Enough Rope

Almost Perfect

He was already at the ballpark when I got there, and that was unusual for Tommy. Of course he was scheduled to pitch that afternoon, going up against the Bobcats in the last game of a three-game home stand, but even when he pitched he tended to show up a lot closer to game time. He’d make it in time to warm up properly, and he’d generally be there for the batting practice that Hairston makes his pitchers take along with everybody else, seeing as our league has escaped the goddam designated hitter rule. But he was basically a last-minute kind of guy, and I’m the opposite, like most catchers. So it was a surprise to walk in and see him already suited up.

But not a big surprise, because Tommy Willis was a southpaw, and it’s true what you’ve heard about them. Pud Hairston was a pitcher himself for twelve years and has been a pitching coach for better than twenty, and he swears they’re all knuckleballs, meaning you never know which way they’re going to break. I don’t know why it should be true, why you can predict a man’ll have a wild hair on the basis of which arm he uses to throw the ball, or why it only seems to work that way with pitchers, while a left-handed outfielder or first baseman will be as regular as the next person, or at least the next ballplayer. A southpaw has an edge against left-handed batters and gives up the same edge to righties, and I can see why that would be, same as I or anybody else can see why he’d have an advantage throwing over to first. But what has all of this got to do with what goes on in his head? That makes no sense to me, but I’ve known enough of them and caught enough of them to be able to swear it’s true.

I said he was early for a change, and he grinned that lazy grin of his. “Gotta get them Bobcats,” he said. We went out and threw a few, and then he put on a jacket and sat down while I went and took my turn in the cage. I love batting practice. You just stand there and you hit. I’d do it all day if they let me.

Around the time the ground crew got to smoothing out the base paths, I checked the stands and spotted my wife sitting where she generally did. I waved, but she was deep in conversation with Sally Peres and didn’t see me. There were rumors that we were looking to trade Reynaldo Peres, and for Kathy’s sake I hoped they weren’t true, as Sally was her closest friend among the wives. (Other hand, if I was the general manager, Peres would have been gone by now. He’s always behind in the count, and that means every hitter’s a struggle for him.)

“I don’t see Colleen,” I said to Tommy, and he said she wasn’t coming.

“She gets tired of baseball,” he said.

Anybody’ll tire of baseball from time to time, even the men who play it, and I can see how a wife could get sick of it, especially if she wasn’t too crazy about hanging out with the other wives. And the TV cameras pan those rows all the time, so you have to make sure you look interested, and that the camera doesn’t catch you yawning, or picking your nose. Kathy doesn’t come to every home game, not by any means. Still, a pitcher doesn’t start but one game in five, so when he’s up his wife’s usually there to see him.

I didn’t say anything, and he said, “Hard to believe. I mean, how could a human being get tired of baseball? But she does. She even gets tired of the Bobcats.”

They were the defending world champions, and a good bet to repeat this year, and our attendance was never higher than when they came to town. So his remark was natural enough, but it had a little extra on it, and I wondered about that. But not for any length of time. We were just minutes away from the first pitch, which he’d be throwing and I’d be catching, and I was more interested in whether his fastball had a little extra on it, and how his curve was breaking.

Introductions went like they always do, with cheers for us and boos for the Bobcats, with the loudest round of boos for Wade Bemis. He had two strikes against him, as far as our fans were concerned. Number one, he was hitting .341, and neck and neck with Clipper DeYoung of the Orioles in the home-run race. Number two, he played for us for four years, jumping to the Bobcats as a free agent. That’s fans for you. The better you are, the more they hate you, and it goes double if you used to play for their team. It never made sense to me, but there’s not much about fans that does.

After Bemis was introduced, the boos dropped to a more cordial level, and Pud Hairston came over and asked how Tommy was throwing. “He should be fine,” I told him.

But we both knew you could never tell for sure. Not until the game got started, and even then you might not know right away.

Early on, I thought fine was the one thing Tommy wasn’t going to be that day. His first three pitches to their leadoff batter, Jeff Coleman, were all off the plate, all in the same spot, and each one a little farther from being a strike than the one before it. I was calling for inside pitches, and he was missing away, and that’s not a good sign. The next one was right down the middle, with Coleman taking all the way. If I’d been coaching the Bobcats I’d have had him take the next pitch, too, the way Tommy had started him off 3–0, but he swung at a bad pitch and popped to short.

Tommy went to 3–1 on the second batter. The biggest mistake a pitcher can make is to get behind in the count, and that’s especially true for a hard-throwing kid like Tommy, who can have a problem with control. His next pitch caught the corner. The batter lined the next one, really got good wood on it, but it went straight into the third baseman’s glove like it had eyes.

Tommy started the next hitter off with two balls, the second one in the dirt, and I dug it out and walked it back to the mound. Bemis was in the on-deck circle, looking eager, and he’d be batting from the right-hand side of the plate today, since Tommy was a southpaw. His on-base average was about the same lefty or righty, but he had more power as a right-hander.

“Let’s get this guy,” I told Tommy.

“Piece of pie,” he said.

He’d say that, piece of pie, where other people’d say piece of cake. Other hand, he’d say something was easy as cake. I was never sure if he got the expressions mixed up accidentally or on purpose.

I went back and gave the sign — the hitter was McGinley, their left fielder, and the book on him was give him nothing but fastballs. The next two were straight heat, right where I wanted them, outside and down. The next pitch was in the same place, and I thought it got the corner, but it was ball three. The next one was down and in, probably off the plate but too close to take, and McGinley got a piece of it, but I got my glove up and held on to it, and we were out of the inning.

We went down one-two-three, with two of our outs coming on the first pitch. There was just enough time for Pud to ask me how Tommy was throwing. I said I thought he was settling in. Pud said he hoped so.

Wade Bemis led off, and he did everything but tip his hat to the fans who booed him. He stood in there like he was waiting for someone to take his picture, and maybe he was. Bemis likes to crowd the plate, and the only way to get him out is to pitch him inside. Tommy almost hit him with the first pitch. Bemis went into the dirt to get away from it, and he had a smug look on his face as he brushed off his uniform. I called for heat and Tommy gave it to him. Bemis took it for strike one, swung at the next one and missed it, and looked silly swinging at a splitter that bounced on the plate.

That got a hand from the crowd. They cheered some more when Tommy struck out the side.

I don’t know just when it was I realized something special was going on.

Oh, I knew he had his stuff when he fanned Wade Bemis. His fastball was really popping, and his control just got sharper and sharper. It got so I’d just stick the mitt out and he’d hit it. And his curve was breaking real good, and his change had the Bobcat batters digging for balls in the dirt.

And we were in sync, too. He wasn’t shaking off my signs hardly at all, and the few times he did I was already questioning the sign in my own mind. It was like we had our minds hooked up, and we were going over the batters together, figuring how to move them back off the plate, then get them to chase stuff they couldn’t hit. When it’s like that, I sometimes lose track in my own mind as to who’s catching and who’s pitching. It’s like we’re both part of the same machine, with the gears meshing just right.

Bemis led off the top of the fifth. We’d left the bases loaded in the bottom of the fourth, and you hate to see that, and Bemis had a cocky smile on his face when he stepped in. Like we’d had our chance, and blew it, and it was his turn now.

Tommy got the first one in — he was throwing nothing but first-pitch strikes by now. His next delivery was low, but didn’t miss by much. Next was a curve, and Bemis swung late and fouled it back. I called for a fastball down and on the outside corner, and Tommy got it where I wanted it, but Kalman called it ball two. I’d swear it caught the corner, but my opinion doesn’t count. It was too close to take with two strikes, but Bemis stood there and took it. He’s got a good eye, but he was plain lucky to get the call.

He fouled off about four pitches, or it could have been five, and checked his swing on a curve that he couldn’t have reached with a broom. I checked with the first base umpire, but he said he didn’t go around. I’d have sworn he did, but you see what you want to see, and anyway no one was asking me.

Next pitch we challenged him with a fastball, high and tight, and he fouled it off. I called for another in the same spot, and he was just the least bit late in his swing, and that’s what saved us, because he really tagged that one. But instead of pulling it he lifted it to the gap in right center, and Justo Chacón floated under it and took it at the warning track.

Bemis was halfway to second when the catch was made, and he turned and trotted back to the Bobcats’ dugout. I happened to notice the expression on his face, and he didn’t look frustrated or disappointed, mad at himself or at Tommy or Justo. He looked all pleased with himself, which wasn’t what you’d expect from someone who was oh for two for the day.

Maybe it was the look on his face that made me turn around and look over to the stands, where the wives were sitting. Kathy was there, of course, and I caught her eye when I turned around, and she gave me a wave. I grinned back, happy because we’d just dodged a bullet, with Bemis’s shot nothing but a long out, happy too because there was my wife waving at me.

I looked for Colleen, too, but of course she wasn’t there, and I reminded myself that Tommy had said she wasn’t coming. I hadn’t exactly forgotten that, but Bemis’s expression made me look for her even though I knew she wouldn’t be there.

I’d heard the rumors, see. I guess everybody heard the rumors. But you hear stuff like that all the time. You don’t pay any attention to it, or at least you try not to.

Once Bemis was out of the way, it only took us four pitches to get out of the inning. Tommy used three of them to strike out the number five hitter, two fastballs that he swung at and missed and a curve he held off on. It was right on the corner, and this time we got the call. Then the next Bobcat batter fouled off the first pitch and our first baseman made a nice running catch at the stands. Three up and three down.

And that was when it first hit me that what I’d just seen was fifteen up and fifteen down, that we’d played five innings without a single Bobcat making it to first base. No runs, no hits, no errors, no bases on balls, no nothing. Tommy Willis, who’d started out shaky, like he might walk the bases loaded, was past the halfway mark of throwing a perfect game.

That’s what it was, but you have to keep in mind that it sounds like more than it is. Being halfway to a perfect game (or an ordinary no-hitter, for that matter, if there can be such a thing as an ordinary no-hitter) is a little like being ninety years old and saying you’re halfway to a hundred and eighty. It’s not as though you’re an even-money shot to get there.

No-hitters are a funny thing. Some of the winningest pitchers in baseball have never had one, or even come close. They get out the guys they have to get out, they shut things down when they’ve got men in scoring position, and game after game they scatter a handful of hits and come out on top.

But to throw a no-hitter you have to be on top of every batter you face. And you need to be lucky, too, because you can have the best stuff in the world and some lifetime .220 hitter can lunge at the ball and knock a flute into shallow left. A no-hitter’s like a soap bubble, it doesn’t take much to burst it.

And a perfect game’s all that and more, because not only can a lucky swing beat you, but a batter can get lucky by not swinging, and your too-close-to-take curveball turns out to be ball four. Your outfielder can misjudge what should have been a routine fly ball, your shortstop can bobble a grounder and then throw it into the stands. Not your fault, but there goes your perfect game.

There’s a million superstitions in baseball, plus the private rituals some players go through. Maybe it’s because there’s so much in the game you can’t control, so you try to get a handle on it by fastening and unfastening the snaps on your batting glove, or keeping a hitting streak alive by not shaving, or pounding your glove a certain number of times between pitches. No one could follow all the baseball superstitions, especially since some of them contradict each other, and anyway there’s too many of them to remember. But one that just about everybody follows is what you do when a guy’s throwing a no-hitter, and that’s that you don’t do anything. And what you especially don’t do is mention it.

It used to be that radio and TV announcers wouldn’t mention it, and some of them still won’t, but plenty of them seem to figure that they’re too far away to jinx it, and their viewers would have a fit if they wound up watching a no-hitter without realizing it.

But you don’t mention it in the dugout or on the field. You sure as hell don’t say a word to the pitcher, but you don’t say anything to anybody else, either. And here’s something interesting — if you’re on the other team, doing everything you can to keep from having a no-hitter pitched against you, you still don’t say a word about it.

I don’t know why that is. There’s no limit to what ballplayers’ll say, trying to get a rise out of each other. You’ll hear comments about a player’s wife, or even his mother. But you won’t hear anything about the no-hitter he’s so many outs away from throwing. I thought it might be like countries at war not using poison gas, because if they do the other side might use it right back at them, but how would that work in baseball? The other team couldn’t mention your no-hitter until you had one going, and it might be forever before that happened.

I guess it’s just a feeling that mentioning it would be bush. Looking bush is something a ballplayer’ll do a lot in order not to.

But the point is Tommy was twelve outs away from a perfect game, which is miles and miles away, but close enough to be aware of. And I wasn’t saying anything, and neither was anybody else, but I would look around and catch another player’s eye and I’d know he knew what was going on, and he’d know the same about me. And pretty soon everybody knew, and nobody said a word.

Except the one person I wasn’t sure about was Tommy. I tried not to stare, but of course I was looking at him when he was out there and I was behind the plate, because how could I catch him properly without taking a lot of long looks at him? And when it was our turn at bat I couldn’t help sneaking peeks at him, and it seemed to me he was just looking straight ahead and not seeing anything. He was in a zone, all right. He was off somewhere with his own private thoughts, and what those thoughts might be or where they were headed was something I didn’t have a clue about. Maybe he was seeing the whole game, past and future, pitch by pitch, or maybe he was off in some world where there was no such thing as baseball. I could stare at him all I wanted and it wouldn’t matter. He wouldn’t know I was staring, and I wouldn’t be able to tell what was going on in his head.

Tommy struck out the side in the top of the sixth.

Justo walked to lead off our half of the inning, and I laid down a bunt that was good enough to get him to second. But that was as far as he got. A pop-up and a ground ball and the inning was over.

In the top of the seventh, Tommy went to three and two on the leadoff batter. Then he shook off my signs until I called for a curveball that I didn’t really want him to throw, and he hung it. The batter got all of it, and I thought it was gone, and it was, but it hooked at the last minute and was foul by a couple of feet.

The whole ballpark held its breath, and when the ball went out and the umpire called it foul, everybody in the place sighed at once. And there were cheers, real cheers, and as far as I know it’s the first time anybody drew cheers for hitting a foul ball. The batter had only got a few steps toward first base, since he and everybody else knew right away it was either a home run or a foul ball, so there was no need to set any records getting down the line. He trotted back and picked up his bat and struck out on the next pitch.

The next batter tapped a grounder to first, and the inning ended with a foul pop. It was high enough so that I could imagine a hundred things going wrong in the time it took to come down, but it plopped in my mitt and stayed there, and we were out of the inning. Twenty-one up and twenty-one down, and six to go.

We scored two runs in the bottom of the seventh, and I’d say it was about time. The thing is, no matter how good a pitcher is, he can’t win a game without runs. There was even a case once of a pitcher throwing nine no-hit innings and losing in extra innings. People don’t believe it could happen, but it’s right there in the book.

Anyway, with one out, Darnell Weeks doubled down the line, and Tommy was next in the order. Ordinarily that would have meant a pinch hitter, because Tommy’s batting average is a lot less than his playing weight. He takes a decent cut at the ball, but more often than not he fans.

So, with the game on the line, he’d have been gone. And that would have been true even if we already had a lot of runs on the board. Tommy would hardly ever stay in for a whole nine innings. If we were behind he’d come out for a pinch hitter, and if we were ahead we’d have Freddie Olendorff close things out. But you don’t lift a guy who’s six outs away from a no-hitter, let alone a perfect game. Tommy picked up a bat and struck out on three pitches.

Pepper Foxwell was up next, and he ran the count to three and two, fouled off five or six pitches, and finally got one he liked. He’s our leadoff batter and doesn’t usually hit for power, but this time he swung hard and got all of it, and just like that Tommy had a two-run cushion.

I watched the ball go out, and as soon as it cleared the fence I looked over at Tommy. Everybody else was off the bench with the crack of the bat, climbing up the dugout steps to watch and then to cheer, but Tommy never moved. I don’t even know if he saw what was happening, or paid any attention to it.

He was in a zone, and he might as well have been in a bubble. Between innings, nobody sat down next to him and nobody talked to him. That’s part of not mentioning a no-hitter. You just leave the pitcher alone, you let him stay in his own space, and I guess that’s where he was.

The next man up hit a long fly, and it looked for a minute like it was going out, too, but their center fielder gathered it in at the track, and that was the third out.

Wade Bemis led off the top of the eighth. He had a funny look on his face, not what you expect of someone whose team’s getting shut out. Like there was a joke and he was in on it.

“Hey, Willis,” he called out. “You’re almost perfect.”

Now I’d say the whole park went silent, but it pretty much already was. Because everybody in the stadium knew Tommy Willis was six outs away from putting a perfect game in the record book, and if that won’t quiet a crowd down I don’t know what will.

Quiet as it was, Bemis’s words rang out loud and clear, and what followed them was a whole lot of silence. I was truly shocked, and the first thing I did was look at Tommy, but if his face showed any expression I couldn’t read it.

In an undertone, so nobody but Bemis could hear it, I said, “Man, that was really bush.”

He must have heard me, but he didn’t react. “Just like Colleen,” he said, loud and clear. “She’s pretty close to perfect herself, Willis.”

Now Tommy reacted, but not like you’d expect. He got this big grin on his face. He stood up there on the mound while Wade Bemis knocked the dirt out of his spikes and got into his stance. Bemis crowded the plate, the way he always did, but this time he was closer than ever. I called for a fastball on the inside corner and Tommy delivered it belt-high. It was a strike and Ev Kalman called it a strike, but at the same time it was almost the end of Tommy’s perfect game, because it was that close to brushing Wade Bemis’s uniform. It was over the plate, but even so it almost hit him. In fact I wasn’t sure it didn’t touch the cloth, and if it had that would have put him on first, even if it was in the strike zone.

Everything would have been different. The box score would have been the same, if you think about it, but everything would have been different.

As close as the pitch was, Bemis didn’t turn a hair. He didn’t make a remark, either. He stepped out of the box, picked up some dirt, gave his batting helmet a tug, and stepped in again. If anything, he was crowding the plate more than ever.

I called for a curve outside. It would break in toward a right-handed batter like Bemis, and if it worked right it would just catch the outside corner. It would be a tougher pitch for him to handle if Tommy could first move him off the plate by throwing high and tight, but I was afraid another inside pitch would get a piece of his uniform and he’d be on first and Tommy’s perfect game would be out the window. I set up low, figuring if Tommy kept the ball down it would be a tough pitch for Bemis to handle, even if he was just about standing on the plate.

Well, everybody in the world saw the pitch Tommy threw. They showed it over and over on every news program in the country. I try not to look at it, but I still guess I must have seen it a hundred times, with Tommy going into his windup and throwing his fastball straight at Wade Bemis’s head. Except it wasn’t right at his head, it was behind his head, so that when Bemis saw it coming and tried to get away from it he just pulled right back into it.

Somebody had a radar gun clocking the pitch — somebody always does, these days — and the ball was going 102 miles an hour when it hit Bemis. Tommy threw it at his head and there was nothing the matter with his control. It got Bemis just above the ear, and I’ll never forget the sound it made.

I suppose they could hear it in Cooperstown.

Bemis was wearing a batting helmet. You have to, and I think they even wear them in slo-pitch softball nowadays, and there’s no question that they prevent a lot of injuries. But so do seat belts, and what good are they if your plane flies into the side of a mountain?

Everybody saw the pitch, and everybody saw what happened next, with Wade Bemis falling flat and lying still, and a whole stadium full of people catching their breath. And then, the next thing anybody knew, there were a dozen cops out on the field, all of them heading for the pitcher’s mound. My first thought was that they were there to protect Tommy, to keep the Bobcats from taking a shot at him, but the Bobcats were in the same state we were, too shocked and stunned to do anything much but stand around. And the cops weren’t protecting Tommy. What they were doing was putting cuffs on him and taking him into custody.

Wade Bemis left first. An ambulance drove in from the bullpen entrance and drove right across the infield, and they got him on a stretcher and loaded him on the ambulance and drove out the way they came, siren blazing away. They didn’t need the siren, as it turned out, and they didn’t even need the ambulance, because Bemis was dead on arrival at the hospital, and he was most likely dead when he hit the ground.

Just about everybody watched the ambulance leave, and most of the crowd missed Tommy’s exit. He left in handcuffs, escorted by ten or a dozen cops, and they took him out through the dugout and the locker room so nobody really knew what was happening.

And then we finished the game.

There was some criticism later about that, some people arguing that the game should have been called on the spot, but how could you do that? For one thing, I think you’d have had a riot on your hands. You don’t call off a game every time a batter gets hit by a pitch.

Some rookie, a skinny guy named Hector Ruiz, was announced as a pinch runner, and he was awarded first base. And our closer, Freddie Olendorff, came on in relief. He took his warmup throws, and I got a hunch and called for a pitchout on the first pitch, and sure enough, Hector Ruiz was off and running. I threw down to Pepper Foxwell at second and we had him out by four feet.

The next two batters grounded out, and that was it for the Bobcats in the top of the eighth. They brought in a new pitcher in the bottom of the ninth and he walked the bases loaded, and we scored two more runs before they managed to stop the bleeding. Then Freddie went out there and shut down the Bobcats one two three, on a pair of ground balls and a foul pop that I caught for the last out.

We were in the locker room and the crowd was out of the stadium and halfway home before we found out what had actually happened that afternoon. That Bemis was dead, which was what we were all afraid of, of course, but didn’t know for a fact, not until the word filtered through to us. And that Tommy Willis was in a jail cell, charged with murder.

That was hard to believe. I think everybody knew it wasn’t an accident, that he’d thrown that ball at Wade Bemis on purpose. And some of us knew he hadn’t been trying to just brush him back, but that he meant to hit him.

And I knew just how intentional it was, because I knew what pitch I’d called and where I’d set up. And Tommy didn’t even bother to shake off my sign. He nodded and went into his windup and threw the ball straight at Bemis.

But since when did you charge a pitcher with murder for hitting a batter? There’ve been pitchers fined for throwing intentional beanballs, and there have been some brief suspensions, but criminal charges? That’s something I’ve never heard of.

But of course it wasn’t Wade Bemis that Tommy was charged with murdering.

It was Colleen.

That was why the cops were out on the field almost before Wade Bemis hit the ground. They’d been waiting since the fourth inning. It was around then that police officers went to the Willis house in Northbrook in response to a neighbor’s complaint. They found Tommy’s wife, Colleen, in the bedroom with a carving knife stuck in her chest.

A pair of detectives came straight to the ballpark, but they had the car radio tuned to the ballgame, so before they got there they knew Tommy was pitching, and that he hadn’t allowed a hit. They got a lot of flak later on for not arresting him right away, and there’s no question but that Wade Bemis would be alive if they had, but I can see why they did what they did.

On the one hand, there was no rush. Tommy wasn’t going anywhere. All they had to do was wait until the game was over, or at least until he’d been yanked for a pinch hitter, and he could be taken into custody without making a public spectacle of the whole thing. That’s what you’d have if you arrested him in the middle of any game, and it would be even worse given the game he was pitching. Can you imagine the crowd reaction if the police interrupted a no-hitter and led the pitcher off in handcuffs? And this wasn’t just any no-hitter, it was a perfect game in the making.

You could easily have a riot on your hands.

And suppose Tommy turned out to be innocent? Suppose somebody else stuck the knife in her, and when it was all over he’d lost not only his beautiful wife but his chance for baseball immortality, all because a couple of eager-beaver cops couldn’t wait a few innings?

And here’s another thing. If they had the game on the radio, it probably means they were fans. And what kind of fan is going to screw up a perfect game?

The way it turned out, the way it goes in the record book, Tommy Willis and Freddie Olendorff combined to throw a no-hitter. That’s rare enough, but this was a no-hitter where they only faced twenty-seven batters. The one man who did reach first — not on a hit, a walk, or an error, unless you call a hit batsman a pitcher’s error — that one man was thrown out stealing. So you’d have to say the game the two of them pitched was the closest possible thing to a perfect game.

Some perfect game.

Colleen was having an affair with Wade Bemis, and Tommy found out. And they had a fight about it, and you know how it ended, with the carving knife stuck in her chest. And maybe if Bemis hadn’t said what he said at his last at-bat, Tommy would have just hung in there and pitched to him. The way he was throwing, you’ve got to figure he’d have gotten him out, and five more after him, and completed his perfect game and got his cheers and gone off quietly with the arresting officers.

Or maybe Bemis would have gotten a hit, and, with the no-hitter out of reach, Tommy would have come out of there. Maybe the Bobcats would have rallied and broken things open and won the game. I mean, it’s baseball.

Anything can happen in a baseball game.

Headaches and Bad Dreams

Three days of headaches, three nights of bad dreams. On the third night she woke twice before dawn, her heart racing, the bedding sweat-soaked. The second time she forced herself up and out of bed and into the shower. Before she’d toweled dry the headache had begun, starting at the base of the skull and radiating to the temples.

She took aspirin. She didn’t like to take drugs of any sort, and her medicine cabinet contained nothing but a few herbal preparations — echinacea and golden seal for colds, gingko for memory, and a Chinese herbal tonic, its ingredients a mystery to her, which she ordered by mail from a firm in San Francisco. She took sage, too, because it seemed to her to help center her psychically and make her perceptions more acute, although she couldn’t remember having read that it had that property. She grew sage in her garden, picked leaves periodically and dried them in the sun, and drank a cup of sage tea almost every evening.

There were herbs that were supposed to ease headaches, no end of different herbs for the many different kinds of headaches, but she’d never found one that worked. Aspirin, on the other hand, was reliable. It was a drug, and as such it probably had the effect of dulling her psychic abilities, but those abilities were of small value when your head was throbbing like Poe’s telltale heart. And aspirin didn’t slam shut the doors of perception, as something strong might do. Truth to tell, it was the nearest thing to an herb itself, obtained originally from willow bark. She didn’t know how they made it nowadays, surely there weren’t willow trees enough on the planet to cure the world’s headaches, but still...

She heated a cup of spring water, added the juice of half a lemon. That was her breakfast. She sipped it in the garden, listening to the birds.

She knew what she had to do but she was afraid.

It was a small house, just two bedrooms, everything on one floor, with no basement and shallow crawl space for an attic. She slept in one bedroom and saw clients in the other. A beaded curtain hung in the doorway of the second bedroom, and within were all the pictures and talismans and power objects from which she drew strength. There were religious pictures and statues, a crucifix, a little bronze Buddha, African masks, quartz crystals. A pack of tarot cards shared a small table with a little malachite pyramid and a necklace of bear claws.

A worn oriental rug covered most of the floor, and was itself in part covered by a smaller rug on which she would lie when she went into trance. The rest of the time she would sit in the straight-backed armchair. There was a chaise as well, and that was where the client would sit.

She had only one appointment that day, but it was right smack in the middle of the day. The client, Claire Warburton, liked to come on her lunch hour. So Sylvia got through the morning by watching talk shows on television and paging through old magazines, taking more aspirin when the headache threatened to return. At 12:30 she opened the door for her client.

Claire Warburton was a regular, coming for a reading once every four or five weeks, upping the frequency of her visits in times of stress. She had a weight problem — that was one of the reasons she liked to come on her lunch hour, so as to spare herself a meal’s worth of calories — and she was having a lingering affair with a married man. She had occasional problems at work as well, a conflict with a new supervisor, an awkward situation with a co-worker who disapproved of her love affair. There were always topics on which Claire needed counsel, and, assisted by the cards, the crystals, and her own inner resources, Sylvia always found something to tell her.

“Oh, before I forget,” Claire said, “you were absolutely right about wheat. I cut it out and I felt the difference almost immediately.”

“I thought you would. That came through loud and clear last time.”

“I told Dr. Greenleaf. ‘I think I may be allergic to wheat,’ I said. He rolled his eyes.”

“I’ll bet he did. I hope you didn’t tell him where the thought came from.”

“Oh, sure. ‘Sylvia Belgrave scanned my reflex centers with a green pyramid and picked up a wheat allergy.’ Believe me, I know better than that. I don’t know why I bothered to say anything to him in the first place. I suppose I was looking for male approval, but that’s nothing new, is it?” They discussed the point, and then she said, “But it’s so hard, you know. Staying away from wheat, I mean. It’s everywhere.”

“Yes.”

“Bread, pasta. I wish I could cut it out completely, but I’ve managed to cut way down, and it helps. Sylvia? Are you all right?”

“A headache. It keeps coming back.”

“Really? Well, I hate to say it, but do you think maybe you ought to see a doctor?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I know the cause, and I even know the cure. There’s something I have to do.”

When Sylvia was nineteen years old, she fell in love with a young man named Gordon Sawyer. He had just started dental school, and they had an understanding; after he had qualified as a dentist, they would get married. They were not officially engaged, she did not have a ring, but they had already reached the stage of talking about names for their children.

