on a police officer, but a half-decent defense attorney would make our relationship questionable."

"How?"

"He'd make it look as though I was your pimp. That would pretty much guarantee an acquittal. Even with the best slant on our relationship, it's a problem. You've got a married cop who's got this friendship with a call girl. You can imagine how that'll play in the courtroom. And in the papers."

"You said he's been arrested before."

"Right, and for the same kind of thing. But the jury won't know that."

"Why? Because charges were dropped?"

"They wouldn't know even if he'd been convicted and done time for it. Prior criminal history isn't admissible in criminal proceedings."

"Why the hell not?"

"I don't know," I said. "I've never understood it. It's supposed to be prejudicial, but isn't it part of the whole picture? Why shouldn't the jury know about it?" I shrugged. "Connie could testify," I said. "He hurt her and he threatened you. But would she stand up?"

"I don't know."

"I don't think she would."

"Probably not."

"I want to see something," I said, and I bent over Motley. He was still out cold. Maybe he had a glass jaw. There was a fighter like that, Bob Satterfield. He could take a punch with the best of them, but if you got his jaw just right he'd flop on his face for a ten count, so out of it he'd sleep through a Chinese fire drill.

I fumbled in his jacket pocket, straightened up, turned to show Elaine what I was holding. "This is a help," I said. "A baby automatic, looks like .25 caliber. It's sure to be unregistered, and there's no way in the world he'd have a carry permit. That's criminal possession of a deadly weapon in the second degree, that's a Class-C felony."

"Is that good?"

"It doesn't hurt. The thing is, I want to make sure his bail is too high for him to make, and I want him charged with something serious enough so that his lawyer can't plea-bargain the case down to nothing. I want him to do real time. He's a bad son of a bitch, he fucking well ought to go away." I looked at her.

"Would you stand up?"

"What do you mean?"

"Would you testify?"

"Of course."

"There's more to it. Would you lie under oath?"

"What do you want me to say?"

I studied her for a moment. "I think you'll stand up," I said. "I'm going to take a chance."

"What do you mean?"

I wiped the gun clean of prints with my pocket handkerchief. I got an arm between Motley's shoulders and the wall and raised him up into a half-crouch. He was heavier than he looked, as thin as he was, and I could feel the hardness of his tissue. The muscles didn't relax fully even when he was out cold.

I fitted the gun into his right hand, got his index finger inside the trigger guard and curled it around the trigger. I found the safety, flicked it off. I wrapped my hand around his, levered his body a few degrees more erect, and saw where the gun was pointed. I was aiming right at one of the paintings, the one that later turned out to be worth fifty grand.

I swung a little ways to the left and squeezed his finger against the trigger and put a hole in the wall. I placed the second shot a little higher, and angled the third almost into the ceiling. Then I let go of him and he fell back onto the floor and the wall, and the gun dropped from his hand to the floor beside him.

I said, "He was holding a gun on me. I kicked the coffee table at him. It knocked him off balance but he did get off three shots while he was falling, and then I crashed into him and took him down and out."

She was nodding, her face a study in concentration. If the gunshots had startled her, she seemed to have recovered quickly. Of course the shots hadn't been that loud, and the little bullets hadn't done much damage, just making neat little holes in the plaster.

"He fired a gun," I said. "He tried to kill a cop. That's not something he'll walk away from."

"I'll swear to it."

"I know you will," I said. "I know you'll stand up." I went over to her and held her for a minute or two.

Then I went into the bedroom and got the bourbon bottle. I had a short one before I picked up the phone and called it in, and I had the rest of it while we waited for the cops to get there.

She never did have to testify, not in court. She gave a sworn statement, perjuring herself cheerfully on paper, and she was letter perfect on that, telling an essentially unvarnished version of the truth up to the point where his gun came into play, and then laying it out for them the way we'd worked it out. My story was the same, and the physical evidence supported it. His fingerprints were on the gun, right where you'd expect to find them, and the paraffin test revealed nitrate deposits on his right hand, evidence that he'd fired a gun. It was indeed unregistered, and he had no license to possess a firearm, or to carry one on his person.

He swore he'd never seen the gun before, let alone fired it. His story was that he'd come to theFifty-first Street premises after having made prior arrangements over the telephone to engage her services as a prostitute. He said he'd never seen her before the night in question, that he'd had the opportunity to have sex with her because I had burst in and attempted to work a version of the badger game upon him, extorting him out of additional funds, and that when that failed I had launched an unprovoked attack upon him. Nobody bought any of this. If this was the first time he'd turned up in her life, why had she sworn out a complaint against him almost a week earlier? And his record might not be admissible evidence and the

jurors might not be entitled to know about it, but the district attorney was damn well entitled and so was the judge who set bail at a quarter of a million dollars. His attorney protested this, arguing that his client had never been convicted of anything, but the judge looked at all those arrests for violence against women, along with a supporting statement that Connie Cooperman had been persuaded to give, and turned down a request for lower bail.

Motley stayed in a cell awaiting trial. The state brought a whole laundry list of charges against him, with attempted murder of a police officer up at the top. His lawyer took a good look at his client and the evidence against him and came around ready to cut a deal. The DA's Office was willing to play; the case was low-profile, the public didn't have a big emotional investment in it, and Elaine and I might come off looking pretty dirty after a round of intensive cross-examination, so why not plea-bargain the thing and save the state time and money? They reduced the main charge to an attempted violation of Section 120.11 of the penal code, aggravated assault upon a police officer. They dropped all the collateral charges, and in return James Leo Motley stood up in front of God and everybody and agreed that he was guilty as charged.

The judge weighed his priors against the lack of convictions and came up with the Solomonic sentence of one-to-ten years in the state penitentiary, with credit for time served.

After sentence had been passed Motley asked the court if he could say something. The judge said he could, but not without reminding him he'd had the opportunity to make a statement prior to sentencing.

Maybe it was shrewdness that had led him to hold his tongue until afterward; if he'd made the same statement earlier the judge would almost certainly have given him a sentence closer to the maximum.

What he said was, "That cop framed me, and I know it and he knows it, the pimping bastard. When I get out I got big plans for him and the two bitches." Then he turned to his left, tilting his head to point his long jaw at me. "That's you and all your women, Scudder. We got something to finish, you and me."

Lots of crooks threaten you. They're all going to get even, same as they're all innocent, they were all framed. You'd think nobody guilty ever went to prison.

He sounded as though he meant it, but that's how they all sound.

And none of it ever comes to anything.

That had been something like a dozen years ago. It was another two or three years before I left the police force, for reasons that had nothing to do with Elaine Mardell or James Leo Motley. The precipitant, though perhaps not the cause, for my leaving was something that happened one night inWashingtonHeights . I was having a few quiet drinks at a tavern there when two men held up the place and shot the bartender dead on their way out. I ran out into the street after them and shot them both, killing one of them, but one shot went wide and fatally injured a six-year-old girl. I don't know that she had any business being there at that hour, but I suppose you could have said the same thing about me.

I didn't get any flak over the incident, as a matter of fact I got a departmental recognition, but from then on I had no heart for the job or my life. I quit the department, and around the same time I gave up trying to be a husband and father and moved into the city. I found a hotel room, and around the corner I found a saloon.

The next seven years are somewhat blurred in memory, although God knows they had their moments.

The booze worked for a long time. Somewhere along the line it stopped working, but I drank it anyway because I seemed to have no choice. Then I started hitting detox wards and hospitals and losing three or four days at a time in blackouts, and I had a seizure and, well, things happened.

What it used to be like, what happened, and what it's like now…

"He's out there," she said.

"It seems impossible. He'd have been out years ago. It bothered me at the time that the judge gave him as short a sentence as he did."

"You didn't say anything."

"I didn't want to worry you. But he got one-to-ten, so he could have been on the street in less than a year. I never figured that would happen, he didn't strike me as the type to charm a parole board or get released after serving a minimum sentence, but even so you'd figure him to be out in three or four years, say five at the most. That's longer than most people can manage to nurse a grudge. But if he served five years that would mean he's been breathing free air for seven years now. Why would he wait this long to go after Connie?"

"I don't know."

"What do you want to do, Elaine?"

"I don't know that, either. I think what I want to do is throw some things in a suitcase and get a cab to

JFK. I think that's what I want to do."

I could understand the impulse, but I told her it struck me as a little premature. "Let me make a few calls in the morning," I said. "It's possible he did something and wound up back in the joint. It'd be silly to fly toBrazil if he's locked up in Green Haven."

"Actually I was thinking more along the lines ofBarbados ."

"Or if he's dead," I said. "I thought at the time that he was a good candidate to come out of there in a body bag. He's the type to make enemies, and it doesn't take a lot for someone to stick a knife in you."

"Then who sent me the clipping?"

"Let's not worry about that until we see if we can rule him out."

"All right. Matt? You'll stay here tonight?"

"Sure."

"I know I'm being silly but I'll feel better. You don't mind?"

"I don't mind."

She made up the couch for me with a couple of sheets and a blanket and a pillow. She'd offered me half the bed but I said I'd be more comfortable on the couch, that I felt restless and didn't want to worry about disturbing her with my tossing and turning. "You wouldn't disturb me," she said. "I'm going to take a Seconal, I take one about four times a year, and when I do nothing disturbs me that registers less than seven on the Richter scale. You want one? It's just the thing if you're wired. You'll be out cold before you even have time to relax."

I passed on the pill and took the couch instead. She went to bed and I stripped to my shorts and got under the covers. I couldn't keep my eyes closed. I kept opening them and looking at the lights ofQueens across the river. A couple of times I thought with regret of the Seconal not taken, but it was never really an option. As a sober alcoholic, I couldn't take sleeping pills or tranquilizers or mood-elevators or any painkiller much stronger than aspirin. They interrupt sobriety and seem to undercut a person's commitment to recovery, and people who use them usually wind up drinking again.

I suppose I slept some, although it felt a lot like a white night.

After a while the sun came up and slanted through the living-room window and I went into the kitchen and made a fresh pot of coffee. I toasted an English muffin and ate it and drank two cups of coffee.

I checked the bedroom. She was still sleeping, curled on her side with her face pressed into the pillow. I tiptoed past the bed and went into the bathroom and showered. It didn't wake her. I dried off and went back to the living room and got dressed, and by then it was time to make some telephone calls.

I had to make quite a few of them, and sometimes it took some doing to reach the person I had to speak with. I stayed at it until I found out what I needed to know, and then I looked in on Elaine again. She hadn't changed position, and I had a moment of wholly irrational panic, convinced that she was dead.

He'd let himself in days ago, I decided, and he'd tampered with the Seconal, salting the capsule with cyanide. Or he'd let himself in just hours ago, slipping through walls like a ghost, slipping past me while I tossed on the leather couch, stabbing her in the heart and stealing away.

Of course it was nonsense, as I learned soon enough by dropping to a knee alongside the bed and listening to her steady shallow breathing.

But it gave me a turn, and it showed me the state of my own mind. I went back to the living room, thumbed through the Yellow Pages, and made another couple of phone calls.

The locksmith got there around ten. I'd explained to him just what I wanted, and he brought along several models for me to look at. He went to work in the kitchen first, and he was halfway through in the living room when I heard her stirring. I went into the bedroom.

She said, "What's that noise? At first I thought you were using the vacuum cleaner."

"It's a drill. I'm having some locks installed. It's going to come to close to four hundred dollars. Do you want to write a check?"

"I'd rather give him cash." She went to the dresser and took an envelope from the top drawer. Counting bills, she said, "Four hundred dollars? What are we getting, a vault?"

"Police locks."

"Police locks?" She arched an eyebrow. "To keep the police out?

Or to keep the police in?"

"Whatever you decide."

"Here's five hundred," she said. "Get a receipt, okay?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"I don't know what my accountant does with them, but he's a bear for receipts."

She showered while I went out and kept the locksmith company.

When he was done I paid him and got a receipt and put it and her change on the coffee table. She came out wearing baggy fatigues from Banana Republic and a short-sleeved red shirt with epaulets and metal buttons. I showed her how the locks worked. There were two of them on the living-room door and one in the kitchen.

