Down Here

^“We already had this conversation.”

“I found some new—”

“No,” Wolfe said, drawing the line all the way down to the exit wound. “You found something new that proves what we already know, so what? We already know Wychek did those rapes. We already know I didn’t shoot him. With what Toby Ringer told Davidson—and I trust him, even if you don’t—we’re never going to have to prove either one.”

She tapped a cigarette out of her pack. Didn’t offer me one. Snapped her lighter into life before I could move.

“And if Toby’s gone in the tank, double so what?” she said, not looking at me. “If they force us anywhere near a trial, we’ll prove both. Steamroll those punks in the DA’s Office like fresh asphalt in August.”

I just sat there, silent.

“I’m not going to prison, Burke. It’s over. Everything’s over.”

She blew a harsh jet of smoke into the night air. “I appreciate all you did,” she said, looking away. “But there’s no more for you now.”

^“Didn’t that prove anything to you?” Laura said. She was lying on her stomach, both hands around the big tube of KY she had taken from under the pillow. Before the handcuffs.

“Is that why you did it?”

“Maybe.”

“To prove what, exactly?”

“That I would do things for you. Things I wouldn’t do for anyone else.”

“I think you know,” I said.

“Know what?”

“You know I’d never hurt you. What you said, a while ago, about trust? If you didn’t trust me, you wouldn’t use those—”

“I trust you now,” she said, softly. “That first time, I couldn’t know. Not for sure. It was a risk. A chance. I was frightened. But it was time, and I knew it.”

“Time?”

“I always know when it’s time to do something, to make the move,” she said. “That’s my gift. That’s what I do. So that’s me.”

^“I’m going to be gone for a couple of weeks or so,” I said, much later that night. Setting the stage for my fadeout.

“Really? To where?”

“Out to the coast. There’s a couple of interviews I need to do for the book. And my so-called agent claims he’s got a couple of meetings set up, with a production company that specializes in TV pilots.”

“You don’t sound very excited about it.”

“I’m not. I’ve had those kind of meetings before. But since I have to be out there anyway . . .”

“You’re here now,” she said, tongue flicking against my chest.

^“When are you leaving, exactly?” she asked, looking up from a bowl of grains and nuts she was breakfasting on. The sun slanted against the far wall of the kitchen, but it didn’t reach where we were sitting.

“I don’t have a flight yet. Next couple of days or so. I have to pack, make arrangements for coverage at the paper. . . . A trip like this, you never know how it’s going to play out. If I come up with something dynamite, I may just—”

“Did you ever hear of StandaBlok Machine Tools?” she said, stopping me in mid-sentence.

“No. Is it one of your—”

“It was a small operation, not so very far from here. You know the area around Liberty Avenue? Anyway, it’s out of business now. The building they used would be just perfect for a conversion like this one. The only thing is the neighborhood.”

“Sooner or later, there’s no neighborhood in New York that won’t be worth money,” I said, reciting the conventional wisdom.

“That’s what I think, too. But for now it’s just an abandoned building. After vandals broke all the windows, it got boarded up and padlocked. Tight. Nobody goes there now.”

“All right,” I said, just to fill the empty space between us.

“The day after tomorrow, I have to go there. Alone. At midnight.”

“What for?”

“To meet my brother,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

What she told me was, Wychek called her at work Monday afternoon. He asked her for a safe place where they could meet. Said he wanted her to choose it, after what happened last time.

“That building she told me about? She’s got the key. The way she was talking, I figure she already owns it. Or a piece of it, anyway. Some development deal.

“All Wychek’s got to do is make sure he’s not followed. If he told her the truth—that nobody knows where he is now— shouldn’t be any problem for him.”

“And she wants to just bring you along?” Michelle asked. “Like a little surprise?”

“No. What she wants is just for me to stand by, close. Once she meets him, she’s going to pitch the idea of him doing the interview with me. For the book. If he says ‘okay,’ she’ll call and wave me in.”

“No chance you make that dance, son.”

“That’s true, Prof. But she can’t know that.”

“Why does she do it, then, mahn?”

“She’s gotten more and more . . . I don’t know the word for it. She keeps trying to ‘prove’ something to me. Like if I thought she was for real I’d . . . be with her, I guess.”

“So you think all this cloak-and-dagger is so she can say, ‘I tried, honey’?” Michelle.

“You tell me.”

“Well, she is a woman. And having a freak in your family doesn’t make you one,” my little sister said. “We all know that song. By heart.”

^“Guy down here, boss.”

“Seen him before?”

“Yeah. The lumberjack.”

“Let him pass, Gateman.”

^“I’m in.”

“In what, Mick?” I asked.

“What you’re doing,” he said, his glance covering all of us, seated around the poker table.

“It’s over,” I told him. “Like Wolfe said.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You looking to join for the coin?” the Prof asked suspiciously.

“There’s only one thing I care about in all this,” Mick said, eyes just for me. “Same as you.”

Nobody said anything, waiting.

“And I don’t trust the fucking feds,” Mick said. “Same as you.”

Thursday, 3:22 a.m. The building was two stories of solid brick, standing squat and square, as if daring anyone to ask it to move.

By the time we finished offloading, the Prof had seduced the lock.

We left him just inside the door, cradling his scattergun. I led the way up the stairs, a five-cell flash in one hand, a short-barreled .357 Magnum in the other. Clarence was just behind me, to my right. As soon as we cleared the area, Max and Mick brought up the gear.

Except for a thin film of interior dust, the place was immaculately clean, as if a former tenant had swept up before moving on.

We set up camp on the top floor. Clarence started to unpack methodically. Max and Mick went around making sure we had more than one way out. I took care of setting up observation posts, carefully using a box cutter to make eye-slits in the blackout curtains we hung behind the boarded windows.

“No people, no food, and it’s nice and warm out,” the Prof muttered, looking around. “So the miserable little motherfuckers got business elsewhere.” The Prof hated rats.

By daybreak, we were ready to start sleeping in shifts.

^“I say he gets here first,” the Prof whispered to me.

“Michelle put the padlock back in place behind us,” I said. “And only the sister has the key.”

“What time’s the meet?”

“Midnight.”

“I got a century to a dime the cocksucker gets here by eleven-thirty, minimum.”

I was still considering the offer when Max slapped a ten-dollar bill on top of one of the duffel bags.

^“Pssst!”

“You got him?”

“Got somebody, mahn. This scope makes everything green, but it’s a man, walking.”

“Alone?”

“Yes,” Clarence said. “Closing now.”

The Prof snatched Max’s ten and his hundred off the top of the duffel bag in one lightning move. Then he and the Mongol took off downstairs. Mick was already there, waiting.

Thirteen minutes later.

“You’re not feds,” Wychek said, despite my dark-blue suit, white shirt, and wine-colored tie. If being stripped, handcuffed to a pipe, and surrounded by the men who had choked him into unconsciousness and carried him up the stairs frightened him, it didn’t show on his face.

“Good guess,” I said.

“And you’re not with . . .”

“With who, John?” I said, pleasantly, not a trace of urgency in my voice.

“Oh no,” he said, lips twisting in a stalker’s smile.

“When did you last take your medication, John?”

“Just before I— What difference does that make?”

“You know why I asked,” I said, very softly.

“I don’t—”

“Ssshhh,” I said, soothingly. “We’re already here. You know what that means.”

“If anything happens to me—”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you, John. But we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t know who else was coming.”

“She doesn’t have it,” he said, smoothly. “She doesn’t even know where it is.”

“One of those is a lie, John. Maybe, maybe it was true that first time, on Forty-ninth. But it’s not true now. Not tonight. So, the way we see it, all we have to do is wait. Soon as she shows up, we won’t need you anymore.”

“The feds know where I am. If anything—”

“You said that already, John. That’s why we took your clothes. To make sure you didn’t have any way to stay in touch.”

Wychek watched me blank-faced, same as he had watched dozens of social workers and therapists and cops and prison guards for a lot of years. His other face only came out under a ski mask.

He hadn’t been carrying a cell phone. No tape recorder, no body mike.

But he had his straight razor. And a roll of duct tape.

I walked around in a little circle, as if I was making up my mind. Finally, said, “You want to know what this is about, John? What it’s really about?”

“Yeah. Because if you think—”

“It’s about money,” I said, moving closer to him. “And you’re going to—”

Clarence stepped into the room, chopped off my speech with a hand gesture. I followed him out of the room, over to where he had an observation slot.

A silver Audi TT convertible pulled up to the front of the building. Its headlights went out. Just as Laura Reinhardt opened her door, I caught a flicker of movement at the edge of the lot.

I gestured to Max and the Prof, pointing two fingers down, forked. They took off.

“Big SUV,” Clarence said, watching through the scope. “Coming on.”

“I’ll cover you from up here,” I said, and went back to where we had Wychek trussed up.

“This is so you don’t hear or see what’s going on,” I said, a doctor explaining a medical procedure to a nervous patient. “Just breathe through your nose,” I told him, very softly.

“Do not panic,” I cautioned him, just before I fitted a set of sound-canceling earphones in place. “We’re all going to be busy for a few minutes. You have yourself a seizure now, it’s your last.”

I slapped a couple of turns of duct tape around his mouth, then dropped the black hood over his head, with another quick turn of the tape to hold the earphones in place.

I heard the downstairs door open.

A flashlight blazed downstairs for a half-second. Then it went out.

The SUV was a moving brick, black against the gray night. It came to a shadowed stop about fifty yards from the building. The front doors opened, and a man climbed out of each side. No light went on inside the truck.

“Can you see anyone still inside?” I asked Clarence.

“It looks empty, mahn. But someone could be on the floor.”

“All right. She should be out of the way by now. Go on downstairs. Remember, if there has to be any—”

“I know,” he said, threading the tube silencer into his nine-millimeter.

I lost sight of the two men just as they entered the building. I moved over to the top of the stairs. Looked down. Shadows inside shadows.

The front door opened. Closed.

A blast! of sudden light.

“Freeze, motherfuckers!” the Prof barked.

I heard a harsh grunt. Then the puffft! of a silenced handgun.