He drowned on a family canoe trip. A couple of hours after it happened, but long before anybody could get word to her, Sylvia awoke from a nightmare, bathed in perspiration. The details of the dream had fled, but she knew it had been awful, and that something terrible had happened to Gordon. She couldn’t go back to sleep, and she had been up for hours with an unendurable headache when the doorbell rang and a cousin of Gordon’s brought the bad news.

That was her first undeniable psychic experience. Before that she’d had feelings and hunches, twinges of perception that were easy to shrug off or blink away. Once a fortune-teller at a county fair had read her palm and told her she had psychic powers herself, powers she’d be well advised to develop. She and Gordon had laughed about it, and he’d offered to buy her a crystal ball for her birthday.

When Gordon died her life found a new direction. If Gordon had lived she’d have gone on working as a salesgirl until she became a full-time wife and mother. Instead she withdrew into herself and began following the promptings of an inner voice. She could walk into a bookstore and her feet would lead her to some arcane volume that would turn out to be just what she needed to study next. She would sit in her room in her parents’ house, staring for hours at a candle flame, or at her own reflection in the mirror. Her parents were worried, but nobody did anything beyond urging her to get out more and meet people. She was upset over Gordon’s death, they agreed, and that was understandable, and she would get over it.

“Twenty-five dollars,” Claire Warburton said, handing over two tens and a five. “You know, I was reading about this woman in People magazine, she reads the cards for either Oprah or Madonna, don’t ask me which. And do you know how much she gets for a session?”

“Probably more than twenty-five dollars,” Sylvia said.

“They didn’t say, but they showed the car she drives around in. It’s got an Italian name that sounds like testosterone, and it’s fire-engine red, naturally. Of course, that’s California. People in this town think you’d have to be crazy to pay twenty-five dollars. I don’t see how you get by, Sylvia. I swear I don’t.”

“There was what my mother left,” she said. “And the insurance.”

“And a good thing, but it won’t last forever. Can’t you—”

“What?”

“Well, look into the crystal and try to see the stock market? Or ask your spirit guides for investment advice?”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“That’s what I knew you’d say,” Claire said. “I guess that’s what everybody says. You can’t use it for your own benefit or it doesn’t work.”

“That’s as it should be,” she said. “It’s a gift, and the Universe doesn’t necessarily give you what you want. But you have to keep it. No exchanges, no refunds.”

She parked across the street from the police station, turned off the engine, and sat in the car for a few moments, gathering herself. Her car was not a red Testarossa but a six-year-old Ford Tempo. It ran well, got good mileage, and took her where she wanted to go. What more could you ask of a car?

Inside, she talked to two uniformed officers before she wound up on the other side of a desk from a balding man with gentle brown eyes that belied his jutting chin. He was a detective, and his name was Norman Jeffcote.

He looked at her card, then looked directly at her. Twenty years had passed since her psychic powers had awakened with her fiancé’s death, and she knew that the years had not enhanced her outward appearance. Then she’d been a girl with regular features turned pretty by her vital energy, a petite and slender creature, and now she was a little brown-haired mouse, dumpy and dowdy.

“ ‘Psychic counseling,’ ” he read aloud. “What’s that exactly, Ms. Belgrave?”

“Sometimes I sense things,” she said.

“And you think you can help us with the Sporran kid?”

“That poor little girl,” she said.

Melissa Sporran, six years old, only child of divorced parents, had disappeared eight days previously on her way home from school.

“The mother broke down on camera,” Detective Jeffcote said, “and I guess it got to people, so much so that it made some of the national newscasts. That kind of coverage pulls people out of the woodwork. I got a woman on the phone from Chicago, telling me she just knows little Melissa’s in a cave at the foot of a waterfall. She’s alive, but in great danger. You’re a local woman, Ms. Belgrave. You know any waterfalls within a hundred miles of here?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. This woman in Chicago, she may have been a little fuzzy on the geography, but she was good at making sure I got her name spelled right. But I won’t have a problem in your case, will I? Because your name’s all written out on your card.”

“You’re not impressed with psychic phenomena,” she said.

“I think you people got a pretty good racket going,” he said, “and more power to you if you can find people who want to shell out for whatever it is you’re selling. But I’ve got a murder investigation to run, and I don’t appreciate a lot of people with four-leaf clovers and crystal balls.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” she said.

“Well, that’s not for me to say, Ms. Belgrave, but now that you bring it up—”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t have any choice. Detective, have you heard of Sir Isaac Newton?”

“Sure, but I probably don’t know him as well as you do. Not if you’re getting messages from him.”

“He was the foremost scientific thinker of his time,” she said, “and in his later years he became quite devoted to astrology, which you may take as evidence either of his openmindedness or of encroaching senility, as you prefer.”

“I don’t see what this has to—”

“A colleague chided him,” she said, brooking no interruption, “and made light of his enthusiasm, and do you know what Newton said? ‘Sir, I have investigated the subject. You have not. I do not propose to waste my time discussing it with you.’ ”

He looked at her and she returned his gaze. After a long moment he said, “All right, maybe you and Sir Isaac have a point. You got a hunch about the Sporran kid?”

“Not a hunch,” she said, and explained the dreams, the headaches. “I believe I’m linked to her,” she said, “however it works, and I don’t begin to understand how it works. I think...”

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid I think she’s dead.”

“Yes,” Jeffcote said heavily. “Well, I hate to say it, but you gain in credibility with that one, Ms. Belgrave. We think so, too.”

“If I could put my hands on some object she owned, or a garment she wore...”

“You and the dogs.” She looked at him. “There was a fellow with a pack of bloodhounds, needed something of hers to get the scent. Her mother gave us this little sunsuit, hadn’t been laundered since she wore it last. The dogs got the scent good, but they couldn’t pick it up anywhere. I think we still have it. You wait here.”

He came back with the garment in a plastic bag, drew it out, and wrinkled his nose at it. “Smells of dog now,” he said. “Does that ruin it for you?”

“The scent’s immaterial,” she said. “It shouldn’t even matter if it’s been laundered. May I?”

“You need anything special, Ms. Belgrave? The lights out, or candles lit, or—”

She shook her head, told him he could stay, motioned for him to sit down. She took the child’s sunsuit in her hands and closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply, and almost at once her mind began to fill with images. She saw the girl, saw her face, and recognized it from dreams she thought she had forgotten.

She felt things, too. Fear, mostly, and pain, and more fear, and then, at the end, more pain.

“She’s dead,” she said softly, her eyes still closed. “He strangled her.”

“He?”

“I can’t see what he looks like. Just impressions.” She waved a hand in the air, as if to dispel clouds, then extended her arm and pointed. “That direction,” she said.

“You’re pointing southeast.”

“Out of town,” she said. “There’s a white church off by itself. Beyond that there’s a farm.” She could see it from on high, as if she were hovering overhead, like a bird making lazy circles in the sky. “I think it’s abandoned. The barn’s unpainted and deserted. The house has broken windows.”

“There’s the Baptist church on Reistertown Road. A plain white building with a little steeple. And out beyond it there’s the Petty farm. She moved into town when the old man died.”

“It’s abandoned,” she said, “but the fields don’t seem to be overgrown. That’s strange, isn’t it?”

“Definitely the Petty farm,” he said, his voice quickening. “She let the grazing when she moved.”

“Is there a silo?”

“Seems to me they kept a dairy herd. There’d have be a silo.”

“Look in the silo,” she said.

She was studying Detective Jeffcote’s palm when the call came. She had already told him he was worried about losing his hair, and that there was nothing he could do about it, that it was inevitable. The inevitability was written in his hand, although she’d sensed it the moment she saw him, just as she had at once sensed his concern. You didn’t need to be psychic for that, though. It was immediately evident in the way he’d grown his remaining hair long and combed it to hide the bald spot.

“You should have it cut short,” she said. “Very short. A crew cut, in fact.”

“I do that,” he said, “and everybody’ll be able to see how thin it’s getting.”

“They won’t notice,” she told him. “The shorter it is, the less attention it draws. Short hair will empower you.”

“Wasn’t it the other way around with Samson?”

“It will strengthen you,” she said. “Inside and out.”

“And you can tell all that just looking at my hand?”

She could tell all that just looking at his head, but she only smiled and nodded. Then she noticed an interesting configuration in his palm and told him about it, making some dietary suggestions based on what she saw. She stopped talking when the phone rang, and he reached to answer it.

He listened for a long moment, then covered the mouthpiece with the very palm she’d been reading. “You were right,” he said. “In the silo, covered up with old silage. They wouldn’t have found her if they hadn’t known to look for her. And the smell of the fermented silage masked the smell of the, uh, decomposition.”

He put the phone to his ear, listened some more, spoke briefly, covered the mouthpiece again. “Marks on her neck,” he said. “Hard to tell if she was strangled, not until there’s a full autopsy, but it looks like a strong possibility.”

“Teeth,” she said suddenly.

“Teeth?”

She frowned, upset with herself. “That’s all I can get when I try to see him.”

“The man who—”

“Took her there, strangled her, killed her. I can’t say if he was tall or short, fat or thin, old or young.”

“Just that he had teeth.”

“I guess that must have been what she noticed. Melissa. She must have been frightened of him because of the teeth.”

“Did he bite her? Because if he did—”

“No,” she said sharply. “Or I don’t know, perhaps he did, but it was the appearance of the teeth that frightened her. He had bad teeth.”

“Bad teeth?”

“Crooked, discolored, broken. They must have made a considerable impression on her.”

“Jesus,” he said, and into the mouthpiece he said, “You still there? What was the name of that son of a bitch, did some handyman work for the kid’s mother? Henrich, Heinrich, something like that? Looked like a dentist’s worst nightmare? Yeah, well, pick him up again.”

He hung up the phone. “We questioned him,” he said, “and we let him go. Big gangly overgrown kid, God made him as ugly as he could and then hit him in the mouth with a shovel. This time I think I’ll talk to him myself. Ms. Belgrave? You all right?”

“Just exhausted, all of a sudden,” she said. “I haven’t been sleeping well these past few nights. And what we just did, it takes a lot out of you.”

“I can imagine.”

“But I’ll be all right,” she assured him. And, getting to her feet, she realized she wouldn’t be needing any more aspirin. The headache was gone.

The handyman, whose name turned out to be Walter Hendrick, broke down under questioning and admitted the abduction and murder of Melissa Sporran. Sylvia saw his picture on television but turned off the set, unable to look at him. His mouth was closed, you couldn’t see his teeth, but even so she couldn’t bear the sight of him.

The phone rang, and it was a client she hadn’t seen in months, calling to book a session. She made a note in her appointment calendar and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. She was finishing the tea and trying to decide if she wanted another when the phone rang again.

It was a new client, a Mrs. Huggins, eager to schedule a reading as soon as possible. Sylvia asked the usual questions and made sure she got the woman’s date of birth right. Astrology wasn’t her main focus, but it never hurt to have that data in hand before a client’s first visit. It made it easier, often, to get a grasp on the personality.

“And who told you about me?” she asked, almost as an afterthought. Business always came through referrals, a satisfied client told a friend or relative or co-worker, and she liked to know who was saying good things about her.

“Now who was it?” the woman wondered. “I’ve been meaning to call for such a long time, and I can’t think who it was that originally told me about you.”

She let it go at that. But, hanging up, she realized the woman had just lied to her. That was not exactly unheard of, although it was annoying when they lied about their date of birth, shaving a few years off their age and unwittingly providing her with an erroneous astrological profile in the process. But this woman had found something wholly unique to lie about, and she wondered why.

Within the hour the phone rang again, another old client of whom she’d lost track. “I’ll bet you’re booked solid,” the woman said. “I just hope you can fit me in.”

“Are you being ironic?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Because you know it’s a rare day when I see more than two people, and there are days when I don’t see anyone at all.”

“I don’t know how many people you see,” the woman said. “I do know that it’s always been easy to get an appointment with you at short notice, but I imagine that’s all changed now, hasn’t it?”

“Why would it...”

“Now that you’re famous.”

Famous.

Of course she wasn’t, not really. Someone did call her from Florida, wanting an interview for a national tabloid, and there was a certain amount of attention in the local press, and on area radio stations. But she was a quiet, retiring woman, hardly striking in appearance and decidedly undramatic in her responses. Her personal history was not interesting in and of itself, nor was she inclined to go into it. Her lifestyle was hardly colorful.

Had it been otherwise, she might have caught a wave of publicity and been nationally famous for her statutory fifteen minutes, reading Joey Buttafuoco’s palm on Hard Copy, sharing herbal weight-loss secrets with Oprah.

Instead she had her picture in the local paper, seated in her garden. (She wouldn’t allow them to photograph her in her studio, among the candles and crystals.) And that was enough to get her plenty of attention, not all of which she welcomed. No one actually crept across her lawn to stare in her window, but cars did slow or even stop in front of her house, and one man got out of his car and took pictures.

She got more attention than usual when she left the house, too. People who knew her congratulated her, hoping to hear a little more about the case and the manner in which she’d solved it. Strangers recognized her — on the street, in the supermarket. While their interest was not intrusive, she was uncomfortably aware of it.

But the biggest change, really, was in the number of people who suddenly found themselves in need of her services. She was bothered at first by the thought that they were coming to her for the wrong reason, and she wondered if she should refuse to accommodate such curiosity seekers. She meditated on the question, and the answer that came to her was that she was unequipped to judge the motivation of those who sought her out. How could she tell the real reason that brought some troubled soul to her door? And how could she determine, irrespective of motivation, what help she might be able to provide?

She decided that she ought to see everyone. If she found herself personally uncomfortable with a client’s energy, then she wouldn’t see that person anymore. That had been her policy all along. But she wouldn’t prejudge any of them, wouldn’t screen them in advance.

“But it’s impossible to fit everyone in,” she told Claire Warburton. “I’m just lucky I got a last-minute cancellation or I wouldn’t have been able to schedule you until the end of next week.”

“How does it feel to be an overnight success after all these years?”

“Is that what I am? A success? Sometimes I think I liked it better when I was a failure. No, I don’t mean that, but no more do I like being booked as heavily as I am, I’ll tell you that. The work is exhausting. I’m seeing four people a day, and yesterday I saw five, which I’ll never do again. It drains you.”

“I can imagine.”

“But the gentleman was so persistent, and I thought, well, I do have the time. But by the time the day was over...”

“You were exhausted.”

“I certainly was. And I hate to book appointments weeks in advance, or to refuse to book them at all. It bothers me to turn anyone away, because how do I know that I’m not turning away someone in genuine need? For years I had less business than I would have preferred, and now I have too much, and I swear I don’t know what to do about it.” She frowned. “And when I meditate on it, I don’t get anywhere at all.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Claire said. “You don’t need to look in a crystal for this one. Just look at a balance sheet.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sylvia,” Claire said, “raise your damn rates.”

“My rates?”

“For years you’ve been seeing a handful of people a week and charging them twenty-five dollars each, and wondering why you’re poor as a churchmouse. Raise your rates and you’ll increase your income to a decent level — and you’ll keep yourself from being overbooked. The people who really need you will pay the higher price, and the curiosity seekers will think twice.”

“But the people who’ve been coming to me for years—”

“You can grandfather them in,” Claire said. “Confine the rate increase to new customers. But I wouldn’t.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“No, and I’m costing my own self money by saying this, but I’ll say it anyhow. People appreciate less what costs them less. That woman in California, drives the red Tosteroni? You think she’d treasure that car if somebody sold it to her for five thousand dollars? You think People magazine would print a picture of her standing next to it? Raise your rates and everybody’ll think more of you, and pay more attention to the advice you give ’em.”

“Well,” she said, slowly, “I suppose I could go from twenty-five to thirty-five dollars...”

“Fifty,” Claire said firmly. “Not a penny less.”

In the end, she had to raise her fee three times. Doubling it initially had the paradoxical effect of increasing the volume of calls. A second increase, to seventy-five dollars, was a step in the right direction, slowing the flood of calls; she waited a few months, then took a deep breath and told a caller her price was one hundred dollars a session.

And there it stayed. She booked three appointments a day, five days a week, and pocketed fifteen hundred dollars a week for her efforts. She lost some old clients, including a few who had been coming to her out of habit, the way they went to get their hair done. But it seemed to her that the ones who stayed actually listened more intently to what she saw in the cards or crystal, or channeled while she lay in trance.

“Told you,” Claire said. “You get what you pay for.”

One afternoon there was a call from Detective Jeffcote. There was a case, she might have heard or read about it, and could she possibly help him with it? She had appointments scheduled, she said, but she could come to the police station as soon as her last client was finished, and—

“No, I’ll come to you,” he said. “Just tell me when’s a good time.”

He turned up on the dot. His hair was very short, she noticed, and he seemed more confident and self-possessed than when she’d seen him before. In the living room, he accepted a cup of tea and told her about the girl who’d gone missing, an eleventh-grader named Peggy Mae Turlock. “There hasn’t been much publicity,” he said, “because kids her age just go off sometimes, but she’s an A student and sings in the church choir, and her parents are worried. And I just thought, well...”

She reminded him that she’d had three nights of nightmares and headaches when Melissa Sporran disappeared.

“As if the information was trying to get through,” he said. “And you haven’t had anything like that this time? Because I brought her sunglasses case, and a baseball jacket they tell me she wore all the time.”

“We can try,” she said.

She took him into her studio, lit two of the new scented candles, seated him on the chaise, and took the chair for herself. She draped Peggy Mae’s jacket over her lap and held the green vinyl eyeglass case in both hands. She closed her eyes, breathed slowly and deeply.

After a while she said, “Pieces.”

“Pieces?”

“I’m getting these horrible images,” she said, “of dismemberment, but I don’t know that it has anything to do with the girl. I don’t know where it’s coming from.”

“You picking up any sense of where she might be, or of who might have put her there?”

She slowed her breathing, let herself go deep, deep.

“Down down down,” she said.

“How’s that, Ms. Belgrave?”

“Something in a well,” she said. “And old rusty chain going down into a well, and something down there.”

A search of wells all over the country divulged no end of curious debris, including a skeleton that turned out to be that of a large dog. No human remains were found, however, and the search was halted when Peggy Mae came home from Indianapolis. She’d gone there for an abortion, expecting to be back in a day or so, but there had been medical complications. She’d been in the hospital there for a week, never stopping to think that her parents were afraid for her life, or that the police were probing abandoned wells for her dismembered corpse.

Sylvia got a call when the girl turned up. “The important thing is she’s all right,” he said, “although I wouldn’t be surprised if right about now she wishes she was dead. Point is you didn’t let us down. You were trying to home in on something that wasn’t there in the first place, since she was alive and well all along.”

“I’m glad she’s alive,” she said, “but disappointed in myself. All of that business about wells.”

“Maybe you were picking up something from fifty years ago,” he said. “Who knows how many wells there are, boarded up and forgotten years ago? And who knows what secrets one or two of them might hold?”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

Perhaps he was. But all the same the few days when the police were looking in old wells was a professional high water mark for her. After the search was called off, after Peggy Mae came home in disgrace, it wasn’t quite so hard to get an appointment with Sylvia Belgrave.

Three nights of nightmares and fitful sleep, three days of headaches. And, awake or asleep, a constant parade of hideous images.

It was hard to keep herself from running straight to the police. But she forced herself to wait, to let time take its time. And then on the morning after the third unbearable night she showered away the stale night sweat and put on a skirt and a blouse and a flowered hat. She sat in the garden with a cup of hot water and lemon juice, then rinsed it in the kitchen sink and went to her car.

The car was a Taurus, larger and sleeker and, certainly, newer than her old Tempo, but it did no more and no less than the Tempo had done. It conveyed her from one place to another. This morning it brought her to the police station, and her feet brought her the rest of the way — into the building, and through the corridors to Detective Norman Jeffcote’s office.

“Ms. Belgrave,” he said. “Have a seat, won’t you?”

His hair was longer than it had been when he’d come to her house. He hadn’t regrown it entirely, hadn’t once again taken to combing it over the bald spot, but neither was it as flatteringly short as she’d advised him to keep it.

And there was something unsettling about his energy. Maybe it had been a mistake to come.

She sat down and winced, and he asked her if she was all right. “My head,” she said, and pressed her fingertips to her temples.

“You’ve got a headache?”

“Endless headaches. And bad dreams, and all the rest of it.”

“I see.”

“I didn’t want to come,” she said. “I told myself not to intrude, not to be a nuisance. But it’s just like the first time, when that girl disappeared.”

“Melissa Sporran.”

“And now there’s a little boy gone missing,” she said.

“Eric Ackerman.”

“Yes, and his address is no more than half a mile from my house. Maybe that’s why all these impressions have been so intense.”

“Do you know where he is now, Ms. Belgrave?”

“I don’t,” she said, “but I do feel connected to him, and I have the strong sense that I might be able to help.”

He nodded. “And your hunches usually pay off.”

“Not always,” she said. “That was confusing the year before last, sending you to look in wells.”

“Well, nobody’s perfect.”

“Surely not.”

He leaned forward, clasped his hands. “The Ackerman boy, Ms. Belgrave. You think he’s all right?”

“Oh, I wish I could say yes.”

“But you can’t.”

“The nightmares,” she said, “and the headaches. If he were all right, the way the Turlock girl was all right—”

“There’d be no dreams.”

“That’s my fear, yes.”

“So you think the boy is...”

“Dead,” she said.

He looked at her for a long moment before he nodded. “I suppose you’d like some article connected with the boy,” he said. “A piece of clothing, say.”

“If you had something.”

“How’s this?” he said, and opened a drawer and brought out a teddy bear, its plush fur badly worn, the stitches showing where it had been ripped and mended. Her heart broke at the sight of it and she put her hand to her chest.

“We ought to have a record of this,” he said, propping a tape recorder on the desk top, pressing a button to start it recording. “So that I don’t miss any of the impressions you pick up. Because you can probably imagine how frantic the boy’s parents are.”

“Yes, of course.”

“So do you want to state your name for the record?”

“My name?”

“Yes, for the record.”

“My name is Sylvia Belgrave.”

“And you’re a psychic counselor?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re here voluntarily.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why don’t you take the teddy bear, then. And see what you can pick up from it.”

She thought she’d braced herself, but she was unprepared for the flood of images that came when she took the little stuffed bear in her hands. They were more vivid than anything she’d experienced before. Perhaps she should have expected as much; the dreams, and the headaches, too, were worse than they’d been after Melissa Sporran’s death, worse than years ago, when Gordon Sawyer drowned.

“Smothered,” she managed to say. “A pillow or something like it over his face. He was struggling to breathe and... and he couldn’t.”

“And he’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“And would you happen to know where, Ms. Belgrave?”

Her hands tightened on the teddy bear. The muscles in her arms and shoulders went rigid, bracing to keep the images at bay.

“A hole in the ground,” she said.

“A hole in the ground?”

“A basement!” Her eyes were closed, her heart pounding. “A house, but they haven’t finished building it yet. The outer walls are up but that’s all.”

“A building site.”

“Yes.”

“And the body’s in the basement.”

“Under a pile of rags,” she said.

“Under a pile of rags. Any sense of where, Ms. Belgrave? There are a lot of houses under construction. It would help if we knew what part of town to search.”

She tried to get her bearings, then realized she didn’t need them. Her hand, of its own accord, found the direction and pointed.

“North and west,” he said. “Let’s see, where’s there a house under construction, ideally one they stopped work on? Seems to me there’s one just off Radbourne Road about a quarter of a mile past Six Mile Road. You think that might be the house, Ms. Belgrave?”

She opened her eyes. He was reaching across to take the teddy bear from her. She had to will her fingers to open to release it.

“We’ve got some witnesses,” he said, his voice surprisingly gentle. “A teenager mowing a lawn who saw Eric Ackerman getting into a blue Taurus just like the one you’ve got parked across the street. He even noticed the license plate, but then it’s the kind you notice, isn’t it? 2ND SITE. Second sight, eh? Perfect for your line of work.”

God, her head was throbbing.

“A woman in a passing car saw you carrying the boy to the house. She didn’t spot the vanity plate, but she furnished a good description of the car, and of you, Ms. Belgrave. She thought it was odd, you see. The way you were carrying him, as if he was unconscious, or even dead. Was he dead by then?”

“Yes.”

“You killed him first thing? Smothered him?”

“With a pillow,” she said. “I wanted to do it right away, before he became afraid. And I didn’t want him to suffer.”

“Real considerate.”

“He struggled,” she said, “and then he was still. But I didn’t realize just how much he suffered. It was over so quickly, you see, that I told myself he didn’t really suffer a great deal at all.”

“And?”

“And I was wrong,” she said. “I found that out in the dreams. And just now, holding the bear...”

He was saying something but she couldn’t hear it. She was trembling, and the headache was too much to be borne, and she couldn’t follow his words. He brought her a glass of water and she drank it, and that helped a little.

“There were other witnesses, too,” he said, “once we found the body, and knew about the car and the license plate. People who saw your car going to and from the construction site. The chief wanted to have you picked up right away, but I talked him into waiting. I figured you’d come in and tell us all about it yourself.”

“And here I am,” she heard herself say.

“And here you are. You want to tell me about it from the beginning?”

She told it all simply and directly, how she’d selected the boy, how she got him to come into the car with her, how she’d killed him and dumped the body in the spot she’d selected in advance. How she’d gone home, and washed her hands, and waited through three days and nights of headaches and bad dreams.

“Ever kill anybody before, Ms. Belgrave?”

“No,” she said. “No, of course not.”

“Ever have anything to do with Eric Ackerman or his parents?”

“No.”

“Why, then?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Second sight,” she said.

“Second...”

“Second sight. Vanity plates. Vanity.”

“Vanity?”

“All is vanity,” she said, and closed her eyes for a moment. “I never made more than a hundred fifty dollars a week,” she said, “and nobody knew me or paid me a moment’s attention, but that was all right. And then Melissa Sporran was killed, and I was afraid to come in but I came in anyway. And everything changed.”

“You got famous.”

“For a little while,” she said. “And my phone started ringing, and I raised my rates, and my phone rang even more. And I was able to help people, more people than I’d ever helped before, and they were making use of what I gave them, they were taking it seriously.”

“And you bought a new car.”

“I bought a new car,” she said, “and I bought some other things, and I stopped being famous, and the ones who only came because they were curious stopped coming when they stopped being curious, and old customers came less often because they couldn’t afford it, and...”

“And business dropped off.”

“And I thought, I could help so many more people if, if it happened again.”

“If a child died.”

“Yes.”

“And if you helped.”

“Yes. And I waited, you know, for something to happen. And there were crimes, there are always crimes. There were even murders, but there was nothing that gave me the dreams and the headaches.”

“So you decided to do it yourself.”

“Yes.”

“Because you’d be able to help so many more people.”

“That’s what I told myself,” she said. “But I was just fooling myself. I did it because I’m having trouble making the payments on my new car, a car I didn’t need in the first place. But I need the car now, and I need the phone ringing, and I need—” She frowned, put her head in her hands. “I need aspirin,” she said. “That first time, when I told you about Melissa Sporran, the headache went away. But I’ve told you everything about Eric Ackerman, more than I ever planned to tell you, and the headache hasn’t gone away. It’s worse than ever.”

He told her it would pass, but she shook her head. She knew it wouldn’t, or the bad dreams, either. Some things you just knew.

Hit the Ball, Drag Fred

One rarely thought of golf as a waiting game. Oh, to be sure, it was a game of considerable preparation, a game even of contemplation. One spent untold hours on the driving range, additional hours on the putting green. And, before actually hitting the ball, one took time to judge the distance, to assess the wind direction and velocity, and thus to select the right club and to envision the ideal shot. Then one took the indispensable practice swing, and in the follow-through one watched the imaginary ball sail to its intended landing place. Then and only then did one address the ball and take a cut at it.

But one did not in the ordinary course of things spend a great deal of time standing around and waiting. If, as sometimes happened, one was stuck in a foursome of dullards who spent half their time knocking the ball into the rough and the other half looking for it, then a certain amount of waiting was inevitable. But Nicholson rarely found himself in such company. He generally avoided playing with men he didn’t know. Better to go out by oneself and play through the duffers and dawdlers.

Today, though, waiting seemed inescapable. At the first tee, a man named Jason Hedrick was waiting for someone to play a round with him, and, a hundred yards away in his car, Roland Nicholson waited for Hedrick to get tired of waiting. There was a bad moment when a car pulled up and golfers piled out of it, but Nicholson relaxed when he saw there were four of them. Their group was complete, and they wouldn’t be asking Hedrick to join them.