"I think this is how he got in twelve years ago," I said, pointing to the service door in the kitchen. "I think he came in through the building's service entrance and up the back stairs. That's how he got past the doorman with no trouble. You've got a deadbolt lock on that door, but maybe it wasn't engaged at the time. Or maybe he had a key for it."

"I never use that door."

"So you wouldn't have known if it was locked or not."

"No, not really. It leads to the service elevator and the incinerator.

Once in a blue moon I go out that way to the incinerator, but I don't like having to squeeze past the refrigerator schlepping a bag of garbage, so I usually go out the front door and walk around."

"The first time he was here," I said, "he could have slipped into the kitchen and unlocked the door. Then it would have been open both times he let himself into the apartment. Sometime after that it would have been unlocked when you went to use it, but would you even have noticed it?"

"I don't think so. I would have just thought I forgot to lock it the last time I'd used it."

"Well, you don't have to use it at all for the time being." I demonstrated the lock, the steel bar that ran across the face of the door and lodged in a hasp on the doorframe. "This key locks and unlocks it," I said, "but I suggest you just leave it locked all the time. There's no way to unlock it from the outside. I had him install it without mounting a cylinder on the other side of the door. You never come in this way anyway, do you?"

"No, of course not."

"So it's permanently sealed now, for all practical purposes, but you can let yourself out with the key if you ever have to get out in a hurry.

But if you do, you can't lock it after you. You can lock the deadbolt with the key, but not the police lock."

"I don't even know if I have a key for that door," she said. "Don't worry about it. I'll keep it closed all the time, and I'll keep the deadbolt and the police lock both locked."

"Good." We returned to the living room. "Now here," I said, "I had him mount two police locks. One of them's the same arrangement as you've got in the kitchen, a police lock that you can lock or unlock only from inside the apartment, with no cylinder on the outside. That way there's no lock out there for anybody to pick. When you're inside the apartment with both locks engaged there's no way anybody can get in without a battering ram. When you go out, you can lock the second police lock with a key. This is the key for it, with the bumps on it. The cylinder's supposed to be pickproof, and the key itself can't be duplicated with ordinary equipment, so it would be a good idea not to lose it or your apartment will be secure against everyone, including you."

"There's a thought."

"You've got a lot of security here," I said. "He put an escutcheon plate over the cylinder so it can't be pried out, and the cylinder itself is some space-age alloy that you can't drill into. While he was at it I had him install a similar guard over the existing Segal deadbolt. All of this probably amounts to overkill, especially if you're planning to catch the next plane toBarbados , but I figured you could afford it. And you ought to have decent locks, Motley or no Motley."

"Speaking of him—"

"He's not dead and he's not in prison."

"When did he get out?"

"In July. The fifteenth of the month."

"Which July?" She looked at me and her eyes widened. "This July?

He drew one-to-ten and served twelve years?"

"He wasn't what you'd call a model prisoner."

"Can they keep you there beyond the maximum sentence? Isn't that a violation of due process?"

"Not if you're a very bad boy. That sort of thing happens now and then. You can go to prison for ninety days and still be inside forty years later."

"God," she said. "I guess prison didn't rehabilitate him."

"It doesn't look that way."

"He got out in July. So that's plenty of time to find out where Connie went to and, and—"

"I guess it's time enough."

"And time to clip the story out of the paper and send it to me. And time to wait around while the fear builds. He gets off on fear, you know."

"It could still be a coincidence."

"How?"

"The way we said last night. A friend of hers knew you were her friend and wanted you to know what had happened."

"And didn't send a note? Or put on a return address?"

"Sometimes people don't want to get involved."

"And theNew York postmark?"

I'd doped that out, too, lying on the couch and looking atLong IslandCity 's skyline. "Maybe she didn't have your address. Maybe she put the clipping in an envelope and mailed the whole thing to someone she knew inNew York , asking him or her to look up your address and send it on."

"That's pretty farfetched, isn't it?"

It had seemed plausible while I was stretched out watching dawn break. Now it did look like a stretch.

And it seemed even less likely an hour later, when I got back to my hotel. There weren't any messages in my box, but while I was checking I collected the letters I'd left behind the previous night. There was some junk mail, and a credit-card bill, and there was an envelope with no return address and my name and address block-printed in ballpoint.

It was the same story clipped from the same paper. No note with it, nothing scribbled in the margins.

Something made me read it all the way through, word for word.

The way you'll watch a sad old movie, hoping this time it'll have a happy ending.

United had a nonstop out of La Guardia at 1:45 that was due intoCleveland at 2:59. I put a clean shirt and a change of socks and underwear in a briefcase along with a book I was trying to read and took a cab to the airport. I was early, but after I'd had a bite in the cafeteria and read the Times through and called Elaine I didn't have long to wait.

We were on time getting off and five minutes early at Cleveland-Hopkins International. Hertz had the car I'd reserved, a Ford Tempo, and the clerk gave me an area map with my route toMassillon marked out for me with a yellow highlighter. I followed her directions and made the drive in a little over an hour.

On the way, it occurred to me that it was just as well driving was one of those things you didn't forget how to do, because I'd done precious little of it in recent years. Unless there was a time I was forgetting, it had been over a year since I'd been behind a steering wheel.

Last October Jan Keane and I had rented a car and driven to the Amish country aroundLancaster,Pennsylvania , for a long weekend of turning leaves and folksy inns and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. It started off well but we'd been having our problems and I suppose the weekend was an attempt to cure them, and that's a lot of weight for five days in the country to carry. Too much weight, as it turned out, because we were sullen and sour with each other by the time we got back to the city. We both knew it was over, and not just the weekend. In that sense you could say the trip accomplished what it was supposed to, though not what we wanted it to.

Police Headquarters inMassillon is housed in a modern building downtown onTremont Avenue . I left

the Tempo in a lot down the street and asked the desk officer for a Lieutenant Havlicek, who turned out to be a big man with close-cropped light brown hair and some extra weight in the gut and jowls. He wore a brown suit and a tie with brown and gold stripes, and he had a wedding ring on the appropriate finger and a Masonic ring on the other hand.

He had his own office, with pictures of his wife and children on his desk and framed testimonials from civic groups on one wall. He asked how I took my coffee, and he fetched it himself.

He said, "I was juggling three things when you called this morning, so let me see if I got it straight. You're with the NYPD?"

"I used to be."

"And you're working private now?"

"With Reliable," I said, and showed him a card. "But this matter doesn't involve them, and I don't have a client. I'm here because I think the Sturdevant killing might tie in with an old case of mine."

"How old?"

"Twelve years old."

"From when you were a police officer."

"That's right. I arrested a man with a history of violence toward women. He took a couple shots at me with a .25, so that was the major charge against him, and he wound up pleading to a reduced count of attempted aggravated assault. The judge gave him less time than I thought he deserved, but he got into trouble in prison and didn't get out until four months ago."

"I gather you figure it's a shame he got out at all."

"The warden at Dannemora says he killed two inmates for sure and was the odds-on suspect in three or four other homicides."

"Then why is he walking around?" He answered his own question.

"Although there's a difference between knowing a man did something and being able to prove it, and I guess that goes double inside a state penitentiary." He shook his head, drank some coffee. "But how does he hook up with Phil Sturdevant and his wife? They weren't the kind of people who lived in the same world as him."

"Mrs. Sturdevant lived inNew York at the time. That was before her marriage, and she'd been on the receiving end of some of Motley's violence."

"That's his name? Motley?"

"James Leo Motley. Mrs. Sturdevant— her name was Miss Cooperman at the time— dictated a statement accusing Motley of assault and extortion, and after sentencing he swore he'd get even with her."

"That's pretty thin. That was what, twelve years ago?"

"About that."

"And all she did was give the police a statement?"

"Another woman did the same thing, and he made the same threat.

Yesterday she got this in the mail." I handed him the clipping. Actually it was the copy I'd received, but I couldn't see that it made any difference.

"Oh, sure," he said. "This ran in the Evening-Register."

"It came all by itself in an envelope with no return address. And it was postmarkedNew York ."

"PostmarkedNew York . Not back-stamped by theNew York office, but marked to indicate it had been mailed there."

"That's right."

He took his time digesting this. "Well, I see why you thought it was worth getting on a plane," he said,

"but I still don't see how your Mr. Motley could have been responsible for what happened in Walnut Hills the other night. Unless he was sending out hypnotic radio broadcasts and Phil Sturdevant was picking them up on the fillings in his teeth."

"It's that open-and-shut?"

"It sure as hell looks to be. You want to have a look at the murder scene?"

"Could I do that?"

"I don't see why not. We've got a key to the house somewhere. Let me get it and I'll take you over there and walk you through it."

The Sturdevant house was at the end of a cul-de-sac in a development consisting of expensive houses on lots of a half-acre or more. It was a one-story structure with a pitched roof and a fieldstone-and-redwood exterior. The property was nicely landscaped with evergreens, and there was a stand of birch trees near the property line.

Havlicek parked in the driveway and opened the front door with his key. We walked through an entrance hall into a large living room with a beamed cathedral ceiling. A fireplace ran the length of the far wall. It looked to be built of the same stone used for the house's exterior.

A gray broadloom carpet had been laid wall-to-wall in the living room, and there were some oriental

area rugs laid here and there on top of it. One of these stretched in front of the fireplace. A chalk outline of a human being had been traced on the rug, with part of the legs extending onto the broadloom.

"That's where we found him," Havlicek said. "Way we reconstruct it, he hung up the phone and came over to the fireplace. You see the gun rack. He kept a deer rifle and a .22 there, along with the twelve-gauge he used to kill himself. Of course we took both rifles along for safekeeping, in addition to the twelve-gauge. He would have been standing right there, and he'd have put the shotgun barrel in his mouth and triggered the weapon, and you can see the mess it made, blood and bone fragments and all.

That's been cleaned up some, just for purposes of sanitation, but there's photographs on file if you need to see them."

"And that's where he fell. He landed face up?"

"That's right. The gun was lying alongside him, about where you'd expect to find it. Place has a charnel-house stink to it, doesn't it? Come on, I'll show you where we found the others."

The children had been murdered in their beds. They'd each had a room of their own, and in each room I got to look at blood-soaked bedding and another chalk outline, one smaller than the next. The same kitchen knife had been used on all three children and their mother, and it had been found in the bathroom off the master bedroom. In the bedroom itself they'd found the corpse of Connie Sturdevant. Bloody bedclothing indicated she'd been killed in bed, but the chalk outline was on the floor at the foot of the bed.

"We figure he killed her on the bed," Havlicek said, "and then threw her down on the floor. She was wearing a nightgown, so she'd evidently gone to sleep, or at least to bed."

"How was Sturdevant dressed?"

"Pajamas."

"Slippers on his feet?"

"Barefoot, I think. We can look at the photos. Why?"

"Just trying to get the picture. What phone did he use to call you people?"

"I don't know. There's extensions all over the house, and whatever one he used he hung it up afterward."

"Did you find bloody fingerprints on any of the phones?"

"No."

"He have blood on his hands?"

"Sturdevant? He had blood all over him, for God's sake. He blew the better part of his head all over his living room. You tend to lose a fair amount of blood that way."

"I know. Was all of it his?"

"What are you getting at? Oh, wait a minute, I can see where you're heading. You're saying he'd have had their blood on him."

"They seem to have done a lot of bleeding. You'd think he'd have got some of it on him."

"There was blood in the bathroom sink, where he must have washed his hands. As to whether he got blood on himself that he couldn't wash off, on his pajamas, say, well, I don't know. I don't even know if you could tell their blood apart. They could all have the same type, for all I know."

"There are other tests these days."

He nodded. "DNA matchups and that sort of thing. I know about that, of course, but an all-out forensic workup didn't appear indicated. I guess I see your point. If the only blood on him was his own, how did he manage to kill them without getting his hands dirty? Except he did get

'em dirty, we found where he tried washing up."

"Then there would have to be foreign bloodstains on his person."