^“The broad strolls in. Max takes her from behind, same as he did the freak. She goes right out, never saw a thing. We wait for the two guys following her. As soon as they come in, I light them up, give them the word. One raises his hands, the other goes for his steel. Clarence cut loose, and—”

“Where’s the sister now?”

“Sleeping,” the Prof said. “I gave her the hypo the Mole put together. One shot, he said she’ll be out for a few hours. Wake up with a bad headache. Be all fuzzy, too, like coming out of a bad dream. That’s why he needed you to tell him how much she weighs, get the dose perfect.”

“We’ve got two men,” I said. “One in the room next door, one upstairs. No way to know if the guys in the SUV had backup—”

“Not in their truck, they didn’t,” Mick said, telling us he had gone out to make sure.

“—but they both had cells. Don’t know if they’re supposed to call in, how much time we’ve got. . . .”

“Got to pick one and run, son.”

“Yeah, Prof. I know.”

“Which one?”

“Wychek knows where. But the guys who came in after Laura, they know why, I think.”

“We came for the green,” the Prof said, settling it.

The man was in his late forties, tall and rangy, with leathery skin. In the soft light from the candle, his eyes were colorless.

“I’m not with them,” he said, in that calm, deliberate voice people use when they’re trying to keep an unstable person calm. “I’m a professional. Freelance, just like you, am I right? No reason for anyone to get wild, now. Just tell me what I have to do to walk out of here, and it’s done.”

“We want the money,” I told him.

“Sure. Give me the book, and you can name your price.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. It would have been just like that if that fucking Yusef didn’t have to play with his toys.”

“That’s what took Wychek out the first time?”

“Yeah. Could I have a cigarette?”

The Prof fired one up, held it to the man’s lips. He inhaled gratefully. “Thanks. I’m the same as you, okay? A professional. I get hired, do a job, get paid. Only they don’t trust outsiders, so they sent that degenerate psycho along with me.”

“Yusef?”

“Right.”

“He came with you tonight? He’s the one—?”

“Yeah. Like I said, he’s one of them. You had the drop on us, cold. Stupid asshole must have figured he was going straight to Mecca,” the tall man said, deliberately distancing himself from the dead body at the foot of the stairs. “After what he pulled the first time, I couldn’t believe they’d ever send him again.”

“The first time? You mean with the girl in that apartment on the Lower East Side?”

“Right. Fucking sicko. They told me he hooked her up to a car battery. He kept jolting her, but she kept telling the same story.”

“And later they found out it was the truth.”

“Not from her. Or from the other one, either. Fucking scumbag morons don’t know from interrogation. All they know is torture. It wasn’t until Wychek contacted them that they knew for sure.”

“He took the book from her apartment? After he raped her?”

“Right. When she found it was gone, she panicked. I don’t blame her, seeing what happened.”

“She couldn’t tell them anything but the truth.”

“Right. But they didn’t know it was the truth until Wychek started holding them up for money. That was when he was in the joint. By then, it was way too late for her. Fucking half-wits outsmarted themselves. They figured, even if they got busted themselves, nobody’d ever think to look for the book in some white girl’s apartment.”

“She was the girlfriend of one of the—?”

“If you mean, was she fucking one of them, yeah, I guess. But that wasn’t why they let her hold the book. She was one of them. One of those rich little ‘revolutionaries,’ you know what I mean? Like shopping isn’t enough of a thrill for them anymore, so they need to go liberate the downtrodden masses.”

The contempt in his voice invited me to join him, but I didn’t say anything, waiting for him to fill the silence. Maybe me holding Wychek’s straight razor helped.

“At first, the little weasel didn’t want that much,” the mercenary said. “I handled everything for them. I was the bridge man to get him that protection contract.”

“From the Brotherhood.”

“Right. You know what happened next. Fucking Wychek steps it up. He wants a lawyer. Okay. Still within budget. And by then they knew he hadn’t turned the book over to anyone. So they figured, Wychek gets out, they can deal with him.

“He gets out, all right. Only what he wants is a lot of money. Now, these sand nig—” He pulled himself up short, segued into—“assholes, they got the money,” without missing a beat. “They got all kinds of money. But instead of just paying him, they decide to get cute.

“Yusef’s got this little pistol. A twenty-five. Custom job. Between the suppressor and the reduced-powder hand-loads, it looked bad enough, but it wouldn’t kill a fucking cockroach. Yusef promises them, no electricity this time. He’ll use fear. Figures, he puts a couple of rounds into Wychek, it won’t kill him, but it’ll scare the shit out of him, make him give up the book.

“And that’s what Yusef does. He pops Wychek a couple of times. Then he puts the piece right between Wychek’s eyes, tells him ‘Last chance,’ and . . .”

“Wychek goes out.”

“Yeah. Fucking Arab assholes. Yusef swore Wychek didn’t have the book on him. Stupid amateur. He was too busy searching the body to check and see if Wychek was even still breathing.”

The tall man took another hit off the cigarette the Prof was holding for him. “After that, they’re in a panic,” he said. “In case Wychek’s got backup—you know, someone he left it with. But the book never surfaces, so they start to breathe easy.

“All of a sudden, there’s that story in the papers. That Wychek didn’t die. And they got this woman charged with shooting him. But Wychek’s supposed to be in a coma, and they’re not worried about him talking. Then, a couple of weeks later—bang!—they get another call. Wychek himself. He’s out of the coma. And he still wants to sell them the book. But now, behind what happened, he wants the money in front.”

I didn’t say anything, watching the play of candlelight on the razor’s edge underline the reality of his situation.

“They figure, pay him, okay?” the tall man said. “But they also figure he makes copies, right?”

“I would.”

“Sure. Look, you got the book now. And you’re not some sick-fuck amateur, like him. I could get them to go a flat million, for real. All cash. Or gold, if you want it that way. Any drop you say.”

“Then I’m in the same place he is,” I said. “On the spot. And I don’t even know who’d be looking for me.”

“If you’d ever looked in the book, you’d know, man. Those camel-jockeys put it all in there. Names, addresses, phone numbers, codes . . . the whole thing. Most of them are still in place. Once they realized Wychek wasn’t going to do anything but hold them up for money, they got cocky. They’re sitting ducks, man. One call, you could take them all down,” he said. “They have to pay.”

The tall man was reciting his credentials. A mercenary to his core, keeping it real. One man-for-hire to another. Whatever was in the book he was talking about, his own name wouldn’t be. In the sociopath’s moral compass, true north is always in his mirror.

“We understand each other, right?” the tall man said. “I’m the same as you.”

I looked over to the Prof. He shook his head.

^“We’re a lot smarter than the Arabs were,” I told Wychek. “If we wanted, we could keep you alive a long time. Long enough for you to tell us whatever we need.”

I deliberately stepped back a couple of paces, to lower the threat-level.

“But I got a better deal for you,” I said. “Fifty-fifty. That’s fair. Come on. You should have hired people like us in the first place. You know what happens if you go anywhere near those psychos yourself. This way, we collect the money for you, split it down the middle. What do you say?”

“How do I know I can trust you?” he asked, eyebrows raised above his reptile eyes.

“You can trust us to hurt you bad, if you make us go that way. Go the right way and you walk, with half of the score. Call it a commission.”

He didn’t say anything.

“We don’t have much time,” Mick said to me, tapping his wristwatch.

“Right,” I said, catching his rhythm. “We’re up against the clock now,” I told Wychek. “So the way it works is this: no answer from you is a ‘no’ answer, understand?”

I started counting inside my head. I was up to seven when he let out a long, thin breath. “My sister’s bringing it,” he said. “It was in a safe-deposit box. Only has her name on it. Her married name; not mine. I told her to go and clean out the box.

“She’s bringing me my . . . other stuff in a suitcase. But the little book, you’d never find it,” he said, twisting his lips into something like a smile.

“Just tell us—”

“I ordered her to carry it in her cunt,” Wychek said. “In a Ziploc. She knows how to do it. As soon as she gets here, just bring her to me and I’ll—”

I drove Laura Reinhardt’s Audi back to her place. My cloned card opened the gate. I put her over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry and took the stairs. Moving slowly, the .357 in one hand.

When she woke up, she would find herself in her own bed. Alone.

I looked down at her. Feeling . . . I wasn’t sure what.

“I never meant to hurt you, Laura,” I whispered, gently adjusting the blanket, touching her body for the last time.

The book had been where Wychek had promised. Boasted. “You were just another casualty,” I said. “That’s the way it is down here. The way it has to be. I’m sorry.”

I kissed her beneath one drug-closed eye. And went out the way I’d come in.

The newspapers said three bodies had been discovered inside a Ford Explorer in the swampland near JFK Airport. All three were charred beyond recognition. The Mole’s package would have been enough on its own; but when the fire hit the gas tank, the whole vehicle had just about vaporized. The police said it was an obvious gangland hit, a “message” of some kind. The Queens DA promised that those responsible would get the maximum sentence.

Wolfe probably never even saw the papers. She had been somewhere off the Maine coast for the past few days. On a little sailboat, with Pepper and Bruiser.

Pepper had made all the arrangements. Used Wolfe’s credit card to rent the sailboat. And the car that they drove up in. And the motel where they stayed.

Pepper’s a real friendly girl. Wolfe’s mostly standoffish. But lots of people saw them. Pepper had some of them take their pictures, the three of them together, for souvenirs of their vacation.

Whenever the coroner’s office got around to doing the autopsy, all they would have to work with was bones. But if they looked close enough, they would find three .25-caliber slugs rattling around in whatever was left of Wychek’s skull.

^“You know what was in what you gave us?” the man asked. I knew him only as Pryce, and I hadn’t seen him in years. Not since the last-minute abortion of a plot to blow up Federal Plaza by a “leaderless cell” out of the White Night underground.

We had planted my brother Hercules in that cell. For him, it was that or go back Inside, forever.

They had ringed the downtown building that housed everything they hated—from the IRS to the FBI—with trucks stuffed full of enough explosives to level the ground down to zero. The drivers thought the plan was for them to set the timers and run, but the boss—hiding in the van outside the blast zone—held the real detonator. He was still holding it when a close-up blast from a girl he thought was a hooker shattered his neurons.

