A Ticket To The Boneyard

I kept my voice neutral. "Are they?"

"Absolutely. I think they're like homemade soup, I think they're actually better on the second day."

Across the street two teenagers leaned against the steel shutter of an army-surplus store, alternately scanning the street and sending casual glances toward me. I said, "I'd like to come over."

"I'd like that. Can you give me an hour or so?"

"I suppose so."

She laughed. "But you don't sound happy about it. Let's see, it's a quarter to twelve. Why don't you come over at one o'clock or a few minutes after. Is that all right?"

"Sure."

I hung up the phone. The two boys across the street were still keeping an eye on me. I had the sudden urge to go over there and ask them what the hell they were staring at. That would have been asking for trouble, but I felt like it all the same.

Instead I turned and walked away. When I'd gone half a block I turned and looked over my shoulder at them. They were still lounging against the same steel shutter, and they didn't appear to have moved.

Maybe they hadn't been looking at me at all.

* * *

I gave her the hour and fifteen minutes she'd asked for. I spent half of it as productively as the two idlers

onEighth Avenue , lurking in a doorway of my own across the street from Elaine's apartment building.

People came and went, all of them strangers to me. I don't know what I was looking for. Motley, I suppose, but he didn't show.

I made myself wait until precisely one o'clock before I went over there and presented myself to her doorman. He called upstairs, handed me the phone. She asked me who had drawn the sketch, and I went blank for an instant, then told her it was Galindez. I gave the phone back to the doorman and let her tell him it was okay to let me come up. When I knocked on her door she checked the judas first, then unfastened all the locks.

"Sorry," she said. "I suppose it's silly to go through all that—"

"That's all right." I walked over to the coffee table, where a floral arrangement was a riot of color among all that black and white. I didn't know the names of all the flowers, but I recognized a couple of exotics, bird-of-paradise and antherium, and I figured I had to be looking at seventy-five dollars' worth of floral affection.

She came over and kissed me. She was wearing a yellow silk blouse over black harem pants, and her feet were bare. She said, "See what I mean? They're prettier than yesterday."

"If you say so."

"Some of the buds are starting to open, I think that's what it is."

Then I guess she picked up on the tone of what I'd said and she looked at me and asked if something was the matter.

"They're not my flowers," I said.

"Did you pick out something different?"

"I didn't send any flowers, Elaine."

It didn't take her long. I looked at her face and watched the wheels turn in her mind. She said, "Jesus Christ. You're not kidding around, are you, Matt?"

"Of course not."

"There was no note, but it never even occurred to me that they weren't from you. For God's sake, I thanked you for them. Yesterday. I called you, remember?"

"You didn't mention flowers."

"I didn't?"

"Not specifically. You thanked me for being romantic."

"What did you think I meant?"

"I don't know. I was a little groggy at the time, I'd dozed off in front of the TV set. I guess I just thought you were referring to the night we'd had together."

"Well, I was," she said. "Sort of. The night and the flowers. In my mind they more or less went together."

"There was no note?"

"Of course not. I figured you didn't bother with a note because you knew I'd know who sent them. And I did, but—"

"But I hadn't."

"Evidently not." She had paled at the news, but her color was back now. She said, "I'm having a little trouble adjusting to this. I've spent the past twenty-four hours enjoying the flowers and thinking warm thoughts about you for having sent them, and now they're not your flowers at all. I suppose they're from him, aren't they?"

"Unless someone else sent them to you."

She shook her head. "My gentlemen friends don't send flowers, I'm afraid. God. I feel like throwing them out."

"They're the same flowers they were ten minutes ago."

"I know, but—"

"What time did they get here?"

"When did I call you, around five o'clock?"

"Something like that."

"They came an hour or two before then."

"Who delivered them?"

"I don't know."

"Well, was it a kid from the florist or what? And did you happen to get the name of the florist? Was there anything on the wrapper?"

She was shaking her head. "Nobody delivered them."

"What do you mean? They couldn't have just turned up on your doorstep."

"That's exactly what they did."

"And you opened the door and there they were?"

"Just about. I had a visitor, and when I let him in he handed them to me. For a split second I thought they were from him, which didn't make any sense, and then he explained they'd been sitting on my welcome mat when he arrived. At which point I immediately assumed they were from you."

"You figured I just dropped them on your doorstep and left?"

"I thought you probably had them delivered. And then I was in the shower and didn't hear the bell, so the delivery boy left them. Or he left them with the doorman, and the doorman left them there when I didn't respond to the bell." She laid a hand on my arm. "To tell the truth," she said, "I didn't give the matter that much thought. I was just, well, moved, you know? Impressed."

"And touched that I had sent you flowers."

"Yes, that's right."

"It certainly makes me wish they were mine."

"Oh, Matt, I don't—"

"It does. And they're beautiful flowers, you can't get around it. I should have kept my mouth shut and taken credit for them."

"Think so, huh?"

"Why not? They're a hell of a good romantic gesture. I can see where a guy could get laid on the strength of something like that."

Her face softened, and her arm moved to circle my waist. "Ah, baby," she said. "What makes you think you need flowers?"

Afterward we lay quietly together for a long while, not asleep but not entirely awake. At one point I thought of something and laughed softly to myself. Not softly enough, because she asked me what was so funny.

I said, "Some vegetarian."

"Some what? Oh." She rolled onto her side and opened her big eyes at me. "A person who abstains entirely from animal matter," she said, "runs the risk over a long period of time of developing a vitamin B-12 deficiency."

"Is that serious?"

"It can lead to pernicious anemia."

"That doesn't sound good."

"It shouldn't. It's fatal."

"Really?"

"So they tell me."

"Well, you wouldn't want to chance that," I said. "And you can get that on a strict vegetarian diet?"

"According to what I've read."

"Can't you get B-12 from dairy products?"

"I think you can, yes."

"And don't you eat dairy? There's milk in the fridge, and yogurt, as I recall."

She nodded. "I eat dairy," she said, "and you're supposed to be able to get B-12 from dairy products, but I figure you can't be too careful, you know what I mean?"

"I think you're right."

"Because why leave something like that to chance? Pernicious anemia just doesn't sound like something a person would want to have."

"And an ounce of prevention—"

"I don't think it was an ounce," she said. "I think it was more like a spoonful."

I must have drifted off because the next thing I knew I was alone in the bed and the shower was running in the bathroom. She emerged from it a few minutes later wrapped in a towel. I took a shower myself, dried off, and got dressed, and when I went into the living room there was coffee poured for me and a plate on the table with cut-up raw vegetables and bite-size chunks of cheese. We sat at the dinette table and nibbled at the food. Across the room, the floral arrangement was as dazzling as ever in the soft light of late afternoon.

I said, "The guy who handed you the flowers."

"What about him?"

"Who was he?"

"Just a guy."

"Because if Motley deliberately used him to get the flowers to you, he might be a lead back to him."

"He didn't."

"How can you be sure?"

She shook her head. "Believe me," she said, "there's no connection.

He's a fellow I've known for a couple of years."

"And he just happened to drop in?"

"No, he had an appointment."

"An appointment? What kind of an appointment?"

"Oh, for God's sake," she said. "What kind of an appointment do you think he had with me? He wanted to come over and spend an hour discussing Wittgenstein."

"He was a john."

"Of course he was a john." She looked at me sharply. "Does that bother you?"

"Why should it bother me?"

"I don't know. Does it?"

"No."

"Because it's what I do," she said. "I turn tricks. This is not new information. It's what I did when you met me and it's what I still do."

"I know."

"So why do I get the impression that it bothers you?"

"I don't know," I said. "I just thought—"

"What?"

"Well, that you were keeping the doors barred for the time being."

"I am."

"I see."

"I am, Matt. I'm not taking any hotel dates, I turned down a couple of people already. And I'm not letting anybody in the door that I don't know. But the fellow who came over yesterday afternoon, he's been a regular date of mine for a few years. He'll show up one or two Saturdays a month, he's no trouble, and why shouldn't I let him in?"

"No reason."

"So what's the problem?"

"No problem. A girl's got to make a living, right?"

"Matt—"

"Got to accumulate some more ready cash, got to buy some more apartment houses. Right?"

"You've got no right to be like that."

"Like what?"

"You've got no right."

"I'm sorry," I said. I picked up a piece of cheese. It was a dairy product, and a likely source of vitamin B-12. I put it back down on the plate.

I said, "When I called this morning."

"And?"

"You told me not to come over right away."

"I told you to give me an hour."

"An hour and fifteen minutes, I think it was."

"I'll take your word for it. So?"

"Did you have someone over here?"

"If I'd had someone here I wouldn't have answered the phone. I'd have put the mute on and let the machine pick it up in silence, the way I did when you and I went into the bedroom."

"Why did you tell me to wait for an hour and a quarter?"

"You won't let it alone, will you? I had a fellow coming at noon."

"So you did have somebody coming."

"That's what I just told you. He called me just a few minutes before you did, as a matter of fact. He made a date to come over at noon."

"At noon on Sunday?"

"He always comes on Sunday, usually late morning or early afternoon. He lives in the neighborhood, he tells his wife he's going out to buy the paper. He comes over here, and I suppose he picks up the Times on his way home. I suppose that's part of the kick for him, putting one over on her that way."

"So you told me—"

"To give me until one o'clock. I knew he'd be on time, and I knew he'd be out of here within a half hour.

He always is. And I wanted a half hour after that so that I could take a shower and freshen up and be—"

"And be what?"

"And be nice for you," she said. "What the fuck is this, will you tell me that? Why are you attacking me?"

"I'm not."

"The hell you're not. And why am I defending myself, that's the real question. Why the hell should I have to defend myself?"

"I don't know." I picked up my coffee cup, but it was empty. I put it down again and picked up a piece of cheese and put that down, too. I said, "So you already had your B-12 today."

For a moment she didn't say anything, and I had time to regret the line. Then she said, "No as a matter of fact I didn't, because that's not what we did. Why? Would you like to know what we did?"

"No."

"I'll tell you anyway. We did what we always do. I sat on his face and he ate me while he jerked himself off. That's what he likes, that's what we always do when he comes over here."

"Stop it."

"Why the hell should I? What else would you like to know? Did I come? No, but I faked it, that's what gets him over the edge. Anything else you'd like for me to tell you? You want to know how big his cock was? And don't you dare hit me, Matt Scudder!"

"I wasn't going to hit you."

"You wanted to."

"I never even raised my hand, for God's sake."

"You wanted to."

"No."

"Yes. And I wanted you to. Not to hit me, but to want to." Her eyes were huge, brimming with tears at their corners. Softly, wonderingly, she said, "What's the matter with us? Why are we doing this to each other?"

"I don't know."

"I do," she said. "We're mad, that's why. You're mad at me because I'm still a whore. And I'm pissed off at you because you didn't send me flowers."

She said, "I think I know what happened. We've been under a strain, both of us. I think it's made us more vulnerable than we realized.

And we wound up casting each other in roles we couldn't play. I thought you were Sir Galahad and I don't know who you got me mixed up with."

"I don't know either. Maybe the Lady of Shalott."

She looked at me.

"How does the poem go? 'Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat.' "

"Stop it."

The sky had gone dark outside her window. Above the lights ofQueens I saw the winking red lights of an airplane making its approach to land at La Guardia.

After a moment she said, "We read that in high school. Tennyson. I used to pretend it was about me."

"You told me once."

"Did I?" Her gaze turned inward as she took a long look at an old memory. Then, crisply, she said,

"Well, I'm no lily maid, baby, and your armor's lost its shine. And it was Sir Lancelot the Lady of Shalott was hung up on, not Sir Galahad, and we're not either of them. All we are is two people who always liked each other and always did each other some good. That's not the worst thing in the world, is it?"

"I never thought so."

"And now we've got a crazy man who wants to kill us, so it's the wrong time for either of us to get kinky.

Agreed?"

"Agreed."

"So let's get the money part handled. Can we do that?"

We could and did. I figured out my expenses to date and she reminded me of some I'd forgotten, then rounded the figure upward and cut off my arguments with a sharp glance. She went into the bedroom and came back with a handful of fifties and hundreds. I watched as she counted out two thousand dollars and shoved the stack across the table at me.

I didn't reach for it. "That's not the number you mentioned," I said.

"I know. Matt, you really shouldn't have to keep track of what you lay out, and you shouldn't have to come back to ask me for more money.

Take this, and when it starts running thin tell me and I'll give you more.

Please don't argue. Money's what I've got, and I damn well earned it, and if you can't use it at a time like this, what's the point of having it."

I picked up the money.

"Good," she said. "That's settled. I don't know about the emotional part. I was always better at the business side. I think we'll just have to play it by ear and take it a day at a time. What do you think?"

I got to my feet. "I think I'll have one more cup of coffee," I said,

"and then I'll get out of here."

"You don't have to."

"Yes I do. I want to go play detective and spend some of the money you gave me. I think you're right, I think we'll play it by ear. I'm sorry about before."

"So am I."

When I came back with the coffee she said, "Jesus, I've got six messages on my machine."

"When did the calls come? When we were in bed?"

"Must have. Is it all right if I play them back?"

"Why shouldn't it be?"

She shrugged and pressed the appropriate button. There was a whirring sound, some background noise, then a click. "A hang-up," she said. "That's what I get most of the time. A lot of people don't like to leave a message."

There was another hang-up. Then a man said, very crisply and confidently, "Elaine, this is Jerry Pines, I'll give you a call in a day or so." Then another hang-up, and then a caller who cleared his throat forcefully, took a long moment trying to think of something to say, and rang off without a word.

Then the sixth caller. A fairly long pause, with the tape running and only background noise audible. Then a whisper:

"Hello, Elaine. Did you like the flowers?"

Another pause, as long as the first. Throughout it the background noise, actually quite low in volume, sounded like the roar of a subway train.

And then, in the same forceful whisper, he said, "I was thinking of you earlier. But it's not your turn yet.

You have to wait your turn, you know. I'm saving you for last." A pause, but a brief one. "I mean second-last. He'll be the last."

That was all he had to say, but the tape ran another twenty or thirty seconds before he broke the connection. Then the answering machine clicked and whirred and readied itself to handle incoming calls again, and we sat there in a silence that hung in the air like smoke.

I was back in my hotel room before dawn, but I didn't beat the sun by much. It was well past four by the time I got there, and I'd spent the whole night running all over the city, going places I hadn't been in years.

Some of them were long gone, and some of the people I was looking for were gone, too, dead or in jail or in some other world. But there were new places and new people, and I found my way to enough of them to keep busy.

I found Danny Boy Bell in Poogan's. He is a short albino Negro, precise in his gestures and polite in his manners. He has always worn conservatively cut three-piece suits and he has always kept vampire's hours, never leaving his house between sunrise and sunset. His habits hadn't changed, and he still drank Russian vodka straight up and ice-cold. The bars that were home to him, Poogan's Pub and the Top Knot, always kept a bottle on ice for him. The Top Knot's gone now.

"There's a French restaurant there now," he told me. "High-priced and not very good. I'm here a lot these days. Or I'll be at Mother Goose on Amsterdam . They got a nice little trio, plays there six nights a week.

The drummer uses the brushes and he never takes a solo. And they keep the lights right."

Right meant dimmed way down. Danny Boy wears dark glasses all the time, and he'd probably wear them at the bottom of a coal mine. "The world's too loud and too bright," I'd heard him say more than once.

"They should put in a dimmer switch. They should turn the volume down."

He didn't recognize the sketch, but Motley's name struck a chord with him. I started to fill him in and he remembered the case. "So he's coming back at you," he said. "Why don't you just grab a plane, go someplace warm while he cools off? Guy like that, give him a few weeks and he'll step on his cock and wind up back in slam. You won't have to worry about him for another ten years."

"I think he's gotten pretty shrewd."

"Went up for one-to-ten and served twelve, how much of a genius can he be?" He finished his drink and moved his hand a few inches, which was all he had to do to get the waitress's attention. After she'd filled

his glass and assured herself that I was still all right, he said, "I'll pass the word and keep my ears open, Matt. All I can do."

"I appreciate it."

"Hard to know where he might hang out, or who he might rub up against. Still, there's places you could check."

He gave me some leads and I went out and chased them around the city. I went to a chicken-and-ribs joint onLenox Avenue and a bar down the street from it where a lot of the uptown players did their drinking. I caught a cab downtown to a place called Patchwork on Third Avenue in the Twenties, where Early American quilts hung on the exposed brick walls. I told the bartender I was there to see a man named Tommy Vincent. "He's not in just now," I was told, "but he usually comes in around this time, if you'd care to wait for him."

I ordered a Coke and waited at the bar. The back-bar mirror let me keep an eye on the door without turning around. I watched some people come in and some others leave, and by the time I had nothing in my glass but ice cubes, a fat man two stools down from me came over and put an arm around me as if we were old friends. "I'm Tommy V.," he said. "Something I can do for you?"

I walked on Park Avenue in the Twenties, Third just below Fourteenth Street , Broadway in the high Eighties,Lexington between Forty-seventh and Fiftieth. That's where the street girls were hard at it, decorously turned out in hot pants and peekaboo halters and orange wigs. I talked to dozens of them, and I let them think I was a cop; they wouldn't have believed a denial anyway. I showed Motley's picture around and said he was a man who liked to hurt working girls, and a likely killer. I said he might be a john, or at least play the part of one, but that he fancied himself a pimp and might try to corral an outlaw girl.

A sallow blonde on Third, her dark roots giving her a two-tone hairdo, thought she recognized him.

"Saw him a time ago," she said. "Looks but don't buy. One time he's got these questions. What will I do, what won't I do, what do I like, what don't I like." She made a fist, held it at her crotch, moved it in a pumping motion. "Jerking me around. Got no time for that, you know?

Time I see him after that, I just walk on by."

A girl on Broadway, with an overblown body and a Deep South accent, said she'd seen him around, but not lately. Last she'd seen of him he'd gone off with a girl named Bunny. And where was Bunny? She'd gone off somewhere, disappeared, hadn't been around in weeks. "On some other stroll," she said. "Or

maybe something happened." Like what? She shrugged.

"Anything," she said. "You see somebody," she said, "and then you don't. And you don't miss them right away, and then you say, 'Hey, what happened to that person?' And nobody knows." Had she seen Bunny again since she'd gone off with Motley? She thought it over and couldn't say one way or the other. And maybe it hadn't been Motley that Bunny had gone with. The more she thought about it, the vaguer she seemed to get.

Somewhere along the way I managed to get to the midnight meeting at Alanon House, a sort of clubhouse occupying a suite of offices on the third floor of a decaying building on West Forty-sixth Street

. They get a young crowd at that meeting, many of them newly and shakily sober, and a majority having a history of heavy drug use along with alcoholism. The crowd that night was a lot like the people outside, the biggest single difference being the direction they were headed. The ones at the meeting were staying clean and sober, or trying to. The ones out there on the street were slipping off the edge of the world.

I got there a few minutes late. The speaker had gotten as far as her twelfth birthday, by which time she'd been drinking for two years and had just started smoking marijuana. The story went on to include all the popular chemical mood-changers, not excepting IV heroin and cocaine, along with shoplifting, street prostitution, and the black-market sale of her infant son. It took a while to tell but it hadn't taken all that long to live; she was only nineteen now.