The four men teed off in turn while Hedrick went on practicing on the putting green. By the time they had disappeared down the fairway, another car pulled up and two golfers emerged, a man and a woman. Nicholson didn’t think such a couple would invite a single man to join them, nor could Hedrick politely invite himself. Still, anything could happen on a golf course, so Nicholson held his breath until the two had teed off and left Jason Hedrick with his putter in his hand.

The man, Nicholson noted, teed off twice. He topped his first drive and sent a little dribbler fifty yards down the middle of the fairway, and promptly teed up a second ball, driving it just as straight but three or four times as far. He’d taken a mulligan, obviously rejecting (and not troubling to count) his first effort. You couldn’t do that in a tournament, or in any halfway serious game of golf, but a disheartening number of players allowed themselves a mulligan in noncompetitive social play, especially off the first tee.

Not Roland Nicholson. He was a far cry from a scratch golfer, and it was no rare thing for him to top a grounder off the tee, or slice the ball into deep woods. As far as he was concerned, that was part of the game. You could take all the practice swings you wanted, but once you actually hit the ball, you went where it went — and hit it again. That, after all, was the game those funny-talking men in skirts had invented at St. Andrew’s. If you weren’t going to play it by the rules, why play it at all?

When a third car arrived, Nicholson thought the day was lost. Two men got out of it and strode toward the clubhouse. Hedrick, who had to be heartily sick of the putting green by now, would feel free to ask if he could join them, and they’d have no reason to turn him down.

Nicholson could invite himself along and make up a foursome, but why on earth would he do that? Better to play a round by himself, and he didn’t much feel like that, either. Easier to turn the car around and go home.

But then the two men came around the clubhouse, each at the wheel of a motorized golf cart. Hedrick might rent a cart himself, desperation might drive him to it, but Nicholson had a hunch the man would hold out. Golfers like Jason Hedrick, and indeed like Nicholson himself, golfers who walked the course, were apt to regard the cart contingent with a raised eyebrow, if not with a curled lip, much as a hunter who tracked and stalked game might regard a man who shot wolves in the Arctic from a helicopter.

The two wheeled golfers dismounted, teed off — no mulligans, Nicholson was pleased to note — and hopped on their motorized steeds. Even as they vanished in the distance, Jason Hedrick walked off the putting green, had a word with the club pro, and headed for the first tee. His drive was straight and true, as good as any Nicholson had seen that morning. He bent to retrieve his tee, straightened up, returned his driver to his bag, and started walking.

Now was the critical moment. If anyone came along, a twosome or foursome, anyone at all...

Nicholson had to wait, had to give Hedrick time to finish the first hole and begin the second. Had to wait, while some unwitting clown in plaid pants came along and spoiled everything.

But no one did. Time crawled, certainly, but still it passed, and when he judged that enough of it had done so, Roland Nicholson fetched his bag of clubs from the trunk, had a word with the club pro, and teed off.

The first hole was a 340-yard par four, with a dogleg to the left around a stand of trees. If Tiger Woods were to play the Oak Hollow course, or John Daly, or any of the really long hitters, he might try to hit a controlled hook that would curve to the left after it cleared the trees. Such refinements were not part of Nicholson’s game, and all he tried to do was keep the ball in the middle of the fairway and drive it as far as he could.

The result was satisfactory. He’d have liked more distance, but the ball flew straight as an arrow, and what more could you ask? He walked to the ball, took out his two iron, put it back, touched the big silvery head of one club, then drew his four wood. His shot, after a deliberate practice swing, was hole high but off to the left. He chipped onto the green, some forty feet from the pin. His first putt ran well past the hole — never up, never in, he told himself — but he steadied himself and sank a twelve-footer coming back, for a bogey five.

A good start.

It took Nicholson several more holes to catch up with Hedrick. He played quickly, but he didn’t want to hurry his shots, knowing that would amount to a false economy — he’d hit the ball poorly, and consequently would have to hit it more often.

He bogeyed the second hole. The third hole was a par five, and he put together a good drive and a strong second shot and was at the edge of the green in three. Par seemed a good possibility but his putter let him down, and he wound up with a seven.

He wrote it on the scorecard.

On the fourth hole he put it all together. His drive carried the fairway bunkers, and he followed it with a five iron, a wedge, and a putt that found the center of the cup. Four for a par.

The fifth hole was the first par three, and as he reached the tee he could see Hedrick 190 yards away, kneeling down, trying to read the green. Nicholson teed up a ball, grabbed his three iron, addressed the ball without benefit of a practice swing, and took his best shot.

“Fore!” he cried.

The ball sailed straight at the green, straight at Hedrick, but carried beyond both and dropped into a sand trap on the far side of the green.

He called out an apology, grabbed his clubs, and hurried down the fairway.

“So damned sorry,” he was saying. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I never even saw you there until I’d hit the ball, and for a change it went right where it was supposed to. I thought it was going to take your head off.”

“I could see it was long,” Hedrick said, “the moment I looked up. What did you use, a three iron?”

“A four,” Nicholson said.

“Oh? Then you must have had your heart in it. I always use a four here myself, but I never carry the green.”

“I should have got more loft,” Nicholson said. “Look, I’m sorry. I’ll be quiet while you putt out, and I’ll be careful not to hit into you again.”

“Prefer to play alone, do you?”

“The only thing I prefer it to,” said Nicholson, “is not playing at all. Fellow I was supposed to play with couldn’t make it. Ben Weymouth. Don’t suppose you know him?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“He canceled at the last minute. I’d been hoping I’d run into somebody at the first tee, but no such luck, and I couldn’t afford to wait on the off chance someone would turn up. And Jimmy said I’d just missed a fellow who’d been looking for somebody to play with.”

“That would have been me,” Hedrick said. “I got tired of waiting, but it looks as though we found each other after all. It’s your shot.”

“Oh,” Nicholson said, seemingly taken aback. “But I couldn’t possibly horn in, not after the way I almost crowned you there.”

“No harm done. So why not finish the round together? Unless you really don’t want company.”

“Company’s exactly what I do want. If you’re sure...”

“I’m sure,” Hedrick said. “And you’re away, and the lie you’ve got in the trap is the reason God invented the sand wedge.”

He got a good shot from the trap and two-putted for a bogey four. Hedrick’s putt lipped the cup, hesitated for a long moment, then dropped for a birdie. Nicholson complimented him on the putt and Hedrick turned it aside, saying it was the result of having so much time to think about it.

“Anyway,” he said, “you’ve brought me luck. If I’d hit that putt straight off, it never would have dropped.”

“Good luck for both of us,” Nicholson replied.

On the next hole they both hit good drives, but to opposite sides of the broad fairway. They met on the green, each reaching it in three, each two-putting for a bogey.

On number seven, Hedrick hooked his drive into the tall grass to the left of the fairway. “Hell,” he said.

“Shouldn’t hurt you much,” Nicholson told him. He teed up his own ball and sent it down the left edge of the fairway.

“Birds of a feather,” he said, retrieving his tee, returning his club to the bag. His forefinger stroked the silvery head of the big driver before he hoisted his bag and stepped away from the tee. “Hit the ball, drag Fred,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“I love golf jokes,” Nicholson said, as they headed down the fairway together. “Not as much as I love golf, but I do get a kick out of them. Of course they’re all the same joke.”

“All the same joke?”

“The point of every golf joke I ever heard,” said Nicholson, “is the obsessive nature of the game. That’s what they’re all about, and that’s what makes them funny. Like the funeral passing by.”

“I must have missed a couple of strokes there,” Hedrick said. “What’s so funny about a funeral?”

“Two fellows are playing golf,” Nicholson said. “And as they approach the tee for the seventh hole there’s a long string of cars passing by.”

“In the middle of a golf course?”

“There’s a road edging the course,” Nicholson said patiently, “and from the seventh tee, they’re within chipping distance of the road. And there are all these cars passing at slow speed, and the first one’s a hearse and the next two are black limousines, and they’ve all of them got their lights on, so you can tell it’s a funeral cortege.”

“On their way to the cemetery,” Hedrick said.

“Evidently. So the one golfer, he immediately shoves his driver back into his bag, whips off his cap, and stands in reverent silence until the very last car has passed them and disappeared into the distance.”

“Why?”

“Just what his partner was wondering. ‘What a respectful thing to do!’ he says. ‘All the times we’ve played together, and it turns out there’s a spiritual side to you I never saw before.’

“The first golfer shrugs and puts his cap back on. ‘I figure it’s the least I can do,’ he says. ‘After all, she was a good wife to me for twenty-seven years.’ ”

Hedrick found his ball, took his second shot, made a good recovery. Nicholson took his own second shot, and they finished the hole in silence. Coming off the green, Hedrick said, “She was his wife.”

“Right.”

“In the hearse. His wife died, and she was being buried, and he was out on the golf course instead of showing up for her funeral.”

“Well, it’s not as though it actually happened,” Nicholson said. “It’s just a joke.”

“Oh, I realize that. I’m just looking at it as a joke. She was his wife and it was a successful marriage, but because golf is the way it is and because golfers are the way they are—”

“The way we are,” Nicholson put in.

“Well, yes. Because of these factors, his idea of showing respect is standing for a couple of minutes with his cap off.”

“When you explain it that way,” Nicholson said, “it’s not terribly funny, is it?”

“Oh, it’s funny,” Hedrick said. “I’m just sort of, oh, deconstructing it, you might say. And I think you said all golf jokes are essentially the same, all based on the same element of humor.”

“I’d say so,” Nicholson said. “Can you think of one that isn’t?”

Hedrick couldn’t, and they played on in relative silence, their conversation limited to compliments on one another’s shots as they played the next two holes. Both men bogeyed the par-three eighth hole. Hedrick scored par on nine, while Nicholson, whose second shot stopped within six feet of the pin, read the green, set himself, and sank the putt for a birdie.

It was, he realized, the first hole he’d won outright.

Approaching the next green, Hedrick said, “But I’m afraid I don’t see where Fred comes into it.”

Nicholson looked at him.

“ ‘Hit the ball, drag Fred.’ Isn’t that what you said? If Fred’s anywhere in the joke about the wife’s funeral, he must have been hiding behind a tree. I have to say I didn’t spot him.”

“It’s another joke,” Nicholson told him, “but in a sense it’s the same joke. Man goes to play a round of golf with his best friend and business partner.”

“Fred, I suppose.”

“Right, Fred. And his wife’s waiting dinner for him, and he’s more than two hours late by the time he walks in the door, and the guy looks terrible. ‘Honey,’ she says, ‘are you all right? Did you have a good afternoon?’

“ ‘I’m not all right,’ he says. ‘And I just had the worst afternoon of my life. I met Fred and we went out together, and everything was fine, it was a beautiful afternoon, and we were both hitting the ball well. And then Fred’s playing his second shot on the sixth hole, he’s set up nicely just to the right of the long fairway bunker, and he goes into his backswing and collapses. He drops dead, right there in the middle of the fairway.’

“ ‘Oh, my God,’ says the wife. ‘Honey, that’s horrible! How awful for poor Fred, and it must have been perfectly terrible for you, too.’

“ ‘I’ll say,’ he says. ‘That was the sixth hole, the long par five. So for twelve more holes it was hit the ball, drag Fred, hit the ball, drag Fred.’ ”

Hedrick didn’t say anything at first. Then he said, “I see what you mean. It’s the same joke. It’s different, but it’s the same.”

“It’s a golf joke,” Nicholson said. “They’re all the same.”

“Are you married?”

“I was,” Hedrick replied. “She died, and the funeral’s this afternoon. I’ll tell you, if the hearse passes us, I’m taking my cap off.”

“You’re not wearing a cap.”

“Well, if I were. No, I’m not married. Why do you ask?”

“Ever been?”

“Briefly, years ago. It didn’t work out, and I’m in no hurry to repeat the experiment.”

“I’m married,” Nicholson said.

“Oh?”

“Happily. Or so I’ve always thought.”

“Oh.”

“There I was,” Nicholson said, “with a beautiful wife. And a best friend. Do you begin to get the picture?”

“I get a picture,” Hedrick said, “but I don’t know whether or not it’s the picture.”

“There’s only one picture,” Nicholson said, “and you got it a lot quicker than I did. It took me a while. The signs were there, but I didn’t see them at first. Then I began to notice things. Facial expressions, eye movements. Something in the air. Nothing concrete, but there came a day when I just knew, and realized I’d known for a while. Known without knowing I knew, if you follow me.”

“Perhaps you were mistaken.”

“Just what I told myself. Then there came the day when my friend backed out of a foursome at the last minute. It wasn’t the first time he’d done this, and for once I could guess the reason.”

“So what happened? The three of you played without him?”

“The three of us teed off together,” Nicholson said, “and the three of us played a couple of holes together, and then I pulled a muscle hitting a two iron and I was in agony. Or at least that’s the show I put on for the two fellows I was with.”

“You dropped out?”

“And left them to finish the round. I knew they wouldn’t quit just because I’d torn up my shoulder. I mean, they’re golfers, right? Hit the ball, drag Fred. Except in this instance Fred picked up his golf clubs and went home. Where I was not greatly surprised to find my friend’s car in my driveway.”

“It was definitely his car?”

“I suppose it could have been somebody else’s green Olds Cutlass, and that it just happened to have a dented right rear fender, and a license plate reading UNDRPAR. No, I’m afraid it was his car.”

“Still, there might have been an innocent explanation.”

“There might,” Nicholson agreed. “I pulled into the driveway and parked behind his car. Then I walked around to the rear of the house and looked in the bedroom window. Again, there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for what I saw. Perhaps, for instance, my best friend had somehow sprung a leak, and my wife was merely trying to reinflate him.”

“Oh.”

“Quite.”

“What did you do? Burst in the door? Confront them?”

“Of course not.”

“Oh.”

“What I felt like doing,” Nicholson said, “was driving straight back to the country club and catching up with the fellows I’d been playing with. But how could I do that after my imaginary shoulder injury? So what I did was go to a chiropractor and get a deep heat treatment.”

“Even though there was nothing wrong with you?”

“You can always find someone happy to give you a deep heat treatment, and what harm can it do? It’s not as though I was in danger of melting. It enabled me to make a miraculous recovery, and I was out on the course the next day.”

“But not with your friend, I don’t suppose.”

“Why not? We’d been playing together for years.”

“But wasn’t it awkward?”

“Why should it be? He didn’t know that I knew anything.”

“And you could just act as though nothing had happened?”

“Not much acting required, is there? All I had to do was play golf and have the sort of cursory conversation one has on a golf course.”

“And inside?”

“In the clubhouse, you mean?”

“Inside yourself.”

“Inside myself,” Nicholson said calmly, “I was filled with murderous rage.”

“I can imagine. You must have wanted to kill them both.”

“Certainly not. Why would I want to kill my wife?”

“But—”

“The woman’s been an ideal wife since the day I married her. An ornament in public, a social asset, an impeccable homemaker, a splendid cook. More to the point, she’s an excellent companion, and, in intimate moments, a spirited partner. I’d have to be out of my mind to want any harm to come to her.”

“But she deceived you,” Hedrick pointed out. “She slept with your best friend.”

“I’m not sure that’s the right word for it,” Nicholson said thoughtfully. “From the look of things, sleep didn’t play much of a role in the relationship. But yes, she deceived me, and with my closest friend. And, quite possibly, with others I don’t know about.”

“And you can accept that?”

“I can certainly forgive it. She’s a woman, for heaven’s sake. Remember your Bible? Eve ate the apple. It cost us all our tenancy in Paradise, but does it make you want to kill the poor woman? Certainly not.”

“But—”

“She was a woman. She was tempted, she was powerless to resist. Not her fault. But as for the one who tempted her...”

“The serpent.”

“The snake,” said Nicholson, with feeling, “in the grass. The damned snake. He’s the one you want to crush under your heel.”

Nicholson held the honors, having won the previous hole. He took an unusually vicious practice swing.

“My best friend,” he said. “Fred.”

“His name can’t really be Fred.”

“It’s as good a name as any. And we might as well call him something. He’s the one who betrayed me. He’s the one I want to kill.”

He settled himself, addressed the ball. His swing was picture-perfect, and the ball sailed off down the fairway.

“And I’ll do it, too,” he said, and stooped to pick up his tee.

Hedrick sliced his own drive into the woods, and Nicholson could see the notion of a mulligan cross the man’s mind. But Hedrick walked manfully after his ball, and Nicholson kept him company and helped him find it. The man tried to recover with a daring shot between two trees, but the ball caromed off one of them and he wound up worse than where he’d started. He played safe on the third shot and got out onto the fairway, but it still took him five strokes before he reached the green of the par-four hole.

“You and... Fred,” he said along the way. “Is this where the two of you play?”

“We’re both members at Ellicott Creek,” Nicholson said. “That’s where we generally play. I’ve been a member here myself for a little over a year now as well, that’s one of the perks my firm extends when you make junior partner, and I’ve had Fred here a couple of times as my guest. But I doubt you’d know him.”

“I was wondering,” Hedrick admitted. They reached the green, and Hedrick, who was away, knelt down to read the green. He got up, stood over the ball. He said, “What you said before. That you intend to kill him. You were just saying that, weren’t you?”

The question was delivered in a tone that suggested it might or might not be rhetorical. One could answer it or not, and Nicholson chose not to.

Hedrick four-putted for a quintuple bogey.

“That big silver club in your bag,” Hedrick said. “Except of course it’s not silver. Titanium or something like that, isn’t it?”

“Some space-age alloy.”

“If they can put a man on the moon,” Hedrick said, “I suppose they ought to be able to add a few yards to a man’s tee shot. That’s the Big Brenda, isn’t it? But you haven’t been using it.”

“Just at the driving range.”

“And did it perform the way it says in the ads? Evidently not, or you’d be using it on the course.”

“I don’t like it,” Nicholson said. “There’s something wrong with the way it’s balanced.”

“I ought to try it on the hole coming up. Par five, 585 yards. A little extra distance wouldn’t hurt.”

“I think the club’s defective,” Nicholson said. “Something wrong with the shaft. I’m planning on taking it back, letting them look at it.”

Hedrick chuckled. “Relax,” he said. “I don’t really want to borrow your Big Brenda. I know better than to try a new club in the middle of a round.”

Hedrick, using his own driver, hit the ball long and straight. It outran Nicholson’s drive by a good thirty yards. They walked down the fairway together, in silence at first. Then Nicholson said, “Over and over I’ve thought about killing him.”

“Your best friend. Except it turns out he’s no friend at all, so I don’t know what to call him.”

“I thought we had settled on Fred.”

“Seems silly, calling him that. But no sillier than talking of killing him.”

“People kill people all the time,” Nicholson said.

“Yes, but—”

“You read the papers, listen to the news, it’s just one murder after another.”

“That’s true, but—”

“A golf club,” Nicholson said.

“How’s that?”

“Be the best way to do it, don’t you think? After all the golf we played together over the years? Bash his treacherous brains out with a golf club, then wrap the shaft around his neck.”

“Can you bend a shaft like that?” Hedrick wondered. “Of course, once you’d bashed his head in, the question’s largely academic, isn’t it?”

They fell silent again when they reached Nicholson’s ball. He sent it on its way with his two wood.

“Good shot.”

“Good old brassie,” he said. “A little left, though. I was afraid of that fairway trap, and I played it a little too safe.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

“So they say. I bought Big Brenda with the idea that I might use her on Fred.”

“Her?”

“Well, it, of course, but since the club has a woman’s name...”

“That alone makes it a good murder weapon,” Hedrick said. “Thing lists for close to five hundred dollars, doesn’t it?”

“Five forty-nine, but I got it for a third off.”

“Pretty good discount.”

“It’s still a lot to pay for a club you’re only going to swing once. But I couldn’t use one of my own clubs, could I?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Although,” he said, “when you come right down to it, what difference would it make? No matter what I used or how I did it, the police would come straight at me.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Because they’d look for someone with a motive to kill Fred,” Nicholson said, “and they’d root around in his life and find out who he was sleeping with. And where would that lead?”

“I see what you mean.”

“And I’m sure I’d break down the minute they started questioning me. I’m not much good at keeping things to myself.” He clapped Hedrick on the shoulder. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

“You know what I’m thinking?”

“That we ought to trade murders. Like the Hitchcock film, where two fellows meet on a train, and they switch victims. You kill Fred while I’m out getting an ironclad alibi, and in return I kill your wife.”

“I’m not married,” Hedrick said.

“Your boss, then, or the person who stands between you and a huge inheritance. Look, it doesn’t matter, because we’re not going to do it.”

“I should say not,” Hedrick said.

“I couldn’t kill a stranger for no reason,” Nicholson said. “And I couldn’t let you kill Fred, either. I mean, the whole thing’s pointless unless I get to kill the son of a bitch myself.”

Hedrick’s second shot was almost as long as his first, and didn’t stop rolling until it was within a few yards of the green, just to the right of the trap. “Brilliant,” Nicholson told him. “You’re a sure bet to win your honors back this hole. An easy chip and you’re putting for a birdie.”

“If I putt the way I did last hole...”

“Well, why leave anything to chance? Sink the chip for an eagle.”

They walked to Nicholson’s ball. He shaded his eyes, looked at the green. “What do you think? A seven iron?”

“Or an eight. Pin’s way at the back of the green, though.”

“Seven iron,” Nicholson said, and drew it from his bag. He took a practice swing, and his eyes tracked the imaginary ball clear to the rear portion of the green.

“The way to get away with it,” he said, “would be to make it look as though it wasn’t about him.”

“Wasn’t about him? Who are we talking about?”

“Fred,” Nicholson said. “Who else?”

“If a man gets killed,” Hedrick said, “it has to be about him. Doesn’t it?”

“Not if it’s about something else.”

“Like what?”

“Like golf,” Nicholson said. “If he were killed with a golf club, like we said, and if his body was found on a golf course...”

“I’m not sure I see what difference that makes,” Hedrick said, and then his jaw dropped and his eyes widened. “Jesus,” he said, “it was in the papers last week, wasn’t it? A fellow found in the deep rough at Burning Hills. The twelfth hole, wasn’t it?”

“I believe it was the fourteenth.”

“That’s the one with the water hazard, isn’t it? I didn’t pay much attention to the story, but he was killed with a golf club, wasn’t he?”

“Is that what happened?”

“My God,” Hedrick said, “you actually did it. And got away with it, from the sound of it. But why would you tell me about it now?” He frowned, then shook his head and took a step back, grinning. “Jesus, what a setup,” he said admiringly. “You had me going there for a moment, didn’t you?”

“Did I?”

“The poor guy at Burning Hills was a college kid, wasn’t he? A little too young to be your best friend and your wife’s lover, I’d have to say. You set up that whole story to get me going, and I have to give you credit.” He laughed. “ ‘Hit the ball, drag Fred.’ The college boy, I don’t suppose his name was Fred, was it?”

“He was somebody else,” Nicholson said.

“Well, I guess he was, wasn’t he? Hell of a thing, dying at that age. They haven’t found out who killed him or why, have they?”

“No.”

“Hard to make sense of, isn’t it? Why kill a college kid on a golf course?”

Nicholson addressed his ball, breathed in and out, in and out. He swung the seven iron and got just the right amount of loft. The ball floated all the way to the back edge of the green, backed up, and trolled to within inches of the cup.

“Beautiful,” Hedrick said.

“Thanks,” Nicholson said. “And to answer your question, I’d guess the boy was killed to establish a pattern.”

“A pattern? What kind of a pattern?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Nicholson said. “Look, you know something about clubs. Take a look at this.”

He drew the Big Brenda out of his bag. Hedrick’s face showed first puzzlement, then concern. He started to say something, but Nicholson didn’t wait to find out what it was. Instead he seized the club’s silver-colored head in one hand and the shaft in the other and twisted. The club head came off in his hand, revealing the end of the shaft, honed to razor sharpness. “Just look at this,” he said, and lobbed the club head underhand at Hedrick.

Hedrick reached for it with both hands. And Nicholson lunged at him, wielding the club shaft like a rapier. The sharpened end of the shaft sank into the man’s chest. Hedrick’s mouth opened, forming a perfect circle, but he was dead before he could utter a sound.

“Hit the ball, drag Fred,” Nicholson said, to no one in particular, and took hold of the dead man by his hands and dragged him across the turf to a convenient sand trap. He went back for Hedrick’s clubs and stretched them out alongside the corpse. With a cloth from his golf bag he wiped the shaft and head of the Big Brenda, and anything else he’d touched that might hold a print. He took one of Hedrick’s golf balls and stuck it in the dead man’s mouth, took four of his tees — two white, two yellow — and used them as plugs in the man’s nostrils and ear holes. He’d found this part of the process a little distasteful at Burning Hills, but discovered it was less objectionable now. Evidently a person got used to it.

He retrieved his own clubs — minus the Big Brenda, of course — and went to the green. He left Hedrick’s ball where it lay, thinking it was a shame the man hadn’t had a chance to try chipping for his eagle. But he wouldn’t have made it anyway, and, when all was said and done, what earthly difference did it make?

His own ball lay less than a foot from the cup, close enough to concede under ordinary circumstances, but in this case it was for a birdie, and you couldn’t make a habit of conceding birdie putts to yourself, could you? He drew the flagstick, got his putter, knocked the ball in, retrieved it, replaced the stick. There was still no one in sight, and this way he felt a good deal more sanguine about entering a four for the hole on his scorecard.

No mulligans taken, no birdie putts conceded. If you were going to play the game, you might as well play it right.

He walked briskly to the next tee. One or two more, he thought, over the course of one or two more weeks, and the pattern would be sufficiently established.

Then it would be Fred’s turn.

How Far It Could Go

She picked him out right away, the minute she walked into the restaurant. It was no great trick. There were only two men seated alone, and one was an elderly gentleman who already had a plate of food in front of him.

The other was thirty-five or forty, with a full head of dark hair and a strong jawline. He might have been an actor, she thought. An actor you’d cast as a thug. He was reading a book, though, which didn’t entirely fit the picture.

Maybe it wasn’t him, she thought. Maybe the weather had delayed him.

She checked her coat, then told the headwaiter she was meeting a Mr. Cutler. “Right this way,” he said, and for an instant she fancied that he was going to show her to the elderly gentleman’s table, but of course he led her over to the other man, who closed his book at her approach and got to his feet.

“Billy Cutler,” he said. “And you’re Dorothy Morgan. And you could probably use a drink. What would you like?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “What are you having?”

“Well,” he said, touching his stemmed glass, “night like this, minute I sat down I ordered a martini, straight up and dry as a bone. And I’m about ready for another.”

“Martinis are in, aren’t they?”

“Far as I’m concerned, they were never out.”

“I’ll have one,” she said.

While they waited for the drinks they talked about the weather. “It’s treacherous out there,” he said. “The main roads, the Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State, they get these chain collisions where fifty or a hundred cars slam into each other. Used to be a lawyer’s dream before no-fault came in. I hope you didn’t drive.”

“No, I took the PATH train,” she said, “and then a cab.”

“Much better off.”

“Well, I’ve been to Hoboken before,” she said. “In fact we looked at houses here about a year and a half ago.”

“You bought anything then, you’d be way ahead now,” he said. “Prices are through the roof.”

“We decided to stay in Manhattan.” And then we decided to go our separate ways, she thought but didn’t say. And thank God we didn’t buy a house, or he’d be trying to steal it from me.

“I drove,” he said, “and the fog’s terrible, no question, but I took my time and I didn’t have any trouble. Matter of fact, I couldn’t remember if we said seven or seven-thirty, so I made sure I was here by seven.”

“Then I kept you waiting,” she said. “I wrote down seven-thirty, but—”

“I figured it was probably seven-thirty,” he said. “I also figured I’d rather do the waiting myself than keep you waiting. Anyway—” he tapped the book “—I had a book to read, and I ordered a drink, and what more does a man need? Ah, here’s Joe with our drinks.”

Her martini, straight up and bone dry, was crisp and cold and just what she needed. She took a sip and said as much.

“Well, there’s nothing like a martini,” he said, “and they make a good one here. Matter of fact, it’s a good restaurant altogether. They serve a good steak, a strip sirloin.”

“Also coming back in style,” she said. “Along with the martini.”

He looked at her. He said, “So? You want to be right up with the latest trends? Should I order us a couple of steaks?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “I really shouldn’t stay that long.”

“Whatever you say.”

“I just thought we’d have a drink and—”

“And handle what we have to handle.”

“That’s right.”

“Sure,” he said. “That’ll be fine.”

Except it was hard to find a way into the topic that had brought her to Hoboken, to this restaurant, to this man’s table. They both knew why she was here, but that didn’t relieve her of the need to broach the subject. Looking for a way in, she went back to the weather, the fog. Even if the weather had been good, she told him, she would have come by train and taxi. Because she didn’t have a car.