The pure-white sheep were still in their trucks when Pryce’s crew went into action. A surgical strike. Only one was left at the end. And when he was clued into what the real plan had been, he sang a canary aria that thinned the rest of their herd, big-time.

Hercules walked away. I don’t know where he is now. But I know where he’s not.

The last time I saw Pryce, he was holding out his hand for me to shake. “I’m gone,” he said quietly. “None of the numbers you have for me will be any good after today. And I won’t have this face much longer, either.”

I took his hand, wondering if the webbed fingers would disappear, too. Watched the muscle jump under his eye. I’d know that one again.

“I’m gone, too,” I had promised him.

If my new face threw him, it didn’t show on his new face. The fingers of his hands were still webbed. The muscle still jumped under his eye. I wondered what he still saw in me.

“I couldn’t make any sense out of it,” I lied. “Just enough to know you’d be interested.”

“It was all pre-Nine/Eleven stuff,” he said. “There were a hell of a lot more people involved than anyone ever imagined. We’ve been making arrests like there was no tomorrow. True-believers and freelancers, they’re all going down.”

“It’s hard to think of—”

“What, Americans working for them? You know the kind of money they’re throwing around? The little princes learned from what happened to the Shah. They eat peacock tongues off gold plates while the rest of their country dies of malnutrition. All the secret police in the world won’t keep them safe from their own people. They know they can’t stay on their thrones unless they provide a shunt for all the pressure building up, a bleed-valve for all the anger and hate.”

Pryce shifted posture, as if his spine hurt, but his pale eyes stayed chemical-cold. “You think those people wiring up their own children and sending them into crowded markets in Israel are revolutionaries? Wake up. They’re fucking flesh-peddlers, selling their kids for the bounty. It’s the most lucrative form of child labor ever invented. You know what the bounty is up to now? Fifty grand. Fifty thousand dollars, for people who don’t know what an indoor toilet is. For people whose other kids are going to grow up to be cannon fodder, anyway. The car-bombers, the one-way pilots, the . . . For all of them, who’s putting up the money? Not the terrorists themselves, my friend. The little princes who finance them.”

I didn’t say anything. What could I?

“It’s been more than two years since the World Trade Center,” Pryce said, softly. “I guess the scumbags thought they were safe in their little sleeper-cells. They knew, if we’d had that book, we would have rounded them up a long time ago. So, therefore, we didn’t have it, see?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “And the case against Wolfe—”

“It’s gone,” he assured me. “And it’s never coming back. One of the bodies in that truck they found out in Queens? It was Wychek.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he said, no expression on his new face. “That book, it was what he was holding over . . . the agency. That’s why they gave him—”

“I don’t care.”

“But if you got the book from . . . ?”

“I didn’t get the book from him,” I said. “And that’s the truth.”

“Why did you just hand it over?” Pryce asked me, his eyes everyplace but on mine. “You had to have some idea of what it could be worth. You’re a merc yourself. How come you didn’t try to make some kind of a deal? When you reached out for me, I thought that was what you were angling for.”

“It’s not true, what they say,” I told him. “You know, that everyone’s got a price. I know people like that. I was raised with them. I’ll never be a citizen. But I’ll never be them, either.”

^“Mayday!” Hauser, on the phone.

I met him an hour later, in the park across the street from the Appellate Division courthouse.

“I was in Atlanta, on assignment,” he said. “Just got back. Turns out, a while back, a woman came to my house in Westchester. It was about four in the afternoon, right after school. My wife was at her Wednesday tennis lesson. One of the kids answered the door. Long story short, when she left, she knew damn well that you’re not me.”

“She saw a photo of you?”

“More than that,” he said, ruefully. “I’ve got great kids. They’re proud of their father. So, when a woman shows up and says Daddy’s getting an award . . .”

“When was this?”

“I don’t know exactly when, but it was a while back, only I just now found out about it,” Hauser said, impatiently. “Kids, they forget things. . . .”

Images of Laura Reinhardt flooded my mind. They turned slowly, like a roulette wheel near the end of its spin. I watched as she built her “business model” as meticulously as she had her bottle tree.

With her own hands. Unrestrained.

“Some kids do,” I told Hauser.

Then I hung up. On all of it.

The waiter cleared away the remnants of our meal, asked us if we wanted dessert. Laura Reinhardt raised her eyebrows at me. “I could go for a little tórta,” I said.

She held up two fingers.

“Now, that may have been going too far,” she said, patting her lips with a white napkin when she was done. She leaned back in her chair, seemed to think better of it, and bent toward me. I lit another cigarette for her.

“Tell me about the book,” she said.

“You’ve been reading about the death-penalty cases—the ones where they find out, years later, that a man sentenced to death was innocent all along?”

“I’ve seen things on TV, that’s all.”

“It’s a national scandal,” I said, locking her eyes with my sincerity. “In Illinois, the last governor canceled every single pending execution before he left office. He said he just couldn’t be sure that people on death row are really guilty. In one case, this guy was accused of raping and murdering a little girl. Turned out it wasn’t him.”

“How would they—?”

“Sometimes, it’s DNA,” I told her. “Sometimes, believe it or not, the actual criminal confesses—usually when they’ve caught him on a whole bunch of other things. Sometimes, it’s as simple as an alibi they never checked out. But it always comes down to the same thing, which is what my book’s about.”

“Innocence?”

“No. I mean, innocence is a part of it, but that’s not the theme, not the . . . drive-force. I’m trying to go deeper. These things aren’t due to incompetence. Well, some of them are, sure. But the dark underbelly to all this is the kind of people who become prosecutors. I’m not talking about corruption, either—although that happens, too—I’m talking about people who have lost their way.”

“Prosecutors?”

“Prosecutors. Some of them lose sight of the difference between fighting crime and fighting criminals.”

“I don’t see the difference myself,” she said. “If you fight criminals, you do fight crime, isn’t that true?”

“In that order, yes,” I agreed. “But not when it’s reversed.”

“How could it be—?”

“A child is murdered. A woman is raped. A building is torched, and a fireman dies when the roof collapses. A . . . You know the type of crime I’m talking about. Public outrage. Lots of media attention. Demands for results. The pressure on prosecutors is tremendous. And, sometimes, they can be so hyper-focused on the crime that they ignore the criminal. It’s almost like, if they can put someone in prison, the crime is ‘solved.’ It just . . . consumes them. Like going snow-blind.

“And it’s our—the public’s—fault, too. How do we judge prosecutors? On their conviction rates, right? So, if a DA has any sort of political ambitions, he’d better clear his cases. That’s where plea bargaining came from, originally. It is a bargain. The criminal gets a much lighter sentence, and the prosecutor doesn’t take a chance on losing a trial.”

“But why would an innocent person agree to a plea bargain?”

“They don’t,” I said, lighting another cigarette. I left it in the ashtray next to the candle-in-Chianti-bottle that had been burning since before I sat down. “And that’s where the gate to hell opens. That’s when the pressure builds to get a result. Any result. That’s when an innocent man goes to prison.”

“A man like—?”

“John Anson Wychek. You understand what they did to him, don’t you? I don’t mean the wrongful conviction,” I said, holding up my hand to stop her from speaking, “I mean the rest of it.”

“I know it ruined his—”

“Ms. Reinhardt . . .”

“Laura.”

“Laura, the fact that you couldn’t be closer to the situation and even you don’t understand the scope of the tragedy, well, that proves why my book has to be written. Look, your brother was convicted of a single crime, right?”

“Yes. They said he—”

“In fact,” I interrupted, “he was convicted of more than a dozen.”

“What? How can you—?”

“Laura, these cases don’t have to be solved. They just have to be cleared. Do you understand the difference?”

“I guess I don’t.”

“When your brother was convicted of that one crime, the police ‘cleared’ a whole bunch of other crimes, naming him as the perpetrator. I don’t mean they charged him with the crimes. I don’t mean he was ever tried for them. But, as far as the police are concerned, those crimes are closed cases now.

“They never could have proved those cases against your brother. He was innocent, and I think they must have known that. So they never brought him to trial. But with that one single conviction they announce that all the crimes—all the similar crimes that were committed throughout the entire metropolitan area!—are solved. And John Anson Wychek, well, he’s the guilty man.”

“They never said—”

“They don’t have to say anything to you. All that counts is the press. And for the press, it’s an instant no-story. They can’t print that your brother is guilty—he’d sue them for millions. But they can’t pressure the DA to ‘solve’ the cases, either. See how it happens?”

“My God,” she said, eyes widening.

“Yes,” I said. “I know just what you’re thinking. Somewhere in this city, maybe somewhere close by, a vicious serial rapist is walking around loose. That’s the hidden penalty society pays every time we stand by and allow an obsessed prosecutor to railroad an innocent man.”

“And you think John’s story could change all that?”

“For what I want, I think he’s perfect,” I said, pure truth beaming out of me, like I was radioactive with it.

The check came inside a small leather folder. The waiter dropped it off and vanished. I opened it up. Much less than I’d expected. I put a fifty inside the folder, closed it back up.

“Wouldn’t credit cards make a better record for your accountant?” she asked.

“The only accountant who’ll ever see this bill is the publisher’s. And they’re not going to care.”

“You’re not one of those guys who pays cash for everything, are you?”

“Me? No. I use credit cards when I have to, I guess. Probably more of that old-fashioned thing. I’m a long way from paying bills over the Internet.”

“Because you’re worried about the security?”

“The security?”

“You know,” she said, raising her eyebrows just a touch. “Identity theft, stuff like that.”

“Oh. Well, you can’t work where I do without hearing about it. But . . . no. I guess I just don’t see what’s so great about doing it any new way.”

“Sometimes, to make things better, you have to try new ways,” she said.

The waiter came back, picked up the leather folder, and walked off without a word.

“What’s the next step?” Laura Reinhardt asked me.

“That depends on you,” I said.

“But you’re going ahead, doing a story on my brother, even if I don’t . . . cooperate, I guess is the word I was looking for.”