The meeting lasted an hour and I stayed until the end. My attention faded after the speaker finished up, and I didn't contribute anything to the discussion, which was ostensibly on the topic of anger. I tuned in now and then when some speaker's anger was voluble enough to break in on my reverie, but for the most part I just let my mind drift and took emotional sanctuary in the meeting. It was a nasty world outside and I'd been seeking out the nastiest part of it for the past few hours, but in here I was just another alcoholic trying to stay sober, same as everyone else, and that made it a very safe place to be.

Then we all stood and said the prayer, and then I went back out into the goddamned streets.

* * *

I slept for around five hours Monday morning and woke up hung over, which didn't seem fair. I'd slopped down quarts of bad coffee and watered Coke and breathed in acres of secondhand smoke, so I don't suppose it was out of the ordinary that I wasn't ready to greet the day like Little Mary Sunshine, but I liked to think I'd given up mornings like this along with the booze. Instead my head ached and my mouth and throat were dry and every minute took three or four minutes to pass.

I swallowed some aspirin, showered and shaved, and went downstairs and around the corner for orange

juice and coffee. When the aspirin and coffee kicked in I walked a few blocks and bought a paper. I carried it back to the Flame and ordered solid food. By the time it came all the physical symptoms of the hangover were gone. I still felt a profound weariness of the spirit, but I would just have to learn to live with that.

The paper didn't do a lot to elevate my outlook. The front-page story was a massacre in Jamaica Heights

, an entire family of Venezuelans shot and stabbed, four adults and six children dead and the house torched, with the fire spreading to a pair of neighboring dwellings. Various evidence seemed to indicate that the deaths were drug-related, which meant, I suppose, that the general public could feel free to shrug it off and the cops wouldn't have to bust their humps trying to solve it.

The news was no more encouraging in the sports pages, with both of theNew York teams losing, the Jets by a lot, the Giants dropping a squeaker to the Eagles. The only good thing about the sports news was that it was trivial; nobody died, and when all was said and done, who really gave a damn who won or lost?

Not I, but then I didn't seem to give a damn about very much. I flipped back to the news pages and read about another drug-related homicide, this one in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn , where someone had used a sawed-off shotgun on a twenty-four-year-old black male with a long record of drug busts.

That didn't elate me either, but I have to admit it disheartened me a little less than the loss to Philadelphia , which hadn't torn me up all that much in the first place.

There was a honey of a story on page 7.

A twenty-two-year-old man named Michael Fitzroy had attended mass at St. Malachy's with his girlfriend. She was an actress with a couple of commercials to her credit, and she had an apartment in Manhattan Plaza , the subsidized housing for actors at Forty-second and Ninth. They were on their way to her place, walking hand in hand down Forty-ninth Street , at about the same time that a woman named Antoinette Cleary decided she'd had enough of life as we know it.

She acted on this decision by opening her window and throwing herself out of it. Her apartment, as luck would have it, was twenty-two stories up, and she picked up speed on the way down according to that formula they teach you in high school physics class, the one nobody remembers. In any event, she was going fast enough at the moment of impact to kill herself, and to do the same for Michael Fitzroy, who got to her predestined spot on the pavement just a second before she did. His girlfriend, one Andrea Dautsch, was uninjured, but the story said she became hysterical. It seemed to me she had every right.

I flipped through the rest of the paper. The mayor of Baltimore had recently proposed the legalization of drugs, and I read what Bill Reel had to say on the subject. I read the comics without cracking a smile.

Then something made me turn back to page 7, and I read once more about the last moments of Michael Fitzroy.

I don't know why the story moved me as much as it did. The fact that it happened so close to home may have had something to do with it.

The Cleary woman had lived at 301 West Forty-ninth, a building I'd walked past hundreds of times. I'd passed it yesterday morning on my way to scout out the Times Square hotels. If I'd slept a little longer I might have been there when it happened.

I thought of Marcus Aurelius, and how everything happened the way it was supposed to. I tried to figure out how this had been true for Michael Fitzroy, as he trudged the road of happy destiny to his girlfriend's apartment. The News reported that the woman who fell on him was thirty-eight years old. It also provided the information that she had taken off all her clothes prior to jumping.

They say God's will is unfathomable, and it certainly looked that way to me. Some celestial force had evidently decided that twenty-two was as old as Michael Fitzroy was supposed to get, and that the highest good of all concerned would be best served by having him struck down in his prime by a rapidly descending, naked lady.

Life, I'd heard someone say, is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. It seemed to me that it was both at once, even for those of us who don't do much of either.

Early that afternoon I called Tom Havlicek in Massillon and caught him at his desk. "Say, I was meaning to call you," he said.

"How's Fun City ?"

It had been a while since I'd heard it called that. "About the same,"

I said.

"How about those Bengals?"

I hadn't even noticed whether they'd won or lost. "Really something," I said.

"You bet. How's it going at your end?"

"He's in New York . I keep cutting his trail, but it's a big city. He threatened a woman yesterday, an old friend of Connie Sturdevant's."

"Nice."

"Yeah, he's a sweetheart. I was wondering if you heard anything from Cleveland ."

"You mean from the lab work." He cleared his throat. "We got a blood type on the semen."

"That's great."

"I don't know how great it is, Matt. It's A-positive, and that's the same type as the husband. If it's your guy who left the tracks, well, that wouldn't be too much of a coincidence. That's the most common blood type. In fact all three kids were A-positive, which means we couldn't tell whose blood Sturdevant had on him when he died, if some of it was theirs or if it was all his from the shotgun wound."

"Can't they do a DNA profile on the semen?"

"They maybe could have," he said, "if they got the job right away instead of waiting over a week for it.

Way it stands, all you can prove is that your suspect didn't leave sperm in the woman. If he's something other than A-positive, he's off the hook."

"For sodomy. Not necessarily for homicide."

"Well, I guess. Anyway, that's all the lab evidence does. It might get him off the hook, depending on his blood type, but it sure don't get him on it."

"I see," I said. "Well, that's disappointing, but I'll find out what Motley's blood type is. His prison records

ought to have it. Oh, by the way, I sent you something Express Mail this morning, you ought to get it tomorrow. It's an artist's sketch of Motley along with an alias he used in New York a few months ago.

Something for you to use when you run a check on hotels and airports."

There was a silence. Then he said, "Well, Matt, I don't know that we'll be doing that."

"Oh?"

"The way it shapes up from here, we don't have any grounds to reopen the case. Even if the semen wasn't the husband's, what does that prove? Maybe she's having an affair, maybe she's got a boyfriend waits tables at a Greek restaurant, maybe her husband found out about it and that's what set him off.

Point is, we haven't got a reason in the world to invest manpower in a case that still looks open-and-shut."

We batted it around some. If he could just get a warrant issued, I said, the New York cops could pull Motley off the street before he killed somebody else. He'd love to oblige, he told me, but his chief would never go for it, and even if he did a judge might not agree that they had grounds for a warrant.

"You say he threatened somebody," he said. "Can't you get her to sign a complaint?"

"It's possible. He didn't speak to her directly. He left a message on her answering machine."

"So much the better. You got evidence. Unless she went and erased it."

"No, I kept the tape. But I don't know what it's evidence of. It's a threat, but the language is veiled. And you'd be hard put to prove it's his voice. He whispered."

"So it would sound spookier? Or to keep her from recognizing his voice?"

"Not that. He wanted her to know who it was. I think he was being careful about voiceprints. Damn it, he was careless and stupid twelve years ago. Prison turned him crafty."

"It'll do that," he said. "It may not rehabilitate them, but it sure will make better criminals out of them."

* * *

Around three it started raining. I bought a five-dollar umbrella on the street and it blew inside out before I got back to the hotel. I left it in a trash basket and took shelter under a canopy until the storm leveled off some, then walked the remaining few blocks home. I got out of my wet clothes and made a few phone calls, then stretched out and took a nap.

It was eight o'clock when I opened my eyes, and just past eight-thirty when I entered the basement meeting room at St. Paul's. The speaker had just been introduced. I got a cup of coffee and found a seat and listened to a good old-fashioned low-bottom drinking story. Jobs lost, relationships ruined, dozens of trips to detox, panhandling in a bottle gang, innumerable exposures to AA. Then one day something clicked, and now the son of a bitch was standing there in a suit and tie with his face shaved and his hair combed, looking nothing like the story he was telling.

The discussion was round-robin at that particular meeting, and they started in the back of the room, so it got to be my turn early on. I was going to pass, but he'd talked a lot about hangovers, and how if all sobriety meant was a permanent respite from hangovers, it was worth it.

I said, "My name is Matt and I'm an alcoholic, and my hangovers used to be bad, too. I figured I was done with them in sobriety, so I felt a little resentful when I woke up with one this morning. It didn't seem fair, and I started off the day with a pretty good resentment. Then I reminded myself that I used to feel that way every morning of my life, and that I took it for granted, I didn't even object to it very strongly.

My God, a normal person who woke up feeling like that would have gone to a hospital, and I would just pull up my socks and go work."

A few other people spoke, and then it was the turn of a woman named Carole. "I never woke up with a hangover since I've been sober,"

she said, "but I identify with what Matt said in another sense. Because I like to believe that everything works out for us once we stop drinking, that bad things don't happen to us anymore. And that's not true. The miracle of sobriety isn't that our lives get better, but that we stay sober even when they get bad. But it still tears me up when bad things happen.

When Cody got AIDS I couldn't believe how unfair it was. Sober people aren't supposed to get AIDS! But the thing is they do, and when they do they die, just like everybody else. And sober people don't commit suicide. My God, all the times I tried to kill myself when I was drinking, and I don't do that anymore, and I thought nobody did, not sober. And then today I learned how Toni committed suicide, and I thought, that's not supposed

to happen. But anything can happen, and I still can't pick up a drink."

I went up to Carole on the break and asked if Toni had been a member of our group. "Came here all the time," she said. "Sober three years. Toni Cleary."

"I can't place him."

"Her. I'm sure you knew her, Matt. Tall, dark hair, around my age.

Worked in the garment center, I forget doing what but she used to talk about how she was having an affair with her boss. I'm positive you knew her."

"My God," I said.

"She never struck me as suicidal. But I guess you never know, do you?"

"We went out and spoke together in Queens less than a week ago,"

I said. "The two of us and Richie Gelman, we went all the way out to Richmond Hill together." I scanned the room looking for Richie, as if he could help confirm what I was saying. I didn't see him. "She seemed in great shape," I said. "She sounded fine."

"I saw her Friday night and she seemed fine then. I don't remember what she said but she didn't seem depressed or anything."

"We had a bite afterward. She seemed solid and content, happy with her life. What was it, pills?"

She shook her head. "She went out a window. It was in the paper and there was something on the six o'clock news tonight. It was freaky, because she landed on some kid fresh out of church services and he was killed, too. Crazy, isn't it?"

Call your cousin, the message read.

This time I didn't have to go through the answering machine. She picked up on the first ring. "He called,"

she said.

"And?"

"He said, 'Elaine, I know you're there. Pick up the telephone and turn off your machine.' And I did."

"Why?"

"I don't know why. He told me to do it and I did it. He said he had a message for you."

"What was the message?"

"Matt, why did I turn off the machine? He told me to do it and I did it. What if he tells me to unlock the door and let him in? Am I going to do it?"

"No, you're not."

"How do you know that?"

"Because that would be unsafe and you'd know not to do it. It didn't put you in any danger to turn off the machine. There's a difference."

"I wonder."

So did I, but I would keep my doubts to myself. I said, "What was the message?"

"Oh right. It didn't make any sense, at least I don't think it did. To me. I wrote it down right after he hung up so I wouldn't forget it. Where did I put it?"

I suppose I knew what it was. I must have.

"Here it is," she said. " 'Tell him I'm going to take all his women away. Tell him yesterday was number two. No extra charge for the kid on the street. He was a dividend.' Does any of that make any sense to you?"

"No," I said. "But I know what it means."

I called Anita. She had remarried, and it was her husband who answered the phone. I apologized for calling so late and asked to speak to Mrs. Carmichael. It felt strange calling her that, but the whole call felt strange.

I told her I was probably bothering her for nothing, but that there was a situation she ought to know about. I went through it quickly, explaining that a man I'd put away years ago was carrying on a psychopathic vendetta, trying to get back at me by killing all my women.

"Except I don't have any," I said, "so he's been forced to interpret the phrase loosely. He killed one woman who was a witness against him twelve years ago, and he killed another who was the most casual acquaintance of mine you could imagine. I didn't even know her last name."

"But he killed her. Why don't the police arrest him?"

"I'm hoping they will. But in the meantime—"

"You think I'm in danger?"

"I honestly don't know. He may not know you exist, and if he does there's no reason to assume he'd know your married name or your new address. But the guy's resourceful."

"What about the boys?"

One was in the service, the other in college on the other side of the country. "They don't have anything to worry about," I said. "It's women he's really interested in."

"In killing, you mean. God. What do you think I should do?''

I made some suggestions. That she think about taking a vacation, if it was convenient. Failing that, that she notify the local police and see what protection they could provide. She and her husband might even want to think about hiring private security guards. And they should certainly pay attention and see if they were being followed or watched, and should avoid opening doors to strangers, and—

"God damn it," she said. "We're divorced. I'm married to somebody else. Doesn't that make a difference?"

"I don't know," I said. "He may be like the Catholic church. He may not recognize divorce."

We talked some more, and then I had her put her husband on the line and went through the whole thing with him. He seemed sensible and decisive and I hung up feeling that he'd think it through and do something positive. I only wished I could say the same for myself.

I went over to the window and looked out at the city. When I moved in you could see the World Trade Center towers from my window, but since then various builders have come along, eating up different portions of the sky. I still have a fairly decent view, but it's not what it used to be.

It was raining again. I wondered if he was out there. Maybe he'd get wet, maybe he'd catch his death.

I picked up the phone and called Jan.

She is a sculptor, with a loft south of Canal on Lispenard Street. I had met her back when we were both drinking, and we did some good drinking at her place, she and I. Then she got sober and we stopped seeing each other, and then I got sober and we began again. And then it stopped working, and then it ended, and neither of us ever quite understood why.

When she answered I said, "Jan, it's Matt. I'm sorry to be calling so late."

"It is late," she said. "Is something the matter?"

"Definitely," I said. "I'm not sure whether or not it affects you. My fear is that it might."

"I don't understand."

I went through it in a little more detail than I had with Anita. Jan had seen the TV coverage of Toni's death, but of course she hadn't suspected that it was anything other than the suicide it appeared to be.

Nor had she known that Toni was in the program.

"I wonder if I ever met her."

"You could have. You came to St. Paul's a few times. And she got around some, spoke at other meetings."

"And you went on a speaking date with her? You told me where but it slipped my mind."

"Richmond Hill."

"Where is that, somewhere in Queens?"

"Somewhere in Queens, yes."

"And that's why he killed her? Or were the two of you sort of an item?"

"Not at all. She wasn't my type and she was involved with someone at her job. We weren't even buddies particularly. I'd talk to her at meetings, but that speaking engagement was the only real time we ever spent together."

"And on the strength of that—"

"Right."

"You're sure it wasn't suicide? Of course you are. That's a stupid question. Do you think—"

"I'm not sure what I think," I said. "He got out of prison four months ago. He could have spent the whole four months tagging along behind me and he wouldn't have seen me spending time with you. But I don't know what he knows, who he talked to, what kind of research he might have done. You want to know what I think you should do?"

"Yes."

"I think you should get on a plane first thing in the morning. Pay cash for your ticket and don't tell anyone where you're going."

"You're serious."

"Yes."

"I have good locks on the door. I could—"

"No," I said. "Your building's not secure, and this is a man who gets in and out of places and makes it look easy. You can decide to take your chances, but don't kid yourself that you can stay in the city and be safe."

She thought for a moment. "I've been meaning to visit my—"

"Don't tell me," I cut in.

"You think the line is tapped?"

"I think it's better if nobody knows where you're going, myself included."

"I see." She sighed. "Well, Matthew, you've got me taking it seriously. I might as well start packing right now. How will I know when it's safe to come back? Can I call you?"

"Anytime. But don't leave your number."

"I feel like a spy, and an inept one at that. Suppose I can't reach you? How will I know when to come in from the cold?"

"A couple of weeks should do it," I said. "One way or the other."

On the phone with her, talking with her, I had to fight the urge to grab a cab to Lispenard Street and set about the business of protecting her. We could spend a few hours drinking gallons of coffee and having one of the intense conversations that had characterized our relationship from the night we met.

I missed those conversations. I missed her, and sometimes I thought about trying to make it work again, but we had already made that attempt a couple of times and the reality of the situation seemed to be that we were through with each other. We didn't feel through with each other, but that was how it seemed to be.

Back when it all fell apart I'd called Jim Faber. "It's just hard for me to grasp," I told him. "The whole idea that it's over between us. I honestly thought it would work out."

"It did," he said. "This is how it worked out."

I almost called him now.

I could have. Our arrangement was that I wouldn't call him after midnight, and it was well past that. On the other hand, I could call him any hour of the day or night if it was an emergency.

I thought about it and decided the present circumstances didn't qualify as an emergency. I wasn't in danger of taking a drink, which is the only sort of emergency I could think of that would justify waking the guy up. Curiously enough, I didn't even feel like drinking. I felt like hitting someone, or screaming, or kicking the wall down, but I didn't much feel like picking up a drink.

I went out and walked around. The rain had tuned itself down to a light drizzle. I walked over to Eighth Avenue and let myself be drawn eight blocks downtown. I knew her building, I'd walked her home. It was on the northwest corner, but I didn't know whether her apartment fronted on the street or the avenue so I couldn't tell just where she'd come down.

Sometimes a jumper lands with enough force to break up the concrete. I didn't see any broken pavement. Of course she'd had Fitzroy there to break her fall and absorb most of the force of it.

No stains on the pavement. There would have been blood, probably a lot of it, but there had been plenty

of rain to clean up whatever the janitorial crew might have missed.

Of course it doesn't always wash away. Sometimes it soaks in.

Maybe there was blood there and I just wasn't seeing it. It was night, after all, and the pavement was wet. You wouldn't be likely to spot bloodstains under such conditions, especially if you weren't sure exactly where to look for them.

There are bloodstains all over the city, if you know where to look.

All over the world, I suppose.

I must have spent an hour walking. I thought of stopping at Grogan's but I knew that wasn't a good idea.

I wasn't up for conversation, nor did I want to allow myself the self-indulgence of barroom solitude. I just kept on walking, and when the rain picked up I didn't even mind. I walked on through it and let it soak me.

All your women, Scudder. Jesus, a madman wanted to take from me women I didn't have. I had barely known Connie Cooperman and hadn't thought of her in years. And who were his other targets? Elaine, who played a shopworn Lady of Shalott to my corroded Lancelot. Anita, my wife years and years ago, and Jan, my girlfriend months and months ago. And Toni Cleary, who'd had the bad judgment to go out for a hamburger with me.

He must have followed us that night. Could he have trailed us all the way out to Richmond Hill? It seemed impossible. Maybe he'd just been in the neighborhood, lurking, and he picked us up on our way to Armstrong's, or walking toward her place.

I kept walking around, trying to sort it out.

I packed it in, finally, went back to my hotel room and hung my wet clothes up to dry. It had turned cold out there and I had paid as little heed to that as to the rain, and I was chilled to the bone. I stood under a hot shower and then crawled into bed.