He said, “No car? Didn’t Tommy say you had a weekend place up near him? You can’t go back and forth on the bus.”

“It’s his car,” she said.

“His car. Oh, the fella’s.”

“Howard Bellamy’s,” she said. Why not say his name? “His car, his weekend place in the country. His loft on Greene Street, as far as that goes.”

He nodded, his expression thoughtful. “But you’re not still living there,” he said.

“No, of course not. And I don’t have any of my stuff at the house in the country. And I gave back my set of car keys. All my keys, the car and both houses. I kept my old apartment on West Tenth Street all this time. I didn’t even sublet it because I figured I might need it in a hurry. And I was right, wasn’t I?”

“What’s your beef with him exactly, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“My beef,” she said. “I never had one, far as I was concerned. We lived together three years, and the first two weren’t too bad. Trust me, it was never Romeo and Juliet, but it was all right. And then the third year was bad, and it was time to bail out.”

She reached for her drink and found the glass empty. Odd — she didn’t remember finishing it. She looked across the table at him and he was waiting patiently, nothing showing in his dark eyes.

After a moment she said, “He says I owe him ten thousand dollars.”

“Ten large.”

“He says.”

“Do you?”

She shook her head. “But he’s got a piece of paper,” she said. “A note I signed.”

“For ten thousand dollars.”

“Right.”

“Like he loaned you the money.”

“Right.” She toyed with her empty glass. “But he didn’t. Oh, he’s got the paper I signed, and he’s got a canceled check made out to me and deposited to my account. But it wasn’t a loan. He gave me the money and I used it to pay for a cruise the two of us took.”

“Where? The Caribbean?”

“The Far East. We flew into Singapore and cruised down to Bali.”

“That sounds pretty exotic.”

“I guess it was,” she said. “This was while things were still good between us, or as good as they ever were.”

“This paper you signed,” he prompted.

“Something with taxes. So he could write it off, don’t ask me how. Look, all the time we lived together I paid my own way. We split expenses right down the middle. The cruise was something else, it was on him. If he wanted me to sign a piece of paper so the government would pick up part of the tab—”

“Why not?”

“Exactly. And now he says it’s a debt, and I should pay it, and I got a letter from his lawyer. Can you believe it? A letter from a lawyer?”

“He’s not going to sue you.”

“Who knows? That’s what the lawyer letter says he’s going to do.”

He frowned. “He goes into court and you start testifying about a tax dodge—”

“But how can I, if I was a party to it?”

“Still, the idea of him suing you after you were living with him. Usually it’s the other way around, isn’t it? They got a word for it.”

“Palimony.”

“That’s it, palimony. You’re not trying for any, are you?”

“Are you kidding? I said I paid my own way.”

“That’s right, you said that.”

“I paid my own way before I met him, the son of a bitch, and I paid my own way while I was with him, and I’ll go on paying my own way now that I’m rid of him. The last time I took money from a man was when my Uncle Ralph lent me bus fare to New York when I was eighteen years old. He didn’t call it a loan, and he sure as hell didn’t give me a piece of paper to sign, but I paid him back all the same. I saved up the money and sent him a money order. I didn’t even have a bank account. I got a money order at the post office and sent it to him.”

“That’s when you came here? When you were eighteen?”

“Fresh out of high school,” she said. “And I’ve been on my own ever since, and paying my own way. I would have paid my own way to Singapore, as far as that goes, but that wasn’t the deal. It was supposed to be a present. And he wants me to pay my way and his way, he wants the whole ten thousand plus interest, and—”

“He’s looking to charge you interest?”

“Well, the note I signed. Ten thousand dollars plus interest at the rate of eight percent per annum.”

“Interest,” he said.

“He’s pissed off,” she said, “that I wanted to end the relationship. That’s what this is about.”

“I figured.”

“And what I figured,” she said, “is if a couple of the right sort of people had a talk with him, maybe he would change his mind.”

“And that’s what brings you here.”

She nodded, toying with her empty glass. He pointed to the glass, raised his eyebrows questioningly. She nodded again, and he raised a hand, and caught the waiter’s eye, and signaled for another round.

They were silent until the drinks came. Then he said, “A couple of boys could talk to him.”

“That would be great. What would it cost me?”

“Five hundred dollars would do it.”

“Well, that sounds good to me.”

“The thing is, when you say talk, it’ll have to be more than talk. You want to make an impression, situation like this, the implication is either he goes along with it or something physical is going to happen. Now, if you want to give that impression, you have to get physical at the beginning.”

“So he knows you mean it?”

“So he’s scared,” he said. “Because otherwise what he gets is angry. Not right away, two tough-looking guys push him against a wall and tell him what he’s gotta do. That makes him a little scared right away, but then they don’t get physical and he goes home, and he starts to think about it, and he gets angry.”

“I can see how that might happen.”

“But if he gets knocked around a little the first time, enough so he’s gonna feel it for the next four, five days, he’s too scared to get angry. That’s what you want.”

“Okay.”

He sipped his drink, looked at her over the brim. His eyes were appraising her, assessing her. “There’s things I need to know about the guy.”

“Like?”

“Like what kind of shape is he in?”

“He could stand to lose twenty pounds, but other than that he’s okay.”

“No heart condition, nothing like that?”

“No.”

“He work out?”

“He belongs to a gym,” she said, “and he went four times a week for the first month after he joined, and now if he goes twice a month it’s a lot.”

“Like everybody,” he said. “That’s how the gyms stay in business. If all their paid-up members showed up, you couldn’t get in the door.”

“You work out,” she said.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “Weights, mostly, a few times a week. I got in the habit. I won’t tell you where I got in the habit.”

“And I won’t ask,” she said, “but I could probably guess.”

“You probably could,” he said, grinning. He looked like a little boy for an instant, and then the grin faded and he was back to business.

“Martial arts,” he said. “He ever get into any of that?”

“No.”

“You’re sure? Not lately, but maybe before the two of you started keeping company?”

“He never said anything,” she said, “and he would. It’s the kind of thing he’d brag about.”

“Does he carry?”

“Carry?”

“A gun.”

“God, no.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“He doesn’t even own a gun.”

“Same question. Do you know this for a fact?”

She considered it. “Well, how would you know something like that for a fact? I mean, you could know for a fact that a person did own a gun, but how would you know that he didn’t? I can say this much — I lived with him for three years and there was never anything I saw or heard that gave me the slightest reason to think he might own a gun. Until you asked the question just now it never entered my mind, and my guess is it never entered his mind, either.”

“You’d be surprised how many people own guns,” he said.

“I probably would.”

“Sometimes it feels like half the country walks around strapped. There’s more carrying than there are carry permits. A guy doesn’t have a permit, he’s likely to keep it to himself that he’s carrying, or that he even owns a gun in the first place.”

“I’m pretty sure he doesn’t own a gun, let alone carry one.”

“And you’re probably right,” he said, “but the thing is you never know. What you got to prepare for is he might have a gun, and he might be carrying it.”

She nodded, uncertain.

“Here’s what I’ve got to ask you,” he said. “What you got to ask yourself, and come up with an answer. How far are you prepared for this to go?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“We already said it’s gonna be physical. Manhandling him, and a couple of shots he’ll feel for the better part of a week. Work the rib cage, say.”

“All right.”

“Well,” he said, “that’s great, if that’s how it goes. But you got to recognize it could go farther.”

“What do you mean?”

He made a tent of his fingertips. “I mean you can’t necessarily decide where it stops. I don’t know if you ever heard the expression, but it’s like, uh, having relations with a gorilla. You don’t stop when you decide. You stop when the gorilla decides.”

“I never heard that before,” she said. “It’s cute, and I sort of get the point, or maybe I don’t. Is Howard Bellamy the gorilla?”

“He’s not the gorilla. The violence is the gorilla.”

“Oh.”

“You start something, you don’t know where it goes. Does he fight back? If he does, then it goes a little farther than you planned. Does he keep coming back for more? As long as he keeps coming back for it, you got to keep dishing it out. You got no choice.”

“I see.”

“Plus there’s the human factor. The boys themselves, they don’t have an emotional stake. So you figure they’re cool and professional about it.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“But it’s only true up to a point,” he went on, “because they’re human, you know? So they start out angry with the guy, they tell themselves how he’s a lowlife piece of garbage, so it’s easier for them to shove him around. Part of it’s an act but part of it’s not, and say he mouths off, or he fights back and gets in a good lick. Now they’re really angry, and maybe they do more damage than they intended to.”

She thought about it. “I can see how that could happen,” she said.

“So it could go farther than anybody had in mind. He could wind up in the hospital.”

“You mean like broken bones?”

“Or worse. Like a ruptured spleen, which I’ve known of cases. Or as far as that goes there’s people who’ve died from a bare-knuckle punch in the stomach.”

“I saw a movie where that happened.”

“Well, I saw a movie where a guy spreads his arms and flies, but dying from a punch in the stomach, they didn’t just make that up for the movies. It can happen.”

“Now you’ve got me thinking,” she said.

“Well, it’s something you got to think about. Because you have to be prepared for this to go all the way, and by all the way I mean all the way. It probably won’t, ninety-five times out of a hundred it won’t.”

“But it could.”

“Right. It could.”

“Jesus,” she said. “He’s a son of a bitch, but I don’t want him dead. I want to be done with the son of a bitch. I don’t want him on my conscience for the rest of my life.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“But I don’t want to pay him ten thousand dollars, either, the son of a bitch. This is getting complicated, isn’t it?”

“Let me excuse myself for a minute,” he said, rising. “And you think about it, and then we’ll talk some more.”

While he was away from the table she reached for his book and turned it so she could read the title. She looked at the author’s photo, read a few lines of the flap copy, then put it as he had left it. She sipped her drink — she was nursing this one, making it last — and looked out the window. Cars rolled by, their headlights slightly eerie in the dense fog.

When he returned she said, “Well, I thought about it.”

“And?”

“I think you just talked yourself out of five hundred dollars.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“Because I certainly don’t want him dead, and I don’t even want him in the hospital. I have to admit I like the idea of him being scared, really scared bad. And hurt a little. But that’s just because I’m angry.”

“Anybody’d be angry.”

“But when I get past the anger,” she said, “all I really want is for him to forget this crap about ten thousand dollars. For Christ’s sake, that’s all the money I’ve got in the world. I don’t want to give it to him.”

“Maybe you don’t have to.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think it’s about money,” he said. “Not for him. It’s about sticking it to you for dumping him, or whatever. So it’s an emotional thing and it’s easy for you to buy into it. But say it was a business thing. You’re right and he’s wrong, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth to fight it out. So you settle.”

“Settle?”

“You always paid your own way,” he said, “so it wouldn’t be out of the question for you to pay half the cost of the cruise, would it?”

“No, but—”

“But it was supposed to be a present, from him to you. But forget that for the time being. You could pay half. Still, that’s too much. What you do is you offer him two thousand dollars. I have a feeling he’ll take it.”

“God,” she said. “I can’t even talk to him. How am I going to offer him anything?”

“You’ll have someone else make the offer.”

“You mean like a lawyer?”

“Then you owe the lawyer. No, I was thinking I could do it.”

“Are you serious?”

“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t. I think if I was to make the offer he’d accept it. I wouldn’t be threatening him, but there’s a way to do it so a guy feels threatened.”

“He’d feel threatened, all right.”

“I’ll have your check with me, two thousand dollars, payable to him. My guess is he’ll take it, and if he does you won’t hear any more from him on the subject of the ten grand.”

“So I’m out of it for two thousand. And five hundred for you?”

“I wouldn’t charge you anything.”

“Why not?”

“All I’d be doing is having a conversation with a guy. I don’t charge for conversations. I’m not a lawyer, I’m just a guy owns a couple of parking lots.”

“And reads thick novels by young Indian writers.”

“Oh, this? You read it?”

She shook her head.

“It’s hard to keep the names straight,” he said, “especially when you’re not sure how to pronounce them in the first place. And it’s like if you ask this guy what time it is he tells you how to make a watch. Or maybe a sun-dial. But it’s pretty interesting.”

“I never thought you’d be a reader.”

“Billy Parking Lots,” he said. “Guy who knows guys and can get things done. That’s probably all Tommy said about me.”

“Just about.”

“Maybe that’s all I am. Reading, well, it’s an edge I got on just about everybody I know. It opens other worlds. I don’t live in those worlds, but I get to visit them.”

“And you just got in the habit of reading? The way you got in the habit of working out?”

He laughed. “Yeah, but reading’s something I’ve done since I was a kid. I didn’t have to go away to get in that particular habit.”

“I was wondering about that.”

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s hard to read there, harder than people think. It’s noisy all the time.”

“Really? I didn’t realize. I always figured that’s when I’d get to read War and Peace, when I got sent to prison. But if it’s noisy, then the hell with it. I’m not going.”

“You’re something else,” he said.

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. The way you look, of course, but beyond the looks. The only word I can think of is class, but it’s a word that’s mostly used by people that haven’t got any themselves. Which is probably true enough.”

“The hell with that,” she said. “After the conversation we just had? Talking me out of doing something I could have regretted all my life, and figuring out how to get that son of a bitch off my back for two thousand dollars? I’d call that class.”

“Well, you’re seeing me at my best,” he said.

“And you’re seeing me at my worst,” she said, “or close to it. Looking to hire a guy to beat up an ex-boyfriend. That’s class, all right.”

“That’s not what I see. I see a woman who doesn’t want to be pushed around. And if I can find a way that helps you get where you want to be, then I’m glad to do it. But when all’s said and done, you’re a lady and I’m a wiseguy.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Yes, I guess I do.”

He nodded. “Drink up,” he said. “I’ll run you back to the city.”

“You don’t have to do that. I can take the PATH train.”

“I’ve got to go into the city anyway. It’s not out of my way to take you wherever you’re going.”

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Or here’s another idea. We both have to eat, and I told you they serve a good steak here. Let me buy you dinner, and then I’ll run you home.”

“Dinner,” she said.

“A shrimp cocktail, a salad, a steak, a baked potato—”

“You’re tempting me.”

“So let yourself be tempted,” he said. “It’s just a meal.”

She looked at him levelly. “No,” she said. “It’s more than that.”

“It’s more than that if you want it to be. Or it’s just a meal, if that’s what you want.”

“But you can’t know how far it might go,” she said. “We’re back to that again, aren’t we? Like what you said about the gorilla, and you stop when the gorilla wants to stop.”

“I guess I’m the gorilla, huh?”

“You said the violence was the gorilla. Well, in this case it’s not violence, but it’s not either of us, either. It’s what’s going on between us, and it’s already going on, isn’t it?”

“You tell me.”

She looked down at her hands, then up at him. “A person has to eat,” she said.

“You said it.”

“And it’s still foggy outside.”

“Like pea soup. And who knows? There’s a good chance the fog’ll lift by the time we’ve had our meal.”

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” she said. “I think it’s lifting already.”

In for a Penny

Paul kept it very simple. That seemed to be the secret. You kept it simple, you drew firm lines and didn’t cross them. You put one foot in front of the other, took it day by day, and let the days mount up.

The state didn’t take an interest. They put you back on the street with a cheap suit and figured you’d be back inside before the pants got shiny. But other people cared. This one outfit, about two parts ex-cons to one part holy joes, had wised him up and helped him out. They’d found him a job and a place to live, and what more did he need?

The job wasn’t much, frying eggs and flipping burgers in a diner at Twenty-third and Eighth. The room wasn’t much, either, seven blocks south of the diner, four flights up from the street. It was small, and all you could see from its window was the back of another building. The furnishings were minimal — an iron bedstead, a beat-up dresser, a rickety chair — and the walls needed paint and the floor needed carpet. There was a sink in the room, a bathroom down the hall. No cooking, no pets, no overnight guests, the landlady told him. No kidding, he thought.

His shift was four to midnight, Monday through Friday. The first weekend he did nothing but go to the movies, and by Sunday night he was ready to climb the wall. Too much time to kill, too few ways to kill it that wouldn’t get him in trouble. How many movies could you sit through? And a movie cost him two hours’ pay, and if you spent the whole weekend dragging yourself from one movie house to another...

Weekends were dangerous, one of the ex-cons had told him. Weekends could put you back in the joint. There ought to be a law against weekends.

But he figured out a way around it. Walking home Tuesday night, after that first weekend of movie-going, he’d stopped at three diners on Seventh Avenue, nursing a cup of coffee and chatting with the guy behind the counter. The third time was the charm; he walked out of there with a weekend job. Saturday and Sunday, same hours, same wages, same work. And they’d pay him off the books, which made his weekend work tax-free.

Between what he was saving in taxes and what he wasn’t spending on movies, he’d be a millionaire.

Well, maybe he’d never be a millionaire. Probably be dangerous to be a millionaire, a guy like him, with his ways, his habits. But he was earning an honest dollar, and he ate all he wanted on the job, seven days a week now, so it wasn’t hard to put a few bucks aside. The weeks added up and so did the dollars, and the time came when he had enough cash socked away to buy himself a little television set. The cashier at his weekend job set it up and her boyfriend brought it over, so he figured it fell off a truck or walked out of somebody’s apartment, but it got good reception and the price was right.

It was a lot easier to pass the time once he had the TV. He’d get up at ten or eleven in the morning, grab a shower in the bathroom down the hall, then pick up doughnuts and coffee at the corner deli. Then he’d watch a little TV until it was time to go to work.

After work he’d stop at the same deli for two bottles of cold beer and some cigarettes. He’d settle in with the TV, a beer bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other and his eyes on the screen.

He didn’t get cable, but he figured that was all to the good. He was better off staying away from some of the stuff they were allowed to show on cable TV. Just because you had cable didn’t mean you had to watch it, but he knew himself, and if he had it right there in the house how could he keep himself from looking at it?

And that could get you started. Something as simple as late-night adult programming could put him on a train to the big house upstate. He’d been there. He didn’t want to go back.

He would get through most of a pack of cigarettes by the time he turned off the light and went to bed. It was funny, during the day he hardly smoked at all, but back in his room at night he had a butt going just about all the time. If the smoking was heavy, well, the drinking was ultralight. He could make a bottle of Bud last an hour. More, even. The second bottle was always warm by the time he got to it, but he didn’t mind, nor did he drink it any faster than he’d drunk the first one. What was the rush?

Two beers was enough. All it did was give him a little buzz, and when the second beer was gone he’d turn off the TV and sit at the window, smoking one cigarette after another, looking out at the city.

Then he’d go to bed. Then he’d get up and do it all over again.

The only problem was walking home.

And even that was no problem at first. He’d leave his rooming house around three in the afternoon. The diner was ten minutes away, and that left him time to eat before his shift started. Then he’d leave sometime between midnight and twelve-thirty — the guy who relieved him, a manic Albanian, had a habit of showing up ten to fifteen minutes late. Paul would retrace his earlier route, walking the seven blocks down Eighth Avenue to Sixteenth Street with a stop at the deli for cigarettes and beer.

The Rose of Singapore was the problem.

The first time he walked past the place, he didn’t even notice it. By day it was just another seedy bar, but at night the neon glowed and the jukebox music poured out the door, along with the smell of spilled drinks and stale beer and something more, something unnamable, something elusive.

“If you don’t want to slip,” they’d told him, “stay out of slippery places.”

He quickened his pace and walked on by.

The next afternoon the Rose of Singapore didn’t carry the same feeling of danger. Not that he’d risk crossing the threshold, not at any hour of the day or night. He wasn’t stupid. But it didn’t lure him, and consequently it didn’t make him uncomfortable.

Coming home was a different story.

He was thinking about it during his last hour on the job, and by the time he reached it he was walking all the way over at the edge of the sidewalk, as far from the building’s entrance as he could get without stepping down into the street. He was like an acrophobe edging along a precipitous path, scared to look down, afraid of losing his balance and falling accidentally, afraid too of the impulse that might lead him to plunge purposefully into the void.

He kept walking, eyes forward, heart racing. Once he was past it he felt himself calming down, and he bought his two bottles of beer and his pack of cigarettes and went on home.

He’d get used to it, he told himself. It would get easier with time.

But, surprisingly enough, it didn’t. Instead it got worse, but gradually, imperceptibly, and he learned to accommodate it. For one thing, he steered clear of the west side of Eighth Avenue, where the Rose of Singapore stood. Going to work and coming home, he kept to the opposite side of the street.

Even so, he found himself hugging the inner edge of the sidewalk, as if every inch closer to the street would put him that much closer to crossing it and being drawn mothlike into the tavern’s neon flame. And, approaching the Rose of Singapore’s block, he’d slow down or speed up his pace so that the traffic signal would allow him to cross the street as soon as he reached the corner. As if otherwise, stranded there, he might cross in the other direction instead, across Eighth Avenue and on into the Rose.

He knew it was ridiculous but he couldn’t change the way it felt. When it didn’t get better he found a way around it.

He took Seventh Avenue instead.

He did that on the weekends anyway because it was the shortest route. But during the week it added two long crosstown blocks to his pedestrian commute, four blocks a day, twenty blocks a week. That came to about three miles a week, maybe a hundred and fifty extra miles a year.

On good days he told himself he was lucky to be getting the exercise, that the extra blocks would help him stay in shape. On bad days he felt like an idiot, crippled by fear.

Then the Albanian got fired.

He was never clear on what happened. One waitress said the Albanian had popped off at the manager one time too many, and maybe that was what happened. All he knew was that one night his relief man was not the usual wild-eyed fellow with the droopy mustache but a stocky dude with a calculating air about him. His name was Dooley, and Paul made him at a glance as a man who’d done time. You could tell, but of course he didn’t say anything, didn’t drop any hints. And neither did Dooley.

But the night came when Dooley showed up, tied his apron, rolled up his sleeves, and said, “Give her my love, huh?” And, when Paul looked at him in puzzlement, he added, “Your girlfriend.”

“Haven’t got one,” he said.

“You live on Eighth Avenue, right? That’s what you told me. Eighth and Sixteenth, right? Yet every time you leave here you head over toward Seventh. Every single time.”

“I like the exercise,” he said.

“Exercise,” Dooley said, and grinned. “Good word for it.”

He let it go, but the next night Dooley made a similar comment. “I need to unwind when I come off work,” Paul told him. “Sometimes I’ll walk clear over to Sixth Avenue before I head downtown. Or even Fifth.”

“That’s nice,” Dooley said. “Just do me a favor, will you? Ask her if she’s got a sister.”

“It’s cold and it looks like rain,” Paul said. “I’ll be walking home on Eighth Avenue tonight, in case you’re keeping track.”

And when he left he did walk down Eighth Avenue — for one block. Then he cut over to Seventh and took what had become his usual route.

He began doing that all the time, and whenever he headed east on Twenty-second Street he found himself wondering why he’d let Dooley have such power over him. For that matter, how could he have let a seedy gin joint make him walk out of his way to the tune of a hundred and fifty miles a year?

He was supposed to be keeping it simple. Was this keeping it simple? Making up elaborate lies to explain the way he walked home? And walking extra blocks every night for fear that the Devil would reach out and drag him into a neon-lit hell?

Then came a night when it rained, and he walked all the way home on Eighth Avenue.

It was always a problem when it rained. Going to work he could catch a bus, although it wasn’t terribly convenient. But coming home he didn’t have the option, because traffic was one-way the wrong way.

So he walked home on Eighth Avenue, and he didn’t turn left at Twenty-second Street, and didn’t fall apart when he drew even with the Rose of Singapore. He breezed on by, bought his beer and cigarettes at the deli, and went home to watch television. But he turned the set off again after a few minutes and spent the hours until bedtime at the window, looking out at the rain, nursing the beers, smoking the cigarettes, and thinking long thoughts.

The next two nights were clear and mild, but he chose Eighth Avenue anyway. He wasn’t uneasy, not going to work, not coming home, either. Then came the weekend, and then on Monday he took Eighth again, and this time on the way home he found himself on the west side of the street, the same side as the bar.

The door was open. Music, strident and bluesy, poured through it, along with all the sounds and smells you’d expect.

He walked right on by.

You’re over it, he thought. He went home and didn’t even turn on the TV, just sat and smoked and sipped his two longneck bottles of Bud.

Same story Tuesday, same story Wednesday.

Thursday night, steps from the tavern’s open door, he thought, Why drag this out?

He walked in, found a stool at the bar. “Double scotch,” he told the barmaid. “Straight up, beer chaser.”

He’d tossed off the shot and was working on the beer when a woman slid onto the stool beside him. She put a cigarette between bright red lips, and he scratched a match and lit it for her.

Their eyes met, and he felt something click.

She lived over on Ninth and Seventeenth, on the third floor of a brownstone across the street from the projects. She said her name was Tiffany, and maybe it was. Her apartment was three little rooms. They sat on the couch in the front room and he kissed her a few times and got a little dizzy from it. He excused himself and went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror over the sink.

You could go home now, he told the mirror image. Tell her anything, like you got a headache, you got malaria, you’re really a Catholic priest or gay or both. Anything. Doesn’t matter what you say or if she believes you. You could go home.

He looked into his own eyes in the mirror and knew it wasn’t true.

Because he was stuck, he was committed, he was down for it. Had been from the moment he walked into the bar. No, longer than that. From the first rainy night when he walked home on Eighth Avenue. Or maybe before, maybe ever since Dooley’s insinuation had led him to change his route.

And maybe it went back further than that. Maybe he was locked in from the jump, from the day they opened the gates and put him on the street. Hell, from the day he was born, even.

“Paul?”

“Just a minute,” he said.

And he slipped into the kitchen. In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought, and he started opening drawers, looking for the one where she kept the knives.

Like a Bone in the Throat

Throughout the trial, Paul Dandridge did the same thing every day. He wore a suit and tie, and he occupied a seat toward the front of the courtroom, and his eyes, time and time again, returned to the man who had killed his sister.

He was never called upon to testify. The facts were virtually undisputed, the evidence overwhelming. The defendant, William Charles Croydon, had abducted Dandridge’s sister at knifepoint as she walked from the college library to her off-campus apartment. He had taken her to an isolated and rather primitive cabin in the woods, where he had subjected her to repeated sexual assaults over a period of three days, at the conclusion of which he had caused her death by manual strangulation.

Croydon took the stand in his own defense. He was a handsome young man who’d spent his thirtieth birthday in a jail cell awaiting trial, and his preppy good looks had already brought him letters and photographs and even a few marriage proposals from women of all ages. (Paul Dandridge was twenty-seven at the time. His sister, Karen, had been twenty when she died. The trial ended just weeks before her twenty-first birthday.)

On the stand, William Croydon claimed that he had no recollection of choking the life out of Karen Dandridge, but allowed as how he had no choice but to believe he’d done it. According to his testimony, the young woman had willingly accompanied him to the remote cabin, and had been an enthusiastic sexual partner with a penchant for rough sex. She had also supplied some particularly strong marijuana with hallucinogenic properties and had insisted that he smoke it with her. At one point, after indulging heavily in the unfamiliar drug, he had lost consciousness and awakened later to find his partner beside him, dead.

His first thought, he’d told the court, was that someone had broken into the cabin while he was sleeping, had killed Karen, and might return to kill him. Accordingly he’d panicked and rushed out of there, abandoning Karen’s corpse. Now, faced with all the evidence arrayed against him, he was compelled to believe he had somehow committed this awful crime, although he had no recollection of it whatsoever, and although it was utterly foreign to his nature.

The district attorney, prosecuting this case himself, tore Croydon apart on cross-examination. He cited the bite marks on the victim’s breasts, the rope burns indicating prolonged restraint, the steps Croydon had taken in an attempt to conceal his presence in the cabin. “You must be right,” Croydon would admit, with a shrug and a sad smile. “All I can say is that I don’t remember any of it.”

The jury was eleven-to-one for conviction right from the jump, but it took six hours to make it unanimous. Mr. Foreman, have you reached a verdict? We have, Your Honor. On the sole count of the indictment, murder in the first degree, how do you find? We find the defendant, William Charles Croydon, guilty.

One woman cried out. A couple of others sobbed. The DA accepted congratulations. The defense attorney put an arm around his client. Paul Dandridge, his jaw set, looked at Croydon.

Their eyes met, and Paul Dandridge tried to read the expression in the killer’s eyes. But he couldn’t make it out.

Two weeks later, at the sentencing hearing, Paul Dandridge got to testify.

He talked about his sister, and what a wonderful person she had been. He spoke of the brilliance of her intellect, the gentleness of her spirit, the promise of her young life. He spoke of the effect of her death upon him. They had lost both parents, he told the court, and Karen was all the family he’d had in the world. And now she was gone. In order for his sister to rest in peace, and in order for him to get on with his own life, he urged that her murderer be sentenced to death.