“I . . . I can’t say that. Not for sure. My contract is for a book on the consequences of false—or, I should say, ‘wrongful’—imprisonment. I thought your brother would be the ideal way to present the material, but he’s not the only candidate. Let’s face it, if he was, I wouldn’t have much of a book.”

“I don’t under—”

“If this kind of thing was an isolated incident, it makes a good news story, but it’s not a book,” I told her. “What I’m talking about is a phenomenon. An epidemic. There’s a lot of reasons for wanting your brother to be the centerpiece. I admit, it would be easier for me, with everything based right here in the city, but there are others who would fit the bill.”

The waiter came back with the leather folder. I opened it. Found a ten-dollar bill, a single, and some change.

“You’re a gambler, huh?” I said to him.

“OTB’s right down the street,” he said, flashing a grin.

I extracted the single, closed up the folder, and handed it back to him.

“Thank you, sir,” he said, nodding as if a deeply held belief had just been confirmed.

^“Can I give you a lift anywhere?” I asked, as we stepped onto the sidewalk.

“I have my own car,” she said. “But I’d appreciate you walking me over to it. This neighborhood has changed a lot since I was a little girl.”

“My pleasure.”

She walked with a compact, efficient stride, matching my normal pace easily, despite the difference in our heights.

“Did you and your brother eat at that same place when you were kids?”

“No. It wasn’t really for family outings. I mean, it is, but I only went there with my father. Like for special treats, just the two of us. There was a Jahn’s close by, too. I always had a sundae I used to think they made just for me—pistachio ice cream with butterscotch topping.”

“You ate that voluntarily?”

“I’m a lot more adventurous than I look,” she said, with a little giggle. “I liked eating something the boys were afraid of.”

“Just hearing about it scares me,” I admitted.

“That’s mine,” she said, stopping midblock. She reached in her purse and took out a set of keys. A chirping sound identified her silver Audi convertible as clearly as if she had pointed her finger.

“Very nice,” I said. “You don’t see many of those in the City.”

“The TT?”

“Convertibles. Costs a fortune to garage them. And if you don’t . . .”

“That’s true,” she said. “But where I live, indoor parking’s part of the deal.”

“I’ve heard about places like that.”

“You don’t look as if you’re starving,” she said, fingering my new suede jacket.

“I’m not,” I said. “But this coat’s not part of my wardrobe; it pretty much is my wardrobe.”

“So I can’t interest you in some of our more . . . adventurous investing prospects?” she said, smiling.

“Maybe after my book hits the charts.”

She crossed the street, opened the door to her convertible.

“I had a very nice time . . . J.P.,” she said, almost formally.

“I did, too. I wish . . .”

“What?”

“Never mind. I . . . I don’t want to . . . Look, Laura, I know you’ve got a lot to think about. About what I told you, I mean. Or people to talk it over with, or whatever. But can I ask you just one thing?”

“What would that be?”

“Will you call me, either way? I mean, if the answer’s ‘no,’ even then?”

“If you want, sure. But couldn’t we just say, if you don’t hear back from me by—?”

“I would much rather you called,” I told her. “And I promise you, if the answer’s ‘no,’ I won’t try to talk you out of it.”

She climbed into her car, got behind the wheel, looked up at me. “I’ll call you,” she said. “Count on it.”

^“All right, Schoolboy. You got a look, but did you set the hook?”

“Tried like hell, Prof. But I can’t know unless I feel a tug on the line.”

“Yeah,” he said, unconvinced. “Your girl, she’s holding the case ace, right?”

“Wolfe? If I’m right about Wychek already recanting, sure. But we can’t know if—”

“And we got the boss hoss for a shyster, too, right?” the Prof pressed.

“Davidson’s as good as there is,” I agreed.

“But you still got my boy and the T-man working those computers like they trying to find the cure for cancer,” the little man said. “And you, you got no doubt, but you still out and about.”

“Am I missing something here?” I said.

“Not you, bro. It’s me that don’t see.”

“Why I’m still working?”

“Don’t play dumb, son. Every one of us know what you got in this. And when it looked dicey, dealing us in, that was fine. But now . . . ?”

“What, Prof?”

“Tell me there’s some green in the scene,” the little man pleaded. “Tell me you a man with a plan. A scheme beats a dream, every time.”

“It’s not a—”

“Don’t have to be no sure score, honeyboy. But there’s a longshot that we got money on somewhere in all this, true as blue?”

“True as blue,” I promised.

^“He wants to meet you, again.” Pepper’s voice, over my cellular.

“Did he say why?”

“Another file, is all he said.”

“Couldn’t he just leave it with—?”

“I got the impression he couldn’t even copy it.”

“Tell him—”

“I did,” she cut me off. “Tomorrow night, Yonkers Raceway. In the outdoor grandstand at the top of the stretch. It’s a Thursday; he’ll find you easy enough, he said.”

I moved the first two fingers of each hand across the tabletop, miming a trotting horse. Not a pacer, a trotter—Max knew the difference. Then I turned an imaginary steering wheel, spread my hands to ask a question I already knew the answer to.

^“You know how I like it, honey,” Michelle insisted.

“Word for word,” I acknowledged. Then I started again, from the beginning.

Michelle made a moue of annoyance when I told her I didn’t recall whether Laura Reinhardt had worn any perfume, never mind what it might have smelled like. But mostly she stayed patient, her long red fingernails resting on the tablecloth.

“Maybe it’s just her . . . habit,” Michelle said, when I was finished. “There’s no way to tell unless we could talk to someone else she met for the first time.”

“What habit?”

“Playing.”

“Just what she said about flirting?”

“No, stupid. Talking about her . . . When a woman mentions a body part, she either wants reassurance about it, or she wants you to pay attention to it.”

“I don’t—”

“Yes, I know,” she cut me off. “Look, I’m not talking about asking. That’s more . . . intimate. You don’t ask a man if he thinks a certain dress makes you look fat unless you have something going with him.”

“She didn’t ask me—”

“She didn’t ask you anything, sweetheart. She told you all about ‘secretarial spread,’ though, didn’t she?”

“I . . . Yeah, she mentioned it, anyway.”

“But you couldn’t see what she was talking about, right?”

“Not with her sitting—”

“Exactly. Now, sometimes, if something bothers a woman, they can’t keep themselves from picking at it. The way magazines are today, I’m surprised more young girls don’t starve themselves to death or run around getting plastic surgery. So—a woman says to you, ‘I know I have a big nose,’ you’re supposed to say, ‘What?,’ as if it never occurred to you. But she tells you she has a big butt, what are you supposed to say then?”

“I don’t know.”

“For once, that was just as well,” she said, grinning. “There is no right answer to that one, not in the situation you were in. You can’t deny it, because you haven’t seen it. And you can’t say you like big butts, because this wasn’t supposed to be a date.”

“So what you said about habit . . . ?”

“Either it’s something that really bothers her, and she can’t keep herself from referring to it—there’re women who are compulsive like that, God knows—or it’s her way of getting sex into your mind.”

“She didn’t do any of the . . . other stuff.”

“Like bump her hip into you by accident when you’re walking together? Or licking her lips after she has some ice cream?”

“I . . . I’m not sure,” I said, trying to remember. “But she . . . It was more than that. More than not that, I mean.”

“Well, the way you left it, the next move is all hers, anyway.”

“What are you saying?”

“That she can’t tell, either.”

“Huh?”

“Burke, sometimes you are the thickest-skulled . . . Look, baby, let’s say the girl was interested in you. Not in this book you’re supposedly writing, or in doing something for her brother, or whatever. Just in you, okay? So she shows you a couple of little things, sees what you do. But you, being you, don’t do anything.

“Now she’s confused. Maybe you missed her signals. Maybe you weren’t interested. Or maybe you were interested as all hell, but you’re trying to be a professional—the book and all—and you didn’t want to blow it. See?”

“I can’t read her, honey. All I can tell you is, she’s not from down here.”

“‘Down here’ is not an address, baby,” she reminded me.

I moved my head. Not so much a nod as a bow, to the truth, letting my little sister’s core sadness reach out to hold hands with my hate, like the first time we met. “So you’re saying, even if she blows off the book, I could maybe—?”

“What could you possibly lose?” Michelle said. “You know what the Prof always says: When you’re looking to score, a window works as good as a door . . . ?”

“And a nun lies as good as a whore,” I finished for her.

^“You got an e-mail!” Terry, on the phone.

“Me?”

“Hauser. It came to the e-mail address on his site, and bounced right over to us. Just like the Dragon Lady said.”

“Read it to me.”

“It just says, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have had that torta.’ The word ‘knew’ is in italics, well, not really italics—but if you put asterisks around a word it means—”

“Just read the whole thing to me, kid, okay? Then you can fill in whatever I don’t understand.”

“Right. Okay, it says, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have had that torta. It’s back to the gym now for sure. I enjoyed our conversation, and I would like to have another. And to hear more about your project. Call me.’”

“Was it signed?”

“Yes. Just the letter ‘L.’”

“Okay, can we just—?”

“Wait,” he said. “Let me tell you what else, remember? Okay, first of all, after the word ‘torta,’ there’s the Internet symbol for a smile.”

“Like one of those happy-face things?”

“No. It’s just keystrokes, like from a regular typewriter. You take a—”

“Never mind, kid. Sorry to have interrupted you. What else?”

“After she says ‘for sure,’ there’s an exclamation point. And where she says she enjoyed your . . . conversation, there are three periods between the two words, like a pause.”

“Like you just did?”

“Egg-zact-lee!” he said. Dealing with my slow learning curve, the kid had learned to take his happiness where he found it . . . just like his mother. “The only other thing is, the letter ‘L’ that she signed it with? That was in lowercase, with no period after it.”

“Does that mean something?”

“Well, it could . . .” he said, doubtfully. “But there’s no way to tell. Some people use that lowercase ‘l’ to stand for ‘love,’ some people use a lowercase initial to be modest, or even to be . . . submissive, I think. But with e-mail, you can never really tell, because people write it and send it off so fast, they never check what they type. So sometimes you think something means something, and all it means it that whoever wrote the e-mail was sloppy.”

“Not this one,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Whatever she is, she’s not sloppy.”

“Oh. Well, you want to answer it?”