Lying there, I had a thought, or skirted close to the edge of one. He was out there, menacing all of these

women who used to be mine, and here I was, running around like a juggler trying to keep all the balls in the air. Trying to save them, trying to protect them, Elaine and Anita and Jan, and in the process trying to hold on to them. Trying, in a sense, to confirm their status as what he labeled them— my women, mine.

Trying in the process to deny the truth, to turn a blind eye on reality. To overlook the bitter fact that these women were not mine, and probably never had been mine. That I didn't have anybody, and likely never would.

That I was all alone.

In daylight you could see the bloodstains, although you would have had to be looking for them to know what they were. I went over there with Joe Durkin, and the doorman pointed out Toni's landing site.

It was on the side street, perhaps twenty yards west of the building's entrance.

The doorman was an Hispanic kid, his shoulders too narrow for the jacket of his uniform, his mustache sparse and tentative. He'd had Sunday off but I showed him the sketch of Motley anyway. He looked at it and shook his head.

Durkin got a passkey and we went upstairs and let ourselves into her apartment. No one had troubled to close the window and it had rained in some the previous day. I leaned out over the sill and tried to see the spot where she came down. I couldn't see anything, and a rush of vertigo made me pull my head in and straighten up.

Durkin went over to the bed. It was made, and some clothing was folded neatly at its foot. A navy skirt, an off-white blouse, a dark gray cable-knit cardigan. A pair of lacy white panties. A bra, also white, with large cups.

He picked up the bra, examined it, put it back.

"Big girl," he said, and glanced my way to check my reaction. I don't suppose I showed much. He lit a cigarette, shook out the match, and looked around for an ashtray. There weren't any. He blew on the match to make sure it was cool and set it down carefully on the edge of the night table.

"Your guy said he killed her," he said. "That right?"

"That's what he told Elaine."

"Elaine's the witness against him? That's twelve years back when all this shit started?"

"That's right."

"You don't think he's like some of these Arab terrorists, do you?

Plane comes down, they're on the phone claiming credit for it."

"I don't think so."

He drew on his cigarette and blew out smoke. "No, I guess not," he said. "Well, it could have been murder. I don't see how you can rule it out. Somebody goes out a high window, how are you going to say whose idea it was?" He walked over to the door. "She had this locked, had the deadbolt on. What's that prove either way? Doesn't make a locked-room case out of it. You can engage the deadbolt from inside by turning this thing here, or you can do it when you leave by locking it with the key.

He puts her out the window, he picks up a key, he locks up after himself on his way out. Proves nothing."

"No."

"Of course there's no note. I never like a suicide without a note.

There ought to be a law."

"What would you have for a penalty?"

"You've gotta come back and live." He looked around reflexively for an ashtray, then flicked ashes on the parquet floor. "Used to be a crime to attempt suicide, though I never heard of anyone prosecuted for it. Idiot statute. Makes it a crime to attempt something that's not a crime if you succeed at it. Here's one for you, the kind of dimwit question turns up on the sergeants' exam. Say she falls out the window and hits the Fitzroy kid. He dies but he breaks her fall and she lives. What's she guilty of?"

"I don't know."

"I suppose it's either criminally negligent homicide or manslaughter two. And there's been incidents like that. Not from twenty-odd stories up, but when someone jumps from say four stories up. You never get a prosecution, though."

"No."

"Unsound mind'd be a pretty good defense, I would think. What I'll do, I'll call and get a lab crew in here. Be a gift from God to find some of his prints on the window frame, wouldn't it now?"

"Or anywhere in the apartment."

"Anywhere," he agreed. "But I don't think we'll get lucky that way, do you?"

"No."

"Be sweet if we did. Couple of uniforms from our house were first on the scene, so if there's a case it's our case, and I'd fucking love to hang it on your guy's neck. But everything says this is a guy who doesn't leave prints. He called her twice, right? First time he whispered."

"That's right."

"And that's what you got on tape, an unidentified male whispering and saying he sent flowers. And a

vague threat, says it's not her turn yet but doesn't say her turn for what. Try making a case out of that."

He looked for someplace to get rid of his cigarette. His eyes went to the floor, then to the open window.

He went instead to the kitchen sink and held the cigarette under the tap, then dropped the butt in the trash.

He said, "Then when he does threaten her and talks in a normal voice it's after he tells her to turn off the machine, and of course she does what he says and turns it off. So we got her word he threatened her, and her word that he confessed to killing Cleary and Fitzroy. And even that's thin, because he didn't say exactly what he did or mention anybody by name."

"Right."

"So unless we've got some physical evidence, I don't see that we've got a thing. I'll copy that sketch and we'll try it on the doorman, the guy who was on that morning, and the rest of the crew, too, just in case somebody spotted him lurking around the premises the past few days. I wouldn't expect much, though.

And placing him in the area, or even in the building, is a long way from convicting him of her murder. First you've got to establish that there's been a murder, and I don't know how you can do that."

"What about the medical evidence?"

"What about it?"

"What was the cause of death?"

He looked at me.

"Wasn't there an autopsy?"

"It's required. You know that. But you also know what they look like after they fall that far. You want medical evidence? Cleary fell headfirst, and her head collided with Fitzroy's head. Don't even think about

the odds of that, but it happened. You know what both their heads look like? Long as the ME doesn't find a bullet in her, he's going to put down that she died from injuries sustained in the fall. You're thinking he may have killed her first."

"It seems likely."

"Yeah, but go prove it. It's just as likely he knocked her out and tossed her out unconscious. What are you going to find, marks on her throat? Evidence of a blow to the head?"

"How about semen? He left some in the woman in Ohio."

"Yeah, and they couldn't even say whose it was. I'll tell you something, Matt, if they find semen in Cleary it could even be Fitzroy's, the way the two of them shared their last moments and all. And say it's Motley's, what does that prove? It's not against the law to go to bed with a woman. It's not even against the law to fuck her in the ass." He reached for another cigarette, changed his mind. "I'll tell you," he said,

"we're not gonna get this guy for Cleary. Not without very strong fingerprint evidence, and probably not even with that. Placing him on the scene, even in the room with her, doesn't make it a murder or him a murderer."

"What does?" He looked at me. "Just what do we have to do, wait for a corpse with his signature on it?"

"He'll fuck up, Matt."

"Maybe," I said. "I don't know that I can wait."

Durkin was good. He might not believe the case had a chance of amounting to anything but he went through the motions all the same, and without wasting time. He got some lab techs over there right away, and that afternoon he called me with a report.

The bad news was that they hadn't turned up a single print of Motley's anywhere in the Cleary apartment. The good news, if you wanted to call it that, was the lack of prints at strategic spots on the frame and sill of the window she went out of, which tended to indicate that someone had either taken care not to leave prints or had wiped them away after the body cleared the window. You couldn't call it evidence, people don't leave a print every time they touch a surface, but it helped confirm for us something we already knew. That Toni Cleary hadn't killed herself. That she had help.

All I could think of to do was what I'd already been doing. Talking to people. Knocking on doors.

Showing his sketch around, and passing out copies of it, along with cards from my diminishing supply.

That made me think of Jim Faber, who'd printed them as a gift to me. Call your sponsor— that's what you heard all the time in meetings.

Don't drink, go to meetings, read the Big Book, call your sponsor. I wasn't drinking and I'd been going to meetings. I couldn't think what the Big Book might have to say about playing hide-and-seek with a vengeful psychopath, nor did I figure Jim was an authority on the subject. I called him anyway.

"Maybe there's nothing you can do," he said.

"That's a helpful thought."

"I don't know if it's helpful or not. It's probably not very encouraging."

"Not very, no."

"But maybe it is. Maybe it's just a way of acknowledging that you're already taking all the appropriate actions. Finding a man who doesn't want to be found in a city the size of New York must be like finding the proverbial needle in the equally proverbial haystack."

"Something like that."

"Of course, if you could involve the police—"

"I've been trying. There's a limit to what they can do at this stage."

"So it sounds as though you're doing everything you can, and beating yourself up because you can't do more. And worrying because the whole thing's out of your control."

"Well, it is."

"Of course it is. We can't control how things turn out. You know that. All we can do is take the action and turn over the results."

"Just take your best shot and walk away from it."

"That's right."

I thought about it. "If my best shot's not good enough, other people get it in the neck."

"I get it. You can't let go of the controls because the stakes are too high."

"Well—"

"You remember the Third Step?" I did, of course, but he felt compelled to quote it anyway. " 'Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him.' You can turn over the small stuff, but when it's nitty-gritty time you have to take control of it yourself."

"I get the point."

"You want to get a handle on the Third Step? Here's a two-point program for you. A— just turn over the small stuff. B— it's all small stuff."

"Thanks," I said.

"You all right, Matt? You're not going to drink, are you?"

"No. I'm not going to drink."

"Then you're all right."

"Yeah, I'm terrific," I said. "You know, someday I'm going to call you and you're going to tell me what I want to hear."

"Entirely possible. But the day that happens is the day you better get yourself another sponsor."

I checked the desk around six and there was a message to call Joe Durkin. He'd left for the day but I had his home number. "I just thought you'd want to know," he said. "I talked to the assistant medical examiner and he said forget it. He said it was hard to tell where one of them started and the other left off.

He said, 'Tell your friend to go up to the top of the Empire State Building and throw down a grapefruit.

Then tell him to go on down to the sidewalk and try to figure out what part of Florida it came from.' "

"Well, we tried," I said. "That's the important thing."

I hung up, thinking that Jim would have been proud of me. My attitude was improving by leaps and bounds, and any minute now I'd be a prime candidate for canonization.

Of course it didn't change anything. We still had nothing, and were going nowhere.

I went to a meeting that night.

My feet, creatures of habit, started heading for St. Paul's shortly after eight. I got to within a block of the big old church and something stopped me.

I wondered whom I'd be endangering by showing up there.

The thought sent a chill through me, as though someone had drawn a piece of chalk squeaking across the Great Blackboard in the Sky. My aunt Peg, God rest her, would have said that a goose just walked over my grave.

I felt like a leper, a Typhoid Mary, carrying a virus that could turn the innocent into homicide victims. For the first time since I'd walked in the door, it was unsafe for me to go to a meeting of my home group. Not unsafe for me, but unsafe for others.

I told myself it didn't make sense, but I couldn't shake the feeling. I turned and retreated to the corner of Fifty-eighth and Ninth and tried to think straight. It was Tuesday. Who else had a meeting on Tuesday night?

I caught a cab and got out at Cabrini Hospital, on East Twentieth.

The meeting was in a conference room on the third floor. The speaker had a full head of wavy gray hair and an engaging smile. He was a former advertising account executive and he had been married six times.

He had sired a total of fourteen children with his various wives, and he had not filed an income-tax return since 1973.

"Things got a little out of hand," he said.

Now he was a sporting-goods salesman in a discount retail store on Park Avenue South, and he lived alone. "All my life I was afraid of being alone," he said, "and now I've discovered that I like it."

Good for you, I thought.

There was no one I knew at the meeting, although there were a few familiar faces in the room. I didn't raise my hand during the discussion and I ducked out before the closing prayer, slipping away without saying a word to anybody.

It was cold out. I walked a few blocks, then caught a bus.

Jacob was on duty, and he told me I'd had some phone calls. I glanced at my box. There was nothing in it.

"She didn't leave a message."

"It was a woman?"

"Believe so. Same one each time, asked for you, said she would call back. Seems like she calls every fifteen, twenty minutes."

I went upstairs and called Elaine, but it hadn't been her. We talked for a few minutes. Then I hung up and the phone rang.

The voice was a rich contralto. Without preamble she said, "I'm taking a big chance."

"How?"

"If he knew about this," she said, "I'd be dead. He's a killer."

"Who is?"

"You ought to know. Your name is Scudder, isn't it? Aren't you the man's been showing his picture all over the street?"

"I'm the man."

There was a stretch of silence. I could tell she hadn't hung up, but I wondered if she might have set the phone down and walked away. Then, her voice little more than a whisper, she said, "I can't talk now.

Stay where you are. I'll call back in ten minutes."

It was more like fifteen. This time she said, "I'm scared, man. He'd kill me in a hot second."

"Then why call me?"

" 'Cause he might kill me anyway."

"Just tell me where I can find him. It won't get back to you."

"Yeah?" She considered this. "You got to meet me," she said.

"All right."

"We got to talk, you know? Before I tell you anything."

"All right. Pick a time and a place."

"Shit. What time is it now? Close to eleven. Meet me at midnight.

Can you do that?"

"Where?"

"You know the Lower East Side?"

"I can find my way around."

"Meet me at— shit, I'm crazy to do this." I waited her out. "Place called the Garden Grill. That's on Ridge Street just below Stanton. You know where that is?"

"I'll find it."

"It's on the right-hand side of the street if you're going downtown.

And there's steps leading down from the street. If you're not looking for it you could miss it."

"I'll find it. You said midnight? How will I know you?"

"Look for me at the bar. Long legs and auburn hair, and I'll be drinking a Rob Roy straight up." A throaty chuckle. "You could buy me a refill."

Ridge Street runs south from Houston Street seven or eight blocks east of First Avenue. It's not a good neighborhood, but then it never was.

Over a century ago the narrow streets began filling up with mean tenements, thrown up in a hurry to house the mob of immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe. The buildings left a lot to be desired when they were new, and the years have not been good to them.

Many of them are gone. Stretches of the Lower East Side have seen the tenements give way to low-income housing projects, which have arguably become worse places to live than the hovels they replaced. Ridge Street, though, remained an unbroken double row of five-story tenements, with an occasional gap in the form of a rubble-strewn lot where someone had torn down a building after someone else had burned it out.

My cab dropped me at the corner of Ridge and Houston a few minutes before twelve. I stood there while the driver made a quick U-turn and looked for greener pastures. The streets were empty, and of course all of the shops on Houston were dark, and most of them shuttered, their corrugated-steel shutters black with undecipherable graffiti.

I walked south on Ridge. On the other side of the street a woman was berating a child in Spanish. A few houses further on, a trio of youths in leather jackets looked me over and evidently decided I was more trouble than I was worth.

I crossed Stanton Street. The Garden Grill, not all that hard to find if you were looking for it, was in the fourth building from the corner. A scrap of neon in an otherwise opaque window announced its name. I walked a dozen yards past it and checked to see if I was attracting any attention. I didn't seem to be.

I retraced my steps and descended a half-flight of stairs to a heavy door with steel mesh over its window. The glass itself was darkened, but through it I could see the interior of a barroom. I opened the door and walked into a real bucket of blood.

A bar ran the length of a long narrow room. There were twelve or fifteen people standing or occupying backed stools, and a few heads turned at my entrance but no one took an undue interest. A dozen tables ranged across from the bar, and perhaps half of them were occupied. The lighting was dim, and the air was thick with smoke, most of it tobacco but some of it marijuana. At one of the tables a man and woman were sharing a joint, passing it back and forth, holding it in an elaborate roach clip. They didn't look in fear of arrest, and no wonder; busting someone in here for possession of marijuana would be like handing out jaywalking summonses in the middle of a race riot.

One woman sat alone at the bar, drinking something out of a stemmed glass. Her shoulder-length hair was chestnut, and the red highlights were like bloodstains in the subdued lighting. She wore red hot pants over black mesh tights.

I went over and stood at the bar, leaving an empty stool between us. When the bartender came over I turned and caught her eye. I asked her what she was drinking.

"A Rob Roy," she said.

It was the voice I'd heard over the phone, low and throaty. I told the bartender to give her another, and ordered a Coke for myself. He brought the drinks and I took a sip of mine and made a face.

"The Coke's flat here," she said. "I should have said something."

"It doesn't matter."

"You must be Scudder."

"You didn't tell me your name."

She considered this and I took a moment to look at her. She was tall, with a broad forehead and a sharply defined widow's peak. She was wearing a short bolero jacket over a halter the same color as her hot pants. Her midriff was bare. She had a full-lipped mouth with bright red lipstick, and she had large hands with bright red polish on her nails.

She looked for all the world like a whore, and I didn't see how she could possibly be anything else. She also looked like a woman, unless you paid attention to the timbre of the voice, the size of the hands, the contour of the throat.

"You can call me Candy," she said.

"All right."

"If he finds out I called you—"

"He won't find out from me, Candy."

"Because he'd kill me. He wouldn't have to think long and hard to do it, either."

"Who else has he killed?"

She pursed her lips, blew out a soundless whistle. "I'm not saying,"

she said.

"All right."

"What I can do, I can take you around, show you where he's staying."

"Is he there now?"

" 'Course not. He's somewhere uptown. Man, if he was anywheres this side of Fourteenth Street, I wouldn't be here talking to you." She raised a hand to her mouth, blew on her fingernails as if they were freshly painted and she wanted to speed their drying. "I ought to get something for this," she said.

"What do you want?"

"I don't know. What's anybody always want? Money, I guess.

Afterward, when you get him.

Something."

"There'll be something for you, Candy."

"Money's not why I'm doing this," she said. "But you do something like this, you ought to get something for it."

"You will."

She nodded shortly, got to her feet. Her glass was still half-full, and she knocked it back and swallowed, her Adam's apple bobbing as she did so. She was a male, or at least she'd been born one.

In some parts of town a majority of the street girls are men in drag.

Most of them are getting hormones, and quite a few have had silicone breast implants; like Candy, they're equipped with more impressive chests than most of their genuinely female competitors. Some have had sex-change surgery, but most of the ones on the street aren't that far along yet, and they may have hit the pavement in order to save up for their operations. For some of them, the surgery will eventually include a procedure to shave the Adam's

apple. I don't think there's anything available yet to reduce the size of hands and feet, but there's probably a doctor somewhere working on it.

"Give me five minutes," she said. "Then come along to the corner of Stanton and Attorney. I'll be walking slow. Catch up with me as I get to the corner and we'll go from there."

"Where will we be going?"

"It's not but a couple blocks."

I sipped my flat Coke and gave her the head start she'd asked for.

Then I picked up my change and left a buck on the bar. I went out the door, up the stairs to the street.

The cold air was bracing after the warm fug inside the Garden Grill. I took a good look around before I walked to the corner of Stanton and looked east toward Attorney. She had covered half the block already, walking in that hip-rolling stroll that's as good as a neon sign. I picked up my own pace and caught her a few yards before the corner.

She didn't look at me. "We turn here," she said, and hung a left at Attorney. It looked a lot like Ridge Street, the same crumbling tenements, the same air of unquiet desperation. Under a streetlamp, a Ford a few years old sat low on the ground, all four of its wheels removed. The streetlamp across the way was out, and so was another further down the block.

I said, "I haven't got much money with me. Under fifty dollars."

"I said you could pay me later."

"I know. But if this was a setup, there's not enough money to make it worthwhile."

She looked at me, a pained expression on her face. "You think that's what this is about? Man, I make more in a half hour than I could ever roll you for, and the men I make it from are all smiles when they give

it to me."

"Whatever you say. Where are we going?"

"Next block. You'll see. Say, that picture of him? Somebody drew it, right?"

"That's right."

"Looks just like him. Got the eyes just right, too. Man, he looks at you, those eyes just go right on through you, you know what I mean?"

I didn't like it. Something felt wrong, something hadn't felt right since I walked down the dark stairwell and into the bar. I didn't know how much of it was my own cop instinct and how much was contagious anxiety that I'd picked up from Candy. Whatever it was, I didn't like it.

"This way," she said, reaching for my arm. I jerked my arm free and she drew back and stared at me.

"What's the matter, you can't stand to be touched?"