"Foreign meaning not his. Why? Oh, because we know he had blood on him to wash off, and you never get all of it. So if there's none of their blood on his hands or his clothing, and if we do find traces of their blood in the bathroom sink, then somebody else killed them." He frowned and thought about it. "If there had been a single false note at the crime scene," he said. "If we had had the slightest reason to suspect this was anything other than what it looked to be, why, we might have taken a longer look at the physical evidence. But for God's sake, man, he called us up and told us what he'd done. We sent a car out and found him dead. When you've got a confession and the killer dead by his own hand, it tends to put a damper on further inquiry."

"I understand that," I said.

"And I haven't seen anything here today to change my mind. You saw the padlock on the front door.

We put that on after, on account of we had to force the door when we got here. He had it locked with the chain on, the way you'll do when you're settled in for the night."

"The killer could have gone out another door."

"The back door was locked the same way, bolted from inside."

"He could have used a window and closed it after him. It wouldn't have been that hard to do. Sturdevant would already have been dead when the killer made the phone call. Do you automatically record calls to headquarters?"

"No. We log 'em, but we don't tape 'em. Is that how they do it inNew York ?"

"There's a tape made of calls to 911."

"Then it's a shame he didn't do this inNew York ," he said, "so there'd be a record, same as your medical examiner could tell us what everybody had for breakfast. But I'm afraid we're a little backward here."

"I didn't say that."

He thought a moment. "No," he said. "I guess you didn't."

"They don't record calls into the individual precincts inNew York , or at least they didn't when I was on the job. And they only started taping the 911 calls when it turned out that the operators were incompetent and kept screwing up. I'm not trying to play City Mouse, Country Mouse with you, Lieutenant. I don't think we'd have looked any harder at this case than you people did. As a matter of fact, the biggest difference between the way you've handled it and the way they'd have done it inNew York is that you've been very decent and cooperative with me. If a cop or ex-cop from out of town came toNew York with the same story, he'd get a lot of doors shut in his face."

He didn't say anything just then. Back in the living room he said, "I can see where it might not be a bad idea to tape incoming calls.

Shouldn't be all that costly to set up, either. What would it do for us in this instance? You're thinking voiceprint, but for that you'd need a recording of Sturdevant's voice for comparison purposes."

"Did he have an answering machine? He might have taped a message."

"I don't think so. Those machines aren't all that popular around here. Of course there might be some record of his voice somewhere.

Home video, that sort of thing. I don't know if something like that would work for voiceprint comparison, though I don't see why not."

"If you had the call taped," I said, "you could find out one thing easily enough. You could find out if it was Motley."

"Well, you could at that," he said. "I never even thought of that, but when you've got an actual suspect it makes a difference, doesn't it? If you had a call taped and the voiceprint matched your Mr. Motley, you'd pretty much have him hanged, wouldn't you?"

"Not until we get a new governor."

"Oh, that's right. Your man keeps vetoing the death-penalty bills, doesn't he? But in a manner of speaking, you'd have your killer cold."

He shook his head. "Speaking of voiceprints, you can probably guess we didn't do any dusting for fingerprints."

"Why should you? It looked open-and-shut."

"We do a lot of things routinely when there's not much point to them. Shame we didn't do that."

"I've a feeling Motley didn't leave any fingerprints."

"Still, it would be nice to know. I could get a crew in here now, but there've been so many people through here by this time I don't think we'd have much luck. Besides, it'd mean reopening the case, and I have to say you haven't given me cause to do that." He hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked at me.

"You honestly think he did it?"

"Yes."

"Can you point to any kind of corroborating evidence? A clipping in the mail and aNew York postmark, that may be enough to get you thinking, but it doesn't do a lot to change how the case looks from here."

I thought about that one while we left the house. Havlicek drew the door shut and snapped the padlock.

It was cooler now, and the birch trees cast long shadows across the lawn. I asked when the killings had taken place. Wednesday night, he said.

"So it's been a week."

"Will be in a matter of hours. The call came in around midnight. I could give you the time to the minute, if it matters, because as I said we keep a log."

"I just wondered about the date," I said. "There was no indication on the clipping. I suppose the story would have run in Thursday night's paper."

"That's right, and there were follow-up stories the next day or two, but they won't tell you anything.

Nothing else came to light, so there wasn't much for them to write about. Just that people were surprised, no indication he was under that kind of stress. The usual things you get from friends and neighbors."

"What kind of a workup did your medical examiner do?"

"The chief of pathology over at the hospital does our medical exams. I don't think he did much beyond looking at the bodies and confirming that the wounds were consistent with the way we read the case.

Why?"

"You still have the bodies on hand?"

"I don't believe they've been released yet. I don't know that we're clear on who we're supposed to release them to, far as that goes. You got something specific in mind?"

"I was wondering if he'd happened to check for semen."

"Jesus God. You think he raped her?"

"It's possible."

"No signs of a struggle."

"Well, he's very strong, and she might not have tried to fight him off. You were asking about corroborative evidence. If there were semen traces, and if the lab work established the semen didn't come from Sturdevant—"

"That'd be corroboration, wouldn't it? You might even wind up matching the semen to your suspect. I'll tell you, I'm not even going to apologize for not ordering a check for pecker tracks. That's about the last thing that would have occurred to me."

"If you've still got the bodies—"

"We can get him to run tests now. I was already thinking that. I don't guess she happened to douche in the past few days, do you?"

"I wouldn't think so."

"Well, let's find out," he said. "Let's see if we can catch the doc before he goes home for dinner. God, his line of work's got to be hell on a man's appetite. Police work's bad enough. Though I seem to manage, don't I?" He clapped a hand to his gut and flashed a rueful grin. "Let's go," he said. "Maybe we'll get lucky."

The pathologist had left for the day. "He'll be in eight o'clock tomorrow morning," Havlicek said. "You did say you were staying over, didn't you, Matt?"

We were Matt and Tom now. I said I was booked on a late-afternoon flight the following day.

"The Great Western's the best place to stay," he said. "It's east of town onLincoln Way . If you like Italian food you can't go wrong at Padula's, that's right atFirst Street , or there's a restaurant at the motel that's not bad. Or here's a better idea, let me call my wife and see if she can't set an extra place at the table."

"That's decent of you," I said, "but I think I'm going to beg off. I had about two hours' sleep last night and I'm afraid I might fall asleep at the table. Suppose you let me take you to lunch tomorrow?"

"We'll have to argue about who takes who, but it's a date. You want to meet me first thing in the morning and we'll go see the doc? Is eight o'clock too early for you?"

"Eight o'clock is fine," I said.

I got my car from the lot where I'd left it and found my way to the motel he'd recommended. I got a room on the second floor and took a shower, then watched the news on CNN. They had cable reception and pulled in thirty channels. After the newscast I worked the dial and found a prizefight on some cable channel I'd never heard of. A pair of Hispanic welterweights were spending most of their time in clinches. I watched until I realized that I wasn't paying any attention to what I was seeing. I went to the restaurant and had a veal chop and a baked potato and coffee and went back to the room.

I called Elaine. Her machine answered, and when I identified myself she picked up and turned the machine off. She was doing fine, she said, sitting behind her barricades and waiting. So far there'd been no untoward phone calls and nothing unlikely in the day's mail. I told her what I'd done, and that I'd be seeing the pathologist in the morning, that I'd ask him to look for semen traces.

"Make sure he checks in back," she said.

We talked a little more. She sounded all right. I told her I'd call when I got back to the city, and then I rang off and worked my way around the TV dial without finding anything that grabbed me.

I got my book from my briefcase. It was The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Jim Faber, my AA sponsor, had recommended it to me, quoting a couple of lines that had sounded interesting, and one day I'd stopped at the Strand and picked up a used copy of the Modern Library edition for a couple of dollars. I'd been finding it slow going. I liked some of the things he said, but a lot of the time I would have trouble tracking his argument, and when I did hit a sentence that resonated for me I would have to put the book aside and think about it for a half hour or so.

This time I read a page or two, and then I hit this passage: Whatever happens at all happens as it should; thou wilt find this true, if thou shouldst watch narrowly.

I closed the book and put it on the table next to me. I tried to imagine the events at the Sturdevant home a week ago. I wasn't sure what order he did them in, but for the sake of argument I decided he'd taken Sturdevant out first because he'd have presented the greatest danger.

Still, the report of the shotgun would have awakened everybody else. So maybe he'd have gone to the kids' rooms first, working his way down the hallway, moving from one room to the next, stabbing the two boys and the girl in turn.

Then Connie? No, he'd have saved her for last. He'd wash up in the bathroom off the master bedroom.

Let's say he immobilized her, got her husband into the living room at gun- or knife-point, killed him with the shotgun, then went back and did Connie. And raped her while he was at it? Well, I'd found out tomorrow, if you could still detect the presence of semen a week after the fact.

Then a phone call, and then a quick trip through the house to get rid of fingerprints. And, finally, a quick and silent exit through a window, and he was on his way. Five people dead, three of them small children.

A whole family gone because twelve years ago a woman had sworn out a statement against a man who'd forced himself on her.

I thought about Connie. Prostitution isn't necessarily a bad life, not at the level she and Elaine had practiced it, withEast Side apartments and an executive clientele. But she had taken her shot at a much better life, and she'd been living it in the house in Walnut Hills.

Then it ended. And Jesus, the way that it ended…

Whatever happens at all happens as it should. Maybe it would be nice to reach the point where I found that true, but I wasn't there yet.

Perhaps I just wasn't watching narrowly enough.

I got my wake-up call in the morning and checked out after breakfast. At eight sharp I gave my name to the desk officer. He had been told to expect me, and sent me back to Havlicek's office.

He was wearing a gray suit this morning, and another striped tie, this one red and navy. He came out from behind his desk to shake hands and asked me if I'd had coffee. I said I had.

"Then we might as well go see Doc Wohlmuth," he said.

I suppose there are older buildings inMassillon , but in my short time there everything I saw looked to have been built within the past ten years. The hospital was new, its walls bright with fresh pastel shades, its floors antiseptically clean. The pathology department was in the basement. We rode down in a silent elevator and walked the length of a hallway. Havlicek knew the route and I tagged along.

I don't know why, but I expected Doc Wohlmuth to be a cantankerous old bastard a few years past retirement age. He turned out to be around thirty-five, with a mop of streaky blond hair and a receding chin and an open boyish face off a Norman Rockwell cover. He shook hands when Havlicek introduced me, then stood there gamely through a round of the badinage cops and pathologists visit upon one another.

When Havlicek asked him if he'd found traces of semen or any other evidence of recent sexual activity upon the corpse of Cornelia Sturdevant, he didn't mind showing that the question came as a surprise.

"Well, hell," he said. "I didn't know I was supposed to look for it."

"There's a possibility the case is more complicated than it looked at first," I said. "Do you have the body on hand?"

"Sure do."

"Could you check?"

"I don't see why not. She's not going anywhere."

He was halfway to the door when I remembered my conversation with Elaine. "Check for anal as well as vaginal entry," I suggested. He stopped in mid-stride, but he didn't turn around so I don't know what showed on his face.

"Will do," he said.

Tom Havlicek and I sat around waiting for him. Wohlmuth had some family snapshots in a lucite cube on his desk. That inspired Tom to tell me that Harvey Wohlmuth had himself a real sweetheart of a wife. I admired her photograph, and he asked me if I was a family man.

"I used to be," I said. "The marriage didn't last."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"It was a long time ago. She's remarried, and my boys are pretty much grown. One's in school and the other's in the service."

"You have much contact with them?"

"Not as much as I'd like."

That was a stopper, and the silence hung for a moment before he picked up the ball and talked about his own children, a girl and a boy, both of them in high school. We moved from family to police work, and then we were just a pair of old cops telling stories. We were still at it when Wohlmuth returned, an owlish expression on his face, to tell us that he'd found semen traces in Mrs. Sturdevant's anus.

"Well, you called that," Havlicek said.

Wohlmuth said he hadn't expected to find anything. "There was no evidence of struggle," he said.

"Nothing. No skin particles under her nails, no bruises on her hands or forearms."