“Couldn’t I just call her? That way, she’d know I got her message.”

“You could, sure. But the message just came in, and it’s almost midnight.”

“I see what you mean. Anyway, I’m not supposed to have her home phone number—it’s not listed.”

“The e-mail came from her home account,” Terry said. “So we have that now, too.”

“What good does that do us?”

“I don’t know, not for sure. But the Dragon Lady says she might be able to tell us some things from the headers and the IP number—”

“Terry . . .”

“Sorry! I just got . . . Anyway, sure, you can answer her. But if you do it now, she’ll know you’re awake, and she might want to IM. You can’t do that from your computer—the one we left there—not without me there. She’d know pretty quick you weren’t used to doing it.”

“Doing it? I don’t even know what it is.”

“See?”

“Yeah. Hey, wait a minute, T. Would she have any way of knowing when her mail was received?”

“Not unless you have the same . . . Ah, never mind, the short answer is no.”

“Okay, let me think for a second. I have to go meet someone tomorrow night, so it can’t be then. For her, I mean. How about this? We send her a message around three in the morning . . . like I couldn’t sleep, so I turned on the computer and found her e-mail.”

“That’s easy. All I have to do is queue it to . . . Never mind,” the kid said, cutting himself off again. His learning curve was a lot flatter than mine.

“All right, how about this, then: ‘Me, too. All counts, except the gym. I’m meeting a source tonight, but I’ll call you at work, okay?’”

“That’s cool,” Terry said. “You’ve got the e-mail rhythm down just right.”

“Beginner’s luck.”

“How do you want to sign it?”

“Uh, how about ‘J.P.’?”

“Caps, with periods—like initials?”

“Perfect. Thanks, T.”

“Hey, this is fun. And it’ll give Clarence another excuse to talk to the Dragon Lady, too.”

It was just going on eleven the next morning when I dialed her number.

“Hi!” she said, when they put me through. “Boy, you keep late hours.”

“More like erratic ones,” I told her, setting the stage.

“I was planning to call you if I didn’t hear from you,” she said. “I realized, as soon as I sent the e-mail, that you might not check it for days. Some people don’t.”

“That’s me,” I admitted. “Only it’s weeks, not days. I don’t get a lot of e-mail at that address; mostly, it just comes to work.”

“I’m surprised, with that sexy picture of you on the site,” she said, teasing.

“Don’t remind me,” I groaned. “That was the publisher’s idea. They said there has to be a photo on the book jacket, anyway, so it would be better if . . .”

“I think it’s cute,” she said.

“You and my mother,” I said. “That’s about it.”

“Mothers are like that, aren’t they?”

“I guess they all are,” I said, thinking that was the biggest lie that had ever come out of my lifelong liar’s mouth.

“‘Meeting a source.’ That sounds so mysterious. But I guess, when you think about it, that’s what I am, too, right? A source.”

“I hope not.”

“What do you mean?” she said, softly.

“It’s . . . kind of complicated,” I said. “I’d rather tell you in person.”

“All right. Not tonight, I know. Tomorrow?”

“Just name the—”

“Can you pick me up after work? I know the traffic is hellish at that hour, but it would be a real treat not to have to ride that miserable subway. Especially this time of the year. Double-especially on a Friday night.”

“No problem. Is there a place to park around there?”

“You won’t need one. Just be out front—you have the address, yes?—at seven.”

“Oh. Sure. I thought you meant we’d eat someplace close to where you worked, and then I’d drive you home.”

“Would you prefer that?”

“To what?”

“To what I have in mind.”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Journalist’s instincts,” I told her.

Sands hadn’t mentioned a specific time to Pepper, and Max wanted to get there early enough to plot out the first race, anyway. I scored a prime parking spot around back, right near the entrance closest to the grandstands.

We bought a program and found seats about midway up and over to the left side, facing forward. The grandstand was more than three-quarters empty. Over an hour to post time—all the tote board showed was the morning line.

I started working on the program, Max watching avidly. I’d taught him to handicap years ago, and he understood all the arcane symbols I used to make notes. But what he was really checking was to see if my scientific method squared with his mystical one. Between gin rummy and casino over the past twenty years, Max was into me for a good quarter-mil. He wasn’t any better at picking horses, but his faith was too pure for him to be deterred by mere experience.

There was nothing I liked in the first. A sorry collection of pacers going for a twenty-five-hundred-dollar purse. You could claim any of them for four grand, and the only sure thing was that there wouldn’t be any takers.

But there was one that drew my eye in the second—a shipper from the Midwest that looked good on paper. I noticed she was a front-runner, with a nice clean stride. No breaks on her program, unusual for a trotter. She always seemed to tie up a bit in the last quarter and get shuffled back, unless the pace was leisurely enough for her to hold on at the end. She was coming out of Sportsman’s Park—a five-eighths-mile track, favoring closers—but Yonkers is a quarter-mile, with a very short run to home.

The mare I liked was in a twenty-K claimer. A couple of the other horses had pretty decent last outs, so I expected her to go off at a nice price. I wasn’t crazy about the post she’d drawn, but, with her early speed, I thought she could grab the rail from the five-hole before the first turn.

I put a big question mark at the top of the first race, then drew a box around the one I liked in the second.

Max made a circling gesture.

I nodded agreement. We’d wheel the Daily Double, putting the five horse in the second race against all the entries in the first. If my horse won the second, we’d have the Double. But even then, it didn’t mean we’d show a profit. The Daily Double wheel was eight bets. At a deuce per, we’d have to win and get a payoff of more than sixteen bucks to come out ahead.

You might think, what kind of Double wouldn’t pay off more than that? But if the crowd liked one of the horses in the first race well enough to send him off real cheap, the chalk-players might be spinning their wheels, too. So we could win and still end up short.

Max knew all this. He held up his hand, for “Wait!” I nodded agreement—we’d see if the money got distributed nice and even on that first race before we made our play.

Max took the program from me and started working on that first race, paying special attention to each horse’s mother’s name.

I spotted Sands a few seconds before he saw me. He had a giant paper cup in one hand; I was pretty sure it wasn’t popcorn.

I stood up, like I was stretching. Sands walked past us, then sat down at an angle, so he could watch us without turning his head.

I strolled over, sat down next to him.

“Who do you like in the first?” I said.

“I see you brought a friend,” he answered.

“He’ll stay where he is, if you want.”

“Is he who I think he is?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard about him for years. Friends of yours, stories get so wild about them, people never seem to know if they’re real or not.”

“Your call,” I said.

“Some of your friends, people don’t even know if they’re dead or not,” Sands said, dropping his voice.

“People don’t know a lot of things,” I said. “But it never seems to stop them from talking about them.”

“Nobody’s doing a lot of talking about her now.”

I knew he meant Wolfe. “Meaning they do know something?” I said.

“You’re too cute for me,” Sands said. “I get enough of that on the job. The way things are today, the smart guys are wearing their vests on backwards. Why don’t you go back to your friend? I’ll let the place fill up a bit before I stop by.”

Max and I each bet a sawbuck on his pick in the first. Or, I should say, we bet twenty bucks together—if we didn’t go partners, it wasn’t any fun for either of us. Max came back from the window with a ten-dollar wheel on the Double, too, meaning we had a hundred invested, total.

By the time they called the pacers for the first race, it was dark enough for the track lights to come on. Max’s horse, Dino’s Diamond, was a ten-year-old gelding who had been racing since he was a kid. He slipped in behind the gate like a journeyman boxer climbing through the ropes. Another tank town, another nickel-and-dime purse—getting paid to be the opponent.

The pace car made its circuit, then pulled in the gate. None of the horses seemed to want the lead—they hit the first turn in a clump. On the backstretch, Max’s horse fitted himself sixth along the rail. “Saving ground,” the track announcer called, but it looked more like phoning it in to me.

The horses came around the second turn Indian-file, Max’s pick still where he started. Two horses came off the rail, one drafting behind the other as they challenged the leader. Max’s horse closed up the gap they left. When the two challengers stayed parked out past the three-quarter pole, the file passed them by, moving them out of contention. At the top of the stretch, the leader was tiring, but none of the others seemed to have the will to make a move.

I felt a sudden stab of pain in my forearm. Max, using his rebar forefinger to tell me what my eyes had just picked up—the lead horse, exhausted, was drifting wide . . . and Dino’s Diamond was charging the inside lane like a downhill freight.

It was photo-close, but Max’s horse got a nose in front at the wire. Max stood up and bowed to the valiant warrior who had found his way home one more time. His flat Mongol face was split in a broad grin.

I spent the next few minutes acknowledging the celestial perfection of Max’s handicapping methods, admitting that we should have wheeled his pick instead of mine—sharing in my brother’s joy.

Dino’s Diamond paid $35.20, making us major winners, no matter what happened in the Double. Max would brag on this one forever, starting with Mama.

It was one of those times; anyone I’d have to explain it to, I wouldn’t want to.

They had just called the trotters for the second race when Sands sat down next to me.

^“There’s three more,” he said, without preamble.

“Three more not in the—?”

“Yeah.”

“Why not?”

“No complaining witnesses.”

“Then how would you know they were cases at all, never mind his?”

“One of them, he was almost caught in the act. But the vic denied it ever happened.”

“A hooker who—?”

“No. Stop asking questions. I can’t hang around here. Just listen. It was on the Lower East Side. A neighbor hears sounds of a struggle. Glass breaking, a scream. She calls it in; she’s too scared to go out and see what’s happening herself, so she turns off all the lights in her apartment, peeks out the window. And there’s the perp, going down the fire escape. She doesn’t get enough for an ID, but it’s our man, no question, right down to the ski mask and the gloves. In fucking July.

“By the time that one went down, everyone knows there’s a serial rapist making the rounds, so the uniforms don’t bother to knock. The door goes right in. And there’s the vic, still tied up, blood coming out of her. Nails on one hand all broken. She must have put up a hell of a fight. Place is ransacked, too.

“But the woman, she says nothing happened. She was playing with the ropes—‘experimenting,’ is what it says in the report—then she fell down and hurt herself. Utter, total bullshit. But she doesn’t budge an inch.