Croydon’s attorney argued that the case did not meet the criteria for the death penalty, that while his client possessed a criminal record he had never been charged with a crime remotely of this nature, and that the rough-sex-and-drugs defense carried a strong implication of mitigating circumstances. Even if the jury had rejected the defense, surely the defendant ought to be spared the ultimate penalty, and justice would be best served if he were sentenced to life in prison.

The DA pushed hard for the death penalty, contending that the rough-sex defense was the cynical last-ditch stand of a remorseless killer, and that the jury had rightly seen that it was wholly without merit. Although her killer might well have taken drugs, there was no forensic evidence to indicate that Karen Dandridge herself had been under the influence of anything other than a powerful and ruthless murderer. Karen Dandridge needed to be avenged, he maintained, and society needed to be assured that her killer would never, ever, be able to do it again.

Paul Dandridge was looking at Croydon when the judge pronounced the sentence, hoping to see something in those cold blue eyes. But as the words were spoken — death by lethal injection — there was nothing for Paul to see. Croydon closed his eyes.

When he opened them a moment later, there was no expression to be seen in them.

They made you fairly comfortable on Death Row. Which was just as well, because in this state you could sit there for a long time. A guy serving a life sentence could make parole and be out on the street in a lot less time than a guy on Death Row could run out of appeals. In that joint alone, there were four men with more than ten years apiece on Death Row, and one who was closing in on twenty.

One of the things they’d let Billy Croydon have was a typewriter. He’d never learned to type properly, the way they taught you in typing class, but he was writing enough these days so that he was getting pretty good at it, just using two fingers on each hand. He wrote letters to his lawyer, and he wrote letters to the women who wrote to him. It wasn’t too hard to keep them writing, but the trick lay in getting them to do what he wanted. They wrote plenty of letters, but he wanted them to write really hot letters, describing in detail what they’d done with other guys in the past, and what they’d do if by some miracle they could be in his cell with him now.

They sent pictures, too, and some of them were good-looking and some of them were not. “That’s a great picture,” he would write back, “but I wish I had one that showed more of your physical beauty.” It turned out to be surprisingly easy to get most of them to send increasingly revealing pictures. Before long he had them buying Polaroid cameras with timers and posing in obedience to his elaborate instructions. They’d do anything, the bitches, and he was sure they got off on it, too.

Today, though, he didn’t feel like writing to any of them. He rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter and looked at it, and the image that came to him was the grim face of that hardass brother of Karen Dandridge’s. What was his name, anyway? Paul, wasn’t it?

“Dear Paul,” he typed, and frowned for a moment in concentration. Then he started typing again.

“Sitting here in this cell waiting for the day to come when they put a needle in my arm and flush me down God’s own toilet, I found myself thinking about your testimony in court. I remember how you said your sister was a goodhearted girl who spent her short life bringing pleasure to everyone who knew her. According to your testimony, knowing this helped you rejoice in her life at the same time that it made her death so hard to take.

“Well, Paul, in the interest of helping you rejoice some more, I thought I’d tell you just how much pleasure your little sister brought to me. I’ve got to tell you that in all my life I never got more pleasure from anybody. My first look at Karen brought me pleasure, just watching her walk across campus, just looking at those jiggling tits and that tight little ass and imagining the fun I was going to have with them.

“Then when I had her tied up in the backseat of the car with her mouth taped shut, I have to say she went on being a real source of pleasure. Just looking at her in the rear-view mirror was enjoyable, and from time to time I would stop the car and lean into the back to run my hands over her body. I don’t think she liked it much, but I enjoyed it enough for the both of us.

“Tell me something, Paul. Did you ever fool around with Karen yourself? I bet you did. I can picture her when she was maybe eleven, twelve years old, with her little titties just beginning to bud out, and you’d have been seventeen or eighteen yourself, so how could you stay away from her? She’s sleeping and you walk into her room and sit on the edge of her bed...”

He went on, describing the scene he imagined, and it excited him more than the pictures or letters from the women. He stopped and thought about relieving his excitement but decided to wait. He finished the scene as he imagined it and went on:

“Paul, old buddy, if you didn’t get any of that you were missing a good thing. I can’t tell you the pleasure I got out of your sweet little sister. Maybe I can give you some idea by describing our first time together.” And he did, recalling it all to mind, savoring it in his memory, reliving it as he typed it out on the page.

“I suppose you know she was no virgin,” he wrote, “but she was pretty new at it all the same. And then when I turned her facedown, well, I can tell you she’d never done that before. She didn’t like it much, either. I had the tape off her mouth and I swear I thought she’d wake the neighbors, even though there weren’t any. I guess it hurt her some, Paul, but that was just an example of your darling sister sacrificing everything to give pleasure to others, just like you said. And it worked, because I had a hell of a good time.”

God, this was great. It really brought it all back.

“Here’s the thing,” he wrote. “The more we did it, the better it got. You’d think I would have grown tired of her, but I didn’t. I wanted to keep on having her over and over again forever, but at the same time I felt this urgent need to finish it, because I knew that would be the best part.

“And I wasn’t disappointed, Paul, because the most pleasure your sister ever gave anybody was right at the very end. I was on top of her, buried in her to the hilt, and I had my hands wrapped around her neck. And the ultimate pleasure came with me squeezing and looking into her eyes and squeezing harder and harder and going on looking into those eyes all the while and watching the life go right out of them.”

He was too excited now. He had to stop and relieve himself. Afterward he read the letter and got excited all over again. A great letter, better than anything he could get any of his bitches to write to him, but he couldn’t send it, not in a million years.

Not that it wouldn’t be a pleasure to rub the brother’s nose in it. Without the bastard’s testimony, he might have stood a good chance to beat the death sentence. With it, he was sunk.

Still, you never knew. Appeals would take a long time. Maybe he could do himself a little good here.

He rolled a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter. Dear Mr. Dandridge, he wrote. I’m well aware that the last thing on earth you want to read is a letter from me. I know that in your place I would feel no different myself. But I cannot seem to stop myself from reaching out to you. Soon I’ll be strapped down onto a gurney and given a lethal injection. That frightens me horribly, but I’d gladly die a thousand times over if only it would bring your sister back to life. I may not remember killing her, but I know I must have done it, and I would give anything to undo it. With all my heart, I wish she were alive today.

Well, that last part was true, he thought. He wished to God she were alive, and right there in that cell with him, so that he could do her all over again, start to finish.

He went on and finished the letter, making it nothing but an apology, accepting responsibility, expressing remorse. It wasn’t a letter that sought anything, not even forgiveness, and it struck him as a good opening shot. Probably nothing would ever come of it, but you never knew.

After he’d sent it off, he took out the first letter he’d written and read it through, relishing the feelings that coursed through him and strengthened him. He’d keep this, maybe even add to it from time to time. It was really great the way it brought it all back.

Paul destroyed the first letter.

He opened it, unaware of its source, and was a sentence or two into it before he realized what he was reading. It was, incredibly, a letter from the man who had killed his sister.

He felt a chill. He wanted to stop reading but he couldn’t stop reading. He forced himself to stay with it all the way to the end.

The nerve of the man. The unadulterated gall.

Expressing remorse. Saying how sorry he was. Not asking for anything, not trying to justify himself, not attempting to disavow responsibility.

But there had been no remorse in the blue eyes, and Paul didn’t believe there was a particle of genuine remorse in the letter, either. And what difference did it make if there was?

Karen was dead. Remorse wouldn’t bring her back.

His lawyer had told him they had nothing to worry about, they were sure to get a stay of execution. The appeal process, always drawn out in capital cases, was in its early days. They’d get the stay in plenty of time, and the clock would start ticking all over again.

And it wasn’t as though it got to the point where they were asking him what he wanted for a last meal. That happened sometimes, there was a guy three cells down who’d had his last meal twice already, but it didn’t get that close for Billy Croydon. Two and a half weeks to go and the stay came through.

That was a relief, but at the same time he almost wished it had run out a little closer to the wire. Not for his benefit, but just to keep a couple of his correspondents on the edges of their chairs.

Two of them, actually. One was a fat girl who lived at home with her mother in Burns, Oregon, the other a sharp-jawed old maid employed as a corporate librarian in Philadelphia. Both had displayed a remarkable willingness to pose as he specified for their Polaroid cameras, doing interesting things and showing themselves in interesting ways. And, as the countdown had continued toward his date with death, both had proclaimed their willingness to join him in heaven.

No joy in that. In order for them to follow him to the grave, he’d have to be in it himself, wouldn’t he? They could cop out and he’d never even know it.

Still, there was great power in knowing they’d even made the promise. And maybe there was something here he could work with.

He went to the typewriter. “My darling,” he wrote. “The only thing that makes these last days bearable is the love we have for each other. Your pictures and letters sustain me, and the knowledge that we will be together in the next world draws much of the fear out of the abyss that yawns before me.

“Soon they will strap me down and fill my veins with poison, and I will awaken in the void. If only I could make that final journey knowing you would be waiting there for me! My angel, do you have the courage to make the trip ahead of me? Do you love me that much? I can’t ask so great a sacrifice of you, and yet I am driven to ask it, because how dare I withhold from you something that is so important to me?”

He read it over, crossed out “sacrifice” and penciled in “proof of love.” It wasn’t quite right, and he’d have to work on it some more. Could either of the bitches possibly go for it? Could he possibly get them to do themselves for love?

And, even if they did, how would he know about it? Some hatchet-faced dame in Philly slashes her wrists in the bathtub, some fat girl hangs herself in Oregon, who’s going to know to tell him so he can get off on it? Darling, do it in front of a video cam, and have them send me the tape. Be a kick, but it’d never happen.

Didn’t Manson get his girls to cut Xs on their foreheads? Maybe he could get his to cut themselves a little, where it wouldn’t show except in the Polaroids. Would they do it? Maybe, if he worded it right.

Meanwhile, he had other fish to fry.

“Dear Paul,” he typed. “I’ve never called you anything but ‘Mr. Dandridge,’ but I’ve written you so many letters, some of them just in the privacy of my mind, that I’ll permit myself this liberty. And for all I know you throw my letters away unread. If so, well, I’m still not sorry I’ve spent the time writing them. It’s a great help to me to get my thoughts on paper in this manner.

“I suppose you already know that I got another stay of execution. I can imagine your exasperation at the news. Would it surprise you to know that my own reaction was much the same? I don’t want to die, Paul, but I don’t want to live like this either, while lawyers scurry around just trying to postpone the inevitable. Better for both of us if they’d just killed me right away.

“Though I suppose I should be grateful for this chance to make my peace, with you and with myself. I can’t bring myself to ask for your forgiveness, and I certainly can’t summon up whatever is required for me to forgive myself, but perhaps that will come with time. They seem to be giving me plenty of time, even if they do persist in doling it out to me bit by bit...”

When he found the letter, Paul Dandridge followed what had become standard practice for him. He set it aside while he opened and tended to the rest of his mail. Then he went into the kitchen and brewed himself a pot of coffee. He poured a cup and sat down with it and opened the letter from Croydon.

When the second letter came he’d read it through to the end, then crumpled it in his fist. He hadn’t known whether to throw it in the garbage or burn it in the fireplace, and in the end he’d done neither. Instead he’d carefully unfolded it and smoothed out its creases and read it again before putting it away.

Since then he’d saved all the letters. It had been almost three years since sentence was pronounced on William Croydon, and longer than that since Karen had died at his hands. (Literally at his hands, he thought; the hands that typed the letter and folded it into its envelope had encircled Karen’s neck and strangled her. The very hands.)

Now Croydon was thirty-three and Paul was thirty himself, and he had been receiving letters at the approximate rate of one every two months. This was the fifteenth, and it seemed to mark a new stage in their one-sided correspondence. Croydon had addressed him by his first name.

“Better for both of us if they’d just killed me right away.” Ah. but they hadn’t, had they? And they wouldn’t, either. It would drag on and on and on. A lawyer he’d consulted had told him it would not be unrealistic to expect another ten years of delay. For God’s sake, he’d be forty years old by the time the state got around to doing the job.

It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he and Croydon were fellow prisoners. He was not confined to a cell and not under a sentence of death, but it struck him that his life held only the illusion of freedom. He wouldn’t really be free until Croydon’s ordeal was over. Until then he was confined in a prison without walls, unable to get on with his life, unable to have a life, just marking time.

He went over to his desk, took out a sheet of letterhead, uncapped a pen. For a long moment he hesitated. Then he sighed gently and touched pen to paper.

“Dear Croydon,” he wrote. “I don’t know what to call you. I can’t bear to address you by your first name or to call you ‘Mr. Croydon.’ Not that I ever expected to call you anything at all. I guess I thought you’d be dead by now. God knows I wished it...”

Once he got started, it was surprisingly easy to find the words.

An answer from Dandridge.

Unbelievable.

If he had a shot, Paul Dandridge was it. The stays and the appeals would only carry you so far. The chance that any court along the way would grant him a reversal and a new trial was remote at best. His only real hope was a commutation of his death sentence to life imprisonment.

Not that he wanted to spend the rest of his life in prison. In a sense, you lived better on Death Row than if you were doing life in general prison population. But in another sense the difference between a life sentence and a death sentence was, well, the difference between life and death. If he got his sentence commuted to life, that meant the day would come when he made parole and hit the street. They might not come right out and say that, but that was what it would amount to, especially if he worked the system right.

And Paul Dandridge was the key to getting his sentence commuted.

He remembered how the prick had testified at the presentencing hearing. If any single thing had ensured the death sentence, it was Dandridge’s testimony. And, if anything could swing a commutation of sentence for him, it was a change of heart on the part of Karen Dandridge’s brother.

Worth a shot.

“Dear Paul,” he typed. “I can’t possibly tell you the sense of peace that came over me when I realized the letter I was holding was from you...”

Paul Dandridge, seated at his desk, uncapped his pen and wrote the day’s date at the top of a sheet of letterhead. He paused and looked at what he had written. It was, he realized, the fifth anniversary of his sister’s death, and he hadn’t been aware of that fact until he’d inscribed the date at the top of a letter to the man who’d killed her.

Another irony, he thought. They seemed to be infinite.

“Dear Billy,” he wrote. “You’ll appreciate this. It wasn’t until I’d written the date on this letter that I realized its significance. It’s been exactly five years since the day that changed both our lives forever.”

He took a breath, considered his words. He wrote, “And I guess it’s time to acknowledge formally something I’ve acknowledged in my heart some time ago. While I may never get over Karen’s death, the bitter hatred that has burned in me for so long has finally cooled. And so I’d like to say that you have my forgiveness in full measure. And now I think it’s time for you to forgive yourself...”

It was hard to sit still.

That was something he’d had no real trouble doing since the first day the cell door closed with him inside. You had to be able to sit still to do time, and it was never hard for him. Even during the several occasions when he’d been a few weeks away from an execution date, he’d never been one to pace the floor or climb the walls.

But today was the hearing. Today the board was hearing testimony from three individuals. One was a psychiatrist who would supply some professional arguments for commuting his sentence from death to life. Another was his fourth-grade teacher, who would tell the board how rough he’d had it in childhood and what a good little boy he was underneath it all. He wondered where they’d dug her up, and how she could possibly remember him. He didn’t remember her at all.

The third witness, and the only really important one, was Paul Dandridge. Not only was he supplying the only testimony likely to carry much weight, but it was he who had spent money to locate Croydon’s fourth-grade teacher, he who had enlisted the services of the shrink.

His buddy, Paul. A crusader, moving heaven and earth to save Billy Croydon’s life.

Just the way he’d planned it.

He paced, back and forth, back and forth, and then he stopped and retrieved from his locker the letter that had started it all. The first letter to Paul Dandridge, the one he’d had the sense not to send. How many times had he reread it over the years, bringing the whole thing back into focus?

“When I turned her facedown, well, I can tell you she’d never done that before.” Jesus, no, she hadn’t liked it at all. He read and remembered, warmed by the memory.

What did he have these days but his memories? The women who’d been writing him had long since given it up. Even the ones who’d sworn to follow him to death had lost interest during the endless round of stays and appeals. He still had the letters and pictures they’d sent, but the pictures were unappealing, only serving to remind him what a bunch of pigs they all were, and the letters were sheer fantasy with no underpinning of reality. They described, and none too vividly, events that had never happened and events that would never happen. The sense of power to compel them to write those letters and pose for their pictures had faded over time. Now they only bored him and left him faintly disgusted.

Of his own memories, only that of Karen Dandridge held any real flavor. The other two girls, the ones he’d done before Karen, were almost impossible to recall. They were brief encounters, impulsive, unplanned, and over almost before they’d begun. He’d surprised one in a lonely part of the park, just pulled her skirt up and her panties down and went at her, hauling off and smacking her with a rock a couple of times when she wouldn’t keep quiet. That shut her up, and when he finished he found out why. She was dead. He’d evidently cracked her skull and killed her, and he’d been thrusting away at dead meat.

Hardly a memory to stir the blood ten years later. The second one wasn’t much better, either. He’d been about half drunk, and that had the effect of blurring the memory. He’d snapped her neck afterward, the little bitch, and he remembered that part, but he couldn’t remember what it had felt like.

One good thing. Nobody ever found out about either of those two. If they had, he wouldn’t have a prayer at today’s hearing.

After the hearing, Paul managed to slip out before the press could catch up with him. Two days later, however, when the governor acted on the board’s recommendation and commuted William Croydon’s sentence to life imprisonment, one persistent reporter managed to get Paul in front of a video camera.

“For a long time I wanted vengeance,” he admitted. “I honestly believed that I could only come to terms with the loss of my sister by seeing her killer put to death.”

What changed that, the reporter wanted to know.

He stopped to consider his answer. “The dawning realization,” he said, “that I could really only recover from Karen’s death not by seeing Billy Croydon punished but by letting go of the need to punish. In the simplest terms, I had to forgive him.”

And could he do that? Could he forgive the man who had brutally murdered his sister?

“Not overnight,” he said. “It took time. I can’t even swear I’ve forgiven him completely. But I’ve come far enough in the process to realize capital punishment is not only inhumane but pointless. Karen’s death was wrong, but Billy Croydon’s death would be another wrong, and two wrongs don’t make a right. Now that his sentence has been lifted, I can get on with the process of complete forgiveness.”

The reporter commented that it sounded as though Paul Dandridge had gone through some sort of religious conversion experience.

“I don’t know about religion,” Paul said, looking right at the camera. “I don’t really consider myself a religious person. But something’s happened, something transformational in nature, and I suppose you could call it spiritual.”

With his sentence commuted, Billy Croydon drew a transfer to another penitentiary, where he was assigned a cell in general population. After years of waiting to die he was being given a chance to create a life for himself within the prison’s walls. He had a job in the prison laundry, he had access to the library and exercise yard. He didn’t have his freedom, but he had life.

On the sixteenth day of his new life, three hard-eyed lifers cornered him in the room where they stored the bed linen. He’d noticed one of the men earlier, had several times caught him staring at him a few times, looking at Croydon the way you’d look at a woman. He hadn’t spotted the other two before, but they had the same look in their eyes as the one he recognized.

There wasn’t a thing he could do.

They raped him, all three of them, and they weren’t gentle about it, either. He fought at first but their response to that was savage and prompt, and he gasped at the pain and quit his struggling. He tried to disassociate himself from what was being done to him, tried to take his mind away to some private place. That was a way old cons had of doing time, getting through the hours on end of vacant boredom. This time it didn’t really work.

They left him doubled up on the floor, warned him against saying anything to the hacks, and drove the point home with a boot to the ribs.

He managed to get back to his cell, and the following day he put in a request for a transfer to B Block, where you were locked down twenty-three hours a day. He was used to that on Death Row, so he knew he could live with it.

So much for making a life inside the walls. What he had to do was get out.

He still had his typewriter. He sat down, flexed his fingers. One of the rapists had bent his little finger back the day before, and it still hurt, but it wasn’t one that he used for typing. He took a breath and started in.

“Dear Paul...”

“Dear Billy,

“As always, it was good to hear from you. I write not with news but just in the hope that I can lighten your spirits and build your resolve for the long road ahead. Winning your freedom won’t be an easy task, but it’s my conviction that working together we can make it happen...

“Yours, Paul.”

“Dear Paul,

“Thanks for the books. I missed a lot, all those years when I never opened a book. It’s funny — my life seems so much more spacious now, even though I’m spending all but one hour a day in a dreary little cell. But it’s like that poem that starts, ‘Stone walls do not a prison make / Nor iron bars a cage.’ (I’d have to say, though, that the stone walls and iron bars around this place make a pretty solid prison.)

“I don’t expect much from the parole board next month, but it’s a start...”

“Dear Billy,

“I was deeply saddened by the parole board’s decision, although everything I’d heard had led me to expect nothing else. Even though you’ve been locked up more than enough time to be eligible, the thinking evidently holds that Death Row time somehow counts less than regular prison time, and that the board wants to see how you do as a prisoner serving a life sentence before letting you return to the outside world. I’m not sure I understand the logic there...

“I’m glad you’re taking it so well.

“Your friend, Paul.”

“Dear Paul,

“Once again, thanks for the books. They’re a healthy cut above what’s available here. This joint prides itself in its library, but when you say ‘Kierkegaard’ to the prison librarian he looks at you funny, and you don’t dare try him on Martin Buber.

“I shouldn’t talk, because I’m having troubles of my own with both of those guys. I haven’t got anybody else to bounce this off, so do you mind if I press you into service? Here’s my take on Kierkegaard...

“Well, that’s the latest from the Jailhouse Philosopher, who is pleased to be

“Your friend, Billy.”

“Dear Billy,

“Well, once again it’s time for the annual appearance before parole board — or the annual circus, as you call it with plenty of justification. Last year we thought maybe the third time was the charm, and it turned out we were wrong, but maybe it’ll be different this year...”

“Dear Paul,

“ ‘Maybe it’ll be different this time.’ Isn’t that what Charlie Brown tells himself before he tried to kick the football? And Lucy always snatches it away.

“Still, some of the deep thinkers I’ve been reading stress that hope is important even when it’s unwarranted. And, although I’m a little scared to admit it, I have a good feeling this time.

“And if they never let me out, well, I’ve reached a point where I honestly don’t mind. I’ve found an inner life here that’s far superior to anything I had in my years as a free man. Between my books, my solitude, and my correspondence with you, I have a life I can live with. Of course I’m hoping for parole, but if they snatch the football away again, it ain’t gonna kill me...”

“Dear Billy,

“... Just a thought, but maybe that’s the line you should take with them. That you’d welcome parole, but you’ve made a life for yourself within the walls and you can stay there indefinitely if you have to.

“I don’t know, maybe that’s the wrong strategy altogether, but I think it might impress them...”

“Dear Paul,

“Who knows what’s likely to impress them? On the other hand, what have I got to lose?”

Billy Croydon sat at the end of the long conference table, speaking when spoken to, uttering his replies in a low voice, giving pro forma responses to the same questions they asked him every year. At the end they asked him, as usual, if there was anything he wanted to say.

Well, what the hell, he thought. What did he have to lose?

“I’m sure it won’t surprise you,” he began, “to hear that I’ve come before you in the hope of being granted early release. I’ve had hearings before, and when I was turned down it was devastating. Well, I may not be doing myself any good by saying this, but this time around it won’t destroy me if you decide to deny me parole. Almost in spite of myself, I’ve made a life for myself within prison walls. I’ve found an inner life, a life of the spirit, that’s superior to anything I had as a free man...”

Were they buying it? Hard to tell. On the other hand, since it happened to be the truth, it didn’t really matter whether they bought it or not.

He pushed on to the end. The chairman scanned the room, then looked at him and nodded shortly.

“Thank you, Mr. Croydon,” he said. “I think that will be all for now.”

“I think I speak for all of us,” the chairman said, “when I say how much weight we attach to your appearance before this board. We’re used to hearing the pleas of victims and their survivors, but almost invariably they come here to beseech us to deny parole. You’re virtually unique, Mr. Dandridge, in appearing as the champion of the very man who...”

“Killed my sister,” Paul said levelly.

“Yes. You’ve appeared before us on prior occasions, Mr. Dandridge, and while we were greatly impressed by your ability to forgive William Croydon and by the relationship you’ve forged with him, it seems to me that there’s been a change in your own sentiments. Last year, I recall, while you pleaded on Mr. Croydon’s behalf, we sensed that you did not wholeheartedly believe he was ready to be returned to society.”

“Perhaps I had some hesitation.”

“But this year...”

“Billy Croydon’s a changed man. The process of change has been completed. I know that he’s ready to get on with his life.”

“There’s no denying the power of your testimony, especially in light of its source.” The chairman cleared his throat. “Thank you, Mr. Dandridge. I think that will be all for now.”

“Well?” Paul said. “How do you feel?”

Billy considered the question. “Hard to say,” he said. “Everything’s a little unreal. Even being in a car. Last time I was in a moving vehicle was when I got my commutation and they transferred me from the other prison. It’s not like Rip van Winkle, I know what everything looks like from television, cars included. Tell the truth, I feel a little shaky.”

“I guess that’s to be expected.”

“I suppose.” He tugged his seat belt to tighten it. “You want to know how I feel, I feel vulnerable. All those years I was locked down twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. I knew what to expect, I knew I was safe. Now I’m a free man, and it scares the crap out of me.”

“Look in the glove compartment,” Paul said.

“Jesus, Johnny Walker Black.”

“I figured you might be feeling a little anxious. That ought to take the edge off.”

“Yeah, Dutch courage,” Billy said. “Why Dutch, do you happen to know? I’ve always wondered.”

“No idea.”

He weighed the bottle in his hand. “Been a long time,” he said. “Haven’t had a taste of anything since they locked me up.”

“There was nothing available in prison?”

“Oh, there was stuff. The jungle juice cons made out of potatoes and raisins, and some good stuff that got smuggled in. But I wasn’t in population, so I didn’t have access. And anyway it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.”

“Well, you’re a free man now. Why don’t you drink to it? I’m driving or I’d join you.”

“Well...”

“Go ahead.”

“Why not?” he said, and uncapped the bottle and held it to the light. “Pretty color, huh? Well, here’s to freedom, huh?” He took a long drink, shuddered at the burn of the whisky. “Kicks like a mule,” he said.

“You’re not used to it.”

“I’m not.” He put the cap on the bottle and had a little trouble screwing it back on. “Hitting me hard,” he reported. “Like I was a little kid getting his first taste of it. Whew.”

“You’ll be all right.”

“Spinning,” Billy said, and slumped in his seat.

Paul glanced over at him, looked at him again a minute later. Then, after checking the mirror, he pulled the car off the road and braked to a stop.

Billy was conscious for a little while before he opened his eyes. He tried to get his bearings first. The last thing he remembered was a wave of dizziness after the slug of scotch hit bottom. He was still sitting upright, but it didn’t feel like a car seat, and he didn’t sense any movement. No, he was in some sort of chair, and he seemed to be tied to it.

That didn’t make any sense. A dream? He’d had lucid dreams before and knew how real they were, how you could be in them and wonder if you were dreaming and convince yourself you weren’t. The way you broke the surface and got out of it was by opening your eyes. You had to force yourself, had to open your real eyes and not just your eyes in the dream, but it could be done... There!

He was in a chair, in a room he’d never seen before, looking out a window at a view he’d never seen before. An open field, woods behind it.

He turned his head to the left and saw a wall paneled in knotty cedar. He turned to the right and saw Paul Dandridge, wearing boots and jeans and a plaid flannel shirt and sitting in an easy chair with a book. He said, “Hey!” and Paul lowered the book and looked at him.

“Ah,” Paul said. “You’re awake.”

“What’s going on?”

“What do you think?”

“There was something in the whiskey.”

“There was indeed,” Paul agreed. “You started to stir just as we made the turn off the state road. I gave you a booster shot with a hypodermic needle.”

“I don’t remember.”

“You never felt it. I was afraid for a minute there that I’d given you too much. That would have been ironic, wouldn’t you say? ‘Death by lethal injection.’ The sentence carried out finally after all these years, and you wouldn’t have even known it happened.”

He couldn’t take it in. “Paul,” he said, “for God’s sake, what’s it all about?”

“What’s it about?” Paul considered his response. “It’s about time.”

“Time?”

“It’s the last act of the drama.”

“Where are we?”

“A cabin in the woods. Not the cabin. That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“If I killed you in the same cabin where you killed Karen. Ironic, but not really feasible. So this is a different cabin in different woods, but it will have to do.”

“You’re going to kill me?”

“Of course.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

“Because that’s how it ends, Billy. That’s the point of the whole game. That’s how I planned it from the beginning.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“Why is it so hard to believe? We conned each other, Billy. You pretended to repent and I pretended to believe you. You pretended to reform and I pretended to be on your side. Now we can both stop pretending.”