Havlicek wanted to know if he could type the sperm and prove that it was or wasn't Sturdevant's.

"It might be possible," Wohlmuth said. "I'm not sure, with all the time that's gone by. We can't do it here, I can tell you that much. What I want to do is send slides and specimens and tissue samples to Booth Memorial inCleveland . They can do a workup beyond what we're capable of here."

"I'll be interested in the results."

"So will I," Wohlmuth said. I asked if there'd been anything else remarkable about the body. He said she appeared to be in good health, which has always struck me as a curious thing to say about a dead person. I asked if he'd spotted any contusions, especially around the rib cage or the thighs.

Havlicek said, "I don't get it, Matt. What would bruises there indicate?"

"Motley had a lot of strength in his hands," I said. "He liked to use his fingers on a spot on the rib cage."

Wohlmuth said he hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary in that respect, but that bruises weren't always that pronounced if the victim died shortly after the injury was inflicted. The injured area didn't discolor a day later in the same way.

"But you could have a look for yourself," he offered. "You want to come see?"

I didn't really, but I dutifully followed him down a hall and through a door into a room as cold as a meat locker, and with a not entirely dissimilar odor to it. He led me to a table where a body lay beneath a sheet of translucent plastic and drew the sheet aside.

It was Connie, all right. I don't know that I'd have recognized her alive, let alone dead, but knowing who she was I was able to see the girl I'd met a few times a dozen years ago. I felt a sickness deep in my gut, not nausea so much as a deep acidic sorrow.

I wanted to look for contusions, but it was hard for me to violate her nakedness with my eyes, and impossible to lay hands on her.

Wohlmuth had no such compunctions, and a good thing, given the line of work he was in. Without ceremony he shunted a breast aside and palpated the sides of the rib cage, and his fingers found something.

"Right here," he said. "See?"

I couldn't see anything. He took my hand and guided my fingers to a spot. She was cold to the touch, of

course, and there was a flaccidity to her flesh. I could see what he'd found; there was a spot where the flesh was softer, less resilient. There wasn't much in the way of discoloration, however.

"And you said the inside of the thigh? Let's have a look. Hmmm.

Here's something. I don't know if it would be a particularly sensitive pressure point for pain. Not an area I've got much expertise in. But there's been some trauma here. You want to see?"

I shook my head. I was unwilling to look between her parted thighs, let alone touch her. I didn't want to see any more, didn't want to be in that room any longer. Havlicek evidently felt the same way, and Wohlmuth sensed it and led us back to his office.

There he said, "I, uh, checked the children for semen."

"Christ!" Havlicek said.

"I didn't find any," Wohlmuth added quickly. "I thought I ought to check, though."

"Couldn't hurt."

"You saw the stab wounds, right?"

"They'd have been hard to miss."

"Right." He hesitated. "Well, they were all inflicted from the front.

Three stab wounds between the ribs and into the heart, and any one of them would have done it."

"So?"

"What did he do, sodomize her and then roll her over and kill her?"

"Maybe."

"How did you find her? Lying on her back?"

Havlicek frowned, summoning the memory. "On her back," he said. "She'd slid down off the foot of the bed. Stabbed through the nightgown, and it covered her to her knees. Maybe that semen was from much earlier."

"No way to tell."

"Or later," I suggested. They looked at me. "Try it this way. She's on her back in bed and he stabs her.

Then he rolls her over onto her stomach, lifts her nightgown, and pulls her halfway off the bed so he can get at her better. He sodomizes and turns her over and pulls her nightgown down, and in the process she slides the rest of the way off the bed. Then he goes into the bathroom to wash up and rinses the knife while he's at it. That would account for the evident lack of struggle, wouldn't it. They don't offer a whole lot of resistance when they're already dead."

"No," Wohlmuth agreed. "They don't insist on a whole lot of foreplay, either. I don't have any knowledge of the man you're talking about. Is that kind of behavior consistent with what you know about him? Because I don't think it's in conflict with the physical evidence."

I thought of what he'd said to Elaine, about dead girls being as good as live ones if you got them early on. "It's consistent," I said.

"So you're talking about a monster."

"Well, Jesus God," Tom Havlicek said. "It wasn't Saint Francis ofAssisi killed those kids."

"James Leo Motley," Havlicek said. "Tell me about him."

"You know about his priors and what he went away for. What else do you want to know?"

"How old is he?"

"Forty or forty-one. He was twenty-eight when I arrested him."

"You got a photo of him?"

I shook my head. "I could probably dig up a photo but it would be twelve years old." I described Motley as I remember him, his height and build, his facial features, his haircut. "But I don't know if he still looks like that. His face wouldn't have changed much, not with the kind of strong features he had. But he could have gained or lost weight in prison, and he might not still have the haircut. As far as that goes, he could have lost the hair. It's been a long time."

"Some prisons will photograph a prisoner at the time of his release."

"I don't know if that's policy at Dannemora or not. I'll have to find out."

"That's where they had him? At Dannemora?"

"That's where he finished up. He started atAttica , but after a couple of years they transferred him."

"Attica's where they had the riot, isn't it? But that would have been before his time. The years seem to go by faster and faster, don't they?"

We were having lunch at the Italian place he'd recommended the night before. The food was good enough but the decor had a determinedly ethnic feel to it, and it came off like a stage set from one of the Godfather movies. Tom had turned down the waitress's suggestion of wine or a cocktail. "I'm not much of a drinker," he said to me, "but you go right ahead."

I'd said it was a little early for me. Now he apologized for having stranded me after we'd left Wohlmuth.

"Hope you found things to keep you busy," he said. I told him I'd had a chance to read the newspapers and walk around town a little.

"What I should have told you," he said, "is we've got the Pro Football Hall of Fame right off Seventy-seven inCanton . If you're any kind of a football fan, it's something you wouldn't want to miss."

That got us onto football, and that carried us through to the coffee and cheesecake.Massillon , he said, was likeKansas during the Civil War, with brother against brother when it came to the Browns and the Bengals. And they both had good teams this year, and if Kosar stayed healthy both teams ought to make the playoffs, and that was about as much excitement as the town could be expected to handle. They'd never face each other in the Super Bowl, not with both of them being in the same conference, but it was conceivable that they'd be matched up for the conference championship, and wouldn't that be something?

"We were talking about a subway series this year," I said. "The Mets and the Yankees, but the Mets lost out in the playoffs and the Yankees were out of it completely."

"I wish I had the time to follow baseball," he said. "But I just don't.

Football, I have about half my Sundays off, and I'm almost always free to watch the Monday night games."

Then, over coffee, we got back on track. "Why I asked about a photo," he said, "is at this point you haven't given me enough to justify reopening the case. We'll have to see what we get from the lab work they'll be doing at Booth inCleveland . If they can say for sure that semen's from somebody else, maybe that'll tilt the balance. Meanwhile, what we got is a piece of mail mailed and delivered inNew York City , and that doesn't mean a lot to my chief here inMassillon ."

"I can understand that."

"Let's assume you've got the right reading on this and your man did it. The murders took place a week ago last night. I'd say he'd have had to've been in town a few days beforehand, and possibly as much as a week. I suppose it's theoretically possible that he committed the murders the day he arrived, but I'd say

it was more likely he took some time to look the situation over."

"I would certainly think so. He's a planner, and he had twelve years to let it all ripen. He'd figure to take his time."

"And he left town with a clipping from Thursday night's paper, so he was still here when the paper hit the street that afternoon. There's a downtown newsstand that gets it around four, but most places don't have it for sale until five or six. So he was here that long, and maybe overnight. When was the postmark?"

"Saturday."

"So he clipped a newspaper Thursday night inMassillon and mailed it Saturday inNew York . And it was delivered Monday?"

"Tuesday."

"Well, that's not so bad. Sometimes they take a week, don't they?

You know what the post office and the Florsheim Shoe Company got in common?" I didn't. "Half a million loafers they'd love to unload but nobody wants 'em. Why I asked about the postmark, if he mailed it Friday we could be pretty sure he flew from here toNew York . Not a hundred percent, because you can drive it in ten hours if you push it.

You happen to know if he has a car?"

I shook my head. "I don't even know where he lives, or what he's been doing since they cut him loose."

"I was thinking we could check with the airlines, look for his name on the passenger manifests. You think he'd use his right name?"

"No. I think he'd pay cash and use an alias."

"Or pay with a stolen credit card, and that wouldn't have his right name on it, either. He probably put up at a hotel or motel here, and again I don't suppose we'll find James Leo Motley signed on any registration cards, but if we had a photo to circulate somebody might recognize his picture."

"I'll see what I can do."

"If he flew, he'd have needed a car to get around. He could have come by bus fromCleveland but he'd still need a car inMassillon . You have to show a license and a credit card to rent one."

"He could have stolen one.''

"Could have. Lot of things to check, and I don't know what any of

'em might prove. I don't know how much effort I can get the department to put into checking, either. If the right word comes back from Booth Memorial, then we might do something. Otherwise I have to say our effort will most likely be minimal."

"I can understand that."

"When you've only got so many man-hours available to you," he said, "and when you're looking at a case you were able to close half an hour after it opened, well, you can see how you wouldn't be in a hurry to open it up again."

Afterward he gave me precise directions to the Hall of Fame inCanton . I listened, but without paying much attention. I was willing to believe it was fascinating, but I wasn't in the mood to stare through plate glass at Bronko Nagurski's old jersey and Sid Luckman's leather helmet.

Besides, I had to turn in the Tempo inCleveland or Hertz would charge me for a second day.

I gave it back to them with time to spare. My flight turned out to be overbooked, and before boarding they asked for volunteers to relinquish their seats and take a later flight, with the reward of a free trip anywhere in the continentalUnited States . I couldn't think of anyplace I wanted to go. Evidently enough other people could, because they got their volunteers in short order.

I fastened my seat belt, opened my book, read a paragraph of Marcus Aurelius, and promptly fell asleep with the book in my lap. I didn't stir until we were making our descent into La Guardia.

My seat companion, wearing granny glasses and aWestern Reserve sweatshirt, pointed to my book and asked me if it was something like TM. Sort of, I said.

"I guess it really works," she said enviously. "You were truly spaced."

I took a bus and a subway intoManhattan ; the rush hour was in full swing, and that figured to be faster than a cab, and twenty dollars cheaper. I went straight to my hotel and checked my mail and messages, none of them important. I went upstairs and took a shower and called Elaine and brought her up to date.

We didn't talk long, and then I went downstairs and had a bite and went over toSt. Paul 's for a meeting.

The speaker was a regular member of the group, sober a good number of years, and instead of telling an elaborate drinking story he talked this time about what he'd been going through lately. He'd had conflicts at work, and one of his kids was in bad trouble with drugs and alcohol. He wound up talking a lot about acceptance, and that became the meeting's unofficial topic. I thought about Marcus Aurelius's wise words on the subject, about everything happening the way it was supposed to happen, and during the discussion period I considered talking about that, and relating it to what had happened in a picture-book suburb ofMassillon,Ohio . But the meeting ended before I got around to raising my hand.

In the morning I called Reliable and told them I wouldn't be able to come in that day. I'd told them the same thing the day before, and the person I spoke to asked me to hold, and then the fellow I reported to came on the line.

"I had some work for you yesterday and today," he said. "Can I expect you tomorrow?"

"I'm not sure. Probably not."

"Probably not. What's the story, you working a case of your own?"

"No, it's something personal."

"Something personal. How about Monday?" I hesitated, and before I could reply he said, "You know,

there's a lot of guys out there can do this kind of work and are glad to get it."

"I know that."

"It's not a regular job, you're not on the payroll, but all the same I need people I can count on to come in when I got work for them."

"I appreciate that," I said. "I don't think you're going to be able to count on me for the next little while."

"The next little while. How long is that?"

"I don't know. It depends how things work out."

There was a long pause, then a sudden bark of laughter. He said,

"You're drinking again, aren't you?

Jesus, why didn't you just say so in the first place? Give me a call when you've got it out of your system and I'll see if I've got anything for you."

Rage boiled up within me, immediate and volcanic. I choked on it until I heard him break the connection, then slammed the receiver down.