"Where are we going?"

"Right through there."

We were at the mouth of an empty lot where a tenement had once stood. Now cyclone fence barred the way, topped with concertina wire, but someone had cut a gate into the fence. Beyond it I could see some discarded furniture, a burned-out sofa and some cast-off mattresses.

"There's a back house to one of the buildings on the next block,"

she said, her voice little more than a whisper. "Except it's sealed off, you can't get in from the other street. The only way's through the lot here.

You could live on this block and never know about it."

"And that's where he is?"

"That's where he stays. Look, man, just come with me to where you can see the entrance. You'd never find it if I don't point it out to you."

I stood still for a moment, listening. I don't know what I expected to hear. Candy stepped through the opening in the fence, not even looking back at me, and when she was a few yards ahead I started in after her. I knew better, but it didn't seem to matter. I felt like Elaine.

He'd told her to pick up the phone and turn off the answering machine, and knowing better didn't help. She did what he told her.

I walked slowly, picking my way through the debris underfoot.

The street had been dark to begin with, and it got darker with every step I took into the lot. I couldn't have been more than ten yards in when I heard footsteps.

Before I could turn a voice said, "That's just fine, Scudder. Hold it right there."

I started to pivot around to my right. Before I'd moved any distance, before I'd even begun to move, his hand fastened on my left arm just above the elbow. His grip tightened and his fingers had found something— a nerve, a pressure point— because pain knifed through me and my arm went dead from the elbow on down. His other hand moved to grasp my right arm, but higher up, close to the shoulder, with his thumb probing the armpit. He bore down and I felt another stab of pain, along with a wave of nausea rolling up from the pit of my stomach.

I didn't make a sound, or move a muscle. I heard more footsteps, and broken glass crunched underfoot as Candy returned to appear a few feet in front of me. A stray shaft of light glinted off one of her gold hoop earrings.

"Sorry," she said. There was no mockery in her tone, but no apology either.

"Pat him down," Motley said.

"He hasn't got a gun, silly. He's just glad to see me."

"Pat him down."

Her hands fluttered like little birds, patting at my chest and sides, circling my waist to grope for a gun tucked beneath my belt. She dropped to her knees before me to trace the outside of my legs to the ankle, then ran her hands up along the inside of the legs to the groin.

There her hands lingered for a long moment, cupping, patting. The touch was at once a violation and a caress.

"Definitely pre-op," she announced. "And no gun. Or would you like me to do a strip search, J.L.?"

"That's enough."

"Are you sure? He could have a weapon up his heinie, J.L. He could have a whole bazooka up there."

"You can go now."

"I'd be willing to look for it."

"I said you could go now."

She pouted, then dropped the attitude and settled her big hands on my shoulders. I could smell her perfume, heady and floral, overlaid upon a body scent of indeterminate gender. She raised up a little on her toes and leaned forward to kiss me flush on the mouth. Her lips were parted and her tongue flicked out. Then she let go of me and drew away. Her expression was clouded, unreadable in the dimness.

"I really am sorry," she said. And then she slipped past me and was gone.

"I could kill you right now," he said. His tone was flat, cold, unemphatic. "With my hands. I could paralyze you with pain. And then write you out a ticket to the boneyard."

He was still holding me as before, one hand above the left elbow, the other at the right shoulder. The pressure he was exerting was painful but bearable.

"But I promised to save you for last. First all your women. And then you."

"Why?"

"Ladies first. It's only polite."

"Why any of this?"

He laughed, but it didn't come out sounding like laughter. He might have been reading a string of syllables off a cue card, ha ha ha ha ha. "You took twelve years of my life," he said. "They locked me up.

Do you know what it's like to be locked up?''

"It didn't have to be twelve years. You could have been back on the street in a year or two. You're the one who decided to make it hard time."

His grip tightened and my knees buckled. I might have fallen if he hadn't been holding on. "I shouldn't have served a day," he said. "

'Aggravated assault upon a police officer.' I never assaulted you. You assaulted me, and then you framed me. They sent the wrong man to jail."

"You belonged there."

"Why? Because I was moving in on one of your women and you couldn't keep her? You weren't strong enough to hold her on your own.

Therefore you didn't deserve her, but you couldn't accept that. Could you?"

I didn't say anything.

"Ah, but you made a mistake framing me. You thought prison would destroy me. It destroys a lot of men, but you have to understand how it operates. It weakens the weaklings and strengthens the strong."

"Is that how it works?"

"Almost always. Cops don't last in prison. They almost never get out alive. They're weak, they need guns and badges and blue uniforms to survive, and they don't have any of those props in prison, and they die within the walls. But the strong just get stronger. You know what Nietzsche said? 'That which does not destroy me makes me stronger.'

Attica, Dannemora, every joint I was in just made me stronger."

"Then you should be grateful to me for putting you there."

He let go of my shoulder. I shifted my weight, looking to balance myself so that I could thrust behind me with my foot, raking his shin, stomping on his instep. Before I could begin to move he jabbed a finger into my kidney. He might as well have used a sword. I cried out in agony and fell forward, landing hard on my knees.

"I was always strong," he said. "I always had great strength in my hands. I never worked at it. It was always there." He grabbed me by my upper arms, hoisted me to my feet. I couldn't even think about kicking out at him. My legs lacked the strength to keep me upright, and if he'd let go of me I think I'd have fallen.

"But I worked out in prison," he went on. "They had weights in the exercise yard and some of us would work out all day long. Especially the niggers. You'd see them with the sweat pouring off them, stinking like hogs, pumping themselves up, turning themselves into muscle-bound freaks. I worked twice as hard as they did but all I added was strength, not bulk. Endless sets, high reps. I never got any bigger but I turned myself into wrought iron. I just got stronger and stronger."

"You needed a knife in Ohio. And a gun."

"I didn't need them. I used them. The husband was soft, like the Pillsbury Doughboy. I could have put my fingers clear through him. I walked him into his living room and killed him with his own gun." He was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice was softer.

"I used the knife on Connie just to make it look good. By then she was already dead in her soul. There wasn't much left of her to kill."

"And the children?"

"Just tidying up." One hand slid over my rib cage, and he didn't take long to find the spot he wanted. He pressed with a fingertip and the pain was like an electric shock, radiating down my arms and legs, taking the resistance right out of me. He waited a moment, then pressed just a little bit harder in the same spot. I felt myself swaying at the brink of unconsciousness, dizzy with vertigo as I stared down into the blackness.

I didn't know what the hell to do. My options were limited— I couldn't try anything physical. He was every bit as strong as he claimed to be, as far as I could tell, and I could barely keep myself upright, let alone mount an attack. Whatever I tried would have to be psychological in nature, and I felt similarly overmatched in that department. I didn't know what strategy was best, whether to talk or to remain silent, whether opposition or agreement was called for.

I tried silence for the time being, perhaps for lack of anything to say. He didn't speak either, letting his fingers do the talking, pressing various spots on my rib cage and around my shoulder blades and collarbone. His touch was painful, even as his instinct was unerring in guiding him to the best targets, but he wasn't putting the pressure on. His fingers toyed with me like a mandarin's with a worry stone.

He said, "I didn't need a knife with Antoinette. Or a gun."

"Why did you kill her?"

"She was one of your women."

"I barely knew her."

"I killed her with my hands," he said, speaking the words as if savoring the memory. "Stupid cow. She never knew who I was or why I was punishing her. 'I'll give you money,' she said. 'I'll do anything you want,' she said. She wasn't a bad fuck. But you already know that."

"I never slept with her."

"I didn't sleep with her," he said. "I just screwed her like you'd screw a sheep. Or a chicken. You wring their necks as you come, that's how you do it with chickens. I didn't wring her neck. I broke it. Snap, like a twig breaking."

I didn't say anything.

"And then out the window. It was just luck she hit the boy on the way down."

"Luck."

"I was trying for Andrea."

"Who?"

"His girlfriend. Of course I didn't expect to hit anybody, but I was trying for her."

"Why?"

"I'd rather kill a woman," he said.

I told him he was crazy. I said he was an animal, that he belonged in a cage. He hurt me again, then crossed a leg in front of mine and gave me a shove. I went sprawling on my hands and knees. I scuttled forward, scraping my hands on gravel and broken glass, stumbling over things I couldn't make out, then spinning around, setting myself, bracing for his approach. He rushed me and I threw a right at him, putting whatever I had into the punch.

He slipped the blow. The follow-through carried me past him and took me right off my feet. I managed one step, then lost it completely and fell full-length upon the ground.

I lay there, gasping for breath, waiting for whatever was coming next.

He let me wait. Then, softly, he said, "I could kill you right now."

"Why don't you."

"You wish I would, don't you? Good. In a week you'll beg me."

I tried to get up onto my hands and knees. He kicked me in the side, just below the rib cage. I scarcely felt it, the pain refused to register, but I stopped trying to get up.

He knelt at my side and put a hand at the back of my head, cupping the base of the skull. His thumb found the hollow behind the earlobe. He was talking to me but my mind was unable to track his sentences.

His thumb dug into the spot he'd found. The pain reached a new level, but I had gone somehow beyond pain. It was as though I were standing to one side, observing the sensation as a phenomenon, experiencing more awe than agony.

Then he turned up the pain a notch. There was already nothing but blackness in front of my eyes, but now the blackness spread behind my eyes as well. There was just one drop of fiery red against a sea of inky black. Then the red shrank to a pinpoint and went out.

I couldn't have been out long. I came to abruptly, as if someone had thrown a switch. I used to come to like that after a long night of drinking. There was a period of time when I never fell asleep and never woke up. Instead I would pass out and come to.

Everything hurt. I lay still at first, taking an inventory of the pain, trying to assess the extent of the damage. It took me a while, too, to make sure that I was alone. He could have been hunkered down alongside me, waiting for me to move.

When I did get up I did so slowly and tentatively, partly out of prudence, partly of necessity. My body didn't seem capable of fast movement or sustained activity. When I got up onto my knees, for example, I had to stay there until I summoned up the strength to stand.

Then, on my feet at last, I had to wait until the dizziness passed or I would have fallen back down again.

Eventually I found my way through the obstacle course of litter to the fence and groped along it until I got to where the opening had been cut. I emerged on Attorney Street. I remembered that was where I was, but I'd lost all sense of direction and couldn't tell which way was uptown. I walked to the corner, which turned out to be Rivington, and then I must have turned east instead of west because I wound up back at Ridge Street. I turned left at Ridge and walked two blocks and finally got to Houston Street, and I didn't have to stand there too long before a cab came along.

I held up a hand and he drew up and slowed down. I started toward him, and I guess he got a good look at me then and didn't like what he saw, because he stepped on the gas and peeled off.

I would have cursed him if I'd had the strength.

Instead it was all I could do to remain on my feet. There was a mailbox nearby and I walked over and let it take some of my weight. I looked down at myself and was glad I hadn't wasted breath cursing the cabbie. I was a mess, with both trouser legs laid open at the knee, my jacket and shirtfront filthy, my hands dark with dried blood and embedded dirt and grit. No cabdriver in his right mind would have wanted me in his hack.

But one did, and I can't say he came across as particularly demented. I stayed there at Ridge and Houston for ten or fifteen minutes, not because I really expected anyone to stop for me but because I couldn't figure out where the nearest subway entrance might be, or trust myself to cope with it once I did.

Three more cabs passed me up, and then one stopped. He may have thought I was a police officer. I was trying my best to give that impression, holding up my billfold as if to display a shield.

When he stopped for me I got the rear door open before he could change his mind. "I'm sober and I'm not bleeding," I assured him. "I won't mess up your cab."

"Fuck the cab," he said. "I don't own this heap of shit, and so what if I did? Wha'd they do, jump you and roll you? This is no place for you at this hour, man."

"Why didn't you tell me that a couple of hours ago?"

"Hey, you're not too bad off if you got your sense of humor. I better get you to a hospital. Bellevue's closest, but maybe you'd rather go someplace else?"

"The Northwestern Hotel," I said. "That's on Fifty-seventh and—"

"I know where it's at, I got a regular pickup five days a week across the street at the Parc Vendome.

But are you sure you wouldn't be better off going to a hospital?"

"No," I said. "I just want to go home."

Jacob was at the desk when I stopped to check for messages. If he noticed anything unusual about my appearance, nothing in his manner showed it. Either he was more diplomatic than I'd ever realized or he'd reached that point in the terpinhydrate bottle where relatively few things got his attention.

No calls, thank God. I went to my room, closed the door, and put the chain on. I'd done that once before, a few years back, only to discover that a man who wanted to kill me was waiting for me in the bathroom. I'd only managed to lock myself in with him.

This time, though, all that was waiting for me in the bathroom was the tub, and I couldn't wait to get into it. But first I braced myself and looked in the mirror.

It wasn't as bad as I'd feared. I was carrying some bruises and superficial scrapes and scratches, and some of the grit I'd rolled in, but I hadn't lost any teeth or broken anything or sustained any bad cuts.

I looked like hell all the same.

I got out of my clothes. My suit was beyond salvage; I emptied the pockets and stripped the belt from the slacks and stuffed them and the jacket into the wastebasket. My shirt was ripped and my tie was a mess.

I tossed them both.

I drew a hot tub and soaked in it for a long time, let the water drain out and filled it up again. I sat there and soaked while I picked bits of glass and gravel out of the palms of my hands.

I don't know what time it was when I finally got to bed. I never did look at the clock.

I had swallowed some aspirin before I went to bed, and I took some more as soon as I got up, and another hot bath to draw some of the ache out of muscle and bones. I needed a shave but knew better than to scrape a blade over my face. I found the electric shaver my kids gave me a few Christmases back and did what I could with it.

There was blood in my urine. It's always a shock to see that, but I'd taken kidney punches before and knew what they did to you. It was unlikely he'd done me any lasting damage. My kidney ached where he'd poked me, and it would probably pain me for a while, but I figured I'd get over it.

I went out and had coffee and a roll and read Newsday. Breslin's column was all about the criminal justice system, and he wasn't giving it any raves. Another columnist got slightly hysterical on the subject of a death penalty for major narcotics dealers, as if that would make them all weigh the consequences of their actions and turn their talents to investment banking instead.

If the previous day was up to the year's average to date, there had been seven homicides within the five boroughs in the course of its twenty-four hours. Newsday had four of them covered. None were in my neighborhood, and none of the victims had names I found familiar. I couldn't say for sure, but from what I read it didn't look as though any of my friends had been murdered yesterday.

I went over to Midtown North but Durkin wasn't around. I caught the noon meeting at the West Side Y

on Sixty-third. The speaker was an actor who'd sobered up on the Coast, and his energy gave a California rah-rah quality to the hour. I walked back to the station house, stopping on the way to get a slice of pizza and a Coke and eat on the street. When I got to Midtown North Durkin was back, holding the phone to his ear and juggling a cigarette and a cup of coffee. He motioned me to a chair and I sat down and waited while he did a lot of listening and not much talking.

He hung up, leaned forward to scribble something on a pad, then straightened up and looked at me.

"You look like you walked into a fan," he said. "What happened?"

"I got in with bad company," I said. "Joe, I want that bastard picked up. I want to swear out a complaint."

"Against Motley?" I nodded. "He did that to you?"

"Most of what he did is where it doesn't show. I let myself get suckered into an alley on the Lower East Side late last night." I gave him a condensed version, and his dark eyes narrowed as he took it in.

He said, "So what do you want to charge him with?"

"I don't know. Assault, I suppose. Assault, coercion, menacing. I suppose assault's the most effective charge to bring."

"Any witnesses to the alleged assault?"

"Alleged?"

"You have any witnesses, Matt?"

"Of course not," I said. "We didn't meet in Macy's window, we were in an empty lot on Ridge Street."

"I thought you said it was an alley."

"What's the difference? It was a space between two buildings with a fence across it and a gap in the fence. If it was a passage to anything, I suppose you could call it an alley. I didn't get far enough into it to find out where it went."

"Uh-huh." He picked up a pencil, looked at it. "I thought you said Attorney Street before."

"That's right."

"Then a minute ago you said Ridge Street."

"Did I? I met the hooker on Ridge, in a toilet of a place called the Garden Grill. I don't know why they call it that. There's no garden, and I don't think there's a grill, either." I shook my head at the memory.

"Then she took me around the block to Attorney."

"She? I thought you said a transsexual."

"I've learned to use female pronouns for them."

"Uh-huh."

"I suppose she's a witness," I said, "but it might be a trick to find her, let alone get her to testify."

"I can see where it might. You get a name?"

"Candy. That would be a street name, of course, and it might have been made up for the occasion. Most of them have a lot of names."

"Tell me about it."

"What's the problem, Joe? He assaulted me and I have a bona fide complaint to file."

"You'd never make it stick."

"That's not the point. It's enough to get a warrant issued and pull the son of a bitch off the street."

"Uh-huh."

"Before he kills somebody else."

"Uh-huh. What time was it when you got in the alley with him?"

"I met her at midnight, so—"

"Candy, you mean. The transsexual."

"Right. So it was probably half an hour after that by the time the assault took place."

"Say twelve-thirty."

"Roughly."

"And then you went to a hospital?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I didn't think it was necessary. He caused a lot of pain but I knew I didn't have any broken bones and I wasn't bleeding. I figured I'd be better off going straight home."

"So there's no hospital record."

"Of course not," I said. "I didn't go to a hospital, so how the hell could there be a hospital record?"

"I guess there couldn't."

"My cabdriver wanted to take me to a hospital," I said. "I must have looked as though I belonged there."

"It's a shame you didn't listen to him. You see what I'm getting at, don't you, Matt? If there was an emergency-room record, it would tend to confirm your story."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"How about the cabdriver?" he went on. "I don't suppose you got his hack license number?"

"No."

"Or his name? Or the number of his cab?"

"It never occurred to me."

"Because he could place you in the neighborhood and give evidence of your appearance and physical condition. As it is, all we've got is your statement."

I felt anger rising, and I made an effort to keep a lid on it. Evenly I said, "Well, isn't that worth something? Here's a guy who went away for aggravated assault on a police officer. After sentencing he threatened that officer in open court. He served twelve years, during which time he committed other acts of violence. Now, a few months after his release, you've got a sworn statement charging him with assault on that same police officer, and—"

"You're not a police officer now, Matt."

"No, but—"

"You haven't been a police officer for quite some time now." He lit a cigarette, shook the match out, went on shaking it after the flame had died. Without looking at me he said, "What you are, you want to get technical about it, you're an ex-cop with no visible means of support."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Well, what else are you? You're a sort of half-assed private detective, but you don't carry a license and you get paid off the books, so what do you think that looks like when you write it up?" He sighed, shook his head. "Late last night," he said. "Was that the first time you saw Motley yesterday?"

"It's the first time I saw him since his sentencing."

"You didn't go over to his hotel earlier?"

"What hotel?"

"Yes or no, Matt. Did you or didn't you?"

"Of course not. I don't even know where he's staying. I've been turning the city upside down looking for him. What's all this about?"

He rooted through papers on his desk, found what he was looking for. "This came through this morning,"

he said.

"Late yesterday afternoon a lawyer named Seymour Goodrich turned up at the Sixth Precinct on West Tenth. He was representing one James Leo Motley, and he had with him a recently obtained order of protection on behalf of his client against you, and—"

"Against me?"

"— and he wanted a complaint on the record about your actions earlier that day."

"What actions?"