Billy was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I was trying to con you at the beginning.”

“No kidding.”

“There was a point where it turned into something else, but it started out as a scam. It was the only way I could think of to stay alive. You saw through it?”

“Of course.”

“But you pretended to go along with it. Why?”

“Is it that hard to figure out?”

“It doesn’t make any sense. What do you gain by it? My death? If you wanted me dead all you had to do was tear up my letter. The state was all set to kill me.”

“They’d have taken forever,” Paul said bitterly. “Delay after delay, and always the possibility of a reversal and a retrial, always the possibility of a commutation of sentence.”

“There wouldn’t have been a reversal, and it took you working for me to get my sentence commuted. There would have been delays, but there’d already been a few of them before I got around to writing to you. It couldn’t have lasted too many years longer, and it would have added up to a lot less than it has now, with all the time I spent serving life and waiting for the parole board to open the doors. If you’d just let it go, I’d be dead and buried by now.”

“You’ll be dead soon,” Paul told him. “And buried. It won’t be much longer. Your grave’s already dug. I took care of that before I drove to the prison to pick you up.”

“They’ll come after you, Paul. When I don’t show up for my initial appointment with my parole officer—”

“They’ll get in touch, and I’ll tell them we had a drink and shook hands and you went off on your own. It’s not my fault if you decided to skip town and violate the terms of your parole.”

He took a breath. He said, “Paul, don’t do this.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m begging you. I don’t want to die.”

“Ah,” Paul said. “That’s why.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I left it to the state,” he said, “they’d have been killing a dead man. By the time the last appeal was denied and the last request for a stay of execution turned down, you’d have been resigned to the inevitable. They’d strap you to a gurney and give you a shot, and it would be just like going to sleep.”

“That’s what they say.”

“But now you want to live. You adjusted to prison, you made a life for yourself in there, and then you finally made parole, icing on the cake, and now you genuinely want to live. You’ve really got a life now, Billy, and I’m going to take it away from you.”

“You’re serious about this.”

“I’ve never been more serious about anything.”

“You must have been planning this for years.”

“From the very beginning.”

“Jesus, it’s the most thoroughly premeditated crime in the history of the world, isn’t it? Nothing I can do about it, either. You’ve got me tied tight and the chair won’t tip over. Is there anything I can say that’ll make you change your mind?”

“Of course not.”

“That’s what I thought.” He sighed. “Get it over with.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Huh?”

“This won’t be what the state hands out,” Paul Dandridge said. “A minute ago you were begging me to let you live. Before it’s over you’ll be begging me to kill you.”

“You’re going to torture me.”

“That’s the idea.”

“In fact you’ve already started, haven’t you? This is the mental part.”

“Very perceptive of you, Billy.”

“For all the good it does me. This is all because of what I did to your sister, isn’t it?”

“Obviously.”

“I didn’t do it, you know. It was another Billy Croydon that killed her, and I can barely remember what he was like.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Not to you, evidently, and you’re the one calling the shots. I’m sure Kierkegaard had something useful to say about this sort of situation, but I’m damned if I can call it to mind. You knew I was conning you, huh? Right from the jump?”

“Of course.”

“I thought it was a pretty good letter I wrote you.”

“It was a masterpiece, Billy. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t easy to see through.”

“So now you dish it out and I take it,” Billy Croydon said, “until you get bored and end it, and I wind up in the grave you’ve already dug for me. And that’s the end of it. I wonder if there’s a way to turn it around.”

“Not a chance.”

“Oh, I know I’m not getting out of here alive, Paul, but there’s more than one way of turning something around. Let’s see now. You know, the letter you got wasn’t the first one I wrote to you.”

“So?”

“The past is always with you, isn’t it? I’m not the same man as the guy who killed your sister, but he’s still there inside somewhere. Just a question of calling him up.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just talking to myself, I guess. I was starting to tell you about that first letter. I never sent it, you know, but I kept it. For the longest time I held on to it and read it whenever I wanted to relive the experience. Then it stopped working, or maybe I stopped wanting to call up the past, but whatever it was I quit reading it. I still held on to it, and then one day I realized I didn’t want to own it anymore. So I tore it up and got rid of it.”

“That’s fascinating.”

“But I read it so many times I bet I can bring it back word for word.” His eyes locked with Paul Dandridge’s, and his lips turned up in the slightest suggestion of a smile. He said, “ ‘Dear Paul, Sitting here in this cell waiting for the day to come when they put a needle in my arm and flush me down God’s own toilet, I found myself thinking about your testimony in court. I remember how you said your sister was a goodhearted girl who spent her short life bringing pleasure to everyone who knew her. According to your testimony, knowing this helped you rejoice in her life at the same time that it made her death so hard to take.

“ ‘Well, Paul, in the interest of helping you rejoice some more, I thought I’d tell you just how much pleasure your little sister brought to me. I’ve got to tell you that in all my life I never got more pleasure from anybody. My first look at Karen brought me pleasure, just watching her walk across campus, just looking at those jiggling tits and that tight little ass and imagining the fun I was going to have with them.’ ”

“Stop it, Croydon!”

“You don’t want to miss this, Paulie. ‘Then when I had her tied up in the backseat of the car with her mouth taped shut, I have to say she went on being a real source of pleasure. Just looking at her in the rear-view mirror was enjoyable, and from time to time I would stop the car and lean into the back to run my hands over her body. I don’t think she liked it much, but I enjoyed it enough for the both of us.’ ”

“You’re a son of a bitch.”

“And you’re an asshole. You should have let the state put me out of everybody’s misery. Failing that, you should have let go of the hate and sent the new William Croydon off to rejoin society. There’s a lot more to the letter, and I remember it perfectly.” He tilted his head, resumed quoting from memory. “ ‘Tell me something, Paul. Did you ever fool around with Karen yourself? I bet you did. I can picture her when she was maybe eleven, twelve years old, with her little titties just beginning to bud out, and you’d have been seventeen or eighteen yourself, so how could you stay away from her? She’s sleeping and you walk into her room and sit on the edge of her bed.’ ” He grinned. “I always liked that part. And there’s lots more. You enjoying your revenge, Paulie? Is it as sweet as they say it is?”

Points

The Knicks were hosting a first-year expansion team at the Garden, and when the two men arrived, thirty minutes before game time, half the seats were empty. “I’m afraid it’s not going to be much of a game,” the younger man said, “and it looks as though I’m not alone in that opinion. Last time I was here the Lakers were in town, and there wasn’t an empty seat.”

“We’re early,” the older man said. “They won’t sell out tonight, but they’ll come closer than you might guess. Remember, this is New York. A lot of guys don’t even leave their desks until seven-thirty for a game that starts at eight.”

“That’s me you’re describing. Not tonight, but the Laker game? There were points on the board by the time I got to my seat. And it would have been the same story tonight if I hadn’t put my foot down. Carrigan came into my office at half past six with something that had to be done and would only take me a minute, swear to God. ‘Not tonight,’ I told him. ‘I’m meeting my dad.’ ”

Anyone looking at them would have suspected they were father and son. The resemblance was unmistakable, in their faces and in the easy loose-limbed grace with which they moved. The son was a younger version of the father, his hair darker, his features less emphatic. Both were tall men, standing several inches over six feet. Both had been slim in their youth, and both had thickened some around the middle with age, the father more than the son. The son was perhaps an inch taller than the father, a fact which had not gone unremarked at their meeting a few minutes earlier.

“You’re taller,” Richard Parmalee had said. “I don’t suppose your pituitary gland kicked into overdrive when nobody was looking. Have you been taking growth hormone?”

The son, whose name was Kevin, shook his head and grinned.

“Then the odds are you’re not taller,” the father said. “So, unless you’ve got lifts in your shoes—”

“Just insoles, but they don’t make you any taller.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. Well, where does logic inexorably lead us? I’m shrinking.”

“You look the same to me.”

“Hell, I’m not melting away like the Wicked Witch of the West. Everybody shrinks, starting around forty or forty-five, but it takes fifteen or twenty years before it’s enough to notice. You’re not even forty for another year and a half, so you’ve got a while before your cuffs start scraping the pavement.”

“That hasn’t happened to you.”

“No, if I’ve lost half an inch that’s a lot. It’s enough to notice, but only just. And I only just noticed it myself within the past month or so. I knew it was something that happens to everybody, but I figured I was different, it wouldn’t happen to me. Same as right now you’re listening and nodding and telling yourself it won’t happen to you.”

The younger man laughed. “Got me. Exactly what I was telling myself.”

“And who knows? You might be right. You’ve got a few years, and by then they may have something to prevent it. I wouldn’t put it past them.”

As Richard Parmalee had predicted, there were a lot of late arrivals, and most seats were occupied by game time. The Knicks, eleven-point favorites according to the line in the papers, jumped off to an early lead that opened up to twenty-two points at halftime. “Well, it’s not much of a game,” the son said. “I was afraid of that.”

“No, but it’s still fun to watch them. I remember coming here to see the Harlem Globetrotters when I was still in high school. They were playing an exhibition game against somebody, probably the Knicks. I couldn’t believe the things they did. Now everybody does that, but without the clowning.”

“They’re still around, the Globetrotters.”

“And they’re probably as entertaining as ever, but less remarkable, because everybody plays like that. It’s a completely different game than when I played it.”

“It looks completely different to me,” the son said, “so I can only imagine the difference from your point of view.”

“In my day we played on our feet. Your generation played the game on your toes. And now it’s a game played in the air.”

“It’s true.”

“And I swear the rules are different.”

“Well, the three-point shot—”

“Of course, but that’s not what I mean. They routinely commit what would have been a traveling violation, but you never see it called. If a guy’s driving to the basket it doesn’t seem to matter how many steps he takes.”

“I know. There’s a rule, but I can’t figure out what it is.”

“And they’ll turn the ball over when they’re dribbling. Double dribble, that used to be, and you lost possession. Not anymore.”

“I like the three-point shot, though,” Kevin Parmalee said.

“Improves the game. No question. But only at the pro distance. The college three-pointer is too close.”

“It’s ridiculous. And yet the college game’s more fun to watch. It’s not as good a game, but it’s more exciting.”

They went on chatting comfortably until play resumed, then fell largely silent and watched the action on the court. The visitors narrowed the gap in the third quarter, and with three minutes to play only six points separated the two teams. Then the Knicks surged, and led by fourteen when the buzzer sounded.

On their way out the son said, “Well, they made a game of it. It was never close, but you wouldn’t have known that from the fans.”

“They beat the spread,” the father said, “and that wasn’t a foregone conclusion. It could have gone either way until the final seconds.”

“You figure that many of the people here had money on the game?”

“Probably more than you’d think, but that’s not the point. We’re New Yorkers, Kev. When we root for a team, we don’t just want to win the game. We want to beat the spread.”

“And we did, so hoorah for our side.”

“Amen. It was a good game.”

“And God knows the price was right.”

“You told me who gave you the tickets, but I forget. One of the senior partners?”

“No, one of Joe Levin’s clients. He gave them to Joe, and Joe thought he could go and then couldn’t, which was why the whole thing was as last-minute as it was.”

“Terrific seats.”

“Well, some corporation pays for them, and lists them as a business expense. So they didn’t cost us anything, and they didn’t cost anybody else anything, either.”

“That’s the way it ought to be,” Richard Parmalee said. “I made a reservation at Keen’s, not that I think we’ll need one at this hour on a weeknight. That sound all right to you?”

“As long as it’s on me.”

“Not a chance.”

“Hey, I asked you out, remember?”

“You got the tickets, I get the dinner check.”

“The tickets were free, remember?”

“So’s the dinner, as far as you’re concerned. You’re not going to win this argument, Kevin, so don’t even try.”

The headwaiter greeted the older man by name and showed them to a table in the grill room. Richard Parmalee ordered a single-malt scotch, neat, with water back. Kevin ordered a Mexican beer.

“I was reading an article on malt whisky,” he said, “and halfway through I decided I owed it to myself to develop a taste for it. Then I remembered that I never liked hard booze, and I especially don’t like the stuff you drink. Laphroiag?”

“No one ever mistook it for mother’s milk,” the older man conceded. He took a small sip and savored it, as if tasting it for the first time. “I’m not sure I like the taste myself,” he said. “I appreciate it, but that’s not the same thing, is it? All in all, I’d have to say you’re better off with beer.”

“I’d probably be better off with orange juice.”

“Chock full of vitamin C. But you don’t drink much, do you?”

“No.”

“I have a drink every day, but it’s an unusual day when I have a second. Which I guess makes this an unusual day, come to think of it, because I had one at my club this afternoon, and here I am having a second. Two drinks in one day, and only five or six hours apart at that.”

“I’ll call AA.”

They ordered the same meal, steak and salad. The restaurant’s ceiling was festooned with white clay pipes, each reserved for a particular patron, and over coffee the father said, “I almost asked him to bring my pipe.”

“That’s right, you have a pipe here, don’t you? I have a faint memory of you smoking it after dinner.”

“It must have been the first time I brought you here. After a game, I suppose.”

“St. John’s — Iona. St. John’s won, and if I worked at it I could probably remember the score. I was fifteen, and I remember deciding that when I grew up I’d have a pipe of my own here.”

“If you were fifteen then I would have been forty-one. So that may well have been the last time I smoked that pipe, because I was forty-two when I quit. Your grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer, and I threw my cigarettes in the garbage. I had some pipes, although I rarely smoked them.”

“I don’t think I ever saw you smoke a pipe aside from that one time right here.”

“As I said, I rarely did. But I threw them out along with the cigarettes. And I gave away all my lighters and cigarette cases, including a silver Ronson that my father had given me. I figured he’d given me plenty of other things, I didn’t have to hang on to it for sentimental reasons. You’ve never smoked, have you?”

“Not tobacco.”

“Then what... oh, marijuana. Do you use it?”

“I did in college, and for a year or two after. I was never into it that much. Mostly just at parties. I haven’t smoked it in years, and I haven’t even smelled it, except on the street. I don’t go to that many parties, and when I do there’s never anybody lighting up a joint in the corner.”

“I suppose I assumed you tried it in college, although I can’t remember giving much thought to the subject. It wasn’t around when I was in college. Oh, it must have been, but I wasn’t aware of it and certainly didn’t know anybody who smoked it.”

“So you never tried it.”

“I didn’t say that. Your mother and I both tried it a few times in, oh, it must have been ‘sixty-seven or — eight.”

“I was five years old. Were you and Mom hippies? You should have turned me on while you were at it.”

“Hippies,” the father said, and shook his head. “The first time we smoked nothing happened. Our friends, the people who turned us on, swore we were stoned, but if we were we didn’t know it, so what good was it? The second time we both got high and it was very nice, though I can’t say I remember what exactly was nice about it. But it was. And then we smoked once or twice after that, and one time your mother became very anxious, and when it wore off we agreed this wasn’t something we wanted to waste our time on.”

“Mom got paranoid?”

“That’s as good a word for it as any, and how did we get on this? Pipes on the ceiling, we’re a long way from pipes on the ceiling. But I had a hell of a time quitting cigarettes, so I don’t think I’ll call for my pipe and my bowl.”

“Did you smoke when you were playing basketball?”

“Not while I was out on the court. But that’s not what you meant. Sure, I smoked. I was a kid, and kids are stupid. I heard smoking would cut my wind, so I tried it, and I didn’t see any difference, so I decided they were full of crap. What did I expect, that the first cigarette I smoked would add three seconds to my time in the hundred-yard dash? Still, I was never that heavy a smoker when I was playing. After I graduated, that’s when the habit took off.”

“Neither of the girls smokes,” Kevin Parmalee said.

“As far as you know.”

“Well, that goes without saying, doesn’t it? There’s no end of things they don’t do as far as I know, and God only knows what they do that I don’t know, and I don’t want to think about it.”

“Jennifer’s more the athlete, isn’t she?”

They talked about the girls, Kevin Parmalee’s daughters, Richard’s granddaughters. They agreed that Jennifer, the older of the two, had innate athletic ability, but lacked the desire to do anything with it. She had the height for basketball, the older man pointed out, and they talked about the emergence of that sport.

He said, “You know how the college kids play a more interesting game than the pros? Well, I’ll tell you something. The women’s game is better than the men’s.”

“College or pro?”

“Either one.”

“I know what you mean. But...”

“But it’s impossible to give a damn which team wins.”

“I was about to say it was hard to get interested in it, but you just nailed it. That’s exactly what it is. It’s like watching golf, I get completely absorbed in it but I don’t give a damn who wins. Why do you figure that is?”

“One of life’s mysteries,” Richard Parmalee said. “Here’s another. Remember how the fans were cheering earlier, rooting for the Knicks to win by more than twelve points?”

“To beat the spread. Sure.”

“It meant something to the fans, whether or not they had bets down. We talked about that earlier. But what did it mean to the players?”

“I’m not sure I follow you. What did it mean to them?”

“Why did they knock themselves out? They couldn’t have played any harder if the game was nip and tuck.”

“You think they had money on the game?”

“You wouldn’t think they’d bother, the kind of salaries they make. Other hand, I don’t suppose it’s entirely unheard of. But I can’t believe they all bet on the game, and they were all playing their hearts out.”

“They’re pros,” Kevin Parmalee said. “Playing all-out is what they do.”

“They’ve been known to dog it from time to time. Maybe they were trying to beat the spread so it wouldn’t look as though they were trying not to beat the spread.”

“In other words, if they dog it somebody might think they’re shaving points. You think that goes on in the NBA?”

“Shaving points? I don’t know. Again, with their salaries, how could you bribe them? Kev, I think you’re probably right. They weren’t even aware of the spread, and they played hard because that’s the way they play.” He picked up his coffee cup, set it down. “When you played,” he said, “were you ever approached?”

“Approached? Oh.”

“Were you?”

“God, why would anyone come to me? I was lucky to be on the team.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You were damn good.”

“I would have been okay somewhere else. I know, Duke was all my idea, but I’ve never been sorry I went. Even if I did ride the bench for four years. I never had more than eight minutes of playing time, so there were never any guys with bent noses trying to get me to dump games.”

“And your teammates were too busy trying to get into the NBA.”

“Trying to get into the Final Four. They knew they were going to get into the NBA.”

The waiter came, and Kevin Parmalee put his hand over his cup. “Just a half a cup for me,” Richard Parmalee said, and was silent until the waiter withdrew. Then he said, “I was approached.”

“Really?”

“Not by a guy with a bent nose. His nose was as straight as yours or mine, and you wouldn’t have marked him as a gangster, not by his appearance or by his manner. Although I suppose that’s exactly what he was.”

“And he wanted you to dump games?”

“Not to dump games. ‘I would never ask you to lose a game,’ he said. It was fine with him if we beat the other team. Just so we didn’t beat the spread.”

“Did you report him?”

“No,” Richard Parmalee said. “No, I didn’t report him.”

“Oh.”

“I took the money,” he said, and raised his eyes to meet his son’s. “And did what I could to earn it.”

“You shaved points.”

“I shaved points. If we were favored, and if Harold gave me the word, I did my best to see that we didn’t cover the spread.”

“How did you do it? Miss shots that you could have made?”

“I missed shots. I don’t know that I could have made them if I hadn’t had a reason not to. Another way, I’d be wide open and I’d pass off instead of taking the shot. There are a million things you can do without being too obvious about it.”

“I can imagine.”

“I got five hundred dollars a game. And this was 1957 we’re talking about. That was a lot of money in 1957.”

“Sure, it must have been a fortune.”

“When I graduated, my first job was as a management trainee with Kaiser & Ledbetter. Starting salary was five thousand dollars a year. And that wasn’t bad money. That’s what you paid a promising college graduate in a job with a future. So every time we didn’t manage to beat the spread, I was making a tenth of a year’s salary, and that’s not counting taxes.”

“I guess you didn’t declare the money that — Harold?”

“Harold. I never knew his last name, and no, I didn’t declare it. He paid me in cash and I didn’t know what the hell to do with it. It’s funny. I was doing it for the money, but I didn’t do anything with the money. I kept it in a cigar box, and I kept moving the box around because I was afraid somebody would find it.”

“You couldn’t put it in the bank?”

“Kev, I didn’t have a bank account. I lived at home with my parents. They gave me a scholarship to play basketball, but all that covered was tuition. I thought the extra money would come in handy, but I didn’t spend a dime of it.”

“You saved it in a cigar box. What did it add up to, do you remember?”

“Forty-five hundred dollars, and how could I forget? He always paid me in twenty-dollar bills. Twenty-five of them at a time, so what does that come to? Two hundred twenty-five? Is that right? Well, it’s close enough. Not enough bills to fill the cigar box, but a good-sized handful.”

“Nine games, that would have been.”

“Nine games,” the father said. “Nine college basketball games, and all I had to do was hold back a little bit, and how hard was that? And who did it hurt? I mean, who gave a damn if we beat St. Bonaventure’s by ten points or three points? The fans didn’t care. The only people who got hurt were the ones who bet on us, and they were breaking the law in the first place by gambling on a basketball game. What the hell did I owe them?”

“It’s not as though your team lost.”

“We did lose one game. We played Adelphi at home, and we were favored, and Harold gave me the word. And I did what I could to keep us from getting too far ahead, and then in the third quarter Adelphi started playing way over their heads, and before I knew it they were out in front, and we never did catch up. Would they have beaten us anyway? The way they were playing I’m tempted to say they would have beaten the Knicks that night, but I don’t know. Maybe yes and maybe no.”

“It must have been weird, watching the game slip away from you.”

“It was awful. I never played harder in my life than in the last five minutes of that game. We were all knocking ourselves out. I remember one shot that went around the rim and out, and the look on the face of the kid who put it up. I’d had my suspicions about him, and his expression confirmed it.”

“You know, I’d been thinking you were the only one doing it, but of course there must have been others.”

“And I never knew how many, or who they were. That one boy, on the basis of the look on his face, but which of the others? Not that I spent a lot of time thinking about it. And I certainly didn’t let myself think about the consequences.”

“Of losing the game?”

“Of doing what I was doing and getting caught at it. It was a crime, you know.”

“I guess it must have been.”

“Oh, no question. There’d been some scandals a few years earlier. A fair number of young men had their lives ruined, and a few went to prison for it. I didn’t worry about it, and it turned out there was nothing to worry about.”

“What happened to the money?”

“Nothing for a couple of years. Then when your mother and I got married, we had expenses. Young couples always do. So the money came in handy after all.”

“Did Mom know where it came from?”

“All she knew was that the bills got paid. Nobody knew that I shaved points. Until tonight, I never said a word about it to anyone.”

“It’s hard to believe,” Kevin Parmalee said, after a moment. “Not that you never said anything, but that you did it. It seems—”

“What?”

“Out of character, I guess.”

“It seemed that way to me at the time. I don’t know that I can explain it. Maybe Harold was a persuasive guy, or maybe I was easily persuaded.”

“How come — no, never mind.”

“What?”

“I just wondered how come you decided to tell me.”

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“Really? Because I had the sense there was something.”

“There was, but that wasn’t it.”

“Oh?”

“If I’d called for my pipe,” Richard Parmalee said, “I could fuss with it, and tamp the tobacco down and relight it, and kill a surprising amount of time that way. Sometimes I think that was as much of an addiction as the nicotine. I went to the doctor about six weeks ago for my annual physical, which is a misnomer, because I’m doing well if I get around to it every other year. He called me two days later to tell me my PSA was a little high, if you know what that is.”

“I don’t.”

“You probably will in a few years. I forget what it stands for, but it’s a prostate test. A slight elevation could be the result of enlargement of the prostate, or a sign of the presence of a low-grade infection. Or it could be an indication of early-stage prostate cancer.”

The two men looked at each other. “So he sent me to a urologist,” Richard Parmalee went on, “and he did his own examination and his own test, and put me on an antibiotic for a week in case it was an infection that was causing the high reading. And a week later he took blood for another test, and the result was still the same, so he had me come in for a biopsy.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s a goddam undignified procedure,” he said, “but less painful than a sprained ankle, and you don’t need an Ace bandage. You have blood in the urine for a few days afterward, and in the semen for up to a month. All of that’s nothing compared to waiting for the lab results. I had the biopsy on a Tuesday and I didn’t hear until the following Monday. Not to keep you in suspense, it came back negative. I haven’t got cancer.”

“Thank God.”

“I suppose I could have said that right off,” Richard Parmalee said, “but instead I let you wait and wonder for what, five minutes? If that. Well, that was to give you an idea. I had a full month to wait and wonder, and maybe you can imagine what that was like.”

“You never said anything.”

“There was nothing to say, not until I found out what I had or didn’t have.”

“Did Mom know?”

“I told her the morning I went in for the biopsy. If it was just an infection, or a false positive, why put her through it? By the time I was ready to go in for the procedure, I figured she ought to know. And I was worn out keeping it to myself.”

“But you’re all right?”

“I have to go in every six months,” he said, “for a PSA, which just means they take some blood and send it to the lab. If there’s no change, all I do is make another appointment. It’s normal for the level to increase gradually with age. If that’s all it does, that’s fine. If there’s a big increase, I get to have another biopsy.”

“Every six months for how long?”

“For as long as possible.”

“For as long as... oh, I get it. In other words, every six months for the rest of your life.”

“And I hope that’s a long time. That’s one of the things I found out while I was waiting. I didn’t want it to be over. If I have to get a needle in my arm twice a year, well, that’s a pretty small price to pay to stick around.”

“I’ll say.”

“But from this point on my life is different. All of a sudden I’m an old man.”

“The hell you’re an old man.”

“I was a kid with a basketball, and the next thing I know I’m an old fart with a prostate. Well, what’s the difference? Either way you dribble.”

They laughed, the two of them, a little more heartily than the line warranted, and when the laughter stopped they were silent. Then the older man said, “I knew I wanted to tell you. I wasn’t in a rush, but it was something you ought to know. Then you called to say you had Knicks tickets, and while I was making dinner reservations I decided it would be the right time and place for this conversation.”

“I’ll probably be a while taking it all in.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that. Intimations of mortality, and your own as well as mine. I’m in damn good shape, I’m happy to say, but in a sense I feel a good deal more vulnerable than I did a couple of months ago. But there’s something I can’t quite figure out. What made me tell you about my little arrangement with Harold?”

“Maybe you were stalling.”

“Stalling? Telling you the one thing to delay telling you the other? No, I don’t think so. That would have been a reason for small talk, but I wasn’t making small talk.”

“No.”

“And it’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. Would my life have been different if I’d told Harold thanks but no thanks?”

“How?”

“That’s what I’ve been wondering. I did something that wasn’t honest, and I kept it a secret. How did that affect the choices I made in life?”

“Maybe it didn’t.”

“Maybe not,” Richard Parmalee said, “but I’ll never know, will I? The road not taken. Maybe it’s made a difference, and maybe it hasn’t.”

“Phil Carrigan called me in two, three weeks ago,” the son said. “I’d knocked myself out for him, and he wanted to let me know how much he appreciated it. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I owe you a big one. And Lisa, I want to make up to her for the extra hours you put in. Here’s what you do, Kevin. Take the lovely lady to Lutèce. You can bill the client.’ ”

“That’s perfect.”

“Isn’t it? His eyes, he was being magnanimous. Giving me something to show his appreciation of what I did for him. So I had his permission to stick it to the client for a couple of hundred dollars. That’s his idea of a grand gesture, and he really thought he was being generous. And maybe he was, because he could just as easily have taken his wife to Lutèce at the client’s expense.”

“That’s interesting. I’m not sure it fits with what we were talking about, but I’m not sure it doesn’t, either. How was the meal?”

“It was terrific, but I’m just as happy with a steak and salad, to tell you the truth.”

“You’re like your old man. And it’s time your old man headed home.”

He raised his hand for the check. “I wish you’d let me get this,” the son said.

“Not a chance. I told you, you got the tickets.”

“And I told you they didn’t cost me a cent.”

“And neither will dinner,” Richard Parmalee said. “The hell, I’ll bill it to a client.”

“Oh, right,” Kevin Parmalee said. “That’s just what you’ll do.”

Sweet Little Hands

Lying there, it seemed to him that he could hear his own cries echoing off the room’s blank walls. His heart was pounding, his skin glossy with sweat. Should he be afraid of this? Could a person actually die at climax?

When he spoke, he did so as if resuming a conversation. “I wonder how often it happens,” he said.

“How often what happens?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d been thinking, and I guess I assumed you could read my mind. And sometimes I think you can.”

For answer, she laid a hand on his thigh. Sweet little hand, he thought.