I stalked away from the phone, my blood singing with the implacable fury of the falsely accused. I thought of a dozen things to tell him. First, though, I'd go over there and throw all his tables and chairs out the window. Then I'd tell him how he could change my per diem into nickels, and just where he could put it. And then—

What I did was call Jim Faber at work. He heard me out, and then he laughed at me. "You know," he said reasonably, "if you weren't an alcoholic in the first place, you wouldn't give a shit."

"He's got no right to think I'm drunk."

"How is it your business what he thinks?"

"Are you saying I haven't got a right to be angry?"

"I'm saying you can't afford it. How close are you to picking up a drink?"

"I'm not going to pick up a drink."

"No, but you're closer than you were before you talked with the son of a bitch. That's what you really felt like doing, isn't it? Before you called me instead."

I thought about it. "Maybe," I said.

"But you picked up the phone, and now you're starting to cool off."

We talked for a few minutes, and by the time I hung up my anger had lost its edge. Who was I really angry at? The guy at Reliable, who'd as much as said he was willing to hire me again after my bender had run its course? Not likely.

Motley, I decided. Motley, for starting all this in the first place.

Or myself, maybe. For being powerless to do anything about it.

The hell with it. I picked up the phone and made some calls, and then I went over to Midtown North to talk to Joe Durkin.

I never met Joe Durkin while I was on the job, although our years of service overlapped. I'd known him now for three or four years, and he'd become as good a friend as I had in the NYPD. We'd done each other a little good over the years. Once or twice he'd steered a client in my direction, and a few times I'd turned up something useful and passed it on to him.

When I first met him he was counting the months toward his twenty years, figuring to put in his papers the day he hit that magic number. He couldn't wait, he always said, to get off the job and out of the goddamned city. He was still saying the same thing, but the number had changed to twenty-five, now that he'd passed the twenty-year mark.

The years have packed meat around his middle and thinned the dark hair that he combs flat across his head, and his face shows the florid cheeks and broken blood vessels of the heavy hitter. He had quit cigarettes for a while, but now he was smoking again. His ashtray overflowed onto the desktop, and he had a fresh cigarette burning. He put it out before I was halfway through with my story, and he had another one going before I was finished.

When I was done he tilted his chair back and blew a trio of smoke rings. There wasn't a lot of air moving in the detective squad room that morning. The rings drifted to the ceiling without losing their shape.

"Hell of a story," he said.

"Isn't it?"

"This guy inOhio sounds like a pretty decent fellow. What's his name, Havlicek? Wasn't there a guy with the same name played for the Celtics?"

"That's right."

"Also named Tom, if I'm not mistaken."

"No, I think it was John."

"You sure? Maybe you're right. Your guy any relation?"

"I didn't ask him."

"No? Well, you had other things on your mind. What is it you want to do, Matt?"

"I want to put that son of a bitch where he belongs."

"Yeah, well, he did what he could to stay there. A guy like that's a good bet to die inside the walls. You think they can make any kind of a case against him inMassillon ?"

"I don't know. You know, he got a big break when they read it as murder-suicide and closed it out on the spot."

"It sounds as though we'd have done the same thing."

"Maybe, or maybe not. We'd have had his call on file, for one thing. Taped, with a chance of voiceprint ID. We'd have run more elaborate forensic workups on all five victims as a matter of course."

"You still wouldn't necessarily find sperm up her ass, not unless you were looking for it."

I shrugged. "It doesn't matter," I said. "For Christ's sake, we'd have been able to say if the husband had any blood on him besides his own."

"Yeah, we'd have probably done that. Except we tend to fuck up a lot too, Matt. You've been away from it long enough to forget that side of it."

"Maybe."

He leaned forward, stubbed out his cigarette. "Every time I quit these things," he said, "I'm a heavier smoker when I go back to them. I think quitting's dangerous to my health. If that semen turns out not to be the husband's, you figure they'll open the case?"

"I don't know."

"Because they're light years away from having a case against him.

You can't prove he was inOhio .

Where is he now, you got any idea?"

I shook my head. "I called the DMV. He doesn't own a car and he doesn't have a license."

"They just told you all that?"

"They may have assumed I had official status."

He gave me a look. "Of course you weren't impersonating a police officer."

"I didn't identify myself as such."

"You want to look up the statute, it says you can't act in such a manner as will lead people to believe you're a peace officer."

"That's with intent to defraud, isn't it?"

"To defraud or to induce people to do for you that which they wouldn't do otherwise. Doesn't matter, I'm just being a hard-on. No car, no license. Of course he could be the unlicensed driver of an unregistered vehicle. Where's he living?"

"I don't know."

"He's not on parole so he doesn't have to tell anybody. What's his last known address?"

"A hotel on upper Broadway, but that was more than twelve years ago."

"I don't suppose they held his room."

"I called there," I said. "Just on the offchance."

"And he's not registered."

"Not under his own name."

"Yeah, that's another thing," he said. "False ID. He could have a full set. Twelve years in the joint, he's got to know a lot of dirty people.

He's been out since when, the middle of July? He could have everything from an American Express card to a Swiss passport by now."

"I thought of that."

"You're pretty sure he's in town."

"Has to be."

"And you think he's gonna make a try for the other girl. What's her name again?"

"Elaine Mardell."

"And then he'll nail you for the hat trick." He gave it some thought.

"If we had an official request fromMassillon ," he said, "we could maybe put a couple of uniforms on it, try to turn him up. But that's if they open the case and issue a warrant for the fucker."

"I think Havlicek would like to do that," I said. "If he could run it past his chief."

"He'd like to while the two of you are eating rigatoni and talking football. Now you're five hundred miles away and he's got a million other things that need doing. It gets easier for him to say the hell with it.

Nobody likes to open a closed file."

"I know."

He got a cigarette from his pack, tapped it against his thumbnail, put it back in the pack. He said, "What about a photo? They got one at Dannemora?"

"From his intake interview eight years ago."

"You mean twelve, don't you?"

"Eight. He was atAttica first."

"Right, you said so."

"So, the only photograph they have is eight years old. I asked if they could send me a copy. The guy I spoke to seemed doubtful. He wasn't sure whether that was policy or not."

"I guess he didn't somehow assume you were a police officer."

"No."

"I could call," he said, "but I don't know how much good it would do. Those people generally cooperate, but it's hard to light a fire under them. They tend to take their time. Of course you don't need the photo until your friend inOhio gets clearance to reopen the case, and that doesn't happen until they get the new forensic report."

"And maybe not then."

"And maybe not then. But by that time you'll probably have the photo from Dannemora. Unless, of course, they decide not to send it to you."

"I don't want to wait that long."

"Why not?"

"Because I want to be able to go out and look for him."

"So you want a photo to show."

"Or a sketch," I said.

He looked at me. "That's a funny idea," he said. "You mean one of our artists."

"I figured you might know somebody who wouldn't mind a little extra work."

"Moonlighting, you mean. Draw a picture, pick up a couple of extra bucks."

"Right."

"I might at that. So you'll sit down with him and get him to draw a picture of somebody you haven't laid eyes on in a dozen years."

"It's a face you don't forget."

"Uh-huh."

"And there was a picture that ran in the papers at the time of the arrest."

"You didn't keep a copy, did you?"

"No, but I could look at the microfilm over at the library. Refresh my memory."

"And then sit down with the artist."

"Right."

"Of course you don't know if the guy looks the same, all these years, but at least you'd have a picture of what he used to look like."

"The artist could age him a little. They can do that."

"Amazing what they can do. Maybe you'd all three get together, you and the artist and Whatsername."

"Elaine."

"Right, Elaine."

"I hadn't thought of that," I said, "but it's a good idea."

"Yeah, well, I'm a bottomless well of good ideas. It's my trademark. Offhand I can think of three guys who could do this for you, but there's one I'll call first, see if I can track him down. You wouldn't get upset if this ran you a hundred bucks?"

"Not at all. More if necessary."

"A hundred ought to be plenty." He picked up the phone. "The guy I'm thinking of is pretty good," he said. "More important, I think he might like the challenge."

Ray Galindez looked more like a cop than an artist. He was medium height and stocky, with bushy eyebrows mounted over brown cocker spaniel eyes. At first I put him in his late thirties, but that was an effect of the weight he carried and a certain solemnity to his manner, and after a few minutes I lowered that estimate by ten or twelve years.

As arranged, he met us at Elaine's that evening at seven-thirty. I'd arrived earlier, in time for her to make a pot of coffee and me to drink a cup of it. Galindez didn't want any coffee. When Elaine offered him a beer he said, "Maybe later, ma'am. If I could just have a glass of water now that'd be great."

He called us sir and ma'am, and doodled on a scratch pad while I explained the nature of the problem.

Then he asked for a brief description of Motley and I gave him one.

"This ought to work," he said. "What you're describing is a very distinctive individual. That makes it

much easier for me. What's the worst thing is when you got an eyewitness and he says, 'Oh, this was just an average person, real ordinary-looking, he just looked like everybody else.' That means one of two things. Either your suspect had a face with nothing there to grab onto, or your witness wasn't really seeing what he was looking at. That happens a lot when you've got different races. Your white witness looks at a black suspect and all he sees is a black person. You see the color and you don't see the face."

Before he did any drawing, Galindez led us in an eyes-closed visualization exercise. "The better you see him," he said, "the more we get on the page." Then he had me describe Motley in detail, and as I did so he worked up a sketch with a soft pencil and an Art-Gum eraser. I'd managed to get to theForty-second Street library early that afternoon, and I'd located two newsphotos of Motley, one taken at the time of his arrest, the other during his trial. I don't know that my memory needed refreshing, but I think they had helped clarify the visual image I'd had of him, the way you'd skim off the grime of the ages to restore an old painting.

It was remarkable, watching the face take shape on the sketch pad.

He had both of us pointing out whatever looked off about the sketch, and he'd go to work with the eraser and make a slight change, and gradually the image came into focus with our memory. Then, when we couldn't find anything else to object to, he brought the sketch up to date.

"What we've got here," he said, "is already a man who looks older than twenty-eight years of age. Partly that's because all three of us know for a fact that he's forty or forty-one now, so our minds have been making little unconscious adjustments to our memory. Still, there's more we can do. One thing that happens as you age, your features get more prominent. You take a young person and draw a caricature of him, ten or twenty years later it doesn't look so exaggerated. I had an instructor once, she said we grow up to be caricatures of ourselves. What we'll do here, we'll make the nose a little bit larger, we'll sink the eyes a little beneath the brow." He did all this with a hint of shadow here, a change of line there.

It was quite a demonstration.

"And gravity starts working on you," he went on. "Pulls you down here and there." A flick of the eraser, a stroke of the soft pencil. "And the hairline. Now here we're in the dark on account of we lack information. Did he keep his hair? Is he bald as an egg? We just don't know. But let's say he did like most people do, most men, that is, and he's got the beginnings of male-pattern baldness with the receding hairline. That doesn't mean he's going to look bald, or even well on his way. All it means is his hairline's changed and he's got himself a higher forehead, might look something like this."

He added a suggestion of lines around the eyes, creases at the corners of the mouth. He increased the definition of the cheekbones, held the pad at arm's length, made a minute adjustment with eraser and pencil.

"Well?" he said. "What do you think? Suitable for framing?"

* * *

His work done, Galindez accepted a Heineken. Elaine and I split a Perrier. He talked a little about himself, reluctantly at first, but Elaine was masterful at drawing him out. I suppose it was a professional talent of hers. He told us how drawing had always been something he could do, how he'd taken it so utterly for granted that it had never occurred to him to make a career of it. He'd always wanted to be a cop, had a favorite uncle in the department, and took the test for admission as soon as he finished up a two-year hitch atKingsboroughCommunity College .

He went on sketching for his own amusement, doing portraits and caricatures of his fellow officers; and one day in the absence of a regular police artist he was pressed into service to produce a sketch of a rapist.

Now that was the bulk of what he did, and he loved it, but he felt himself being drawn away from police work. People had been suggesting that he might have the potential for an artistic career far greater than anything he could expect to realize in law enforcement, and he wasn't sure how he felt about that.