"According to Motley, you turned up at his lodgings at the Hotel Harding. You menaced him, threatened him, and laid hands on his physical person in a threatening and intimidating manner, et cetera et cetera et cetera." He let go of the paper and it floated down onto the cluttered desktop. "You're saying it never happened. You never went to the Harding."

"Sure I went there. It's a flop at the corner of Barrow and West, I knew it well years ago when I was attached to the Sixth. We used to call it the Hard-on."

"So you did go there."

"Sure, but not yesterday. I went there when I was knocking on doors down there. Saturday night, it must have been. I showed his picture to the desk clerk."

"And?"

"And nothing. 'No, he don't look familiar, I never seen him before.'

"

"And you never went back?"

"What for?"

He leaned forward, crushed out his cigarette. He pushed his chair back and leaned all the way back and fixed his gaze on the ceiling. "You can see how it looks," he said.

"Suppose you tell me."

"Guy comes in, swears out a complaint, he's got an order of protection, a lawyer, the whole bit. Says you shoved him around and got rough with him. Next day you came in looking like you fell down a flight of stairs and you're the one with a complaint this time, only it happened in the middle of the night somewhere in the asshole of Manhattan, Attorney Street for God's fucking sake, and there's no witnesses, no cabdriver, no hospital report, nothing."

"You could check trip sheets. You might find the cabbie that way."

"Yeah, I could check trip sheets. I could put twenty men on it, a high-priority thing like that."

I didn't say anything.

He said, "Going back twelve years, why'd he sound off in the courtroom? 'I'll get you for this,' all that crap. Why?"

"He's a psychopath. What does he need with a reason?"

"Yeah, right, but what was the reason he thought he had?"

"I was putting him in jail. That's as much of a reason as he needed."

"Putting him away for something he didn't do."

"Well, sure," I said. "They're all innocent, you know that."

"Yeah, nobody guilty ever goes away. He said you framed him, right? He never fired a gun, he never owned a gun. A frame-up all the way."

"According to him, he was innocent of all charges. It's a funny stance to take when you're pleading guilty, but that's the way he told it."

"Uh-huh. Was it a frame?"

"What do you mean?"

"I just wondered," Durkin said.

"Of course not."

"Okay."

"It was a damn good case. The guy fired three shots at a police officer who was trying to collar him. He should have drawn a lot more than one-to-ten."

"Maybe," he said. "I'm just thinking about what it looks like now."

"And what's that?"

He avoided my eyes. "This Mardell," he said. "She was a snitch, is that right?"

"She was a source, yes."

"You make a lot of cases with the stuff she gave you?"

"She was a good source."

"Uh-huh. Cooperman a source, too?"

"I hardly knew Connie, I only met her a few times. She was a friend of Elaine's."

"And any friend of Elaine's was a friend of yours."

"What kind of—"

"Sit down, Matt. I'm not enjoying this, for Christ's sake."

"You think I am?"

"No, probably not. Did you take money from them?"

"Who?"

"Who do you think?"

"I just want to hear you say it."

"Cooperman and Mardell. Did you?"

"Sure, Joe. I wore a floppy purple hat, drove a pink Eldorado with leopard upholstery."

"Sit down."

"I don't want to sit down. I thought you were a friend of mine."

"I thought so, too. I still think so."

"Good for you."

"You were a good cop," he said. "I know that. You made detective early on and you had some damn good collars."

"What did you do, pull my file?"

"It's all in the computer, you just punch a few keys and it comes right up. I know about the letters of commendation you got. But you had a drinking problem, and maybe you got in over your head a little, and what good cop ever did everything by the book anyway, right?" He sighed. "I don't know," he said.

"So far all you can show me is a domestic homicide in another state and a woman who takes a dive out a window five blocks from here.

You say he did 'em both."

"He says so."

"Yeah, but nobody else heard him say it. Only you. Matt, maybe everything you're telling me is gospel, maybe he did those Venezuelans the other day, too. And maybe that was a hundred percent kosher bust twelve years ago; maybe you didn't sweeten it to make sure he got himself some jail time." He turned, and his eyes met mine. "But don't swear out a complaint against him and ask me to try and get a warrant.

And for Christ's sake don't go looking for him, because the next thing you know somebody'll be arresting you for violating an order of protection. You know how that works. You're not allowed to go near him."

"That's a great system."

"It's the law. You want to get into a pissing contest with him, now's the wrong time to do it. Because you'd lose."

I started for the door, not trusting myself to speak. As I reached for it he said, "You think I'm not your friend. Well, you're wrong. I'm your friend. Otherwise I wouldn't be saying all this shit to you. I'd let you find it out on your own."

"He's not at the Harding," I told Elaine. "He checked in the night before last and checked out the next day, right after I allegedly went over there and threatened him. I don't know that he ever actually occupied a room there. He registered under his own name, probably so he would have an address to use when his attorney applied for the order of protection."

"You went there looking for him?"

"After I left Durkin. I don't know that you can really say I was looking for Motley at the Harding, because I knew I wouldn't find him there." I thought for a moment. "I don't even know that I wanted to find him. I found him last night and I didn't come out of it too well."

"Poor baby," she said.

We were in her apartment, in the bedroom. I was stripped to my shorts and lying facedown on the bed.

She had been giving me a massage, not working too deep, her hands gentle but insistent, working the muscles, taking some of the knots out, soothing some of the aches. She gave a lot of attention to my neck and shoulders, where much of the tension seemed to be centered. Her hands seemed to know just what to do.

"You're really good," I said. "What did you do, take a course?"

"You mean how did a nice girl like me get into this? No, I never studied. I've been getting massages once or twice a week for years. I just paid attention to what people did to me. I'd be better at it if I had more strength in my hands."

I thought of Motley, and the strength in his hands. "You're strong enough," I said. "And you've got a knack. You could do this professionally."

She started to laugh. I asked her what was so funny.

She said, "For God's sake don't tell anybody. If word gets out all my clients'll want this, and I'll never get laid anymore."

Later we were in the living room. I stood at the window with a cup of coffee, watching traffic on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. A couple of tugs sported on the river, maneuvering a barge around. She was on the couch, her feet tucked under her, eating a quartered orange.

I sat on a chair across from her and put my cup down on the coffee table. The flowers were gone. She had tossed them shortly after I'd left Sunday, not long after his phone call. It seemed to me, though, that I could still feel their presence in the room.

I said, "You won't leave town."

"No."

"You might be safer out of the country."

"Maybe. I don't want to go."

"If he can get into the building—"

"I told you, I spoke to them. They're keeping the service entrance bolted from inside. It's to be opened only when one of the porters or doormen is present, and it'll be refastened after each use."

That was fine, if they stuck to it. But you couldn't count on it, and there were just too many ways to get into an apartment building, even a well-staffed one like hers.

She said, "What about you, Matt?"

"What about me?"

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know," I said. "I came pretty close to throwing a fit in Durkin's office. He as much as accused me of— well, I told you all that."

"Yes."

"I went there intending to accomplish two things. I was going to swear out a complaint against Motley.

The son of a bitch worked me over pretty good last night. That's what you're supposed to do, isn't it? If you're a private citizen?

Somebody assaults you, you're supposed to go to the police and report it."

"That's what they taught us in tenth-grade civics."

"They told me the same thing. They didn't tell me how pointless it would turn out to be."

I went to the bathroom and there was blood in my urine again, and my kidney throbbed as I returned to the living room. Something must have shown in my face, because she asked what was the matter.

"I was just thinking," I said. "The other thing I wanted from Durkin was for him to help me fill out an application for a pistol permit and rush it through. After the routine he gave me I didn't even bother mentioning it." I shrugged. "It probably wouldn't have done any good. They wouldn't issue me a carry permit, and I can't keep a loaded gun in my top dresser drawer and hope the bastard comes over for tea."

"You're afraid, aren't you?"

"I suppose so. I don't feel it but it has to be there. The fear."

"Uh-huh."

"I fear for other people's safety. You, Anita, Jan. It stands to reason that I'm at least as much afraid of getting killed myself, but I'm not really aware of it. There's this book I've been trying to read, the private thoughts of a Roman emperor. One of the themes he keeps coming back to is that death is nothing to be afraid of. The point he makes is that since it's inevitable sooner or later, and since you're just as dead no matter how old you are when you die, then it doesn't really matter how long you live."

"What does matter?"

"How you live. How you face up to life— and to death, as far as that goes. That's what I'm really afraid of."

"What?"

"That I'll screw up. That I'll do what I shouldn't, or fail to do what I should. That one way or another I'll turn out to be a day late and a dollar short and not quite good enough."

* * *

The sun was down when I left her apartment, and the sky was darkening. I set out intending to walk back to my hotel, but I was breathing heavily before I'd covered two blocks. I walked over to the curb and held up a hand for a cab.

I hadn't eaten anything all day aside from a hard roll for breakfast and a slice of pizza for lunch. I walked into a deli to pick up something for dinner but walked out again before it was my turn to order. I didn't have any appetite and the smell of food turned my stomach. I went up to my room and got there just in time to throw up. I wouldn't have thought I'd have had enough in my stomach to manage it, but evidently I did.

The process was painful, involving muscles that were sore from the night before. When I was done heaving a wave of dizziness took me and I had to cling to the doorjamb for support. When it passed I walked to my bed, moving with the deliberate mincing steps of an old man walking the deck of a storm-tossed ship. I threw myself down on the bed, breathing like a beached whale, and I wasn't there for more than a minute or two before I had to get up and stagger back into the bathroom to pee. I stood there swaying and watched the bowl fill up with red.

Afraid he'd kill me? Jesus, he'd be doing me a favor.

The phone rang an hour or so later. It was Jan Keane.

"Hello," she said. "If I remember correctly, you don't want to know where I'm calling from."

"Just so it's out of town."

"It's that, all right. I almost didn't go."

"Oh?"

"It all seemed overly dramatic, can you understand that? When I drank I was always addicted to that kind of high drama. Jump up, grab a toothbrush, call a taxi, and grab the next plane to San Diego. That's not where I am, by the way."

"Good."

"I was in the cab, heading for the airport, and the whole thing seemed bizarre and out of proportion. I almost told the driver to turn the cab around."

"But you didn't."

"No."

"Good."

"It's not just drama, is it? It's real."

"I'm afraid so."

"Well, I needed a vacation anyway. I can always look at it that way. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," I said.

"You sound, I don't know. Exhausted."

"It's been an exhausting day."

"Well, don't push yourself too hard, all right? I'll call every few days, if that's all right."

"That's fine."

"Is around now a good time to call? I thought I could have a good chance of finding you in before you left to go to a meeting."

"It's usually a good time," I said. "Of course my schedule's a little erratic right now."

"I can imagine."

Could she? "But call every few days," I said, "and I'll let you know if things clear up."

"You mean when they clear up, don't you?"

"That must be what I mean," I said.

I didn't get to a meeting. I thought about it, but when I stood up I realized I didn't want to go anywhere.

I got back into bed and closed my eyes.

I opened them a little while later to the sound of sirens outside my window. It was the Rescue Squad, and I watched idly as they hauled someone out of the building across the street on a stretcher and loaded him into the ambulance. They sped off, heading for Roosevelt or St.

Clare's, running with the throttle and the siren both wide open.

If they'd been readers of Marcus Aurelius they might have relaxed and taken it easy, knowing that it didn't make any real difference if they got there on time or not. After all, the poor clown on the stretcher was going to die sooner or later, and everything always happened just the way it was supposed to, so why knock yourself out?

I got into bed again and dozed off. I think I may have been running a fever, because this time I slept fitfully and came awake drenched in sweat, clawing my way out of some shapeless nightmare. I got up and drew a tub of water, as hot as I could stand it, and I lay gratefully in it, feeling it draw the misery out of me.

I was in the tub when the phone rang, and I let it ring. When I got out I called down to the desk to see if the caller had left a message, but he hadn't, and the genius on duty couldn't remember if it had been a man or a woman.

I suppose it must have been him, but I'll never know for sure. I didn't notice what time it was. It could have been anybody, really. I'd passed out my business cards all over town, and any of a thousand people could have been moved to call me.

And if it was him, and if I'd been there to take the call, it wouldn't have changed a thing.

When the phone rang again I was already awake. The sky was light outside my window and I'd opened my eyes ten or fifteen minutes ago.

Any minute now I'd get up and go to the bathroom and find out what color urine I was producing today.

I picked up the phone and he said, "Good morning, Scudder," and it was chalk on a blackboard again, and an arctic chill that went right through me.

I don't remember what I said. I must have said something, but maybe not. Maybe I just sat there holding the goddamned phone.

He said, "I had a busy night. I suppose you've already read about it."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about blood."

"I don't understand."

"No, evidently you don't. Blood, Scudder. Not the kind you spill, although I'm afraid that did happen.

But there's no sense crying over spilled blood, is there?"

My grip tightened on the telephone. I felt the anger and impatience rising in me, but I kept a lid on it, refusing to give him the response he seemed to want. I made myself take a breath, and I didn't say anything.

"Blood as in blood ties," he said. "You lost someone near and dear to you. My sympathies."

"What do you—"

"Read the paper," he said shortly, and he broke the connection.

I called Anita. While the phone rang I felt as though an iron band was tightening around my chest, but when I heard her voice on the other end of the line I couldn't think of a thing to say to her. I just sat there as wordless as a heavy breather until she got tired of saying "hello?" and hung up on me.

A blood tie, someone near and dear to me. Elaine? Did he know that she was my honorary cousin Frances? It didn't make sense but I called anyway. The line was busy. I decided he must have killed her and left her phone off the hook, and I got an operator to check and make sure. She did, and reported that the phone was in use. I'd identified myself as a police officer, so she cooperatively offered to break into the call if it was an emergency. I told her not to bother. It might or might not be an emergency, but I didn't want to talk to Elaine any more than I'd wanted to talk to Anita. I just wanted to assure myself that she was alive.

My sons?

I was looking in my book for phone numbers before the unlikelihood of that struck me. Even if he'd managed to find one of them and chase across the country after him, how could it have made today's paper? And why didn't I quit wasting time and go out and buy the paper and read about it, whatever it was?

I threw some clothes on, went downstairs and picked up the News and the Post. They both had the same story headlined on the front page.

The Venezuelan family, it turned out, had been killed by mistake.

They weren't drug dealers after all. The Colombians across the street were drug dealers, and the killers had evidently gone to the wrong house.

Nice.

I went to the Flame and sat at the counter and ordered coffee. I opened one of the papers and started going through it without knowing what I was looking for.

I found it right away. It would have been hard to miss. It was spread all over page 3.

A young woman had been killed in a particularly brutal fashion by a killer or killers who had invaded her home early the previous evening.

She was a financial analyst employed by an investment-management corporation headquartered on Wall Street, and she had lived just below Gramercy Park on Irving Place, where she'd occupied the fourth floor of a brownstone.

Two photos ran with the article. One showed an attractive girl with a long face and a high forehead, her expression serious, her gaze level.

The other showed the entrance to her building, with police personnel carrying her out in a body bag. The accompanying text stated that the well-appointed apartment had been ransacked by the killer or killers, and that the woman had been subjected to repeated sexual assault and unspecified sadistic mistreatment. The police were withholding details, as was customary in such cases, but the news story did mention that the victim had been decapitated, and one sensed that this was not the only surgery that had been performed.

Bugs Moran, intended victim of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, knew right away who'd machine-gunned his men in a Chicago garage.

"Only Capone kills that way," he said.

You couldn't say that here. All too many people kill in all too many ways, and Motley's murders didn't run to type, not as far as I could see.

All the same, this was one of his. That was obvious right away. I didn't have to look at the murder scene or interview the victim's friends and fellow workers.

All I needed to know was her name. Elizabeth Scudder.

Back in my room I flipped through the Manhattan White Pages to my own last name. There were eighteen listings, three of them businesses. I wasn't there, but Elizabeth was, listed as Scudder E J, with an address on Irving Place.

I picked up the phone and started to call Durkin but stopped with the number half-dialed. I sat there, thinking it through, and put the receiver back in its cradle.

The phone rang a few minutes later. It was Elaine. She'd had a call from him herself, and once again he'd begun by demanding that she turn off the answering machine and pick up the phone, and once again she'd done it. At that point he stopped whispering and began talking in his normal tone of voice, whereupon she reached over and flicked a switch on the answering machine so that it would record the conversation.

"But it didn't," she said. "Can you believe it? The fucking machine malfunctioned. Maybe I positioned the switch wrong, I don't know, I can't figure it out. The tape advanced as if it were recording, but when I played it back there was nothing on it."

"Don't worry about it."

"He told me all about killing a woman last night. I would have had it on tape, they could have checked it for voiceprints or whatever it is you do. And I screwed it up."

"It doesn't matter."

"Really? I thought I was being brilliant when I switched the tape on. I thought he'd incriminate himself and we'd have something on him."

"We would, but I don't think it would help. I don't think this whole thing's going to resolve itself on the basis of some piece of evidence that comes to light. The whole idea of an investigation seems pretty pointless to me. I can spend forever groping around in the dark while he goes on doing what he did last night."

"What did he do last night? He wasn't that specific, so maybe it wouldn't have helped to have a recording of the conversation. I gather he killed somebody."

"That's what he does."

"He told me to look in the newspaper but I didn't have one to look at. I put the all-news station on but they didn't have anything, or if they did I must have missed it. What happened?"

I filled her in, and she gasped predictably enough when she heard the victim's name.

"It's no relation," I told her. "I'm the only son of an only son, so I don't have any relatives named Scudder."

"Did your grandfather have any brothers?"

"My father's father? I don't know, he may have. He died before I was born, and I didn't have any Scudder great-uncles that I was aware of. The Scudders came from England originally. At least that's what I was told. I don't know much about that side of the family."

"So you and Elizabeth could have been distantly related."

"I suppose so. I suppose all the Scudders are related if you go back far enough. Unless one of my ancestors changed his name, or unless one of hers did."

"Even so, we all go back to Adam and Eve."

"Right, and we're all children of God. Thanks for pointing that out."

"I'm sorry. I may be taking this lightly because I'm not letting it register. It's so awful that I don't want to have to take it seriously. He must have thought she was a relative of yours."

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe not. There's something you have to remember about Motley. It's true that he's cunning and clever and resourceful, but that doesn't change the fact that he's nuts."

The phone book was still open on the bed. I looked at the list of my namesakes. It occurred to me that perhaps I ought to call the rest of them and warn them. "Change your name," I could say, "or face the consequences."

Was that what he was going to do next? Would he actually try working his way through the list? Then he could move on to the other four boroughs, and after that there were always the suburbs.

Of course if he killed enough people with the same last name, sooner or later some brilliant cop would spot a pattern. One of the listings was for the Scudder group of mutual funds; he could travel all over the country, knocking off all their shareholders.

I closed the phone book. I couldn't call the Scudders, but was there any point in calling Durkin? It wasn't his case, it was a long ways from his precinct, but he could find out who was in charge and get through to him. Elizabeth Scudder's murder would generate a lot of heat. The killing had been bloody and fierce, there was a sex angle, and the victim was young, white, upscale and photogenic.

What good was a tip from me? For a change there was no danger the case would get written off as a suicide, or a family squabble. A full lab crew would have long since labored over the scene, and every shred of physical evidence would have been measured and photographed and bagged and bottled. If he'd left prints, they'd have them, and by now they'd know who'd left them there. If he'd left anything, they'd have it.