“My heart’s back to normal now,” he said, “or close enough to it. But I was wondering how often men die like that. If a fellow had a weak heart...”

“My husband’s heart is strong.”

“I wasn’t thinking of your husband.”

“I was,” she said. “From the moment we got in bed. Longer than that, actually. Since we got here. Since I got up this morning, knowing I was going to be with you this afternoon.”

“You’ve been thinking of him.”

“And of what you’re going to do.”

He didn’t say anything.

“His heart is strong,” she said. “In a physical sense, that is. In another sense, he has no heart.”

“Do we have to talk about him?”

She rolled onto her side, let her hand find the middle of his chest, more or less over his heart. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, we have to talk about him. Do you know what it does to me? Knowing what you’re going to do to him?”

“Tell me.”

“It thrills me,” she said. “God, Jimmy, it gets me so hot I’m melting. I couldn’t wait to see you, and then I couldn’t wait to be in bed with you. We’ve always been hot for each other and it’s always been good between us, but all of a sudden it’s at a whole new level. You felt it, didn’t you? Just now?”

“You get me so hot, Rita.”

Her bunched fingers stroked his chest, moving in a little circle. “If I could get him hot,” she said, “so hot his heart would burst, I’d do it.”

“You hate him that much.”

“He’s ruining my life, Jimmy. He’s draining me, he’s sucking the life out of me. You know what he’s done.”

“And you can’t just leave him.”

“He told me what I’d get if I ever tried. Didn’t I tell you?”

“You really think...”

“ ‘Acid in your face, Rita. Not in the eyes, because I’ll want you to be able to see what you look like. Acid all over your tits, too, and between your legs, so nobody will ever want you, not even with a bag over your head.’ ”

“What a bastard.”

“George is worse than that. He’s a monster.”

“I mean, to say a thing like that.”

“And it’s not just talk, either. He’d do it. He’d enjoy doing it.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “He deserves to die.”

“Tonight, Jimmy.”

“Tonight?”

“Baby, I can’t wait for it to be over. And we have to do it before he finds out about you and me. I think he’s starting to suspect something, and if he ever finds out for sure...”

“That wouldn’t be good.”

“It would be the end of everything. Acid for me, and God knows what for you. We can’t afford to wait.”

“I know.”

“He’ll be home tonight. I’ll make sure he drinks a lot of wine with dinner. There’s a baseball game on television and he’ll want to watch it. He always watches, and he never stays awake past the third inning. He settles into his La-Z-Boy and puts his feet up, and he’s out in no time at all.”

Her hand moved idly as she went over the plan, working its way down his chest, down over his stomach, stroking, petting, eliciting a response.

“He’ll be in the den,” she was saying. “You remember where that is. On the first floor, the second window on the right-hand side. He’ll have the alarm set, but I’ll fix it so it’s limited to the doors. There’s a way to do that, in case you want to have a window open for ventilation. And I’ll have the window in the den open a couple of inches. Even if there’s a draft and he gets up and closes it, it won’t be locked. You’ll be able to open it without setting off the alarm. Jimmy? Is something the matter?”

He took hold of her wrist. “Just that you’re setting off my alarm,” he said.

“Don’t you like what I’m doing?”

“I love it, but—”

“You’ll come in through the window,” she went on. “He’ll be asleep in his chair. There’s all this crap on the walls, swords and daggers, a ceremonial war club from some South Sea Island tribe. Stab him with a dagger or beat his head in with the club.”

“It’ll look spur-of-the-moment,” he said. “Burglar breaks in, panics when the guy wakes up, then grabs whatever’s closest and — Christ!”

“I just grabbed whatever was closest,” she said innocently. “Jimmy, I can’t help it. It gets me all excited thinking about it.” Her lips brushed him. “We may have to stay away from each other for a while,” she said, “while I do the Grieving Widow number.” Her breath was warm on his flesh. “So I’ve got an idea, Jimmy. Suppose we have our victory celebration now?”

“A splendid dinner,” George said, pushing back from the table. He was a large and physically imposing man, twenty years her senior. “But you didn’t eat much, my dear.”

“No appetite,” she said.

“For food.”

“Well...”

“I guess it’s almost time,” he said, “for me to adjourn to the library for brandy and cigars. Except it’s a den, not a library, and brandy gives me heartburn, and I don’t smoke cigars. But you know what I mean.”

“Time for you to watch the ballgame. Who’s playing?”

“The Cubs and the Astros.”

“And is it an important game?”

“There’s no such thing as an important game,” he said. “Grown men trying to hit a ball with a stick. How important could that possibly be?”

“But you’ll watch it.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Another cup of coffee first?”

“Another cup? Hmmm. Well, it is exceptionally good coffee. And I guess there’s time.”

This is crazy, he thought.

There was her house, and there, in the second window on the right-hand side, was the flickering glow of a television screen. The garage door was closed, and there were no cars parked in the driveway, or at the curb. Nobody walking around on the street.

Crazy...

He drove halfway around the block, found a parking place out of the reach of the streetlights. He left the car unlocked and circled the block on foot, his heartbeat quickening as he neared her house.

Anyone who saw him would see a man of medium height and build dressed in dark clothes. And he’d burn the clothes when this was over. He’d assume there were bloodstains, or some other sort of physical evidence, and he’d leave nothing to chance.

Impossible to believe he was actually going to do this. Going to kill a man, a man he’d never met. And would never meet, because with any luck at all he’d strike the fatal blow while the man slept.

Not a man, not really. A monster. Acid on that beautiful face, those perfect breasts...

A monster.

Was it murder when Beowulf slew Grendel? When St. George struck down the dragon? That was heroism, not homicide. It was what you had to do if you wanted to win the heart of the fair maiden.

Or he could go home right now and forget about her. There were plenty of women out there, and most of them never asked you to kill anybody. How hard would it be to find somebody else?

Not like her, though. Never anybody like her. Never had been, and he somehow knew there never would be.

Never an afternoon like the one he’d just spent. Never. Drained him, emptied him out — and, even so, just remembering it was getting him stirred up again.

He was at the window now. It was open a few inches, as she’d said it would be, and through it he could hear the voices of the baseball announcers, the crack of the bat, the subdued roar of the crowd. The mindless prattle of the commercial. “Bud.” “Wei.” “Ser.”

He strained to hear more. Movement from the man. The husband.

The monster.

He got up on his toes, hooked his hands under the bottom edge of the window. He was standing in a bed of shrubbery, and it struck him that he was leaving footprints. Have to get rid of the shoes, too, he thought, along with the rest of his clothes.

Unless he gave it up and went home right now.

But how much better he’d feel if he went home in triumph, with the monster slain and the maiden won!

Besides, he realized, he wanted to do it. Wanted to thrust with the dagger, to flail away with the war club. God help him, he couldn’t wait.

He took a full breath and eased the window all the way open.

She hadn’t been able to eat. Now, upstairs in the bedroom she shared with her husband, she found herself unable to sit still. Her pulse was rapid, her mouth dry, her palms damp.

Any minute now...

She stripped to her skin, let her clothes lie where they fell. She sat up in bed and gazed down at her naked body, as if with a lover’s eyes. And touched herself, as if with a lover’s hands.

Remembering:

Crouching over him, she’d reached to probe with a finger, felt him stiffen and resist. Probed again, not to be denied, and felt him open up reluctantly to her. Unwilling to respond, unable to keep from responding...

Her own excitement was mounting now. He was at the window now, he had to be, she was sure of it. But she was stuck up here, unable to know what was happening downstairs in the den. His den, George’s den, and her lover was at the window, must be at the window, had to be at the window...

She looked down at her hands, then closed her eyes, remembering:

“God, Rita, what you do to me.”

“I had two fingers in you.”

“God.”

“First one and then two.”

“I wasn’t expecting that.”

“You liked it.”

“It was... interesting.”

“You didn’t want to like it, but you liked it.”

“Well, the novelty.”

“Not just the novelty. You liked it.”

“Well.”

“Next time I’ll use my whole hand.”

“Rita, for God’s sake—“

She made a fist, opened it and closed it, opened it and closed it, watching the expression on his face.

“You’ll like it,” she said.

And he was down there now. She knew he was, she could tell, she could feel him there. She cupped her breasts, felt their weight, then let her hands slide lower. Let her fingers move, let her fantasies build, let her excitement mount...

She was close, very close. Hovering there, not wanting to go any further, wanting to stay there, right on the brink—

A shot rang out.

God!

She stayed there, stayed right there, right on the edge, right on the fucking edge, trembling, trembling, hot and wet and trembling, and waiting, God, waiting, Christ, waiting—

Another shot. No louder than the first, how could it be louder than the first, but God, it seemed louder—

She cried out with joy and fell back onto the bed.

She was wearing a blue satin robe. Her feet were bare. She stepped carefully into the den and gasped at the sight of the man lying there. He was dressed all in black and lay sprawled on his back like a rag doll discarded by a spoiled child. One hand was at his side, the fingers splayed. The other still gripped the hilt of a foot-long dagger.

She drew back involuntarily, then forced herself to take a closer look. “Yes,” she said, turning from the corpse. “Yes, that’s the man.”

“James Beckwith,” the detective said.

“Is that his name?”

“According to the ID in his wallet.”

“I never knew his name,” she said. “When I reported him to the police, I didn’t have a name to give them. Because I never knew it.”

“You gave them a good description,” the detective said. “When I called in just now, they read it back to me, and it was all right on the money. Height, weight, age, hair color, everything down to the mole on his right cheek. That was what, four days ago that you reported him?”

She nodded. “Can we go in the other room now? Seeing him there like that...”

In the living room the detective said, “You did the right thing, filing the report. He was stalking you and you reported it. It’s a shame we couldn’t have done anything that might have prevented this, but—”

“You didn’t have a name,” her husband said. “You couldn’t have him picked up, not if you didn’t know who he was.”

“No, but we could have staked out your house, and we would have if we’d had reason to believe he was planning anything like this. But we get so many complaints of this nature it’s hard to know which ones to take seriously. So we wait and see if the guy takes it to a new level, and then we do something.”

“It’s a shame it came to this,” her husband said. “Possibly, with professional help—”

The detective was shaking his head. “My opinion,” he said, “a guy’s got this particular kind of a screw loose, there’s not a whole lot anybody can do for him. You can say it’s a shame he got hurt, but the thing to focus on is nobody else got hurt, not you and not your wife. That dagger he was holding, in fact he’s still holding it, well, I don’t think he was planning on using it for a toothpick. It’s a damn good thing you had the gun handy.”

“It’s usually locked in a desk drawer. Ever since Rita told me about this fellow, about the remarks and the threats—”

“And I believe he assaulted you physically, ma’am?”

“My breasts,” she said, and lowered her eyes. “He ran up and took hold of my breasts. It was the most awful violation.”

The detective shook his head. “You can call him a sick man,” he said, “and say he was emotionally disturbed, but another way of looking at it is he got pretty much what he deserved.”

“He’s gone,” she said.

“He’s gone, and the rest of them are gone, and the body’s gone.”

“The body.”

“And they took my gun, but your friend swears I’ll get it back.”

“My friend?”

“He’d certainly like to be your friend. He couldn’t keep his eyes off you. When he wasn’t trying for a glimpse of your tits he was looking at your little pink toes.”

“I guess I should have put slippers on.”

“And fastened the top button of your robe. But I think you were just fine the way you were. Quite fetching, and the detective thought so, too.”

“And now he’s gone, and we’re alone. So tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

‘Tell me everything, George. I was going crazy, sitting up there and not knowing what was going on down here.”

“As if you didn’t know.”

“How could I know? Maybe he’d chicken out. Maybe you actually would fall asleep—”

“Small chance of that.”

“Tell me what happened, will you?”

“He opened the window and climbed over the sill. Clumsily, I’d have to say. I was afraid he’d make so much noise he’d frighten himself off and pop out again before I could do anything.”

“But he didn’t.”

“Obviously not. I opened one eye just wide enough to get a glimpse of him, and as soon as he had both feet on the floor I opened both eyes and pointed the gun at him.”

“And he’d already grabbed the dagger off the wall?”

“Of course not. That came later.”

“He grabbed it later?”

“Do you want to hear this or do you want to keep on interrupting?”

“I’m sorry, George.”

“He saw the gun, and his eyes widened, and he looked on the point of saying something. So I shot him.”

“That was the first shot.”

“Obviously. I shot him in the pit of the stomach, and—”

“Where? I couldn’t really see anything. Where did the bullet enter? Around the navel?”

“Below the navel. I’d say about halfway between his navel and the place where you left your lipstick.”

“The place where I left—”

“Just a joke, my dear. Halfway between his navel and his dick, that’s where I shot the son of a bitch. It put him down and shut him up and I guess it hurt. Abdominal wounds are supposed to be the most painful.”

“And then it was ages before the second shot.”

“I doubt it was more than thirty seconds. Say a minute at the outside.”

“Was that all? It seemed longer.”

“For him as well, I’m sure. But I wanted a moment or so to tell him.”

“To tell him.”

“I didn’t want him to die thinking something had gone horribly wrong. I wanted him to know everything was working out just the way it was supposed to, that he’d been set up and played for a sap. He didn’t want to believe it.”

“But you convinced him.”

“ ‘A few hours ago,’ I told him, ‘she had two fingers up your ass. I hope you enjoyed it.’ ”

“You told him that?”

“It was a convincer.”

“And then what? You shot him?”

“In the heart. To put him out of his misery, although he didn’t look miserable so much as he looked embarrassed. You should have seen the look on his face.”

“I wish I had. That was the one thing wrong.”

“That you weren’t there for it.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you could have been waiting in the living room. You could have popped in when you heard the first shot. But I don’t suppose it was a total loss, was it? Being stuck upstairs?”

“What do you mean?”

“You had your hands full, didn’t you?”

“Well,” she said.

“Excited, were you?”

“You know I was.”

“Yes, I know you were. My goodness, now that I think about it, those pretty little fingers have been a lot of places today, haven’t they? I hope you washed them before you shook hands with the detective.”

“Did I shake hands with him? I don’t remember shaking hands with him.”

“Maybe you didn’t. But if you did, I bet he remembers.”

“You think he liked me?”

“I’ll bet he calls you.”

“You really think so?”

“Oh, he’ll have a pretext. He’s not fool enough to call without a pretext. He’ll have something to report on the disposition of the case, or he’ll want to check on your state of mind. And if he doesn’t get any encouragement from you he’ll have the sense to let it drop.”

“But if he does?” She nibbled her lower lip. “He’s kind of cute,” she said.

“I had a feeling you liked him.”

“I just wanted him to go home. But he is kind of cute. You think?”

“What?”

“Well, we couldn’t do things the same way we did with Jimmy, could we?”

“What, get him to crawl in the window and then blow him away? I don’t think so.”

“When he calls,” she said, “if he calls—”

“He’ll call.”

“—I don’t think I’ll encourage him.”

“Even if he is cute.”

“There are lots of cute guys,” she said, “and there ought to be a way to surprise them the way we surprised Jimmy.”

“We’ll think of something.”

“And next time I’ll be in the room when it happens.”

“Sure.”

“I mean it, I want to be there.”

“You could even do it,” he said.

“Really?”

“Look at you,” he said. “You’re something, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

“I’ll say. But yes, you can be there, and maybe you can do it. We’ll see.”

“You’re good to me, George. Good to me and good for me.”

“I am, and don’t you forget it.”

“I won’t. You know the one thing I regret?”

“That you weren’t in the room to see it happen.”

“Besides that.”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s silly,” she said. “But I wish we’d put it off a day or two longer.”

“To stretch out the anticipation?”

“That, but something else. Remember what I told him today? That next time I’d get my whole hand inside of him?”

“You’re saying you would have liked to try.”

“Well, yeah. It would have been interesting.”

“Sweet little hands. Maybe you could do that to me.”

“You’d let me?”

“And maybe I could do it to you.”

“God,” she said. “You’ve got such big hands.”

“Yes, I do, don’t I?”

“God,” she said. “Can we go upstairs now? Can we?”

Terrible Tommy Terhune

“As every high school chemistry student knows,” wrote sportswriter Garland Hewes, “the initials TNT stand for tri-nitro-toluene, and the compound so designated is an explosive one indeed. And, as every tennis fan is by now aware, the same initials stand as well for Thomas Norton Terhune, supremely gifted, immensely personable, and, as he showed us once again yesterday on the clay courts of Roland Garros, an unstable and violently explosive mixture if ever there was one, and a grave danger to himself and others.”

The incident to which the venerable Hewes referred was one of many in Tommy Terhune’s career in world-class tennis. In the French Open’s early rounds, he dazzled players and spectators alike with the brilliance of his play. His serve was powerful and on-target, but it was his inspired all-around play that lifted him above the competition. He was quick as a cat, covering the whole court, making impossible returns look easy. His drop shots dropped, his lobs landed just out of his opponent’s reach but just inside the white line.

But when the ball was out, or, more to the point, when the umpire declared it to be out, Tommy exploded.

In his quarterfinal match at Roland Garros, a shot of Terhune’s, just eluding the outstretched racquet of his Montenegrin opponent, landed just inside the baseline.

The umpire called it out.

As the television replay would demonstrate, time and time again, the call was an error on the official’s part. The ball did in fact land inside the line, by two or three inches. Thus Tommy Terhune was correct in believing that the point should be his, and he was understandably dismayed at the call.

His behavior was less understandable. He froze at the call, his racquet at shoulder height, his mouth open. While the crowd watched in anticipatory silence, he approached the umpire’s raised platform. “Are you out of your mind?” he shouted. “Are you blind as a bat? What the hell is the matter with you, you pop-eyed frog?”

The umpire’s response was inaudible, but was evidently uttered in support of his decision. Tommy paced to and fro at the foot of the platform, ranting, raving, and drawing whistles of disapproval from the fans. Then, after a tense moment, he returned to the baseline and prepared to serve.

Two games later in the same set, he let a desperate return of his opponent’s drop. It was long, landing a full six inches beyond the white line. The umpire declared it in, and Tommy went berserk. He screamed, he shouted, he commented critically on the umpire’s lineage and sexual predilections, and he underscored his remarks by gripping his racquet in both hands, then swinging it like an axe as if to chop down the wooden platform, perhaps as a first step to chopping down the official himself. He managed to land three ringing blows, the third of which shattered his graphite racquet, before another official stepped in to declare the match a forfeit, while security personnel took the American in hand and led him off the court.

The French had never seen the like, and, characteristically, their reaction combined distaste for Terhune’s lack of savoir-faire with grudging respect for his spirit. Phrases like enfant terrible and monstre sacré turned up in their press coverage. Elsewhere in the world, fans and journalists said essentially the same thing. Terrible Tommy Terhune, the tennis world’s most gifted and most temperamentally challenged player, had proven to be his own worst enemy, and had succeeded in ousting himself from a tournament he’d been favored to win. He had done it again.

The racquet Tommy shattered at the French Open was not the first one to go to pieces in his hands. His racquets had the life expectancy of a rock star’s guitar, and he consequently had learned to travel with not one but two spares. Even so, he’d been forced to withdraw from one tournament in the semifinal round, when, after a second double fault, he held his racquet high overhead, then brought it down full-force upon the hardened playing surface. He had already sacrificed his other two racquets in earlier rounds, one destroyed in similar fashion to protest an official’s decision, the other snapped over his knee in fury at himself for a missed opportunity at the net. He was now out of racquets, and unable to continue. His double fault had cost him a point; his ungovernable rage had cost him the tournament.

Such episodes notwithstanding, Tommy won his share of tournaments. He did not always blow up, and not every episode led to disqualification. In England, one confrontation with an official provoked a clamor in the press that he be refused future entry, not merely to Wimbledon, but to the entire United Kingdom; in response, Tommy somehow held himself in check long enough to breeze through the semifinals, and, in the final round, treated the fans to an exhibition of play unlike anything they’d seen before.

Playing against Roger MacReady, the rangy Australian who was the crowd’s clear favorite, Tommy played center court at Wimbledon as Joe Dimaggio had once played center field at Yankee Stadium. He anticipated every move MacReady made, moving in response not at the impact of ball and racquet but somehow before it, as if he knew where MacReady was going to send the ball before the Australian knew it himself. He won the first two sets, lost the third in a tiebreaker, and soared to an easy victory in the fourth set, winning 6–1, and winning over the crowd in the process. By the time his last impossible backhand return had landed where MacReady couldn’t get to it, the English fans were on their feet cheering for him.

A month later, the laurels of Wimbledon still figuratively draped around his shoulders, Terrible Tommy Terhune diagnosed an official as suffering severely from myopia, astigmatism, and tunnel vision, and recommended an unorthodox course of ophthalmological treatment consisting of the performance of two sexual acts, one incestuous, the other physically impossible. He then threw his racquet on the ground, stepped on its face, and pulled up on its handle until the thing snapped. He picked up the two pieces, sailed them into the crowd, and stalked off the court.

Morley Safer leaned forward. “If you were watching a tennis match,” he began, “and saw someone behave as you yourself have so often behaved—”

“I’d be disgusted,” Tommy told him. “I get sick to my stomach when I see myself on videotape. I can’t watch. I have to turn off the set. Or leave the room.”

“Or pick up a racquet and smash the set?”

Tommy laughed along with the TV newsman, then assured him that his displays of temper were confined to the tennis court. “That’s the only place they happen,” he said. “As to why they happen, well, I know what provokes them. I get mad at myself when I play poorly, of course, and that’s led me to smash a racquet now and then. It’s stupid and self-destructive, sure, but it’s nothing compared to what happens when an official makes a bad call. That drives me out of my mind.”

“And out of control?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“And yet there are skeptics who think you’re crazy like a fox,” Safer said. “Look at the publicity you get. After all, you’re the subject of this 60 Minutes profile, not Vasco Barxi, not Roger MacReady. All over the world, people know your name.”

“They know me as a maniac who can’t control himself. That’s not how I want to be known.”

“And there are others who say you gain by intimidating officials,” Safer went on. “You get them so they’re afraid to call a close point against you.”

“They seem to be dealing with their fears,” Tommy said. “And wouldn’t that be brilliant strategy on my part? Get tossed out of a Grand Slam tournament in order to unnerve an official?”

“So it’s not calculated? In fact it’s not something subject to your control?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, what are you going to do about it? Are you getting help?”

“I’m working on it,” he said grimly. “It’s not that easy.”

“It’s rage,” he told Diane Sawyer. “I don’t know where it comes from. I know what triggers it, but that’s not necessarily the same thing.”

“A bad call.”

“That’s right.”

“Or a good call,” Sawyer said, “that you think is a bad call.”

Tommy shook his head ruefully. “It’s embarrassing enough to explode when the guy gets it wrong,” he said. “The incident I think you’re referring to, where the replay clearly showed he’d made the right call, well, I felt more ashamed of myself than ever. But even when I’m clearly right and the official’s clearly wrong, there’s no excuse for my behavior.”

“You realize that.”

“Of course I do. I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.”

“And if you are crazy, it’s temporary insanity. As I think our viewers can see, you’re perfectly sane when you don’t have a tennis racquet in your hand.”

“Well, they haven’t asked me to pose for any mental health posters,” he said with a grin. “But it’s true I don’t have to struggle to keep a lid on it. That only happens when I’m playing tennis.”

“The court’s where the struggle takes place.”

“Yes.”

“And when you honestly think a call has gone against you, that it’s a bad call...”

“Sometimes I can keep myself in check. But other times I just lose it. I go into a zone, and, well, everybody knows what happens then.”

“And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Not really.”

“You’ve had professional help?”

“I’ve tried a few things,” he said. “Different kinds of therapy to help me develop more insight into myself. I think it’s been useful, I think I know myself a little better than I used to, but when some clown says one of my shots was out when I just plain know it was in—”

“You’re helpless.”

“Utterly,” he said. “Everything goes out the window, all the insight, all the coping techniques. The only thing that’s left is the rage.”

“You have a life most women would envy,” Barbara Walters told Jennifer Terhune. “You’re young, you’re beautiful, you’ve had success as a model and as an actress. And you’re the wife of an enormously talented and successful athlete.”

“I’ve been very fortunate.”

“What’s it like being married to a man like Tommy Terhune?”

“It’s wonderful.”

“The clothes, the travel, the VIP treatment...”

“That’s all nice,” Jennifer acknowledged, “but it’s, like, the least of it. Just being with Tommy, sharing his life, that’s what’s truly wonderful.”

“You love your husband.”

“Of course I do.”

“But I’m sure there are women in my audience,” Walters said, “who wonder if you might not be the least bit afraid of your husband.”

“Afraid of Tommy?”

Walters raised her eyebrows. “Mr. TNT? Terrible Tommy Terhune?”

“Oh, that.”

“ ‘Oh, that.’ You’re married to a man with the most famously explosive temper in the world. Don’t tell me you’re never afraid that something you might do or say will set him of.”

“Not really.”

“What makes you so confident, Jennifer?”

“Tommy has a problem with rage,” Jennifer said, “and I recognize it, and he recognizes it. He’s been working on it, trying a lot of different things, like, to help him cope with it. I just know he’ll be able to get a handle on it.”

“And I’m sure our hopes are with him,” Walters said, “but that doesn’t address the question, does it? What about you, Jennifer? How do you know that terrible temper, that legendary rage, won’t one day be aimed at you?”

“I’m not an umpire.”

“In other words...”

“In other words, the only time Tommy loses it, the only time his temper is the least bit of a problem, is when an official makes a bad call against him on the tennis court. He never gets mad at an opponent. He doesn’t go into the stands after fans who make insulting remarks, and I’ve heard some of them say some pretty outrageous things. But he takes that sort of thing in stride. It’s only bad calls that set him off.”

“And after an explosion?”

“He’s contrite. And ashamed of himself.”

“And angry?”

“Only during a match. Not afterward.”

“So it’s never directed at you?”

“Never.”

“He’s a perfect gentleman?”

“He’s thoughtful and gentle and funny and smart,” Jennifer said, “in addition to being the best tennis player in the world. I’m a lucky girl.”

Later, watching herself on television, Jennifer thought the interview had gone rather well. She sounded a little ditsy, saying like often enough to sound like a Valley Girl, but outside of that she’d done fine. Her hair, which had caused her some concern, wound up looking great on camera, and the dress she’d worn had proved a good choice.

And her comments seemed okay, too. The likes notwithstanding, she came across not as an airhead but as a concerned and supportive life partner and helpmate. And, she told herself, that was fair enough. Everything she’d said had been the truth.

Though not, she had to admit, the whole truth. Because how could she have sat there and told Barbara Walters that Tommy’s temper was one of the things that had attracted her to him in the first place? All of that intensity, when he served and volleyed and made impossible shots look easy, well, it was exciting enough. But all of that passion, when he roared and ranted and just plain lost it, was even more exciting. It stirred her up, it got her juices flowing. It made her, well, hot — and how could she say all that to Barbara Walters?

In fact, when you came right down to it, she was a little disappointed that Tommy never lost it except on the tennis court. It was a pity, in a way, that he never brought that famous temper home with him, that he never lost it in the bedroom.

Sometimes — and she would never admit this to anyone, on or off camera — sometimes she tried to provoke him. Sometimes she tried to make him mad. Even if he were to get physical, even if he were to slap her around a little, well, maybe it was kinky of her, but she thought she might like that.

But it was hopeless. On the court, with a racquet in his hand and an official to argue with, he was Mr. TNT, the notorious Terrible Tommy Terhune. At home, even in the bedchamber, he was what she’d said he was, the perfect gentleman.

Darn it...

“So we begin to make progress,” the psychoanalyst said. “The need to win your father’s approval. The approval sometimes granted, other times withheld, for reasons having nothing to do with your own behavior.”

“It wasn’t fair,” Tommy said.

“And that is what so infuriates you about a bad call on the tennis court, is it not so? The unfairness of it all. You have done everything you were supposed to do, everything within your power, and still the approval of the man in authority is denied to you. Instead he sits high above you, remote and unreachable, and punishes you.”

“That’s exactly what happens.”

“And it is unfair.”

“Damn right it is.”

“And you explode in rage, the rage you never let yourself feel as a child. But now you know its source. It’s not the official, who of course cannot be expected to be right every time.”

“They’re only human.”

“Exactly. It’s your father you’re truly enraged at, and he’s dead, and out of reach of your anger, no longer available to approve or disapprove, to applaud or punish.”

“That’s it, all right.”

“And now, armed with the insight you’ve developed here, you’ll be able to master your rage, to dispel it, to rise above it.”

“You know something?” Tommy said. “I feel better already.”

In a first-round match two weeks later, an unreturnable passing shot by his unseeded opponent fell just outside the sideline marker. The umpire called it in.