He said no to Elaine's offer of a second beer, thanked me for the two fifties I handed him, and told us he hoped we'd let him know how things turned out. "When you take him down," he said, "I hope I get a chance to see him, or at least a photo of him. Just to see how close I came. Sometimes you'll see the actual guy and he's nothing like what you drew, and other times anybody'd swear you must have been working from a model."

When he left Elaine closed the door after him and engaged all the locks. "I feel silly doing this," she said,

"but I've been doing it anyway."

"There are people all over town with half a dozen locks on every door, and alarm systems and everything else. And they don't have somebody who's threatened to kill them."

"I suppose it's comforting to know that," she said. "He's a nice kid, Ray. I wonder if he'll stay a cop."

"Hard to say."

"Was there ever anything else you wanted to be? Besides a cop?"

"I never even wanted to be a cop. It was something I drifted into, and before I was out of the Academy I realized it was what I'd been born for. But I never knew that early on. When I was a kid I wanted to be Joe DiMaggio when I grew up, but that's what every kid wanted, and I never had the moves to go with the desire."

"You could have married Marilyn Monroe."

"And sold coffee makers on television. There but for the grace of God."

She carried our empty glasses into the kitchen and I trailed along behind her. She rinsed them under the tap, placed them in the strainer. "I think I'm getting stir-crazy," she said. "What are you doing tonight? Do you have anyplace you have to be?"

I looked at my watch. I usually go toSt. Paul 's on Fridays for the eight-thirty step meeting, but it was too late now, they'd already started.

And I had caught a noon meeting downtown already that day. I told her I didn't have anything planned.

"Well, how about a movie? How does that sound?"

It sounded fine. We walked over to Sixtieth and Third to a first-run house. It was the weekend so there was a line, but there was a pretty decent film at the end of it, a slick caper movie with Kevin Costner and Michelle Pfeiffer. "She's not really pretty," Elaine said afterward, "but there's something about her, isn't there? If I were a man, I'd want to fuck her."

"Repeatedly," I said.

"Oh, she does it for you, huh?"

"She's all right."

" 'Repeatedly,' " she said, and chuckled. Around us,Third Avenue was thronged with young people who looked as though the country were every bit as prosperous as the Republicans kept telling us it was. "I'm hungry," Elaine announced. "You want to get a bite? My treat."

"Sure, but why is it your treat?"

"You paid for the movie. Can you think of a place? Friday night in this neighborhood, wherever we go we're going to be up to our tits in yuppies."

"There's a place in my neighborhood. Great hamburgers and cottage fries. Oh, wait a minute. You don't eat hamburgers, do you? The fish is good there, but I forget if you said you eat fish."

"Not anymore. How's their salad?"

"They serve a good salad, but is that enough for you?"

She said it would be plenty, especially if she stole a few of my cottage fries. There were no empty cabs and the streets were full of people trying to hail one. We started to walk, then caught a bus onFifty-seventh Street and got off atNinth Avenue . The place I had in mind, Paris Green, was five blocks downtown. The bartender, a lanky fellow with a brown beard that hung down like an oriole's nest, gave a wave as we cleared the threshold. His name wasGary , and he'd helped me out a few months ago when I'd been hired to find a girl who'd done some of her drinking there. The manager, whose name was Bryce, had been a little less helpful then, but he was helpful enough now, greeting us with a smile and showing us to a good table. A waitress with a short skirt and long legs came over to take our drink order, went away, and came back with Perrier for me and a Virgin Mary for Elaine. I must have been watching the girl's departure, because Elaine tapped my glass with hers and advised me to stick to Michelle Pfeiffer.

"I was just thinking," I said.

"I'm sure you were."

When the girl returned Elaine ordered the large garden salad. I had what I generally have there, a Jarlsberg cheeseburger and well-done fries. When the food came I had what felt like déjà vu until I realized I was getting echoes of Tuesday night, when I'd had a late bite at Armstrong's with Toni. The two restaurants weren't that much alike, and neither were the women. Maybe it was the cheeseburgers.

Halfway through mine I thought to ask her if it bothered her that I was eating a cheeseburger. She looked at me as though I were crazy and asked why it should bother her.

"I don't know," I said. "You don't eat meat, and I just wondered."

"You must be kidding. Not eating meat is just a choice I make, that's all. My doctor didn't order me to quit, and it wasn't an addiction I had to struggle with."

"And you don't have to go to the meetings?"

"What meetings?"

"Carnivores Anonymous."

"What a thought," she said, and laughed. Then her eyes narrowed and she looked appraisingly at me. "Is that what you did? AA?"

"Uh-huh."

"I thought that was probably how you did it. Matt, would it have bothered you if I'd ordered a drink?"

"You did."

"Right, a Virgin Mary. Would it have—"

"You know what the British call it? Instead of a Virgin Mary?"

"A Bloody Shame."

"Right. No, it wouldn't have bothered me if you'd ordered a real drink. You can order one now if you want."

"I don't."

"Is that why you ordered a Virgin Mary? Because you thought it might bother me otherwise?"

"It didn't even occur to me, as a matter of fact. I hardly ever drink alcohol these days. I hardly ever did.

The only reason I asked was because you asked about the cheeseburger, and while we've been discussing meat and drink I've been sneaking your cottage fries."

"While my attention was diverted elsewhere. We could probably arrange to get you some of your own."

She shook her head. "Stolen sweets are best," she said. "Didn't your mother ever tell you that?"

She wouldn't let me take the check, and then rejected my suggestion that we split it. "I invited you," she said. "Besides, I owe you money."

"How do you figure that?"

"Ray Galindez. I owe you a hundred bucks."

"The hell you do."

"The hell I don't. Some maniac's trying to kill me and you're protecting me. I ought to be paying your regular rate, you know that?"

"I don't have a regular rate."

"Well, I ought to be paying you what a client pays. I certainly ought to be covering the expenses.

Speaking of which, you flew toCleveland and back, you stayed over at a hotel—"

"I can afford it."

"I'm sure you can, but so what?"

"And I'm not just acting on your behalf," I went on. "I'm his target at least as much as you are."

"You think so? He's probably a lot less likely to fuck you in the ass."

"You never know what he learned in prison. I'm serious, Elaine.

I'm operating in my own interest here."

"You're also acting in mine. And it's depriving you of income, you already said how you're not working at the detective agency in order to make time for this. If you're contributing your time, the least I can do is cover all the expenses."

"Why don't we split them?"

"Because that's not fair. You're the one running around, you're the one putting your regular work on the

shelf for the duration. Besides, I can afford it better than you can.

Don't pout, for Christ's sake, it's no reflection on your manhood, it's just a simple statement of fact. I've got a lot of money."

"Well, you earned it."

"Me and Smith Barney, making our money the old-fashioned way.

I earned it and I kept it and I invested it, and I'm not rich, honey, but I'll never be poor. I own a lot of property. I own my apartment, I bought right away when the building went co-op, and I own houses and multiple dwellings inQueens

.JacksonHeights , mostly, and some in Woodside. I get checks every month from the management company, and every now and then my accountant tells me I've got too big a balance in my money-market account and I have to go out and buy another piece of property."

"A woman of independent means."

"You bet your ass."

She paid the check. On the way out we stopped at the bar and I introduced her toGary . He wanted to know if I was working on a case.

"He let me play Watson once," he told Elaine. "Now I live in hope of another opportunity."

"One of these days."

He draped his long body over the bar, dropped his voice low. "He brings suspects here for grilling," he confided. "We grill them over mesquite."

She rolled her eyes and he apologized. We got out of there, and she said, "God, it's glorious out, isn't it?

I wonder how long this weather can last."

"As long as it wants, as far as I'm concerned."

"It's hard to believe it's something like six weeks until Christmas. I don't feel like going home. Is there

someplace else we can go? That we can walk to?"

I thought for a moment. "There's a bar I like."

"You go to bars?"

"Not usually. The place I'm thinking of is kind of lowlife. The owner— I was going to say he was a friend of mine, but that may not be the right word."

"Now you've got me intrigued," she said.

We walked over to Grogan's. We took a table, and I went over to the bar to get our drinks. They don't have waiters there. You fetch what you want yourself.

The fellow behind the stick was called Burke. If he had a first name, I'd never heard it. Without moving his lips he said, "If you're looking for the big fella, he was just here. I couldn't say if he'll be back or not."

I brought two glasses of club soda back to the table. While we nursed them I told her a couple of stories about Mick Ballou. The most colorful one involved a man named Paddy Farrelly, who'd done something to arouse Ballou's ire. Then one night Ballou went in and out of every Irish saloon on theWest Side . He was carrying a bowling bag, so they said, and he kept opening it to show off Paddy Farrelly's disembodied head.

"I heard that story," Elaine said. "Wasn't there something about it in the papers?"

"I think one of the columnists used it. Mick refuses to confirm or deny. In any event, Farrelly's never been seen since."

"Do you think he did it?"

"I think he killed Farrelly. I don't think there's any real question of that. I think he went around showing off a bowling bag. I don't know for sure that he ever opened it, though, or that there was anything in it."

She thought it over. "Interesting friends you have," she said.

Before our club soda ran out, she got a chance to meet him. He came in with two much smaller men in tow, two men dressed alike in jeans and leather flier's jackets. He gave me a slight nod as he led the two the length of the room and through a door at the rear. Some five minutes later the three reappeared. The two smaller men walked on out of the bar and headed south on Tenth Avenue, and Ballou stopped at the bar, then came over to our table with a glass of twelve-year-old Jameson in his hand.

"Matthew," he said. "Good man." I pointed to a chair but he shook his head. "I can't," he said. "I have business. The man who's his own boss always winds up working for a slavedriver."

I said, "Elaine, this is Mick Ballou. Elaine Mardell."

"A pleasure," Ballou said. "Matthew, I've been saying I wished you would come by, and here you are and I have to be off. Come back again, will you?"

"I will."

"We'll tell tales all night and go to mass in the morning. Miss Mardell, I'll hope to see you again as well."

He turned away. Almost as an afterthought he raised his glass and drained it. On his way out he left the glass on an empty table.

After the door closed behind him Elaine said, "I wasn't prepared for the size of him. He's huge, isn't he?

He looks like one of those statues onEaster Island ."

"I know."

"Rough-hewn from granite. What did he mean about going to mass in the morning? Is that code for something?"

I shook my head. "His father was a meatcutter in theWashington Street market. Every once in a while Mick likes to put on his father's old apron and go to the eight o'clock mass at St. Bernard's."

"And you go with him?"

"I did once."

"You bring a girl to the most remarkable places," she said, "and introduce her to the most remarkable people."

* * *

Outside again, she said, "You live near here, don't you, Matt? You can just put me in a cab. I'll be all right."

"I'll see you home."

"You don't have to."

"I don't mind."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive," I said. "Besides, I'm going to need that sketch Galindez made. I want to get it photocopied first thing in the morning and start showing it to people."

"Oh, right."

There were plenty of cabs now, and I flagged one and we rode across town in silence. Her doorman opened the cab door for us, then hurried ahead to hold the door to the lobby.

As we rode up in the elevator she said, "You could have had the cab wait."

"There are cabs all over the place."

"That's true."

"It's easier to get another one than pay his waiting time. Besides, I might walk home."

"At this hour?"

"Sure."

"It's a long walk."

"I like long walks."

She unfastened both locks, the Segal deadbolt and the Fox police lock, and when we were inside she fastened them all again, the two she'd just unlocked and the other, the police lock that could only be engaged from inside. It was a lot to go through given that I was going to be leaving in a minute, but I was pleased to see her do it. I wanted her to get in the habit of setting all the locks the minute she walked into the place.

And not just most of the time. All of the time.

"Don't forget the cab," she said.

"What about the cab?"

"All the cabs," she said. "You want to keep track, so I can reimburse you."

"Oh, for Christ's sake," I said.

"What's the matter?"

"I can't bother with that kind of chickenshit," I said. "I don't go through that when I have a client."

"What do you do?"