“The uniforms don’t know what to do. Fuck, neither would I—whoever heard of something like this? I mean, sure, people playing sex games, they get carried away, someone gets hurt . . . so they don’t tell the truth about how it happened. Anyone who works ER around here is going to see a few of those every year. But this one, with the witness and all, it was for real, all the way.

“So they call in the detectives. Nothing. They even try a social worker. Blank. Zero. Nada.”

“Christ.”

“The second one, she gets found by her aunt. Comes to pick her up in the morning for church, can you believe it? We get a statement. Same pattern, right down to the mouthpiece.

“Then, a week or so later, out of the blue, the vic calls up, says she doesn’t want to ‘press charges.’ Like it was some bitch-slap incident or something.

“Okay, so the plainclothes guys go to see her, too. A total washout. She’s not talking. Not saying it didn’t happen, just saying she’s not going to cooperate.”

“So they figured she probably knew the perp?” I said.

“That is what they figured. And we were going to put surveillance on her. If she was covering for the guy, or, better yet, blackmailing him, we could end up with a solid ID.”

“What happened?”

“She moved. To fucking Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Lock, stock, and barrel. They tried to get a wiretap going, but the judge laughed at them, said they were a mile short of probable cause. And what was the crime, anyway?”

“Maybe she just wanted out of New York,” I said. “Some people do that, put a lot of distance between themselves and . . . whatever happened to them.”

“I don’t know,” Sands said.

“You said three.”

“Yeah. The first one, who denied anything happened? She turned up, later. Dead.”

“You think it was Wychek?”

“He was already locked up by then,” Sands said. “For the one Wolfe nailed him on. Besides, something else was going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was tortured,” Sands said, voice flat and hard, a shield against his feelings, like the booze. “Somebody worked her over with a stun gun. Or electricity. Had those burn marks all over her . . . in the worst spots.”

“In her own apartment?”

“Nobody knows where it was done. Where they found her was in a building that was getting rehabbed over in Williamsburg. One of the workers spotted her, hanging, when he opened up in the morning. It was in the papers.”

“She was hung?”

“Not to kill her. They did that with a bullet. Two of them, one in each eye.”

“A message.”

“Yeah. Maybe it was for the third one.”

“Huh?”

“Her best friend. Roommate. Wasn’t home when the rape—the one she said never happened—went down. That one—the third one— just plain disappeared. The detectives looked for her as soon as the original vic wouldn’t cooperate. On the books, she’s a missing person.”

“Missing and presumed.”

“Yeah.”

“So the homicide case is still open, too?”

“Yeah.”

“You got names and—?”

“I see you already got a pen,” he said, nodding toward the program.

Max nudged my shoulder, bringing me back from wherever I’d gone. I looked up at the board. The third race was two minutes to post.

Max pointed to the info I’d jotted down, held up three fingers, made a questioning gesture.

“I don’t know,” I told him. I drew a stick figure of a man, surrounded by a ring of swastikas. “But it looks like Wychek’s friends may have started taking care of him earlier than we thought.”

Max hadn’t left my side, so I knew he hadn’t gotten a bet down since the second race. I turned to that page in the program, made a “What happened?” gesture.

He held up the ticket. All the answer I needed. If my horse hadn’t gotten home first, he would have torn it up.

I found a place in the program with some white space showing, handed it to Max. He diagrammed the race for me in increments, drawing it as clear as a video.

My mare had left hard, cranked off a good first quarter, put some real distance on the field without a challenge, and maintained strong fractions until her second time past the clubhouse turn. Then they all came at her, slingshotting around at the top of the stretch. She was fading fast, but still game, staggering home a half-length ahead of the nearest horse. Paid $8.80 to win, anchoring our four-hundred-and-change Double, a personal record.

Max held up his hand, fingers spread, to emphasize that we didn’t just have it, we had it five times!

Neither of us wanted to stay around after that. The minute they get ahead, suckers say they’re “playing with the track’s money.” That’s why they’re called suckers.

^“Anything new?”

“Stone-fucking-wall,” Davidson said. “Cocksuckers must think they’re playing with an amateur.”

“I spoke to Wolfe; she doesn’t seem worried.”

“I wouldn’t play poker with her, I was you.”

“Yeah, I know. So you’re saying . . . ?”

“I’m saying that somebody’s cooking up something. I don’t give an obese rodent’s rump what that is, so long as it isn’t my client on the burner.”

“I’m still with it,” I promised.

“You maybe got something?”

“Maybe. A long maybe.”

“Want to tell me?”

“I’m your investigator,” I said, “not your client.”

^“No, no, no,” Michelle said, hands on hips. “You cannot wear that same jacket.”

“But you said it would be like a—”

“Never mind what I said. This is different.”

“How?”

“Stop being such a dolt, Burke! We already went over this. That girl wants something. And if I’m right, we have to go for it.”

“I don’t see why I can’t wear the—”

“She’s a money-girl, right?”

“I . . . No, I don’t think so. Everything we have about her background says middle-class.”

“Give me strength,” Michelle muttered. “Sweetheart,” she said, her voice a mockery of patience, “I don’t mean a from-money girl, like a trust-funder. I mean she works with money. That’s her thing.”

“So?”

“So I’m guessing she wants to see you know how to make some. Or you already have.”

“Maybe she just wants to go slumming.”

“That could be,” Michelle admitted. “But any woman who’s willing to buy a man a cell phone and let him use her credit card can get all the downmarket action she wants. We play it like it’s something else,” she said, firmly.

“What do I have to buy this goddamned time?”

“You don’t have to buy anything,” she said, triumphantly. “Remember that beautiful Bally jacket I got you when we were working that movie scam?”

“How could I forget? It cost—”

“Well, maybe now you see the value of the classics,” she said. “You wear that number over a nice shirt with a plain tie. . . .”

“A tie now?”

“She said dinner, am I right?”

“Yeah. But she said ‘dinner’ that first time, and you said—”

“Oh, do shut up,” she said, closing the subject.

That night, I motored up Third Avenue, taking my time—as if I had any choice, at that hour. Still, I was in place twenty minutes before I was to meet Laura. The Plymouth isn’t the kind of car any cop lets sit at the curb, so I circled the block, budgeting ten minutes for each pass.

I wasn’t far off. At 6:55, she was already standing at the curb, wearing a fuchsia dress. As I pulled over, I could see her shoes matched it.

“I hope I didn’t keep you waiting,” I said, out the window.

“Oh!” she said, as if startled. But she trotted around to the passenger door and let herself in.

“You look—” I said, deliberately cutting myself off, like I’d said too much.

“What?” she said, flashing a smile. Her lipstick was only minutes old.

“I was going to say ‘great,’ I guess. But I didn’t want you to think I was—”

“What? Being polite?”

“No, no. Being . . . unprofessional.”

“Hmmmm . . .” she said.

“Where to?” I asked.

“The Midtown Tunnel,” she said. “I’ll guide you once we get out.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, touching two fingers to my forehead.

^“This is quite an . . . unusual car,” she said, as we waited in line at the tunnel entrance.

“It’s one of my hobbies,” I said. “I restore muscle cars from the Fifties and Sixties. This is an original Plymouth Roadrunner.”

“Roadrunner, like in the cartoon?”

I “meep-meeped” the horn for her. She clapped in delight.

“Oh, that’s exactly it. Are these . . . cars valuable?”

“Well, it’s not a Bugatti or a Duesenberg,” I said. “This one was mass-produced, and not exactly to the highest standards. But clean survivors are pretty rare now. When I get it all done, it should be worth, oh, thirty-five thousand.”

“And how much will all that cost you?” she said, looking over the raggedy dashboard out to the gray-primered hood.

“Depends on how much of the work I do myself,” I said. “Like, see this steering wheel? It’s an original Tuff model,” I bragged. “Pretty hard to find.”

I tapped the thick-rimmed, smaller-than-stock wheel, with its center horn button and three brushed-aluminum “holed” spokes. It wasn’t exactly a bolt-in—the turn-signal lever had to be shortened, so I wouldn’t risk snagging my left leg when I got out—but the look was still semi-original.

“Were they fast?” she asked, rolling up her window as we entered the tunnel. “When they were new, I mean.”

“The Hemi Roadrunner was one of the legitimate kings of the street, back in its glory days,” I said, not mentioning that the reincarnation I was driving wasn’t a Hemi. Or that the hogged-out wedge motor in mine would have inhaled anything that was prowling the boulevards back then.

“Didn’t they come with air conditioning?” she said, reaching in her pocketbook for a tissue.

“Not the serious ones,” I told her. “Those were stripped to the bone.”

“That doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

“Different people, different pleasures,” I said.

“Did you want a car just like this when you were a kid?” she asked, as we exited the tunnel and got in line for the toll booths.

“I wanted a lot of things when I was a kid,” I said, wishing I could pull back the ice in my voice as soon as I spoke.

“Oh! I didn’t mean to . . . I’ve just noticed that some of the men I know, they collect all kinds of things they wanted when they were young. One of the guys I work with, he’s got every baseball card ever made, I bet.”

“Well, I say it’s my hobby, but this is the only car I have,” I said, chuckling to muffle what she had triggered with her innocent question. “And I’ve had it a long time, like a project that never gets completed.”

“Are you going to make it perfect?”

“Perfect?”

“Like, what’s the word I’m looking for . . . concours? I have clients who fix up old cars so they’re exactly like they were brand-new. Then they have shows for them.”

“No,” I laughed. “I’m going to make it perfect, all right. But perfect for me, not for anyone else. Besides, I don’t see a piece of Detroit iron like this making the grade in that company.”

We took an E-ZPass lane, letting the scanner read the box I had fastened to the windshield instead of having to pay the toll in cash. Very efficient system. Speeds the traffic flow. And keeps very good records. I have “spares” I can use when I want to go certain places to do certain things, but tonight wasn’t anything I cared if the government knew about.

“The LIE’s a pain at this hour,” she said. “But it’s still the fastest . . .”

“I’m in no hurry,” I said.

“It must be frustrating.”

“What?”

“Having such a fast car, and not being able to go fast.”