Semen? Skin under her nails? Some part of his physical being that would do for a DNA match?

It wasn't like fingerprint evidence, where you could run a computer check and see what you had in your files. To get a DNA match you had to have a suspect in custody. If he'd left sperm or skin behind, they'd need someone to tell them whose it was. Then, after they'd picked him up, forensic techniques could put the rope around his neck.

The rope was figurative, of course. The state doesn't hang killers. It doesn't fry them, either, which is what it used to do. It does put them away, occasionally for life. Sometimes a life sentence translates into seven years or less, but in Motley's case I figured they'd want to hang on to him a little longer. The last

time, he went away for one-to-ten and served twelve; if he was true to form the second time around, they'd bury him inside the walls.

Assuming he got there in the first place. DNA matching and similar sophisticated forensics added up to good corroborative evidence, but you couldn't expect to build a whole case out of it. Juries didn't know what the hell you were talking about, especially after the defense had brought in their hired experts to argue that the prosecution's hired experts were full of crap. If the accused was the victim's boyfriend and if they picked him up in her bedroom with her blood on his hands, then a DNA match on his semen would ice his cupcake nicely. If, on the other hand, the accused had no connection to the victim beyond the fact that she had the same last name as the cop who'd arrested him over a decade ago— well, under those circumstances it might not carry much weight.

I did give Durkin a call, finally. I don't know what I might have said to him. He wasn't in.

I didn't give my name, or leave a message.

* * *

I left the hotel around eleven-thirty intending to go to the noon meeting at Fireside. That's the name of the group that meets at the Y on West Sixty-third.

I didn't get there.

Walking wasn't as much of an effort as it had been the day before.

I was still stiff, and my body was holding on to a considerable amount of pain, but my muscles weren't as tight and I didn't tire as quickly.

And it was warmer today, with less of a breeze blowing and not so much dampness in the air. Good football weather, I suppose you'd call it.

A little too warm for the raccoon coat, but brisk enough to make you appreciate the flask on your hip, or the flat pint of rye in your overcoat pocket.

I ambled over to Eighth Avenue and turned south instead of north.

I walked downtown as far as Toni Cleary's building and stood looking at her landing site, then up at the window he'd thrown her out of. A voice in my head kept telling me it was my fault she was dead.

It seemed to me the voice was right.

I circled the block and wound up right back where I'd started, which seemed to be my current role in life. I gazed up at Toni's window again and wondered if she'd had a clue what was happening to her, or why. Maybe he'd told her that she was being punished for being one of my women. If so, he'd very likely referred to me by my last name. That was what he called me.

Had she even known my last name? I hadn't known hers. She'd been killed because of her association with me, and she might well have died without knowing who her killer was talking about.

Not that it mattered. She'd have been in the twin grip of pain and terror, and an understanding of her killer's motivations would have been fairly far down on her list of emotional priorities.

And Elizabeth Scudder? Had she died wondering about her long-lost cousin Matthew? I might have gone over and stared at her building if it hadn't been a mile and a half to the south of me and clear across town. Her building couldn't have told me anything, but Toni's wasn't giving me much, either.

I looked at my watch and saw that I'd missed the meeting. It was still going on but it would be all but over by the time I got there. That was fine, I decided, because I didn't really want to go anyway.

I bought a hot dog from one street vendor and a knish from another and ate about half of each. I got a cardboard container of coffee from a deli and stood on the corner with it, blowing on it between sips, finishing most of it before I got impatient and spilled the rest in the gutter. I held on to the cup until I got to a trash basket. They're sometimes hard to find. Suburbanites steal them, and they wind up in backyards in Westchester. They make efficient and durable trash burners, enabling their new owners to contribute what they can to air pollution in their local communities.

But I was public-spirited, your ideal solid citizen. I wouldn't litter, or pollute the air, or do anything to lower the quality of life for my fellow New Yorkers. I'd just go through life a day at a time while the bodies piled up around me.

Great.

I never set out to look for a liquor store. But here I was, standing in front of one. They had their Thanksgiving window display installed, with cardboard figures of a Pilgrim and a turkey, and a lot of autumn leaves and Indian corn placed appropriately.

And a few decanters, seasonal and otherwise. And a lot of bottles.

I stood there looking at the bottles.

This had happened before. I'd be walking along with nothing much in mind, certainly not thinking about drinking, and I'd come out of some sort of reverie and find myself looking at the bottles in a liquor-store window, admiring their shapes, nodding at various wines and deciding what foods they'd go with. It was what I'd heard people call a drink signal, a message from my unconscious that something was troubling me, that I was not at that particular moment quite as comfortable with my sobriety as I might think.

A drink signal wasn't necessarily cause for alarm. You didn't have to rush to a meeting or call your sponsor or read a chapter of the Big Book, although it might not hurt. It was mostly just something to pay attention to, a blinking yellow light on sobriety's happy highway.

Go home, I told myself.

I opened the door and went in.

No alarms went off, no sirens sounded. The balding clerk who glanced my way looked me over as he might have looked at any prospective customer, his chief concern being that I wasn't about to show him a gun and demand that he empty the till. Nothing in his eyes suggested any suspicion on his part that I had no business in his store.

I found the bourbon section and looked at the bottles. Jim Beam, J.

W. Dant, Old Taylor, Old Forester, Old Fitzgerald, Maker's Mark, Wild Turkey.

Each name rang a bell. I can walk past saloons all over town and remember what I drank there. I may be less clear on what brought me there or whom I drank with, but I'll recall what was in my glass, and what bottle it came from.

Antique Age. Old Grand Dad. Old Crow. Early Times.

I liked the names, and especially the last. Early Times. It sounded like a toast. "Well, here's to crime."

"Absent friends." "Early Times."

Early Times indeed. They got better the more of a distance you looked back at them from. But what didn't?

"Help you?"

"Early Times," I said.

"A fifth?"

"A pint'll be enough," I said.

He slipped the bottle into a brown paper bag, twisted the top, handed it over the counter to me. I dropped it into a pocket of my topcoat and dug a bill out of my wallet. He rang the sale, counted out change.

One drink's too many, they say, and a thousand's not enough. But a pint would do. For starters, anyway.

There's a liquor store right across the street from my hotel, and I couldn't guess how many times I went

in and out of it during the drinking years. This store, though, was a few blocks away on Eighth Avenue, and the walk back to the Northwestern seemed endless. I felt as though people were staring at me on the street. Maybe they were. Maybe the expression on my face was the sort to draw stares.

I went straight up to my room and bolted the door once I was inside it. I took the pint of bourbon from my coat pocket and laid it down on the top of my dresser. I hung my coat in the closet, draped my suit jacket over the back of a chair. I went over to the dresser and picked up the bottle and felt its familiar shape through the brown paper wrapping, and weighed it in my hands. I put it back down, still unwrapped, and went over to look out the window. Downstairs, across Fifty-seventh Street, a man in a topcoat like mine was entering the liquor store. Maybe he'd come out with a pint of Early Times and take it back to his room, and look out his window.

I didn't have to unwrap the damn thing. I could open the window and pitch it out. Maybe I could take aim, and try to drop it on someone who looked as though he just got out of church.

Jesus.

I put the TV on, looked at it without seeing it, turned it off. I walked over to the dresser and took the bottle out of the paper bag. I put it back on the dresser but I stood it upright this time, then crumpled the paper bag and dropped it in the wastebasket. I returned to my chair and sat down again. From where I was sitting I couldn't see the bottle on top of the dresser.

Back when I was first getting sober I'd made Jan a promise.

"Promise me you won't take that first drink without calling me," she said, and I'd promised.

Funny the things you think of.

Well, I couldn't call her now. She was out of town, and I'd ordered her not to tell anyone where she'd gone. Not even me.

Unless she hadn't left. I'd had a call from her the day before, but what did that prove? The connection, now that I thought about it, had been crystal clear. She might have been in the next room from the sound of it.

Failing that, she could have been on Lispenard Street.

Would she do that? Convinced that the danger was largely in my mind, would she have stayed in her loft and lied to me about it?

No, I decided, she wouldn't do that. Still, there was no reason I could think of not to call her.

I dialed, got her machine. Was there anyone left in the world who didn't have one of those damned things? I listened to the same message she'd had on there for years, and when it ended I said, "Jan, it's Matt.

Pick up if you're there, will you?" I waited a moment while the machine went on taping the silence, and then I said, "It's important."

No answer, and I hung up. Well, of course she hadn't answered.

She was miles away. She wouldn't have played it dishonest. If she'd decided to stay in the city, she'd have told me so.

Anyway, I'd kept my promise. I'd made the call. Not my fault there was nobody home, was it?

Except that it was. My fault, that is. It was my warning that got her in a cab to the airport, and it was my actions years ago, long before I met her, that made the trip necessary. My fault. Jesus, was there one thing in the fucking world that wasn't my fault?

I turned, and the pint of Early Times was on the dresser, with light from the overhead fixture glinting off its shoulder. I went over and picked up the bottle and read its label. It was eighty proof. All of the popular-priced bourbons had been eighty-six proof for years, and then some marketing genius had come up with the idea of cutting the proof to eighty and leaving the price unchanged. Since the federal excise tax is based on alcohol content, and since alcohol costs the manufacturer more than plain water, the distiller increased his profit while slightly boosting the demand at the same time, since dedicated drinkers had to swill down more of the product in order to get the same effect.

Of course the bonded bourbons were still a hundred proof. And some of the brands came in at odd figures. Jack Daniel's was ninety proof. Wild Turkey was 101.

Funny what sticks in your mind.

Maybe I should have picked up a fifth, or even a quart.

I put the bottle down and walked over to the window again. I felt curiously calm, and at the same time I was all hyped up. I looked out across the street, then turned and looked at the bottle again. I switched on the TV and clicked the dial from channel to channel, not even noticing what I was looking at. I went around the dial two or three times and turned the set off.

The phone rang. I stood there for a moment, looking at it as though I couldn't figure out what it was, or what to do about it. It rang again. I let it ring a third time before I picked it up and said hello.

"Matt, this is Tom Havlicek." It took me a moment to place the name, and I got it just as he added, "In Massillon. Beautiful downtown Massillon, isn't that what they say?"

Did they? I didn't know how to respond to that, but fortunately I didn't have to. He said, "I just thought I'd give you a call, find out what kind of progress you were making."

Great progress, I thought. Every couple of days he kills somebody.

The NYPD doesn't have a clue what's going on, and I stand around with my thumb up my ass.

What I said was, "Well, you know how it goes. It's a slow process."

"You don't have to tell me. I guess that's one thing's the same the whole world over. You put the puzzle together a piece at a time." He cleared his throat. "Why I called, I might have a piece of the puzzle.

There's a night clerk at a motel on Railway Avenue who recognized your sketch."

"How did he happen to see it?"

"She. Little bitty woman, looks like your grandmother and has a mouth on her would shame a sailor. She took one look at him and knew him right away. Only problem was matching him to the right registration card, but she found him. He didn't call himself Motley. No surprise there."

"No."

"Robert Cole is what he put down. That's not far from the alias you said he used in New York. You had it written down on the sketch but I don't have it handy. Ronald something."

"Ronald Copeland."

"That's right. For address he put a post-office box, and he put down Iowa City, Iowa. He had a car, and he put down the plate number, and the motor vehicles people in Des Moines tell me there's no such plate been issued. They say they couldn't issue such a plate because it doesn't jibe with their numbering system."

"That's interesting."

"I thought so,'' he said. "Now my thinking is either he just made up the plate number or he used the one on the car he was driving, but it wasn't an Iowa tag in the first place."

"Or both."

"Well, sure. To take it the rest of the way, if he drove from New York he most likely had New York plates, and he might want to put down the correct plate number just in case some sharp-eyed clerk compared his car with the card he filled out. So if you were to check motor vehicles there at your end—"

"Good idea," I said. He gave me the plate number and I copied it down, along with the name Robert Cole. "He used an Iowa address at a local hotel here," I remembered. "Mason City, though. Not Iowa City. I wonder why he's fixated on Iowa."

"Maybe he's from there originally."

"I don't think so. He sounds like a New Yorker. Maybe he locked with somebody from Iowa in Dannemora. Tom, how did the motel clerk get to see the sketch?"

"How did she get to see it? I showed it to her."

"I thought the case wasn't going to be reopened."

"It wasn't," he said. "Still hasn't been." He was silent for a moment.

Then he said, "What I do on my free time's pretty much up to me."

"You ran all over town on your own?"

He cleared his throat again. "Matter of fact," he said, "I found a couple of the fellows to help out. I was the one who showed the sketch to that woman, but that was just the luck of the draw."

"I see."

"I don't know what good all of this is, Matt, but I thought you ought to know what showed up so far. I don't know where we go from here, if anywheres, but you'll hear from me if anything else turns up."

I hung up and went over to the window again. On the street a couple of uniforms were in conversation with a street vendor, a black man who'd set up shop a few weeks ago in front of the florist's, selling scarves and belts and purses, and cheap umbrellas when it rained. They come over from Dakar on Air Afrique, stay five and six to a room in the Broadway hotels, and fly back to Senegal every few months with presents for the kids. They learn quick over here, and evidently their curriculum includes low-level bribery, because the two blues left this one to tend his open-air store.

Nice of Havlicek, I thought. Decent of him, putting in his own time on a case his chief wouldn't reopen, even getting some other cops to work some of their off-hours.

For all the good it would do.

I looked over at the bottle and let it draw me across the room to the dresser. The federal tax stamp ran from one shoulder to the other, so arranged that you'd tear it when you twisted the cap. I teased the edges of the stamp with the ball of my thumb. I picked up the bottle and held it to the light, looking at the overhead bulb through the amber liquid the way you're supposed to view an eclipse through a piece of smoked glass.

That was what whiskey was, I'd sometimes thought. The filter through which you can safely look upon a reality that's otherwise too vivid for the naked eye.

I put the bottle down, made a phone call. A gruff bass voice said,

"Faber Printing, this is Jim."

"This is Matt," I said. "How's it going?"

"Not so bad. And you?"

"Oh, I can't complain. Say, I didn't catch you at a bad time, did I?"

"No, it's a slow day. What I'm doing right now is running carry-out menus for a Chinese restaurant. They buy thousands of them at a time and their deliverymen leave stacks of them in every vestibule and hallway they can find."

"So you're printing litter."

"That's exactly what I'm doing," he said cheerfully. "Contributing what I can to the solid-waste disposal problem. And you?"

"Oh, nothing much. It's a slow day."

"Uh-huh. There's a memorial service for Toni. Did you hear about that?"

"No."

"What's today, Thursday? It's sometime Saturday afternoon. Her family's holding a funeral somewhere in Brooklyn. Is there a section called Dyker Heights?"

"Near Bay Ridge."

"Well, that's where the family lives, and they'll be having a wake out there, and a service with a requiem mass. Some of Toni's friends in the program wanted a chance to remember her, so somebody arranged the use of an assembly room at Roosevelt. There'll be an announcement at the meeting tonight."

"I'll probably be there."

We talked a few more minutes, and then he said, "Was there anything else? Or can I go run the rest of these menus?"

"Go to it."

I hung up and sat down in my chair again. I must have sat there for twenty minutes.

Then I stood up and got the bottle from the dresser. I walked into the bathroom, and when I got there I gave the cap a twist, breaking the seal and tearing the tax stamp. In one motion I removed the cap with my right hand and tilted the bottle in my left, letting its contents spill into the sink. The smell of good bourbon came rushing up from the porcelain basin, even as the booze spiraled down the drain. I stared down at it until the bottle was empty, then raised my eyes to regard myself in the mirror.

I don't know what I saw there, or what I'd expected to see.

I held the bottle inverted over the sink until every drop was out of it, capped it, dropped it in the wastebasket. I turned on both taps and let the water run for a full minute. When I turned it off I could still smell the booze. I ran more water and splashed it up against the sides of the basin until I was satisfied that I'd washed it all away. The smell of it still rose from the drain, but there was nothing I could do about that.

I called Jim again, and when he answered I said, "This is Matt. I just poured a pint of Early Times down the sink."

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "There's something new available that you ought to know about. It's called Drano."

"I think I may have heard of it."

"It's better for the drains, it's cheaper, and it's not a whole lot worse for you if you should happen to drink it by mistake. Early Times. What's that, bourbon?"

"That's right."

"I was more a scotch drinker myself. Bourbon always tasted like varnish to me."

"Scotch tasted medicinal."

"Uh-huh. They both did the job though, didn't they?" He paused for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice was serious.

"Interesting pastime, pouring whiskey down the sink. You did this once before."

"A couple of times."

"Just once that I recall. You were about three months sober. No, not quite that, you were just coming up on your ninety days. You say there was another time?"

"Around Christmas last year. Things had fallen apart with Jan, and I was feeling sorry for myself."

"I remember. You didn't call me that time."

"I called you. I just didn't happen to mention the bourbon."

"I guess it slipped your mind."

I didn't say anything. Neither did he for a moment. Outside, someone, hit his brakes hard and they squealed long and loud. I waited for the crash, but evidently he stopped in time.

Jim said, "What do you suppose you're trying to do?"

"I don't know."

"Is it limit-testing? You want to see how close you can come?"

"Maybe."

"Staying sober's hard enough when you do all the right things. If you go and sabotage yourself, the odds get longer and longer against you."

"I know that."

"You had a lot of chances along the way to do the right thing. You didn't have to go into the store, you didn't have to buy the bottle, you didn't have to take it home with you. I'm not telling you anything you don't know."

"No."

"How do you feel now?"

"Like a damn fool."

"Well, you earned it. Aside from that, how do you feel?"

"Better."

"You're not going to drink, are you?"

"Not today."

"Good."

"A pint a day's my limit."

"Well, that's plenty for a fellow your age. Will I see you at St.

Paul's tonight?"

"I'll be there."

"Good," he said. "I think that's probably a good idea."

But it was still only the middle of the afternoon. I put on my jacket and got my topcoat from the closet. I was halfway out the door when I remembered the empty bottle in the wastebasket. I fished it out, wrapped it in the brown bag it had come in, and returned it to my coat pocket.

I told myself I just didn't want it in my room, but maybe I didn't want the maid to find it during her weekly visit. It probably wouldn't mean anything to her, she hadn't been working at the hotel all that long, she very likely didn't know that I used to drink or that I'd stopped. Still, something made me carry the thing in my coat pocket for a couple of blocks and then slip it almost surreptitiously into a trash basket, like a pickpocket ditching an empty wallet.

I walked around some. Thinking about things, and not thinking about things.

I had told Jim I felt better, but I wasn't sure that was the truth. It was true that I had been very close to drinking, and it was true that I was no longer in any real danger of taking a drink. That crisis had passed, leaving in its wake a curious residue, a mixture of relief and disappointment.

Of course that wasn't all I felt.

I was on a bench in Central Park a little ways west of the Sheep Meadow. I'd been thinking of Tom Havlicek and trying to figure out if there was any point in calling the DMV and trying to run that license plate. I couldn't see what good it would do. If the plate led anywhere, it would probably be to a stolen vehicle. So what? He wasn't going to go away for auto theft.

I went on sorting things out, deep in my own thoughts, and the kid with the radio was pretty close before I was aware of him. He and the radio were both oversize. It was as large a ghetto blaster as I'd ever seen, all gleaming chrome and shiny black plastic, and you'd have had to check it on an airplane. It was too big for carry-on.