"I set some kind of arbitrary flat rate and it includes my expenses. I can't make myself keep receipts and write down every time I get on the subway. It drives me crazy."

"What about when you do a day's work for Reliable?"

"I keep track as well as I can, and it makes me a little bit nuts, but I put up with it because I have to. I may be done working for them anyway, after the conversation I had with one of the bosses this morning."

"What happened?"

"It's not important. He was a little miffed that I was taking some time off, and I'm not sure he'll want me back when it's over. Then again, I'm not sure I'll want to go back."

"Well, you'll work it out," she said. She walked over to the coffee table, picked up a little bronze statue of a cat, and turned it over in her hands. "I don't mean keep receipts," she said. "I don't mean itemize everything to the penny. I just want you to get paid back for whatever out-of-pocket expenses you have.

I don't care how you arrive at a figure, just so you don't cheat yourself."

"I understand."

She walked over to the window, still passing the little cat from hand to hand. I moved alongside her and we looked atQueens together.

"Someday," I said, "all of this will be yours."

"Funny man. I want to thank you for tonight."

"No thanks are due."

"I think they are. You saved me from a severe case of cabin fever.

I had to get out of here, but it was more than that. I had a good time."

"So did I."

"Well, I'm grateful. Taking me to places in your neighborhood, Paris Green and Grogan's. You didn't have to let me into your world like that."

"I had at least as good a time as you did," I said. "And it doesn't exactly hurt my image to be seen with a beautiful woman on my arm."

"I'm not beautiful."

"The hell you're not. What do you want, reassurance? You must know what you look like."

"I know I'm not a bow-wow," she said. "But I'm certainly not beautiful."

"Oh, come on. How'd you get all those houses across the river?"

"You don't have to look like Elizabeth Taylor to make it in life, for God's sake. You ought to know that.

You just have to be a person a man'll want to spend time with. I'll tell you a secret. It's mental work."

"Whatever you say."

She turned away, put the cat back on the coffee table. With her back to me she said, "Do you really think I'm beautiful?"

"I've always thought so."

"That's so sweet."

"I'm not trying to be sweet. I just—"

"I know."

Neither of us said anything for a moment, and the room turned deeply silent. There had been a moment like that in the film we saw, when the music stopped and the sound track went soundless. It heightened the suspense, as I recall.

I said, "I'd better take that sketch."

"You'd better. I want to put it in something, though, so it won't smudge. Let me go pee first, okay?"

While she was gone, I stood in the middle of the room looking at James Leo Motley as Ray Galindez had drawn him and trying to read the expression in his eyes. That didn't make much sense, given that I was looking at an artist's drawing instead of a photo, and that Motley's eyes had been opaque and unreadable even in person.

I wondered what he was doing out there. Maybe he was holed up in an abandoned building sucking on a crack pipe. Maybe he was living with a woman, hurting her with the tips of his fingers, taking her money, telling her she liked it. Maybe he was out of town, shooting craps inAtlantic City , lying on a beach inMiami .

I went on gazing at the sketch, trying to let my old animal instincts tell me where he was and what he was doing, and Elaine returned to the room and moved to stand beside me. I felt the gentle pressure of her shoulder against my side and breathed in her scent.

She said, "I thought a cardboard tube. That way you wouldn't have to fold it, you could just roll it, and it won't get smudged."

"How do you happen to have a cardboard tube on hand? I thought you didn't keep stuff."

"I don't, but if I pull the rest of the paper towels off the roll I'll have a tube."

"Clever."

"I thought so."

"If you think it's worth it."

"How much is a roll of paper towels? A buck nineteen, something like that?"

"I don't know."

"Well, it's something like that. Of course it's worth it." She extended a forefinger, touched the sketch.

"When this is over," she said, "I want this."

"What for?"

"I want it matted and framed. Remember what he said, 'Suitable for framing'? He was joking, but that's because he doesn't take his work seriously yet. This is art."

"You're serious."

"You bet I am. I should have gotten him to sign it. Maybe I'll get in touch with him later, ask him if he'd be willing. What do you think?"

"I think he'd be flattered. Listen, I was going to have a few Xerox copies made, but now you're giving me ideas. What I'll do is I'll run an edition of fifty and number them."

"Very funny," she said. She moved her hand and laid it gently on top of mine. "Funny man."

"That's me."

"Uh-huh."

There was more of that utter silence, and I cleared my throat to break it. "You put perfume on," I said.

"Yes, I did."

"Just now?"

"Uh-huh."

"It smells nice."

"I'm glad you like it."

I turned to put the sketch on the table, then straightened up again.

My arm moved around her waist and my hand settled on her hip. She sighed almost imperceptibly and leaned against me, her head on my shoulder.

"I feel beautiful," she said.

"You should."

"I didn't just put on perfume," she said. "I got undressed."

"You're dressed now."

"Yes, I am. But before I was wearing a bra and panties, and now I'm not. So it's just me under these clothes."

"Just you."

"Just me and a little perfume." She swung around to face me. "And I brushed my teeth," she said, tilting

her head, looking up at me with her lips slightly parted. Her eyes held mine for a moment, and then she closed them.

I took her in my arms.

* * *

It was quite wonderful, urgent yet unhurried, passionate yet comfortable, familiar yet surprising. We had the ease of old lovers and the eagerness of new ones. We had always been good together, and the years had been kind. We were better than ever.

Afterward she said, "I was thinking about this all night. I thought, gee, I like this guy, I always liked him, and wouldn't it be nice to find out if the gears still mesh after all these years. So in a manner of speaking I had this planned, but it was all in the mind. Do you know what I mean?"

"I think so."

"My mind was excited at the prospect. Then you told me I was beautiful and all of a sudden I'm standing there with wet panties."

"Honestly?"

"Yeah, instant arousal. Like magic."

"The way to a woman's heart—"

"Is through her panties. Can't you see new worlds opening up for you? All you have to do is tell us we're beautiful." She put her hand on my arm. "I think the reason it worked is you made me believe it. Not that I am, but that you think I am."

"You are."

"That's your story," she said, "and you stick to it. You know that story about Pinocchio? The girl sits on his face and says, 'Lie to me, lie to me.' "

"When did I ever lie to you?"

"Ah, baby," she said, "I figured it'd be fun to do this, and I knew it was going to happen one of these days, but who would have guessed we'd be so hot for each other?"

"I know."

"When was the last time we were together like this? The last time you were over here was three years ago, but we didn't go to bed then."

"No, it was a few years before then."

"So it could have been seven years ago?"

"Maybe even eight."

"Well, that explains it. The cells in your body change completely every seven years. Isn't that what they say?"

"That's what they say."

"So your cells and my cells had never met before. I never understood that, the cells changing every seven years. What the hell does it mean? If you get a scar you've still got it several years later."

"Or a tattoo. The cells change but the ink stays between them."

"How does it know how to do that?"

"I don't know."

"That's what I can't figure out. How does it know? You don't have any tattoos, do you?"

"No."

"And you call yourself an alcoholic. Isn't that when people get them, when they're tanked?"

"Well, it never struck me as the reasoned act of a sober man."

"No, I wouldn't think so. I read somewhere that a high percentage of murderers are heavily tattooed.

Have you ever heard that?"

"It sounds familiar."

"I wonder why that would be. Something to do with self-image?"

"Maybe."

"Did Motley have any?"

"Self-image?"

"Tattoos, you dimwit."

"Sorry. Did he have any tattoos? I don't remember. You ought to know, you saw more of his body than I did."

"Thanks for reminding me. I don't remember any tattoos. He had scars on his back. Did I tell you about that?"

"Not that I remember."

"Bands of scar tissue across his back. He was probably physically abused in childhood."

"It happens."

"Uh-huh. Are you sleepy?"

"Sort of."

"And I'm not letting you doze off. That's the thing about fucking, it wakes women up and puts men to sleep. You're an old bear and I won't let you hibernate."

"Ummmmm."

"I'm glad you don't have any tattoos. I'll let you alone now. Good night, baby."

I slept, and sometime during the night I awoke. I was dreaming, and then the dream had slipped away beyond recall and I was awake.

Her body was drawn close to mine and I could feel her heat, and I was breathing her smell. I ran a hand along her flank, feeling the wonderful smoothness of her skin, and the suddenness of my own physical response surprised me.

I filled my hands with her and stroked her, and after a moment she made a sound not unlike a cat's purr and rolled onto her back, shifting to accommodate me. I eased onto her and into her and our bodies found their rhythm and labored together, endlessly rocking.

Afterward she laughed softly, in the darkness. I asked her what was so funny.

" 'Repeatedly,' " she said.

In the morning I slipped out of bed and showered and dressed, then woke her to let me out and lock up after me. She wanted to make sure I had the sketch. I held up the cardboard core from a roll of paper towels, Galindez's effort coiled within.

"Don't forget I want it back," she said.

I told her I'd take good care of it.

"And of yourself," she said. "Promise?"

I promised.

I walked back to my hotel. On the way I found a copy shop that hadn't closed for the weekend and got

them to run a hundred copies of the sketch. I dropped most of them in my room, along with the original, which I'd rolled and reinserted in its cardboard sleeve. I kept a dozen or so copies and took along a batch of business cards, the ones Jim Faber had printed up for me, not the ones from Reliable. These had my name and phone number, nothing else.

I took the Broadway local uptown and got off at Eighty-sixth. My first stop was the Bretton Hall, Motley's last known address at the time of his arrest. I already knew he wasn't registered there under his own name, but I tried his picture on the man behind the desk. He studied it solemnly and shook his head.

I left the picture with him, along with one of my cards. "Be something in it for you," I said. "If you can help me out."

I worked my way up the east side of Broadway to110th Street , hitting the residential hotels on Broadway itself and on the side streets.

Then I crossed to the other side and did the same thing, working my way back down to Eighty-sixth and continuing on down to around Seventy-second Street. I stopped for a plate of black beans and yellow rice at a Cuban-Chinese lunch counter, then worked the east side of Broadway back up to where I'd started. I passed out more business cards than pictures, but I still managed to get rid of all but one of the copies of the sketch and wished I'd brought more. They'd only cost me a nickel apiece, and at that rate I could have afforded to paper the city with them.

A couple of people told me Motley looked familiar. At one welfare hotel, the Benjamin Davis on Ninety-fourth, the clerk knew him immediately.

"He was here," he said. "Man stayed here this summer."

"What dates?"

"I don't know as I could say. He was here more than a couple weeks, but I couldn't tell you when he came or when he moved out."

"Could you check your records?"

"I might could, if I recollected his name."

"His real name's James Leo Motley."

"You don't always get real names here. I don't suppose I have to tell you that." He flipped to the front of the register, but the volume only went back to early September. He went into a back room and came back with the preceding volume in hand. "Motley," he said to himself, and started paging through the entries. "I don't see it here. I got to say I don't think that was the name he used. I disremember his name, but I would know it if I heard it, you know what I'm saying? And when I hear Motley it don't ring no bells."

He went through the book all the same, running his finger down the pages slowly, moving his lips slightly as he scanned the names of lodgers. The whole process drew some attention, and a couple of others, tenants or hangers-on, drifted over to see what was occupying us.

"You know this man," the clerk said to one of them. "Stayed here over the summer. What was the name he called hisself?"

The man he'd asked took the sketch and held it so the light fell on it. "This ain't a photograph," he said.

"This is like a picture somebody drawn of him."

"That's right."

"Yeah, I know him," he said. "Looks just like him. What name was you calling him?"

"Motley. James Leo Motley."

He shook his head. "Wasn't no Motley. Wasn't no James anything."

He turned to his friend. "Rydell, what was this dude's name? You remember him."

"Oh, yeah," Rydell said.

"So what was his name?"

"Looks just like him," Rydell said. "On'y his hair was different."

"How?"

"Short," Rydell told me. "Short on top, on the sides, short all over."

"Real short," his friend agreed. "Like maybe he used to be someplace where they give you a real short haircut."

"Where they just use that old clippers," Rydell said, "and all's they do is buzz you up one side of your head and down the other. I swear I'd know his name. If I was to hear it I'd know it."