“Not all the time, no. But that’s okay. Sometimes, knowing you can do something is pretty much as good as doing it.”

“That’s how I feel,” she said. “About my work. But that’s a mistake I can’t make too often.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“In my job, being very good at something, even being brilliant at it, doesn’t count. Only results do. If you allow yourself to just, I don’t know, luxuriate in your abilities, like a bubble bath with soft music and candles, you can forget that the world—my world, anyway—isn’t about strategy, it’s about success.”

“I thought those were the same thing.”

“No,” she said, turning in her seat so her whole body was facing me, despite the seatbelt. “Strategy is what I love. The game of it. But if I come up with a perfect strategy to, say, put a deal together, and I don’t make the deal, my bonus is going to be light that year.”

“I think I know what you mean.” I goosed the throttle to switch lanes ahead of an overfilled minivan. “Kind of like my book, isn’t it?” I said.

“Strategy?”

“Not exactly. I mean, I already sold it. The book, that is. I’m talking about my idea for it. I know it’s perfect. But if I can’t bring it off, the book will still happen, but it won’t be as good as if—”

“That’s one idea,” she said. “I was talking more about . . . models.”

“Models?”

“Ways of doing things. Ones you develop over time, testing and retesting . . .”

“Like a system for picking winners at the racetrack?”

“A little more sophisticated than that, I hope,” she said, chuckling. “And a little more successful, too. None of those ‘systems’ really work, do they?”

“I never heard of one that did,” I told her, pure truth.

“Here we go,” she said. “You know the Maurice Avenue switch-off?”

“Sure,” I said. “I once worked as a cab driver. To get perspective for a piece I was doing.”

“Okay, now just follow it around until we get to Sixty-first.”

“That’s Maspeth, right?”

“Yes, it is. Not many people from the City know that.”

“That’s one of the things about having a car,” I said. “You go places where the subway doesn’t.”

“I have a car, too, remember? Turn . . . there! Yes. Now just go along until I tell you to turn again.”

“You like that Audi?” I asked her.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Whoever did the interior-design work on it was a genius.”

“Is it pretty quick?”

“It has a turbocharger,” she said, almost smugly. “I got a ticket when I went upstate for a ski weekend once. The officer said he clocked me at a hundred and ten. But he only wrote me up for eighty-five.”

“If it had been me, he would have written me up for a hundred twenty.”

“Because your car is so fast, you mean?”

“No. Because I’m about the polar opposite of a pretty girl.”

“That’s cynical,” she said, grinning to show me she didn’t really think so.

I followed her directions for a few minutes, watching the densely packed little houses give way to flatland.

“There!” she said.

“Where? That’s not a restaurant. It looks like—”

“An old factory?” she said, pleased with herself. “That’s what it was, once. Now it’s condos. And one of them is mine.”

“Okay, I get it. You want to change out of your work clothes before we—?”

“I do want to change,” she said. “But I also want to cook. Okay?”

“Beautiful,” I said.

^“What did this place use to make?” I asked her, following her directions to drive around to the back.

“Some kind of containers, I think. Metal. As I understand, the conversion to plastic would have been too expensive. And the work wasn’t there anymore, anyway.”

“This is pretty neat,” I said, looking at a vertical steel-barred fence with an inset gate.

“Use this,” she said, handing me a credit-card-sized piece of plastic.

I inserted the card in the slot, and the gate swung open. We were facing a four-story building that looked like poured concrete, painted the color of cigarette smoke. Laura reached in her purse, pulled out a remote garage-door opener. She pressed the button; a triple-wide steel door rolled up soundlessly as the gate closed behind us.

Inside, there were individual spaces for parking, enough for thirty or so cars.

“Use number seven,” she said. “It’s mine.”

I backed the Plymouth in carefully—the car in stall number six was her silver Audi.

“That’s slick,” I said. “You own the space on the other side of it, too?”

“Actually, I do. But I don’t just own the parking spaces; they come with the units upstairs. So I have six slots; you get two with each apartment.”

“You own three apartments?” I asked, cutting the ignition with the car in gear so the engine wouldn’t diesel on me—big-block Mopars will do that sometimes.

“Me and the bank,” she said, flashing a quick grin.

We got out, me extra-carefully, so that the Plymouth’s door wouldn’t ding her Audi.

“You don’t have to worry,” she said, standing by the front fender. “There’s a lot of space between the slots. This used to be the loading bay for the factory. Even with two slots per unit, we have a ton of space left over. See that?” she said, pointing to a chain-linked enclosure to my right.

“Yeah.”

“That’s for storage. Every unit-holder gets a certain amount of space in there, too. You supply your own lock.”

“Damn! Something like that in Manhattan would set you back a—”

“If you think this is a bargain, wait till you see upstairs,” she said.

^“There’s an elevator,” she said. “But I always walk. Sometimes, it’s the only exercise I get all day. Do you mind?”

Without waiting for an answer, she unlocked the stairway door and started up ahead of me. Halfway up the first flight, I realized Michelle had read Laura Reinhardt better secondhand than I had in person; if she was suffering from secretarial spread, I couldn’t see a hint of it.

Her unit was on the top floor. Two locks, deadbolt and doorknob. She stepped inside, flicked on a light, said, “Well?”

The apartment opened directly into a broad expanse of hardwood floor, bleached so deeply it was almost white. The side wall was exposed brick, beautifully repointed. At the end of the room was a corner-to-corner set of pale-pink drapes. She hit a switch and the drapes parted, revealing a floor-to-ceiling glass wall.

“Jesus!” I said.

I wasn’t acting. The wall opposite the exposed brick was a complex arrangement of brass piping, holding what looked like teak shelves. Hardcover books with somber jackets alternated with framed photographs and an assortment of small objects I couldn’t make out from where I was standing. Modernistic furniture was scattered about as if at random, but it looked so . . . tailored that I figured it for a professional’s touch.

“Come on,” she said, “I’ll give you the quick tour.”

I followed her into a kitchen that I knew the average yuppie would commit several felonies for. A stainless-steel refrigerator-freezer lorded it over a granite-block island and a black porcelain double sink. The cabinets looked like they had been fashioned from the same teak as the bookshelves. The stove didn’t appear to have any burners on it. A chrome table sat off to one side, with eight matching chairs. An eat-in kitchen, big enough to hold Thanksgiving dinner.

Before I could ask about that, she was on the move again.

“My office,” she said, pointing to a spacious room with a window facing the same direction as the one in the living room. It looked like high-tech heaven, mostly in carbon-fiber black. A flat-screen computer monitor; a multi-line phone with both wired and cordless handsets; one of those fax-photocopier-scanner things. Under a desk with a black marble top, a large paper-shredder—my money was on cross-cut.

“There’s more,” she said, pulling me by the hand.

We passed a blue-tiled bathroom, a bedroom—“It’s really a guest room,” she said—and then came to a room dominated by a big-screen TV and a single white leather recliner. “If I were a man, I’d probably claim this was a den,” she chuckled.

The master bedroom was a good three hundred square feet, with plenty of room for the queen-sized bed with a Mondrian-pattern headboard, and a garage-sized closet. The attached bath had a two-person Jacuzzi, and it didn’t cramp the area. One wall was a triptych of mirrors.

“How big do you think the whole thing is?” she asked, walking back toward the living room.

“Twenty-five hundred?” I guessed.

“Closer to thirty-five,” she said. “See what I mean about a bargain?”

“I guess that depends on what you paid. But I can’t imagine anything like this going for less than—”

“Right around four hundred,” she said.

“About the going rate for a decent two-bedroom on the Upper West Side.”

“You wish,” she said. “For that kind of money, you’re buying a rehab project.”

“Well, this one sure didn’t come the way it is now.”

“Oh, that’s true,” she said, perching confidently on one of the modern chairs. “But I didn’t have to do structural stuff. It wasn’t really all that expensive. And it’s a good investment.”

“That I can believe,” I said, sitting down myself.

“I’m going to go change,” she said, getting to her feet. “Take a look around, you’ll see what I mean.”

I listened to her heels click on the hardwood floors. Couldn’t pick up the sound of a door closing anywhere, but that didn’t tell me anything—the walls were thick, and the bedroom was a couple of sound-muffling turns away.

She’s gone from arm’s-length to “make yourself at home” pretty damn quick, I thought. But there were too many possibilities, dice tumbling in my head.

I stood up, made a slow circuit of the living room. In one corner, I found a white pillar so smoothly mounted it looked as if it had grown from the floor. On its base, a black-glazed pot sat in a tray of gray pebbles, still gleaming from its last watering.

Inside the pot was a bonsai tree. Magnificently sculptured, thick-trunked, with a complex branch formation . . . but no fruit, and only the occasional leaf. Dangling from the branches were dozens of tiny glass bottles: some clear, the others in shades of green, blue, red, and brown. Each bottle had markings of some kind—pieces of labels, smears of paint, logos, brand names.

I’d seen bottle trees before. In a lush back courtyard of a palatial mansion in New Orleans, and a dirt patch that passed for the front yard of a shotgun shack in Mississippi. But a miniature one? In the middle of a New York living room?

I fanned my hand rapidly in front of the branches, listening hard. The tinkle of the glass was so faint I couldn’t be sure I actually heard it.

“Like my tree?”

She was standing behind me, not quite close enough to touch. Wearing a tangerine kimono that came to mid-thigh. Her feet were bare, and her dark hair glistened, as if she had just showered.

“It’s . . . exquisite,” I said.

“I’ll bet I’ve been working on it longer than you have on that car of yours,” she said.

“Working on it? You mean, keeping it—?”

“No. I made it. I bought the bonsai, but you have to prune them to get the exact shape you want. It’s constant work. The bottles . . . I took a course in glass blowing, and I figured out how to do the rest.”

“How did you get them all marked?”

“It’s just a form of miniature,” she said. “Painting, I mean.”

“Another course you took?”

“Actually, it’s something I was always good at it. In school, sometimes I’d draw whole pictures no bigger than my fingernail. With a Rapidograph. For some projects, the most important thing is to use the right tool.”

“Did you want to be an artist? Wait, scratch that. You are an artist. I meant, did you want to make it a career?”