He'd have been a small man on a basketball court, but nowhere else. He was six-six easy, and built proportionately, with wide shoulders and thighs that bulged the legs of his jeans. His jeans were black denim, ragged at the cuffs, and he had high-top basketball sneakers on his feet, their laces untied. The hood of a gray sweatshirt hung over the collar of his warm-up jacket.

On the other side of the asphalt path from me was a bench occupied solely by a heavyset middle-aged woman. Her ankles were badly swollen, and there was an air of great weariness about her. She was reading a hardcover book, a best-seller about extraterrestrial aliens in our midst. She looked up from it when he approached, his radio blaring.

The music was heavy-metal rock. I think that's what it's called. It was senselessly loud, of course, and it didn't sound like music to me, it sounded like noise. Every generation says that of the next generation's music— and, it seems to me, always with increasing justification. As loud as it was you still couldn't make out the words, but the underlying rage was evident in every note.

He sat down at one end of the bench. The woman looked at him, a pained expression on her round face. Then she stirred herself and heaved her bulk over to the other end of the bench. He didn't seem aware of her presence, or indeed of anything but himself and his music, but as soon as she'd moved he swung the radio up onto the spot she'd vacated. It sat there, blaring across at me. Its owner stuck his long legs out into the path, crossing one over the other at the ankle. The untied shoes, I noted, were Converse All-Stars.

My eyes went to the woman. She did not look happy. You could see her weighing alternatives in her mind. At length she turned and said something to the kid, but if he heard her he gave no indication. I don't see how he could have heard over the wall of noise rising between them.

Something was rising within me, too, as angry as the music he liked. I breathed into the feeling and felt it building in my body, warming me.

I told myself to get the hell out of there and take a hike, or find another bench. There was an ordinance against loud radio playing, but nobody was paying me to enforce it. Nor did some code of chivalry demand that I come to this woman's aid. She could haul ass and go elsewhere if the noise bothered her.

And so could I.

Instead I leaned forward and called out. "Hey," I said.

No response, but I was fairly certain he'd heard me. He just didn't want to let on.

I stood up and moved a couple of yards toward him, covering maybe half the width of the path. Louder I said, "Hey, you! Hey!"

His head swung around slowly and his eyes moved to fix on me.

He had a big head, a square face with a thin-lipped mouth and an upturned porcine nose. He lacked definition around the jawline, and he'd be jowly in a few years. A flat-top haircut accented the squareness of the face. I wondered how old he was,

and how much weight he was carrying.

I pointed at the radio. "Want to turn that down?"

He gave me a long look, then let his whole face relax into a smile.

He said something but I couldn't get it by lip-reading or make it out over the roar of the radio. Then he reached out very deliberately and turned the volume control, not lowering but raising the sound level. It didn't seem possible that more noise could come out of that box, but it got discernibly louder.

He smiled wider. Go ahead, his eyes said. Do something about it.

I felt a tightness in my upper arms and in the backs of my thighs.

That inner voice was chattering away, telling me to cool it, but I didn't want to hear it. I stood there for a moment, my eyes locked with his, then heaved a sigh and shrugged theatrically and walked away from him.

It seemed to me that his laughter followed me, but I don't see how that could be the case. He couldn't have laughed loud enough for me to hear him over the radio.

I kept on walking for twenty or thirty yards before turning to see if he was watching me. He wasn't. He sat as before, legs out, arms draped over the bench, head tilted back.

Let it alone, I thought.

My blood was racing. I left the path and doubled back behind the row of benches. The ground was thick with fallen leaves, but the last thing I had to worry about was their rustling underfoot. With all that cacophony filling his ears he wouldn't have heard a fire engine.

I came right up behind him and got close enough to smell him.

"Hey!" I yelled, loud, and before he could react I dropped an arm down in front of his face and pulled back, the crook of my elbow under his chin, my arm drawn tight against his throat. I hauled up and back, bracing my hip against the rear of the bench and putting some muscle into it, keeping my arm tight around his thick neck, hauling him right off the edge of the bench.

He was struggling, trying to duck his chin, trying to twist loose from my grasp. I bulled my way onto the

path and dragged him along after me. He was trying to cry out but the sound got trapped in his throat and all he could manage was a gurgle.

I felt it more than I heard it, felt his voice box vibrating against my arm.

His legs twitched and his feet scrabbled at the ground. One of his untied sneakers slipped off. I tightened my grip and his body twitched convulsively, and I dropped him and left him flopping on the ground. I went back for the radio, snatched it up in both hands, raised it high overhead and dashed it down onto the asphalt. Dials and bits of plastic went flying but the damned thing continued to play. I picked it up again, eager for the kill now, and I whirled around and smashed the thing against the concrete base of the bench. The case broke into fragments and the music stopped abruptly, leaving a cavernous silence.

He lay where I'd dropped him. He'd managed to reach a sitting position, one hand behind him for support, the other raised to rub his throat. His mouth was open and he was trying to say something but he couldn't get words out, not after the way I'd throttled him.

Here he was, mute in a suddenly silent world. While he puzzled over this I ran at him and kicked him in the side, just below the ribs. He went sprawling. I let him get up onto his hands and knees and then I kicked him again, under the right shoulder, and he fell down and stayed down.

I wanted to kill him. I wanted to pound his face into the pavement, I wanted to flatten his nose and smash his teeth. The wanting was physical, in my arms, in my legs. I stood over him, daring him to move, and he managed to raise himself a few inches and turn his face toward me. I looked at his face and drew my foot back to kick it in.

And stopped myself.

I don't know where I found the strength, but I wrapped one hand around his belt and bunched the other in the protruding hood of his sweatshirt and yanked him to his feet. "Now get out of here," I said, "or I'll kill you. I swear I'll fucking kill you."

I gave him a shove. He swayed and almost fell but got his balance and managed to stay on his feet. He took a few shuffling steps in the direction I had him pointed, turned his head, looked at me, turned again, and kept on going. He wasn't running, but neither was he taking his sweet time.

I watched him round the bend in the path, then turned back to the scene of the crime. His magnificent radio lay in pieces over several square yards of Central Park. Earlier I'd carried a cardboard coffee container for blocks to avoid littering, and now look what a mess I'd made.

The woman was still on the bench. Our eyes met, and hers went very wide. She looked at me as though I were far more of a danger than the creature I'd just rousted. When I took a step in her direction she swung the book up in front of her, as if it were a cross and I a vampire.

On its cover, an alien with a triangular head gazed at me with almond-shaped eyes.

I smiled ferociously at her. "It's nothing to worry about," I told her.

"That's the way we handle things on Mars."

Jesus, it felt great. I got all the way to Columbus Circle, carried along on adrenaline, riding the wave with my blood singing in my veins.

Then the rush wore off and I felt like an asshole.

And a lucky one at that. Fate had smiled at me, handing me the perfect adversary, someone bigger and younger and even more of a lout than I. It had filled me with righteous anger, always the best kind, and it had even furnished a maiden whose honor I could defend.

Wonderful. I'd almost killed the kid. I'd beaten him up good, launching what the courts would have rightly called an unprovoked assault. I might very well have done some real damage to him, and I'd run the risk of killing him. I could have crushed his windpipe, or ruptured internal organs when I kicked him.

If a cop had witnessed the incident I'd be on my way downtown now. I'd wind up in jail, and I'd deserve to be there.

I still couldn't work up much sympathy for the kid with the flattop.

He was by all objective standards a first-rate son of a bitch, and if he came out of this with a sore throat and a bruised liver he wasn't getting a whole lot more than he had coming. But who appointed me the avenging angel? His behavior was none of my business, and neither was his punishment.

Our Lady of the Swollen Ankles hadn't needed me to defend her. If she'd had enough of an aversion to heavy metal she could have bestirred herself and waddled away. And so could I.

Face it— I'd done a number on him because I couldn't get anyplace with Motley. I couldn't stop his taunting, so I silenced the kid's radio instead. I couldn't win when I was face-to-face with him on Attorney Street, so I evened things up by putting the boot to the kid. I was powerless over what mattered, so I made up for it by demonstrating power over what didn't matter.

Worst of all, I'd known better. The rage that had empowered me had not been quite strong enough to shut out the little voice in my head that told me to cut the shit and act like a grown-up. I'd heard the voice, just as I'd heard it before when it counseled against buying the booze.

There are people who never hear their own inner voices, and maybe they can't honestly help the things they do in life, but I'd heard it loud and clear and told it to shut the fuck up.

I'd caught myself just in time. I hadn't taken the drink, and I hadn't kicked the kid's head in, but if those were victories they struck me as small ones.

I didn't feel very proud of myself.

* * *

I called Elaine from the hotel. She had nothing to report and neither did I, and we didn't stay on the phone long. I went into the bathroom to shave. My face had recovered enough so that I felt I could use a disposable razor instead of the electric thing. I shaved carefully and didn't nick myself.

Throughout it I was aware of the smell of alcohol wafting up from the drain. I don't think it was real, I don't see how it could have been, but I smelled it all the same.

I was patting my face dry when the phone rang. It was Danny Boy Bell.

"There's somebody you ought to talk to," he said. "You free around twelve, one o'clock?"

"I can be."

"Come up to Mother Goose, Matthew. You know where that is?"

"Amsterdam, I think you said."

"Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-first Street. Three doors up from the corner, east side of the avenue.

Some nice soft music, do you good to listen to it."

"No heavy metal?"

"What a nasty thought. Shall we say twelve-thirty? Ask for my table."

"All right."

"And Matthew? You'll want to bring money."

I stayed in my room and watched the news, then went out for dinner. I had the urge for hot food, and it was the first real appetite I'd felt since the ambush on Attorney Street, so I wanted to indulge it. I was halfway to the Thai place when I changed my mind and walked over to Armstrong's. I had a big plate of their black-bean chili, adding a lot of crushed red pepper to the already potent mixture the waitress brought me. It left me feeling almost as good as smashing that radio in the park, and I was considerably less likely to regret it afterward.

I used the john while I was there, and there was blood in my urine again but it wasn't as bad as it had been, and my kidney hadn't been bothering me lately. I went back to my table and drank some more coffee. I had Marcus Aurelius along for company but I didn't make much headway. Here's the passage I read:

Never surpass the sense of your original impressions. Perhaps they tell you that a certain person speaks ill of you. That was their sole message; they did not go on to say you have been harmed by him.

Perhaps I see my child suffers illness; my eyes tell me so but do not tell me his life is in danger. Always keep to your original impressions; add no interpretation of your own and you remain safe. Or at the most add a recognition of the great world order by means of which all things come to pass.

That seemed to hold some advice for a detective, but I wasn't sure if I agreed with it. Keep your eyes and ears open, I thought, but don't try to make any sense out of what you see and hear. Or was that what he was saying? I played with the idea for a while, then gave up and put the book away and enjoyed the coffee and the music. I don't know what it was, something classical with a full orchestra. I enjoyed it, and didn't feel driven to smash the machine that was playing it.

I got to the meeting a few minutes early. Jim was there, and we chatted for a few minutes by the coffee urn without either of us referring to our earlier conversation. I talked to a few other people, too, and then it was time to take a seat.

The speaker was from the Bronx, an Irishman from the Fordham Road section. He was a big florid-faced fellow, still working the same job as the butcher in a neighborhood supermarket, still married to the same woman, still living in the same house. Alcoholism had left him visibly unscarred until it put him in a detox three years ago with nerve and liver damage.

"I was a good Catholic all my life," he said, "but I never said a real prayer until I got sober. Now I say two prayers a day. I say please in the morning and thank you every night. And I don't take that drink."

During the discussion an older fellow named Frank, sober since the Flood, said there was one prayer that had served him well over the years.

"I say, 'God, thank you for everything just the way it is,' " he said. "I don't know what good it does Him to hear it, but it does me good to say it."

I raised my hand and said I'd come close to a drink that afternoon, as close as I'd ever come since I got sober. I shied away from going into detail, but said I'd done every possible thing wrong except take the drink. Someone else responded to that, saying that not taking the drink was the only thing any of us absolutely had to get right.

Toward the end there was an announcement of Toni's memorial service, to be held in one of the big rooms at Roosevelt Hospital at three Saturday afternoon. Several people had mentioned Toni during the sharing, speculating on what might have caused her suicide and relating it to their own lives.

There was more speculation along those lines afterward at the Flame. It made me uncomfortable. I knew something they didn't know and wasn't willing to fill them in. It felt curiously disloyal to Toni to let her death pass as a suicide, but I didn't know how to set matters straight without causing more of a stir than I wanted and making myself too much the center of attention in the process. When the conversation stayed on that subject I thought about leaving, but then someone switched to another topic and I relaxed.

The meeting broke at ten, and I spent about an hour drinking coffee at the Flame. I stopped at my hotel to check for messages, then walked back out to the street without going upstairs.

I was early for my meeting with Danny Boy. I walked uptown, taking my time about it, stopping to look in store windows, waiting for lights to change even in the absence of oncoming traffic. Even so I reached the corner of Eighty-first and Amsterdam ahead of schedule. I walked a block past the place on the avenue, crossed the street, and planted myself in a doorway across from Mother Goose. I stayed there in the shadows and watched people go in and out of the place, keeping an eye on other activity on the street at the same time. On the southeast corner of the intersection, three people were standing around, heroin addicts waiting for the man. I couldn't see that they had any connection with Mother Goose, or with me.

At 12:28 I crossed the street and entered the club. I stepped into a dark narrow room with a bar along the left-hand wall and a coat room on the right near the door. I handed my coat to a girl who looked to be half black and half Asian, took the numbered plastic disc she gave me in return, and walked the length of the bar. At its end the room opened up to twice its width. The walls were brick, with sconces providing muted indirect lighting. The floor was tile in a pattern of red and black checkerboard squares.

On a little stage, three black men played piano, bass and drums.

They had short hair and neatly trimmed beards and they all wore dark suits and white shirts and striped ties. They looked like the old Modern Jazz Quartet, with Milt Jackson gone around the corner for a quart of milk.

I stood a few feet from the end of the bar, scanning the room, and a headwaiter glided over. He looked as though he could have been a fourth member of the group onstage. I couldn't see Danny Boy, my eyes hadn't adjusted to the lighting, but I asked for Mr. Bell's table and he led me to it. The tables were set close together, so it was a narrow serpentine path he led me on.

Danny Boy's table was at ringside. There was an ice bucket on the table, a bottle of Stolichnaya resting in it. Danny Boy wore a vest boldly patterned in vertical stripes of yellow and black; otherwise his attire matched the band and the headwaiter. He had a tumbler of vodka in front of him and a girl at his right.

She was a blonde, her hair cut in an extreme punk style, long on one side, cropped close to the skull on the other. Her dress was black, and cut to show a lot of cleavage. She had one of those greedy little hill-country fox faces, the kind you get growing up in a house with three or four broken cars permanently installed on the front lawn.

I looked at her, then at Danny Boy. He shook his head, glanced at his watch, nodded to a chair. I sat down, having been informed that the girl was not the person I'd come to meet, that the person in question would be along in a little while.

The set lasted another twenty minutes, during which time no one at our table said a word, nor was there any audible conversation at the surrounding tables. From where I sat the crowd looked to be about half black and half white. I saw one man I recognized. He'd been a pimp when I first knew him, and since then he'd gone through what you could call a mid-life crisis, I suppose, and re-emerged as a dealer in African art and antiquities, with a shop on upper Madison Avenue. I'd heard he was doing well, and I could believe it. He'd always done superbly as a pimp.

When the trio left the stage, a waitress came over with a fresh drink for Danny Boy's companion, something in a tall glass with fruit and a paper parasol in it. I asked if they had coffee. "Just instant," she said apologetically. I told her that would be fine and she went off to fetch it.

Danny Boy said, "Matt, this is Crystal. Crystal, say hello to Matthew."

We said hello to each other, and Crystal assured me it was a pleasure to meet me. Danny Boy asked me what I thought of the group and I said they were fine.

"Piano player's special," he said. "Sounds a little bit like Randy Weston, a little like Cedar Walton. You can hear it especially when the other two sit out and he plays solo. He played one whole set solo the other night. Very special, very tasteful."

I waited.

"Our friend'll be along in about five minutes," he said. "I thought you might like to come early and catch a set. Nice place, wouldn't you say?"

"Very nice."

"They treat me right. And you know me, Matthew. Creature of habit, when I like a place I'm there all the time. Every night, or pretty near."

The coffee came. The waitress set it down and hurried off with drinks for somebody else. They didn't serve during the set, so they made up for it by working feverishly during the breaks. A lot of the customers ordered two or three drinks at a time. Some, like Danny Boy, had a bottle on the table. That used to be illegal, and very likely still is, but it was never a hanging offense.

Danny Boy poured more vodka into his glass while I stirred my coffee. I asked what he knew about the person we were waiting for.

"Meet him first," he said. "Look him over, hear him out."

At one o'clock I saw the headwaiter coming our way with a man in tow. I knew he was the fellow we were waiting for because he was all wrong for the club. He was a thin white man wearing a houndstooth sport jacket over a navy-blue corduroy shirt, and he looked out of place in a room full of black men dressed like bank vice presidents. He appeared to feel out of place, too, and he stood awkwardly with one hand on the back of his chair. Danny Boy had to tell him to sit down a second time before he pulled the chair back and sat on it.

As he sat down, Crystal got to her feet. It must have been her cue.

She smiled all around and threaded her way among the tables. Our waitress came over right away. I said I'd have more coffee, and the new arrival ordered a beer. They had six brands on hand and the waitress named them all. He looked irritated by the need to make a decision.

"Red Stripe," he said. "What's that?" She told him it was Jamaican.

"That's fine," he said. "Bring me one of those."

Danny Boy introduced us, first names only. His was Brian. He put his forearms on the table and looked down at his hands, as if to make sure that his nails were clean. He was about thirty-two, with a lumpy round face that looked to have taken its share of punches over the years.

His hair, a dark blond, was going thin in front.

You could see he'd done time. I can't always tell, but some guys might as well be wearing a sign.

His beer came, and my coffee. He picked up the longneck bottle and read the label, frowning as he did

so. Then, ignoring the glass the waitress had provided, he took a drink from the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Jamaican," he said. Danny Boy asked him how it was. "It's all right," he said. "All beer's the same." He put the bottle down and looked at me. "You're looking for Motley," he said.

"You know where he is?"

He nodded. "I seen him."

"Where do you know him from?"

"Where else? The joint. We were both on E-block. Then he went in the hole for thirty days, and when he got out they switched him somewhere else."

"Why did they put him in solitary?"

"A guy got killed."

Danny Boy said, "That's the punishment for murder? Thirty days'

solitary confinement?"

"They couldn't prove it, they didn't have no witnesses, but everybody knew who done it." His eyes touched mine, then slid to the side. "I know who you are," he said. "He used to talk about you."

"I hope he said nice things."

"Said he was going to kill you."

"When did you get out, Brian?"

"Two years ago. Two years and a month."

"What have you been doing since then?"

"This and that. You know."

"Sure."

"What I gotta do. I started usin' again when I got outta the joint, but now I'm in a methadone program. I get day work out of the state employment, or I'll turn a buck. You know how it is."

"I know. When did you see Motley?"

"Must of been a month ago. Maybe a little more."

"You talk to him?"

"What for? No. I seen him on the street. He was comin' down the steps of this house. Then I seen him a few days later and he's goin' into the house. Same house."

"And that was over a month ago?"