"So would I," the other man said.

"Coleman," Rydell said.

"Wasn't Coleman."

"No, but it was like Coleman.Colton ? Copeland!"

"Think you're right."

"Ronald Copeland," Rydell said triumphantly. "Reason I said Coleman, you know that actor, used to be, name of Ronald Colman?

Dude here was Ronald Copeland."

And, amazingly, his name was in the book, with a check-in date of July 27, twelve days after he cleared

the gate at Dannemora. For previous address he'd putMason City,Iowa . I couldn't imagine why, but I dutifully noted it in my notebook.

They had an odd system of record-keeping at the Benjamin Davis, and there was no indication in the book of his date of departure. The clerk had to consult a card file to find that out. It turned out he'd been there exactly four weeks, checking out on the twenty-fourth of August.

He had not left a forwarding address, and the desk clerk couldn't recall that there'd been anything that needed forwarding, or that he'd received any mail during his stay, or had any callers.

None of them could recall a conversation with him. "Man kept to hisself," Rydell said. "Time you'd see him, he'd be going to his room or out to the street. What I'm saying, he was never just standing around talking to you."

His friend said, "Something about him, you didn't start up no conversation with him."

"Way he looked at you."

"Hell, yes."

"He could look at you," Rydell said, "and it was like you'd get a chill. Not a hard look, neither, or a dirty look. Just cold."

"Ice-cold."

"Like he'd kill you for any reason at all. You want my opinion, man's a stone killer. I didn't never know nobody looked at you like that and wasn't."

"I knew a woman once had that kind of look," his friend said.

"Shit, I don't want to meet no woman like that."

"You didn't want to meet this one," his friend said. "Not on the shortest day of your life."

We talked some more, and I gave them each a card and told them it would be worth something to know where he was now, or if he turned up again in the neighborhood. Rydell offered the opinion that the conversation we'd just had ought to be worth something already, and I wasn't inclined to argue the point.

I gave ten dollars to each of them, him and his friend and the desk clerk. Rydell allowed as to how it might have been worth more than that, but he didn't seem surprised when that was all he got.

"You see those dudes on the TV," he said, "and they be passing out twenty dollars here, twenty dollars there, 'fore nobody even tells 'em anything. Why is it you never see no dudes like that around here?"

"They spend all their money," his friend said, "before they get this far uptown. This gentleman here, this gentleman's a man knows how to pace hisself."

I paced myself all up and down Broadway, and that was the only time I had occasion to hand out any money. It was also as close as I came to getting a lead, and I suppose it was progress of a sort. I could place him with certainty inNew York for four weeks ending August 24. I had an alias for him, and had the inferential evidence that he was dirty.

If he was clean, what did he need with an alias?

More important, I'd established that Galindez's drawing was recognizably close to Motley's present appearance. His hair had been shorter, but by now his prison haircut would have grown out. Then too, he might have sideburns or facial hair, but he very likely didn't; he hadn't had them before he went away, and he hadn't started growing them by the time he checked out of theDavis , six weeks after they let him out of prison.

By the time I made the circle back to the Bretton Hall my legs were feeling the mileage. And that was the least of it. That kind of legwork takes its toll. You have the same conversation with dozens of people, and most of the time it's like talking to plants. The only bright spot that day had come at the Benjamin Davis, with a long dry spell before it and a longer drier one after. That was typical. When you make rounds like that— knocking on doors, cops call it, but on this occasion I'd had no doors to knock on—when you do this, you know you're wasting at a minimum ninety-five percent of your time and effort.

There doesn't seem to be any way around this, because you can't do the useful five percent without the other. It's like shooting birds with a scattergun. Most of the pellets miss, but you don't mind as long as the bird falls. And you couldn't expect to bring him down with a .22. He's too small, and there's too much sky around him.

Still, it takes it out of you. I took the bus and went back to my hotel room and turned on the television.

There was a late college game underway, two Pac-10 teams, and one of them had a quarterback who was being hyped for the Heisman Trophy. I sat down and started watching, and I could understand what the fuss was about. He was a white boy, too, and big enough for pro ball.

Something gave me the feeling that his income over the next ten years was going to be higher than mine.

I must have dozed off watching, because I was having some kind of dream when the phone rang. I opened my eyes, turned the sound down on the TV, and answered the phone.

It was Elaine. She said, "Hi, sweetie. I called earlier but they said you were out."

"I didn't get a message."

"I didn't leave one. I just wanted to thank you and I didn't want to do that by message. You're a sweet man, but I suppose everybody tells you that."

"Not quite everybody," I said. "I talked to dozens of people today and not one of them told me that.

Most of them didn't tell me a thing."

"What were you doing?"

"Looking for our friend. I found a hotel where he spent a month after he got out of prison."

"Where?"

"A flop in the West Nineties. The Benjamin Davis, but I don't think you'd know it."

"Would I want to?"

"Probably not. Our sketch is good, I managed to establish that much, and it may be the most important thing I learned today."

"Did you get the original back?"

"You still want it, huh?"

"Of course I do. What are you doing tonight? Do you want to bring it over?"

"I've got some more legwork to do."

"And I bet you give great leg, don't you?"

"And I want to get to a meeting," I said. "I'll call later, if it's not too late. And maybe I'll come by, if you feel like late company."

"Good," she said. "And Matt? That was sweet."

"For me, too."

"Did you used to be such a romantic? Well, I just wanted you to know I appreciate it."

I put the phone down and turned the sound up. The game was well into the fourth quarter, so I'd evidently been asleep for a while. It was no contest at this stage, but I watched the rest of it anyway, then went out to get something to eat.

I took a batch of copies of Motley's likeness and an inch-thick stack of business cards, and after I ate I went on downtown. I worked the SRO hotels and rooming houses inChelsea , then walked on down to the Village. I timed things so I could catch a meeting in a storefront onPerry Street . There were about seventy people jammed into a room that would have held half that number comfortably, and the seats were all spoken for by the time I got there. There was standing room only, and precious little of that. The meeting was lively, though, and I got a seat when the place thinned out at the break.

The meeting broke at ten and I made the rounds of some of the leather bars, Boots and Saddles on Christopher, the Chuckwagon onGreenwich , and a couple of lowdown riverfront joints onWest Street .

The gay bars catering to the S & M crowd had always had a murky ambience, but now in the Age of AIDS I found their atmosphere particularly unsettling. Part of this, I suppose, came from the perception that a large proportion of the men I saw, looking so gracefully casual in denim and cowhide, smoking their Marlboros and nursing their Coors, were walking time bombs, infected with the virus and odds-on to come down with the disease within months or years. Armed with this knowledge, or perhaps disarmed by it, it was all too easy for me to see the skull beneath the skin.

I was there on a hunch, and a thin one at that. The day Motley surprised us at Elaine's apartment, the first time I'd seen him, he'd been togged out like some sort of urban cowboy, all the way down to his metal-tipped boots. This was a long way from making him a leather queen, I had to admit, but I didn't have any trouble picturing him in those bars, leaning sinuously against something, those long strong fingers curled around a beer bottle, those flat cold eyes staring, measuring, challenging. As far as I knew, women were Motley's victims, but I couldn't be sure how discriminating he was in that particular regard. If he didn't care whether his partners were alive or dead, how important could their gender be to him?

So I showed his likeness around and asked the questions that went with it. Two bartenders thought Motley looked familiar, although neither could ID him for certain. At one of theWest Street dives, they had a dress code on weekends; you had to be wearing denim or leather, and a bouncer wearing both stopped me in my suit and pointed to the sign explaining the policy.

I suppose it's fair play. Look at all the people in jeans and bomber jackets who don't get to have a drink at the Plaza. "It's not a social call,"

I told him. I showed him Motley's picture and asked if he knew him.

"What's he done?"

"He hurt some people."

"We get our share of rough trade."

"This is rougher than you'd want."

"Let me see that," he said, raising his sunglasses, bringing the sketch up to his eyes for a closer look.

"Oh, yes," he said.

"You know him?"

"I've seen him. You wouldn't call him a frequent flier, but I've got a bitching memory for faces. Among other body parts."

"How many times has he been here?"

"I don't know. Four times? Five times? First time I saw him must have been around Labor Day. Maybe a little earlier than that. And he's been here, oh, four times since. Now he could come in early in the day and I wouldn't know it, because I don't start until nine o'clock."

"How was he dressed?"

"Our friend here? I don't remember. Nothing specific sticks in my mind. Jeans and boots, for a guess. I never had to challenge him, so whatever he was wearing must have been appropriate."

I asked some more questions and gave him my card and told him to keep the sketch. I said I'd like to go inside and show the sketch to the bartender, if I could do so without too severely breaching decorum.

"We have to make certain exceptions," he said. "After all, you're a police officer, aren't you?"

"Private," I said. I don't know what made me say it.

"Oh, a private dick! That's even better, isn't it?"

"Is it?"

"I'd have to say it's about as butch as it gets." He sighed theatrically. "Honey," he said, "I'd let you past the rope even if you were wearing taffeta."

It was well past midnight by the time I ran out of leather bars.

There were other places I could have tried, after-hours cellars clubs that were just getting started at that hour, but most of the ones I knew about were gone now, shut down in reaction to the gay plague, barn doors securely padlocked now that the horse was gone. One or two had survived, though, and I'd learned of some new ones that night, and for all I knew James Leo Motley was in one of them at that very moment, waiting for an invitation into the darkened back room.

But it was late and I was tired and I didn't have the stomach to go looking for him. I walked for a dozen blocks, trying to clear my nostrils of the reek of stale beer and backed-up drains and sweat-soaked leather and amyl nitrate, an amalgam of smells with a base note of lust. Walking helped, and I'd have walked all the way home if I hadn't already been feeling the miles I'd clocked earlier in the day. I walked until a cab came along, then rode the rest of the way.

In my room I thought of Elaine, but it was much too late to call her. I spent a long time under the shower and went to bed.

Church bells woke me. I must have been sleeping right on the surface of consciousness or I wouldn't have heard them; but I did, and I stirred myself and sat on the edge of my bed. Something was bothering me and I didn't know what it was.

I called Elaine. Her line was busy. I tried her again after I'd finished shaving and got another busy signal.

I decided I'd try her again after breakfast.

There are three places I'm apt to have breakfast, but only one of them is open on Sundays. I went there and all the tables were taken. I didn't feel like waiting. I walked a couple of blocks to a place that had opened within the past several months. This was my first meal there, and I ordered a full breakfast and ate about half of it. The food didn't satisfy my appetite but it did a good job of killing it, and by the time I got out of there I'd forgotten about calling Elaine.

Instead I continued on downEighth Avenue and started making the rounds of theTimes Square hotels.

There used to be more of them. A lot of the buildings have come down to make way for bigger ones, and most of the landlords would tear theirs down if they could. For a few years now there's been a moratorium on the conversion or demolition of SRO hotels, the city's attempt to keep the homelessness problem from getting worse than it is.

The closer you get toForty-second Street , the nastier it gets in the lobbies. Something in the air announces that everyone within the walls has a couple of wants out on him. Even the semi-respectable places, third-class hotels charging fifty or sixty dollars a night, have a sour and desperate aura. As you move down in class, more and more signs turn up above the desk and taped to the glass partitions. No guests after eight o'clock. No cooking in the rooms. No firearms allowed on premises.

Maximum stay twenty-eight days— this to prevent anyone's attaining the status of a permanent resident, and thus acquiring a statutory immunity to steep rent increases.

I put in a couple of hours and handed out a fair number of cards and pictures. The desk clerks were either wary or uninterested, and some of them managed to be both at once. By the time I'd worked my way past the Port Authority bus terminal, everybody looked like a crack addict to me. If Motley was staying in one of these dumps, what was the point of trying to ferret him out? I could just wait a while and the city would kill him for me.

I found a phone, dialed Elaine's number. She had the machine on but picked up after I'd announced myself. "I had a late night last night," I said. "That's why I didn't call."

"It's just as well. I made it an early night and slept like a log."

"You probably needed it."

"I probably did." A pause. "Your flowers are beautiful today."