“Oh, never,” she said. “It was always just for me. From the beginning. Once I make something, with my own hands, I can never let go of it. I’ve always been that way. That’s the hardest part of what I do. I make deals, I put together packages, I devise strategies . . . but I can’t keep them. I have to let go of them. Otherwise, they’re worthless.”

“I never thought of it like that,” I said. “I guess because I’m no artist. I know some people write books just to be writing them. Because they need to, I guess. For me, that would be the waste. If nobody ever gets to read it . . .”

“Ah,” she said. “Your book.”

“I was just—”

“You like me, don’t you? Pardon my bluntness, it’s just the way I am. The way I have to be, in my business.”

“Yeah. I do like you.”

“So this is . . . confusing for you, yes? You want information from me. For your book. And, like you said, it’s not professional to, I don’t know what, get involved with a . . . Oh, that’s right, you said I wouldn’t be a source. Whatever you said I was, it wouldn’t be . . .”

I took a step toward her, put my hands on her shoulders. I’m not sure how the kimono came off.

She was slim from the waist up, with small round breasts set far apart, but her hips were heavy enough to be from a different woman. Her thighs touched at their midpoint, and her calves were rounded, without a trace of definition, tapering radically to small ankles and feet.

“You don’t smell like cigarettes,” she said, her face in my neck. “I wish I knew how you did that. No matter how many showers I take, or what perfume I use, I always—”

I parted her thighs. She was more moist than wet, tight when I entered.

The bed was too soft. I stuffed a pillow under her bottom, reached down, and lifted her legs to my shoulders.

“I hope you don’t think—” she said, then cut herself off as she let go, shuddering deep enough to make me come along with her.

^“I do that sometimes,” she said, later. She was lying on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, smoking. “Talk too much. When I’m nervous. It only happens in . . . social situations, I guess you’d call them. When I’m at work, I guard my words like they were my life savings.”

“Everybody has pressure-release valves,” I said. “They’re in different places for different people.”

“Where’s yours?” she said.

I put my thumb at the top of her buttocks, ran it gently all the way down the cleft until I was back in her sweet spot. “Right there,” I said.

“That’s a good place.”

“It’s not a place,” I said. “It’s a person.”

“I thought they all looked alike in the dark,” she said, teasingly.

“Looking isn’t what does it for me,” I said, moving my thumb inside her.

She rolled away from me, then tentatively put one leg over. “Do you mind?”

For an answer, I shifted my weight, so she was straddling me.

She made a little noise in her throat.

“Sit up,” I told her.

She did it. “Oh!” she said, bouncing a little.

^“You’re not going to take a shower, are you?” she said, much later.

“I can use the bathroom in the other—”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I just . . . I just like how you smell. Like you smell now. You can take one before you go, okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

^“Cooking is not one of my hobbies,” she said, later, standing in her ultra-kitchen. “And I never took a course.”

“You still want to go out? There’s a diner on Queens Boulevard that never closes. It’s not the Four Seasons, but it’s got a fifty-page menu—got to have something you’d like.”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“I already feel like a guy who expected a Happy Meal and got filet mignon,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” she said, smiling. “And you already figured out we’re not going to get any talking done here, right?”

^“I’ll drive,” she said, electronically unlocking her car as we walked toward the stalls.

“Is there anything under here?” I asked, pointing at the concrete floor.

“Oh, there’s a basement of some kind. For the . . . power plant, I think they called it. The boiler, things like that. The utility people go down there to read the meters—they’re separate for each unit—and the phones lines are all down there, too.”

“I figured they had to be somewhere,” I said. “And running power lines up the side of a building like this wouldn’t be too stylish.”

“Not at all,” she agreed, climbing behind the wheel. She turned the key and flicked the lever into reverse without waiting for the engine to settle down—there was a distinct clunk as the transmission engaged.

She drove out of the garage, piloting the car with more familiarity than skill.

“Queens Boulevard, you said, right? I think I know the one you mean. On the south side?”

“Yep.”

“We’re not urban pioneers, you know,” she said.

“I don’t know what you—”

“Where I live. It’s not like it’s a depressed neighborhood. It’s solid, middle-class. A good, stable population. Low crime rate. Our building may be upscale for the area now, but that won’t be forever. It’s not like those people rehabbing brownstones across a Hundred and Tenth Street, in Manhattan.”

“And you’re not displacing anyone, converting a factory,” I said.

“That’s right. The people around us, they were thrilled when they heard what was going on. Instead of an abandoned building where kids can get into trouble, or that the homeless could turn into a squat, they get something that actually improves their property values. Adds to the tax base, too.”

Why are you telling me this? I thought, but just nodded as if I gave a damn.

She drove the Audi like an amateur, going too fast between lights so that she ended up stopping for all of them. Or maybe she mostly used the car for those upstate trips she had talked about, wasn’t used to city driving.

“There it is,” I said, “just up ahead.”

She made the left, swung into the parking lot. It was relatively empty—well past dinner, and too early for the night owls.

We walked inside, followed a young woman in a pale green dress toward the back.

“Would you prefer a booth or a table?”

“A booth, please,” I said. “As private as possible.”

“You can take that one there,” she said, pointing. “But this place can fill up just like that,” snapping her fingers.

“I know it can,” I said, slipping her a ten. “And if we end up surrounded, I know it won’t be your fault.”

Laura ordered a Greek salad and a glass of red wine. I made do with a plate of chopped liver, potato salad, and coleslaw, French fries on the side. Not Delancey Street quality, but decent enough. And I was hungry.

“What good would it do him?” she said, out of the blue.

“Your brother?”

“Yes. I did a little . . . well, ‘research’ would be too strong a word. Just a little looking around in the . . . genre, I guess you’d call it. The books I found, they’re either about how an innocent man was finally freed, or they’re an attempt to get him freed. Don’t you think that’s accurate?”

“Pretty much,” I conceded.

“Well, except for the people still in prison—I mean, anyone could see what good a book would do them—the other ones, the people who were the . . . stars, I guess you’d call them, didn’t they get money, too?”

“I guess in some cases they did. Like when you see their names as ‘co-writers,’ you can probably bet on it. Some, maybe not—they might have just wanted to get their stories told.”

“But they never have control, do they?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, I read about one man, Jeffrey MacDonald, I think his name was. He was accused of murdering his wife and children. Didn’t he . . . cooperate with a journalist? And it backfired on him?”

“MacDonald played his own hand,” I said. “And, anyway, there’s no similarity. Your brother’s already free. And he’s not charged with any crimes. The book you’re talking about, it was the investigation of a crime. My book is an investigation of the system.”

“But you said yourself, John is the centerpiece.”

“I said I’d like him to be.”

“All right, you’d like him to be. But it comes down to the same question.”

“What’s in it for him?”

“Yes,” she said. “I don’t mean to sound so cold-blooded. This doesn’t have—doesn’t have to have—anything to do with you and me. But I have to view all deals the same way. The interests of the parties.”

“If it doesn’t have anything to do with you and me, maybe we should just split it up,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she said, spots of color in her cheeks.

“You’re not your brother’s . . . agent, I guess is the word I’m looking for. Let’s put them all face-up, okay?

“One, I would rather have simply approached your brother, made my pitch, and either started working with him, incorporating him into my project, or moved on. Quick and easy, yes or no.

“But, in his current situation, he’s not only less accessible—I don’t have a clue where he even is, never mind how to reach him—he’s more attractive. Because of the whole prosecutor-on-trial angle.

“Two, I . . . like you. I guess that’s obvious. I don’t want one thing to screw up the other. I don’t want to put you in a position of making choices you shouldn’t have to make.”

“You mean . . . ? I don’t know what you mean.”

“I want to meet your brother,” I said. “Talk to him. And leave you out of it. And, regardless of how that works out, I want to keep seeing you.”

“Oh.”

I didn’t say anything, just went back to my food. At least the Dr. Brown’s cream soda was the same as you could buy on Second Avenue.

“You wouldn’t still want my . . . recollections?” she asked. “The family history, things like that?”

“Sure I would,” I said. “The truth is, your brother’s story—the factual part of his story—pretty much tells itself. There’s court documents—indictments, trial transcripts, appeals—all over the place. I was looking for more. Deep background. What I told you was one hundred percent true. The impact on the family is a microcosm of the impact on all society.

“It wasn’t until we . . . it wasn’t until I realized I had feelings for you that I decided I didn’t want to risk one thing for the other.”

“We went to bed,” she said, scanning my face. “I don’t know a lot about men, but I know enough to know that doesn’t take a lot of ‘feelings’ on their part.”

“I didn’t expect it to happen,” I said. “Any of it. Sure, you’re a gorgeous girl, and I’m not pretending I wouldn’t want to get next to you even if I had never spent ten minutes talking to you. You don’t know a lot about men; I don’t know a lot about women. But I know some things. I know you’re not the kind of girl who makes love to a man unless you’ve got feelings of your own.”

“You know that . . . how?”

“I couldn’t tell you if you gave me a shot of truth serum,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not right. It’s just something I . . . sense, maybe. I don’t know.”

She toyed with her salad, not looking up.

“Tell me I’m wrong, and that’ll do it,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me you don’t have feelings for me, and we’ll drop the whole thing.”

“You’re confusing me.”

“Look at me, Laura. You don’t have to be a map reader to know I’ve been around for a while. I’m not too old to play, but I’m too old not to play for keeps. If you just like sex, and figured I might be fun, I hope I didn’t disappoint you. But it would sure disappoint me.”

“And if I said that . . . that I was just horny?”

“No hard feelings,” I said. “You’re a big girl, you get to make your own decisions.”

“You’d still want to do the book? With my brother, I mean?”

“Sure.”

“Just . . . what, then?”

“Just nothing. I thought, if I told you I could just meet your brother, leave you out of it, maybe you and I, we could try being together, see how it worked.”

She pushed her plate away from her, said, “You can’t meet my brother. I don’t even know where he is. I hear from him, once in a while. But they’re keeping him safe. Until the trial, anyway.”

“I understand.”

“I wish you could smoke here,” she said.

“I can fix that,” I said, catching the attention of our waitress with a check-signing gesture.