"Say a month."

"And you haven't seen him since?"

"Sure I did. A couple of times, on the street in the neighborhood.

Then I got the word, somebody's lookin' for the guy, so I hung around a little. Stood on the corner where I could keep an eye on the house. Had coffee next door to it so I could see who's goin' in and out. He's still there." He showed me a bashful smile. "I asked some questions, you know? There's a broad he's living with, it's her apartment. I found out, you know, which apartment it is."

"What's the address?"

He shot a look at Danny Boy, who nodded. He took another pull from his bottle of Red Stripe. "He better not know where this came from."

I didn't say anything.

"All right," he said. "Two eighty-eight East Twenty-fifth, that's near the corner of Second. There's a coffee shop on that corner serves you a good meal reasonable. Good Polish food."

"Which apartment?"

"Fourth floor in the back. Name on the bell is Lepcourt. I don't know if that's the broad's name or what."

I wrote all this down, closed my notebook. I told Brian that I wouldn't want Motley to know about our conversation.

He said, "No fuckin' way, man. I ain't talked to him since they switched him outta E-block. I ain't gonna talk to him now."

"You haven't said a word to him?"

"What for? I seen him, you know, an' I reckanized him right off.

He's got this funny-shaped head, kind of a long face. If you seen him once you'd never miss him. Me, I got a face your eyes'll slide right over.

He looked at me the other day, Motley, looked at me on the street. His eyes never even slowed down. He didn't reckanize me." Another shy smile. "A week from today you won't reckanize me."

He seemed proud of this. I looked at Danny Boy, who flashed two fingers at me. I got out my wallet and took out four $50 bills. I folded them, palmed them, and reached across the table to slip them into Brian's hand. He took the money and dropped his hand into his lap, holding the money out of sight while he had a look at it. When he looked up the smile was back. "That's decent," he said. "That's real decent."

"One question."

"Shoot."

"Why rat him out?"

He looked at me. "Why not? We was never friends. A guy's gotta turn a buck, you know that."

"Sure."

"Anyway," he said, "he's a real bad fucker. You know that, don't you? Shit, you gotta know it."

"I know it."

"That woman he's living with? I bet he kills her, man. Maybe he killed her already."

"Why?"

"I guess he likes it or something. I heard him talkin' about it one time. He said women didn't last, they got used up quick. After a while you had to kill 'em and get a new one. I never forgot that, not just what he said but how he said it. You hear all kinds of shit, but I never heard nothing like that." He took another pull on his beer and put the bottle down. "I gotta go," he said. "I owe for the beer or are you taking care of that?"

"It's taken care of," Danny Boy said.

"I only drank half of it. It's okay, though. Anybody wants the rest of it, feel free." He got to his feet. "I hope you get him," he said. "A guy like that don't belong on the street."

"No, he doesn't."

"The thing is," he said, "he don't belong in the joint, either."

I said, "What do you think?"

"What do I think, Matthew? I think he's one of Nature's noblemen.

Generous, too. I don't suppose you'd care to finish his bottle of beer."

"Not just now."

"I think I'll stay with Stoly myself. What do I think? I don't think he told you any lies. Your friend may not still be on Twenty-fifth Street, but it won't be because Brian tipped him off."

"I think he's scared of him."

"So do I."

"But somebody else gave a very convincing performance of fear the other night, and then she led me right into a trap." I ran down what had happened on Attorney Street. He thought about it while he refilled his glass.

"You walked right into it," he said.

"I know."

"This doesn't have that kind of feel to it," he said. "Then again, our Brian didn't show up with character references. Still, you'll want to exercise caution."

"For a change."

"Quite. If it's not a setup, I don't think he'll sell you out. I don't think he'd want to get that close to Motley." He drank. "Besides, you paid him well."

"A duece was more than he expected to get."

"I know. There's an advantage, I've found, in giving people more than they expect to get."

That wasn't a cue, but it reminded me. I opened my wallet in my lap and found a pair of hundreds. I passed them to him and he smiled.

"As Brian would say, that's real decent. But there's no need to pay me now. Why not wait until you find out if his information is valid?

Because you don't owe me anything if it's not."

"You hang on to it," I suggested. "I can always ask for it back if it's old news."

"True, but—"

"And if it's straight," I said, "I might not be around to pay you. So you'd better take the money now."

"I won't dignify that with an answer," he said.

"But you'll keep the money."

"I doubt I'll keep it long. Crystal's an expensive toy. Do you want to stay for another set, Matthew? If not, would you stop at the bar and tell the little darling it's safe to return? And put your money away, I'll pay for your coffee. My God, you're as bad as Brian."

"I only drank half of that last cup," I told him. "It's not bad for instant, though. You're welcome to the rest of it."

"That's decent of you," he said. "That's real decent."

The cabbie had it all figured out. The only way to handle the crack problem was to cut off the supply.

You couldn't lessen the demand because everybody who tried the stuff got addicted to it, and you couldn't seal the borders, and you couldn't control production in Latin America because the dealers were more powerful than the governments.

"So you gotta be the government," he said. "What we do, we annex the fuckers. Take 'em over. Make

'em territories at first, until they shape up and they're ready for statehood. Right away you dry up your drugs at the source. And you got no more wetbacks, because how can people sneak into a country when they're already there? Any place where you got your insurgents, your rebels up in the hills, you declare

'em citizens and draft their asses into the U.S. Army. Next thing you know they got three hots and a cot, they got clean uniforms and GI haircuts and they're shopping at the PX. You do this right, you solve all your problems at once."

He let me out at the ideal place for solving all my problems at once. Tenth and Fiftieth. Grogan's Open House, Michael J. Ballou, proprietor.

I walked in the door and the beer smell reached out to embrace me.

The crowd was light and the room was quiet. The jukebox was silent, and nobody was playing darts at the back. Burke was behind the bar with a cigarette in his mouth, trying to make his lighter produce a flame.

As I came in he gave me a tiny nod, put down the lighter and lit the cigarette with a match.

I didn't see his lips move but he must have said something because Mick turned at my approach. He was wearing his butcher's apron, more a coat than an apron. It buttoned up to the neck and covered him to the knees. It was gleaming white except where it showed reddish-brown stains. Some of them had faded over the years, and some had not.

"Scudder," he said. "Good man. What will you drink?"

I said a Coke would be fine. Burke filled a glass and slid it across the bar to me. I picked it up, and Mick raised his own glass to me. He was drinking JJ&S, the twelve-year-old Irish that the Jameson people turn out in small quantities. Billy Keegan, who'd worked behind the stick at Armstrong's some years back, used to drink it, and I'd tried it on a few occasions. I could still remember what it tasted like.

"It's a late hour for you," Mick said.

"I was afraid you might be closed."

"When did we ever close at this hour? It's not two yet. We're open till four, as often as not. I bought this bar to have a place for late drinking. Sometimes a man has need of a late night." His eyes narrowed.

"Are you all right, man?"

"Why?"

"You look like a man who's been in a fight."

I had to smile. "This afternoon," I said, "but it didn't put a mark on me. A few nights ago it was a different story."

"Oh?"

"Maybe we should sit down."

"Maybe we should," he agreed. He snatched up the whiskey bottle and led the way to a table. I brought my Coke and followed him. As we sat down, someone at the far end of the room played the jukebox and Liam Clancy declared himself to be a freeborn man of the traveling people. The volume was low and the music didn't get in your way, and neither of us said anything until the song had ended.

Then I said, "I need a gun."

"What sort of gun?"

"A handgun. An automatic or a revolver, it doesn't matter.

Something small enough to conceal and carry around but heavy enough to have some stopping power."

His glass was still a third full, but he drew the cork stopper from the JJ&S bottle and topped it up, then picked up the glass and looked into it. I wondered what he was seeing.

He drank off some of the whiskey and put the glass down. "Come on," he said.

He stood up, pushed his chair back. I followed him to the back of the room. There was a door to the left of the dart board. Press-on letters announced that it was private, and a lock guaranteed privacy.

Mick opened it with a key and ushered me into his office.

It was a surprise. There was a big desk, its top completely clear. A Mosler safe as tall as I was stood off to one side, flanked by a pair of green metal filing cabinets. A brass coatrack held a raincoat and a couple of jackets. There were two groups of hand-colored engravings on the walls, some of Ireland, the others of France. He'd told me once that his mother's people came from County Sligo, his father from a fishing village near Marseilles. Behind the desk there was a much larger picture, a black-and-white photograph with a white mat and a narrow black frame. It showed a white frame farmhouse shaded by tall trees, with hills in the distance and clouds in the sky.

"That's the farm," he said. "You've never been."

"No."

"We'll go one day. It's up near Ellenville. We should have snow soon. That's when I like it the most, when all those hills have snow on them."

"It must be beautiful."

"It is." He went to the safe, worked the combination lock, opened the door. I went over and examined one of the French engravings. It showed sailing boats in a small and well-protected harbor. I couldn't read the caption.

I went on looking at it until I heard the door of the safe swing shut.

I turned. He had a revolver in one hand and half a dozen shells in the palm of the other. I went over and he handed me the gun.

"It's a Smith," he said. "Thirty-eight caliber, and the shells are hollow-point, so you won't lack for stopping power. As for accuracy, that's another matter. Someone's cut the barrel down to an inch, and of course that did for the front sight. The rear sight's been filed down, and so's the hammer, so you can't cock it, you have to fire it double-action.

It'll go in your pocket and come free without snagging on the lining, but you won't win a turkey shoot with it. You can't really aim it, I don't think. You can only point it."

"That's all right."

"Will it do you, then?"

"It'll do fine," I said. I turned the gun over in my hands, getting the feel of it, smelling the gun oil. There was no powder smell, so it had most likely been cleaned since its last firing.

"It's not loaded," he said. "I've only the six shells. I can make a phone call and get more."

I shook my head. "If I miss him six times," I said, "I can forget the whole thing. He's not going to give me time to reload." I swung the cylinder out and began filling the chambers. You can make a case for leaving one chamber empty so you won't have a live shell under the hammer, but I figured I'd rather have one more bullet in the gun.

Besides, with the hammer filed down the possibility of an accidental discharge was slight.

I asked Mick what I owed him.

He shook his head. "I'm not in the business of selling guns," he said.

"Even so."

"I've no money in it," he said. "And no need to see money out of it.

Bring it back if you don't use it.

Failing that, forget about it."

"It's unregistered?"

"As far as I know. Someone picked it up in a burglary. I couldn't tell you who owned it, but I doubt he registered it. The serial number's gone. A man who licenses his gun rarely files down the number. You're sure it'll do you?"

"I'm sure."

We went back to the other room and he locked the office door. The same Liam Clancy record was playing as we returned to our table. The television set behind the bar was tuned to a western movie, and the sound was too low to carry past the three men watching it. I drank some Coke and Mick drank some Irish.

He said, "What I said before, that I'm not in the gun business. I've been in and out of that business in my day. Did you ever happen to hear the story of the three cases of Kalashnikovs?"

"No."

"Now this was some years ago. It might be long enough that I could tell it in court. It's seven years, isn't it? The statute of limitations?"

"On most felonies. There's no statute of limitations on tax evasion or murder."

"Don't I know it." He picked up his glass and looked at it. "Here's how it was. There were these three cases of Kalashnikovs. AK-47s, you know. Assault rifles. They were in a storage bin in Maspeth, just off Grand Avenue. Big crates they were, with more than thirty rifles in each, so you had close to a hundred in all."

"Whose were they?"

"Ours, once we blew the lock on that storage shed. The crates were too large for the van we had. We broke them open and loaded the rifles into the back of the van. I don't know whose guns they were, but he couldn't own them legally, and he couldn't go to the police about it, could he?" He took a drink. "We already had a buyer for them. You wouldn't steal something like that if you didn't."

"Who was your buyer?"

"Some lads who looked like Hitler's next of kin. Their heads this close to shaved, and the three I saw were dressed alike. Blue shirts with designs on the pocket and khaki trousers. They said they had a training camp in the Adirondacks, up around Tupper Lake. They wanted the guns, and they paid more

than they had to, I'll say that for them."

"So you sold them."

"So I did. And two nights later I'm having a drink at Morrissey's, and Tim Pat himself calls me aside.

You remember Tim Pat Morrissey."

"Of course."

" 'I hear you've a few extra rifles,' he says. 'Wherever did you hear that?' I say. Well, the whole of it is that he wants the lot of them for some friends of his in the north of Ireland. You knew they were involved in all of that, the brothers. Didn't you?"

"I'd certainly heard as much."

"Well, nothing would do but he must have these rifles. He won't believe I've already sold them. He's sure I couldn't have moved them so quick, you see. 'You don't want them in this country,' he says. 'Think what your man may do with them.' Why, I said, he and his friend will go and play toy soldier with them, or at worst they'll go and shoot a few niggers. 'You don't know that,' he says. 'Maybe they'll start a revolution and storm the governor's mansion. Maybe they'll give the guns to the niggers. Sell them to me and you'll know where they're going.' "

He sighed. "So we stole them back and sold them to Tim Pat. He wouldn't pay the price the little Nazis paid, either. What a bargainer he was! 'You're doing this for Holy Ireland,' he said, driving the price down. Still, when you collect twice for the same fucking guns, any price is a good price."

"Did the original buyers come back at you?"

"Ah," he said. "Now there's the part the statute of limitations doesn't cover. You might say they were in no position to retaliate."

"I see."

"I made good money on those guns," he said. "But once they were out of the country, well, that was an end to it. I was out of guns, and so I was out of the gun business."

I went to the bar and got another Coke. This time I had Burke cut me a wedge of lemon to cut the sweetness. When I got back to the table Mick said, "Now what made me tell you that story? The gun business, that's what put me in mind of it, but why go on and tell it?"

"I don't know."

"When we sit together, you and I, the stories roll."

I sipped my Coke. The lemon helped. I said, "You never asked me what I needed with a gun."

"Not my business, is it?"

"Maybe not."

"You happen to need a gun and I happen to have one. I don't think you'll shoot me, or hold up the bar with it."

"It's not likely."

"So you owe me no explanation."

"No," I said. "But it makes a good story."

"Well," he said, "now that's another thing entirely."

I sat there and told him the whole thing. Somewhere along the way he held up a hand and drew a short horizontal line in the air, and Burke chased the last few customers and started shutting down the bar.

When he started putting the chairs up on the tables Ballou told him to let it go, that he'd see to the rest of it. Burke turned off the lights over the bar and the ceiling lights and let himself out, drawing the sliding gates across but not engaging the padlock. Mick locked the door from inside and cracked the seal on a fresh bottle of whiskey, and I went right on with my story.

When I got to the end he looked again at the sketch of Motley.

"He's a bad bastard," he said. "You can see it in his eyes."

"The man who drew the picture never even saw him."

"No matter. He put it in the picture whether he saw him or not." He folded the sketch and gave it back to me. "The woman you brought in the other night."

"Elaine."

"I thought so. I didn't recall her name, but I thought it must be the same one. I liked her."

"She's a good woman."

"You've been friends a long time then."

"Years and years."

He nodded. "When it all started," he said. "Your man said you framed him. Is he still saying it now?"

"Yes."

"Did you?"

I'd left that part out, but I couldn't see any reason to hold it back.

"Yes, I did," I said. "I got a lucky shot in and he went out cold. He had a glass jaw. You wouldn't remember a boxer named Bob Satterfield, would you?"

"Wouldn't I though? His fights looked fixed. The ones he lost, that is. He'd be way ahead, and then he'd get tapped on the jaw and go down like a felled steer. Of course you'd never fix a fight that way, but the average man's reasoning powers don't reach that far. Bob Satterfield, now his is a name I've not heard in years."

"Well, Motley had Satterfield's jaw. While he was out I stuck a gun in his hand and squeezed off a few rounds. It wasn't a complete frame. I just made the charges more serious so that he'd draw a little jail time."

"And you trusted her to back you?"

"I figured she'd stand up."

"You thought that well of her."

"I still do."

"And rightly so, if she did stand up. Did she?"

"Like a little soldier. She thought it was his gun. I had a throw-down with me, an unregistered pint-size automatic I used to carry around just in case. I palmed it and pretended to find it when I frisked him, so she had no reason not to believe it was his gun. But she was there to see me wrap his fingers around it

and shoot holes in her plaster, and she still went in and swore he'd done the shooting and he'd been trying to kill me when he did it. She put it in her statement and signed it when they typed it up and handed it to her. And she would have sworn to it all over again in court."

"There's not many you could count on like that."

"I know."

"And it worked. He went to prison."

"He went to prison. But I'm not sure it worked."

"Why do you say that?"

"Since he got out he's killed eight people that I know of. Three here, five in Ohio."

"He'd have killed more than that if he'd spent the past twelve years a free man."

"Maybe. Maybe not. But I gave him a reason to select certain people as his targets. I broke some rules, I pissed into the wind, and now it's blowing back in my face."

"What else could you do?"

"I don't know. I didn't take a lot of time to think it through when it happened. It was the next thing to instinctive on my part. I figured he belonged inside and I'd do what it took to put him there. Now, though, I don't think I'd do it that way."

"Why? All because you gave up the drink and found God?"

I laughed. "I don't know that I've found Him yet," I said.

"I thought that was what your lot did at those meetings."

Deliberately he uncorked the bottle and filled his glass. "I thought you all learned to call Him by His first name."

"We call each other by our first names. And I suppose some people develop some kind of a working relationship with whatever God means to them."

"But not you."

I shook my head. "I don't know much about God," I said. "I'm not even sure if I believe in Him. That seems to change from one day to the next."

"Ah."

"But I'm not as quick to play God as I used to be."

"Sometimes a man has to."

"Maybe. I'm not sure. I don't seem to feel the need as often as I used to. Whether or not there's a God, it's beginning to dawn on me that I'm not Him."

He thought that over, working on the whiskey in his glass. If it was having any effect on him, I couldn't see it. Nor was it affecting me. The incident in my hotel room that afternoon had been some sort of watershed, and the threat of picking up a drink had lifted for the time being once the bourbon was done splashing in the sink basin. There were times when it was dangerous for me to be in a saloon, sipping Coke among the whiskey drinkers, but this was not one of those times.

He said, "You came here. When you needed a gun, you came here for it."

"I thought you might have one."

"You didn't go to the cops, you didn't go to your sober friends. You came to me."

"There's nobody on the force who'd bend the rules for me, not at this point. And my sober friends don't pack a lot of heat."

"You didn't just come here for the gun, Matt."

"No, I don't suppose I did."

"You had a story to tell. Is there anybody else who's heard the whole of it?"

"No."

"You came here to tell it. You wanted to tell it here and you wanted to tell it to me. Why?"

"I don't know."

"It had nothing to do with the gun. What if I'd had no gun for you?" His eyes, cool and green as his mother's homeland, took my measure. "We'd be here just the same," he said. "Saying these words."

"Why did you let me have the gun?"

"Why not? It was doing me no good locked in the safe. I have other guns I can lay my hands on, if I feel the sudden need to shoot somebody. Why not give it to you?"

"Suppose you hadn't had one. You know what you'd have done?

You'd have called around and gone out and found one."

"Why would I do that?"

"I don't know," I said, "but it's what you would have done. I don't know why."

He sat there thinking about it. I went to the men's room and stood at a urinal full of cigarette butts. My urine had a slight pink cast to it, but it was a lot less alarming than it had been lately. My kidney seemed to be mending.