“You blind bastard,” Tommy screamed. “How much are they paying you to steal the match from me?”

“With every breath,” the little man in the loincloth intoned, “you draw the anger up from the third chakra. Up up up, past the heart chakra, past the throat chakra, to the third eye. Then, as you breathe out, you let the anger flow in a stream out through the third eye, transformed into peaceful energizing white light. Breathe in and the anger is drawn upward from the solar plexus, where it is stored. Breathe out and you release it as white light. With every breath, your reserve of rage grows less and less.”

“Om,” Tommy said.

In his next tournament, the Virginia Slims Equal Opportunity Challenge (dubbed Men Deserve Cancer Too by one commentator), Tommy waltzed through the early rounds, breathing in and breathing out. Then, in the quarterfinals, he smashed his racquet after a service double fault.

He had a replacement racquet, and it wasn’t until midway through the next game that he snapped it over his knee.

“Why put you on the couch for ten or twelve years,” the doctor said, “when I can give you a little pill that’ll fix what’s wrong with you? If you had high blood pressure, you wouldn’t probe your psyche to uncover the underlying reasons for it, would you? You might stroke out while you were still trying to remember your childhood. No, you’d take your medication. If you had diabetes, you’d watch your diet and take your insulin. I’m going to write you a prescription for a new tranquilizer, and I want you to take one first thing every morning. And you won’t have to master your anger, or figure out where it comes from. Because it’ll be gone.”

“Neat,” said Tommy.

“There’s something curiously listless about Terhune’s play,” the television announcer reported. “He’s performing well enough to win his early matches, but we’re used to seeing him rush the net more often, and his reflexes seem the tiniest bit less sharp. We’ve heard rumors that he’s been taking medication to help him with his emotional difficulties, and it looks to me as though whatever he’s taking is slowing him down.”

“But his temper’s in check, Jim. When that call went against him in the first set, he barely noticed it.”

“Oh, he noticed it. He stared over at the official, and he looked puzzled. But he didn’t seem to care very much, and he lifted his racquet and played the next point without incident.”

“If he’s on something, it does seem to be working... Oh, what’s this?”

“He thought Beckheim’s return was out.”

“But it was clearly in, Jim.”

“Not the way Terhune saw it. Oh, there he goes. Oh, my.”

“Your eyelids are very heavy,” the hypnotist said. “You cannot keep them open. You are sleeping, you are in a deep sleep. From now on, you will be completely calm and unruffled on the tennis court. Nothing will disturb your composure. If anything upsetting occurs, you will stop what you are doing and count slowly to ten. When you reach the count of ten, all tension and anger will vanish, and you will once again be calm and unruffled. Now how will you be when you play tennis?”

“Calm,” Tommy mumbled. “Calm and unruffled.”

“And what will you do if something upsetting occurs?”

“Count to ten.”

“And how will you feel when you reach the count of ten?”

“Calm and unruffled.”

“Very good. When I reach the count of five, you will wake up feeling curiously refreshed, with no conscious recollection of this experience. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. How do you feel, Tommy?”

“Calm and unruffled,” he said. “And curiously refreshed.”

Looking neither calm nor unruffled, Tommy stalked over to where the official was perched. “One,” he said, and swung his racquet at the platform. “Two,” he said, and he continued his count, punctuating each number with a hammer blow to the base of the platform. The racquet shattered on the count of six, but he continued counting all the way to ten as he marched off the court.

“You have the chicken?” Atuele said. “Perfect white chicken. No dark feather, no blemish. Very good.” He placed the chicken on the little altar, placed his hands gently on the bird, and gazed thoughtfully at it. After a long moment the chicken fell over and lay on its side.

“What happened to the chicken?” Tommy asked.

“It is dead.”

“But, uh, how did it die?”

“As it was supposed to,” Atuele said.

Tommy looked around. He was in a compound about a third the size of a football field, just a batch of mud huts strung around an open area that faced the altar, where the chicken was apparently still dead. He’d flown Air Afrique from New York to Dakar, then transferred to Air Gabon, whatever that was, for a harrowing flight to Lomé, the capital of Togo, wherever that was. He’d been granted an audience with this Sorbonne-educated witch doctor, who’d sent him off to buy a chicken. And now the chicken was dead, and he felt like an idiot. What did any of this have to do with tennis? What could it possibly have to do with Thomas Norton Terhune?

“I don’t know what this guy does,” a friend had told him, “and you feel like the world’s prize jackass while he’s doing it, but it’s magic. And it works.”

“Maybe if you believe in it...”

“Hell, I didn’t believe in it. I thought it was pure-Dee ooga-booga horseshit. But it worked anyway. You want to know something? I still think it was ooga-booga horseshit. But now I believe in it.”

How, he wondered, could you believe in something while still believing it to be horseshit? And how could it possibly work? And—

“You need a spirit,” Atuele told him. “A spirit who will live within you, and who will have the job of keeping you serene while you are playing tennis.”

“A spirit,” Tommy said hollowly.

“A spirit. In order to give you this spirit, you require a ceremony. Go to your hotel. Return at sunset. And you must bring something.”

“Another chicken?”

“No, not another chicken. A bottle of scotch whiskey and a box of cigars.”

“That’s easy enough. What are we going to do, get drunk and smoke cigars together?”

“No, they are for me. And bring five thousand dollars.”

“Five thousand dollars?”

“For the ceremony,” Atuele explained.

The ceremony turned out to be ridiculous. Six half-naked men pounded on drums, while two dozen young women danced around, heads thrown back, eyes rolling. Atuele broke an egg in a bowl, poured it onto Tommy’s head, rubbed it into his scalp. He gave him a ball of ground-up grass and told him to eat it, then left him to sit in the circle, and eventually to shuffle around on the dance floor. After an hour or so of this Tommy got a taxi back to his hotel and went to bed.

In the morning he showered, packed, and went to the airport, knowing he’d wasted his money, hoping only that nothing had leaked to the press, that the world would never know the lengths to which he’d been driven or how utterly he’d been made a fool of. He flew to Dakar and on to JFK, then caught another flight to Phoenix for the Scottsdale Open.

Jennifer met him at the airport. “Waste of time,” he told her. She knew only that he’d heard about a secret treatment, not where you went for it or what it consisted of, and he didn’t feel like filling her in. “Lots of mumbo jumbo,” he said. “It won’t work.”

But it did.

At Scottsdale, Tommy Terhune reached the final round of the tournament, losing to Roger MacReady in four sets. He used the same racquet for the entire tournament, and never hit anything with it but the ball. He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t once curse himself, his opponents, the largely hostile audience, or the officials, who made their share of inaccurate calls. He was, that is to say, a perfect gentleman.

And he managed all this with no effort whatsoever. He didn’t take a pill, didn’t count to ten, didn’t clamp a lid on his anger, didn’t chant or meditate. All he did was play tennis, and the moment he stepped onto the court each day, a curious calm settled over him. He still took notice when a call went unfairly against him, but he didn’t mind, didn’t take it personally. He stayed focused on his game, and his game had never been better.

Of course, he told himself, one tournament didn’t necessarily prove anything. He’d gone through whole tournaments before without treating the crowd to a display of the famous Terhune temper, only to lose it a week or a month down the line. How could he be sure that wouldn’t happen?

Somehow, though, he knew it wouldn’t. Somehow he could tell that something had happened within that circle of mud huts in Togo. According to Atuele, he now had a spirit invested inside of him, a spirit who took control of his temper the moment he picked up a racquet and stepped onto a court. And that’s just how it felt. One way or another, he’d morphed into a person who didn’t have to control himself because he didn’t experience any anger to begin with. He played his matches, won or lost, and went home feeling fine either way.

Calm and unruffled, you might say.

Tommy played brilliantly in his next tournament. He sailed serenely through the early rounds, fell behind in his quarterfinal match, then rallied to salvage a victory over his unseeded opponent. Then, in the third set of the semis, the audience fell silent when Tommy served, came to the net, and leaped high into the air to slam his opponent’s return. The ball struck near the baseline, but everyone present could see it was clearly in.

Except the official, who declared it out.

Tommy took a step toward the platform. The official cowered, but Tommy didn’t seem to notice. He said, “Was that ball out?”

The official nodded.

“Oh,” Tommy said, and shrugged. “From here it looked good, but I guess you can see better from where you’re sitting.”

He went back to the baseline and served the next point. He went on to win the match and advance to the finals, in which he played brilliantly, beating Roger MacReady in straight sets.

“And here’s Mrs. Tommy Terhune, the lovely Jennifer,” said the TV reporter, sticking a mike in her face. “Your husband was really commanding out there, wasn’t he?”

“He was,” she agreed.

“He played brilliant tennis, and he seems to have triumphed in the inner game as well, wouldn’t you say?”

“The inner game?”

“He didn’t lose his temper at all.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “No, he didn’t.”

“I’ll bet you’re proud of him.”

“Very proud.”

“You’ve been quoted as saying he’s always been a perfect gentleman off the court. Now he seems to be every bit the perfect gentleman on the court as well. That must be extremely gratifying to you.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling furiously. “Extremely gratifying.”

It was in the U.S. Open that the extent of the change in Terrible Tommy Terhune became unmistakably evident. Earlier, prior to his still-secret visit to West Africa, some commentators had theorized that the brilliance of his play might be of a piece with the ungovernability of his temper. Passion, after all, was the common denominator. Put the one on a leash, they suggested, and the other might wind up hobbled in the bargain.

But this was clearly not the case. Tommy had an easy time of it in the early rounds at Flushing Meadows, winning every match in straight sets. In the quarterfinals, his Croatian opponent won a single game in the first set and none at all in the second and third, but the fellow’s play was not as pathetic as the score suggested. Tommy was simply everywhere, getting to every ball, his returns always on target and, more often than not, unreturnable.

The calls, of course, did not always go his way. But his reaction was never greater than a shrug or a raised eyebrow. Spectators looked for him to be struggling with his emotions, but what was becoming clear was that there was no struggle, and no emotions.

In the semifinals, Tommy’s opponent was the young Chinese-American Scott Chin, but most fans were looking past the semis to a final round that would see Tommy pitted once again with his Australian rival, Roger MacReady. But this was not to be — while Tommy moved easily past Chin, MacReady lost the fifth set to a previously unknown Belgian player named Claude Macquereau.

Two days later, after a women’s final in which one player grunted while the other wept, Terhune and Macquereau met for the men’s championship. If the fans had been disappointed by MacReady’s absence, the young Belgian soon showed himself as a worthy opponent for Tommy. His serve was strong and accurate, his game at net and at the baseline a near mirror image of Tommy’s. Macquereau won the first set 7–6, lost the second 7–5. Most games went to deuce, and most individual points consisted of long, wearying volleys marked by one impossible return after another.

By the third set, which Tommy won in a tiebreaker, the fans knew they were watching tennis history being made. Midway through the fourth set, won by Macquereau in an even more attenuated tiebreaker, the television commentators had run out of superlatives and the crowd had shouted itself hoarse. Both players, run ragged in the late-summer heat and humidity, looked exhausted, but both played as though they were fresh as daisies.

In the third game of the final set, a perfectly placed passing shot of Tommy’s was called out. The audience drew its collective breath — they knew the ball was in — and Tommy approached the platform.

“Ball was out?” he said conversationally.

The official managed a nod. The man must have known he’d missed the call, and must have been tempted to reverse himself. But all he did was nod.

“Okay,” Tommy said, and played the next point, while the audience released its collective breath in a great sigh that mingled relief with disappointment.

After ten games in the final set, they had taken turns breaking each other’s service, and were tied 5–5. In the eleventh game, Tommy served and went to the net, and Macquereau’s return flew past Tommy’s outstretched racquet and landed just inside the sideline.

The official called it out.

It was close, certainly closer than the call that had gone against Tommy earlier in the set, but the ball was definitely in and, more to the point, Tommy Terhune knew it was in. The game had been tied at 15–all, and this point put Tommy ahead, 30–15.

His response was immediate. He went to the service line, hit two serves into the net to tie the score at 30–all, then deliberately double-faulted a second time, putting Macquereau a point ahead, as he would have been had the call been correct.

The act was uncommonly gracious, and all the more so for coming when it did. It is, as one reporter pointed out, easier to give back a questionable point when you’re winning or losing by a considerable margin, but Tommy’s unprecedented act of chivalry might well cost him the championship.

Not so. Trailing 40–30, he won the next point with a service ace, then won the game by playing brilliantly for the next two points. The final game was almost anticlimactic; Macquereau, serving, seemed to know how it was going to end, and scored only a single point while Tommy broke his service to take the game, the set, the match, and the United States Open championship.

All of which made the aftermath just that much more tragic.

The whole world knows the rest. How Tommy Terhune, flushed with triumph, accompanied by his curiously unemotional wife, returned to his hotel, racquet in hand. How Roger MacReady was waiting for them in the lobby, and accompanied them upstairs to their suite. How Jennifer explained haltingly that she and MacReady had fallen in love, that they had been, like, having an affair, and that she wanted Tommy to give her a divorce so that she and MacReady could be married.

She said all this calmly, expecting Tommy to take it every bit as calmly. Perhaps she thought it was a good time to tell him — riding high after his victory, he could presumably take a lost love in stride. In any event, Tommy had never shown much emotion off the court, and now was equally cool on it, so she knew she could count on him to be a gentleman about this. If he could be gallant enough to hand two points to Claude Macquereau through purposeful double faults, wouldn’t he be equally gallant and self-sacrificing now?

As it happened, he would not.

He was clutching his tennis racquet when she told him all this. It was the racquet he had been using ever since his return from Togo, and it had lasted longer than any racquet he had previously owned, because he had not once swung it at anything harder than a tennis ball.

By the time he let go of it now, it was in pieces, and his wife and his rival were both dead. He smashed the edge of the racquet into Roger MacReady’s head, striking him five times in all, fracturing his skull even as he smashed the racquet, and he went on swinging until all he had left in his hand was the jagged handle.

Which he continued to hold as he backed the terrified Jennifer into a corner, where he pinned her against the wall and drove the racquet handle into the hollow of her throat.

Then he picked up the phone and told the desk clerk to summon the police.

Everyone had a theory, of course, and one that got a lot of play held that Tommy’s temper, no longer released periodically on the tennis court, didn’t just disappear. Instead it got tamped down, compressed, so that the eventual inevitable explosion was that much greater and more disastrous.

One enterprising newsman found his way to Togo, where the enigmatic Atuele told him essentially the same thing. “I gave the man a spirit,” he said, between puffs on a cheroot. “To help him when he played tennis. And it helped him, is it not so?”

“But off the court—”

“Off the court,” Atuele said, “the man had no problem. So, when he was not playing tennis, the spirit’s work was done. And the anger had to go somewhere, didn’t it?”

Three in the Side Pocket

You’d think they would have a pool table. When you walked into a joint called the Side Pocket, you expected a pool table. Maybe something smaller than regulation, maybe one of those dinky coin-operated Bumper Pool deals. But something, surely, where you poked a ball with a stick and it went into a hole.

Not that he cared. Not that he played the game, or preferred the sound of balls striking one another as background music for his drinking. It was just a matter of unfulfilled expectations, really. You saw the neon, “The Side Pocket,” and you walked in expecting a pool table, and they didn’t have one.

Of course, that was one of the things he liked about his life. You never knew what to expect. Sometimes you saw things coming, but not always. You could never be sure.

He stood for a moment, enjoying the air-conditioning. It was hot out, and humid, and he’d enjoyed the tropical feel of the air as he’d walked here from his hotel, and now he was enjoying the cool dry air inside. Enjoy it all, he thought. That was the trick. Hot or cold, wet or dry. Dig it. If you hate it, then dig hating it. Whatever comes along, get into it and enjoy it.

Right.

He walked over to the bar. There were plenty of empty stools but he stood instead. He gazed at the light glinting off the shoulders of the bottles on the top row of the back bar, listened to the hum of conversation floating on the surface of soft jazz from the jukebox, felt the cool air on his skin. He was a big man, tall and thickly muscled, and the sun had bronzed his skin and bleached blond streaks in his brown hair.

Earlier he’d enjoyed being in the sun. Now he was enjoying being out of it.

Contrasts, he thought. Name of the game.

“Help you?”

He’d been standing, staring, and there was no telling how long the bartender had been right in front of him, waiting for him to order something. A big fellow, the bartender, sort of an overgrown kid, with one of those sleeveless T-shirts cut to show off the delts and biceps. Weightlifter’s muscles. Get up around noon, pump some iron, then go lie in the sun. Spend the evening pouring drinks and flexing your muscles, go home with some vacationing schoolteacher or somebody’s itchy wife.

He said, “Double Cuervo, neat, water back.”

“You got it.”

Why did they say that? And they said it all the time. You got it. And he didn’t have it, that was the whole point, and he’d have it sooner if they didn’t waste time assuring him that he did.

He didn’t like the bartender. Fine, nothing wrong with that. He examined the feeling of dislike and let himself enjoy it. In his imagination he drove two stiffened fingers into the bartender’s solar plexus, heard the pained intake of breath, followed with a chop to the windpipe. He entertained these thoughts and smiled easily, smiled with genuine enjoyment, as the fellow poured the drink.

“Run a tab?”

He shook his head and drew out his wallet. “Pay as you go,” he said, riffling through a thick sheaf of bills. “Sound fiscal policy.” He plucked one halfway out, saw it was a hundred, tucked it back. He rejected another hundred, then found a fifty and laid in on top of the bar. He drank the tequila while the bartender rang the sale and left his change on the bar in front of him, returning the wallet to his side pocket.

Maybe the bar’s name had nothing to do with pool, he thought. Maybe the Side Pocket meant a pocket in a pair of pants, not the hip pocket but the side pocket, which could have made it an unhip pocket, but in fact made it a more difficult target for pickpockets.

They had a pool table there once, he decided, and the owner found it didn’t pay for itself, took up space where he could seat paying customers. Or the bar changed hands and the first thing the new guy did was get rid of the table. Kept the name, though, because he liked it, or because the joint had a following. That made more sense than pants and pickpockets.

He kept his own wallet in his side pocket, but more for convenience than security. He wasn’t much afraid of pickpockets. Draining the drink, he felt the tequila stirring him and imagined a hand slipping artfully into his pocket, groping almost imperceptibly for his fat wallet. Imagined his own hand taking hold of the smaller hand. Squeezing, breaking small bones, doing damage without looking, without even seeing the face of the person he was hurting.

He saw the bartender was down at the end of the bar, talking to somebody on the telephone, grinning a lazy grin. He waited until the kid looked his way, then crooked a finger and pointed at his empty glass. Get it? You got it.

A pair of double Cuervos gave you a nice base to work on, got the blood humming in your veins. When the second was gone he switched to India Pale Ale. It had a nice bite to it, a complicated flavor. Sat comfortably on top of tequila, too. Not so comfortably, though, that you didn’t know it was there. You definitely knew it was there.

He was halfway through the second IPA when she came in. He didn’t exactly sense her presence, but the energy in the place shifted when she walked through the door. Not that everybody turned to look at her. For all he knew, nobody turned to look at her. He certainly didn’t. He just stood there, his hand wrapped around the base of the longneck bottle, ready to refill his glass. He felt the shift in energy and turned it over in his mind.

He caught sight of her in the back bar, watched out of the corner of his eye as she approached. One empty stool separated the two of them, but she showed no awareness of his presence, her attention directed at the bartender.

She said, “Hi, Kevin.”

“Lori.”

“It’s an oven out there. Sweetie, tell me something. Can I run a tab?”

“You always run a tab,” Kevin said. “Though I heard someone say Pay As You Go is a sound fiscal policy.”

“I don’t mean a tab like pay at the end of the evening. I mean like I’ll pay you tomorrow.”

“Oh,” he said. “The thing is I’m not supposed to do that.”

“See, the ATM was down,” she said.

“Down? Down where?”

“Down as in not working. I stopped on the way here and it wouldn’t take my card.”

“Is Jerry meeting you here? Because he could—”

“Jerry’s in Chicago,” she said. “He’s not due back until the day after tomorrow.” She was wearing a wedding ring, and she fiddled with it. “If you took plastic,” she said, “like every other place...”

“Yeah, well,” Kevin said. “What can I tell you, Lori? If we took plastic the owner couldn’t cook the books as much. He hates to pay taxes even more than he hates to bathe.”

“A wonderful human being.”

“A prince,” Kevin agreed. “Look, I’d let you run a tab, the hell, I’d just as soon let you drink free, far as it goes, but he’s on my ass so much these days...”

“No, I don’t want to get you in trouble, Kevvie.”

He’d been taking this all in, hanging on every word, admiring the shape of it even as he’d admired her shape, long and curvy, displayed to great advantage in the pale yellow cotton shift. He liked the way Kevin had quoted his pay-as-you-go remark, a sure way to draw him toward the conversation if not into it.

Now he said, “Kevin, suppose I buy the lady a drink. How will that sit with the owner?”

This brought a big grin from the bartender, a pro forma protest from Lori. Very nice, little lady, he thought, but you have done this before. “I insist,” he said. “What are you drinking?”

“I’m not,” she said. “That’s the whole problem, and you, kind sir, are the solution. What am I drinking? Kevin, what was that drink you invented?”

“Hey, I didn’t invent it,” Kevin said. “Guy was drinking ’em in Key West and described it to me, and I improvised, and he says I got it right. But I never tasted the original, so maybe it’s right and maybe it isn’t.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what to call it. I was leaning toward Key Hopper or maybe Florida Sunset but I don’t know.”

“Well, I want one,” Lori said.

He asked what was in it.

“Rum and tequila, mostly. A little OJ.” Kevin grinned. “Couple of secret ingredients. Fix you one? Or are you all right with the IPA?”

“I’ll try one.”

“You got it,” Kevin said.

During the first round of Key Hoppers she told him her name was Lori, which he knew, and that her husband’s name was Jerry, which he also knew. He told her his name was Hank Dettweiler and that he was in town on business. He’d been married once, he told her, but he was long divorced. Too many business trips.

During the second round she said that she and Jerry weren’t getting along too well. Too few business trips, she said. It was when they were together that things were bad. Jerry was too jealous and too possessive. Sometimes he was physically abusive.

“That’s terrible,” he told her. “You shouldn’t have to put up with that.”

“I’ve thought about leaving him,” she said, “but I’m afraid of what he might do.”

During the third round of Key Hoppers (or Florida Sunsets, or whatever you wanted to call them) he wondered what would happen if he reached down the front of her dress and grabbed hold of one of her breasts. What would she do? It was almost worth doing just to find out.

There was no fourth round, because midway through the third she suggested they might be more comfortable at her place.

They took her car and drove to her house. It was a one-story box built fifty years ago to house vets. No Down Payment to Gls, Why Rent When You Can Own? He figured it was a rental now. Her car was an Olds Brougham a year old and her house was a dump with Salvation Army furniture and nothing on the walls but a calendar from the dry cleaners. Why rent when you can own? He figured Lori and Jerry had their reasons.

He followed her into the kitchen, watched as she found an oldies station on the radio, then made them both drinks. She’d kissed him once in the car, and now she came into his arms again and rubbed her little body against him like a cat. Then she wriggled free and headed for the living room.

He went after her, drink in hand, caught up with her, and put his arm around her, reaching into the front of her dress and cupping her breast. It was the move he’d imagined earlier, but of course the context was different. It would have been shocking in a public place like the Side Pocket. Here it was still surprisingly abrupt, but not entirely unexpected.

“Oh, Hank,” she said.

Not bad. She remembered the name, and acted as if his touch left her weak-kneed with passion. His hand tightened a little on her breast, and he wondered just how hard he could squeeze before fear and pain took the place of passion. They’d be more genuine emotions, certainly, and a lot more interesting.

People always got more interesting when you handed them something they didn’t expect. Especially if it wasn’t what they wanted. Especially if it was painful or frightening, or both.

He pulled her down onto the couch and began making love to her. His touch and his kisses were gentle, exploratory, but in his mind he hurt her, he forced her. That was interesting, too, a mental exercise he had performed before. She was vibrating to his touch, but she’d be screaming her lungs out if his actions matched the images in his mind.

Just something for his own private amusement, while they waited for Jerry.

But where was good old Jere? That was the question, and he could tell it had occurred to her as well, could tell by the way she worked to slow the pace. It wouldn’t do if he got to nail her before the Jealous Husband burst through the door. The game worked best if he was caught on the verge, made doubly vulnerable by guilt and frustration, and awkward, too, with his pants down around his knees.

Happily, their goals were the same. And, when his pants were indeed around his knees and consummation appeared to be right around the corner, they both froze at the sound of a key in the lock.

“Oh my God!” she cried.

Enter Jerry. The door flew open and there he was. You looked at him and you wanted to laugh, because he was hardly the intimidating figure he was supposed to be. Traditionally, the outraged husband was big as a house and meaner than a snake, so that his physical presence alone would scare the crap out of you. Jerry wasn’t a shrimp, but he was a middle-aged guy who stood five-ten in his shoes and looked like his main form of exercise was changing channels with the remote control. He wore glasses, he had a bald spot. He looked like a store clerk, night man at the 7-Eleven, maybe.

Which helped explain the gun in his hand. You take a guy five-four, eighty years old, weighs no more than a sack of flour, you put a gun in his hand, you’ve got a figure that commands respect.

Lori was whimpering, trying to explain. Hank got to his feet, turned from her, turned toward Jerry. He pulled up his pants, fastened them.

“You must be Jerry,” he said. “Now look, just because you got a gun don’t mean you get to jump the line. You gotta wait your turn, just like everybody else.”

It was comical, because Jerry wasn’t expecting that. He was expecting a load of begging and pleading, explanations and justifications, and instead he got something that didn’t fit any of the slots available for it.

So he didn’t know how to react, and while he was figuring it out Hank crossed the room, grabbed the gun in one hand, hit him with the other. His fist went right into the pit of Jerry’s soft stomach, just about midway between the nuts and the navel, and that was the end of the war. You hit a person there just right, before he’s had a chance to tense his stomach muscles, and if you put enough shoulder into the punch you can deliver a fatal blow.

Not instantly fatal, though. It can take a day or a week, and who has that kind of time?

So he let Jerry double up, clutching his belly with both hands, and he grabbed hold of him by the hair on his head and forced his head down hard, fast, and brought his own knee up hard, fast. He smashed Jerry’s face, broke his nose.

Behind him, she was carrying on, going No, no, no, clutching at his clothing. He backhanded her without looking, concentrating his attention on Jerry, who was blubbering through the blood that coursed from his nose and mouth.

That was nice, that knee-in-the-face maneuver. His pants were already bloody at the knee, and it was a sure bet there was nothing in Jerry’s closet that would fit him. That was the advantage of having the husband be a big bozo, the way the script called for it; after you were done with him, you could pick out something nice from his wardrobe.

But his pants were khakis, replaceable for thirty bucks at the nearest mall. And, since they were already ruined—

This time he cupped Jerry’s head with both hands, brought it down, brought his knee up. The impact brought a great cry from Lori. He gave Jerry a shove and the man wound up sprawled against the wall, jaw slack, eyes glassy. Conscious? Unconscious? Hard to say.

And what did it matter? Eager to get on with it now, he went over to Jerry, put one hand under his chin and the other on the top of his head, and snapped his neck.

Hell of a sound it made. First a grinding noise like something you’d hear in a dentist’s office, and then a real sharp crack. Left you in no doubt of what you’d just done.

He turned to Lori, relishing the look on her face. God, the look on her face!

“Honey,” he said, “you see what I did? I just saved your life.”

It was amusing, watching the play of emotions on her sharp little face. Like her head was transparent, like you could see the different thoughts zooming around in there. She had to come up with something that would leave her with a pulse at the evening’s end, and the effort made her thoughts visible.

Thoughts caroming around like balls on a pool table...

She said, “He was going to kill me.”

“Going to kill us both,” he agreed. “Violent fellow, your husband. What do you figure makes a man like that?”

“The gun was pointed right at me,” she said, improvising nicely. “I thought I was going to die.”

“Did your whole life flash before your eyes?”

“You saved my life.”

“You’re probably wondering how to thank me,” he said. He unfastened his pants, let them drop to the floor, stepped out of them. A shadow of alarm flashed on her face, then disappeared.

He reached for her.

It was interesting, he thought, how rapidly the woman adjusted to new realities. Her husband — well, her partner, anyway, and for all he knew her husband as well — her guy was down for the count, on his way to room temperature. And she wasn’t wasting time mourning him. Off with the old, on with the new.

“Oh, baby,” she said, and sighed theatrically, as if her passion had been real, her climax authentic. “I knew I was hot for you, Hank. I knew that the minute I saw you. But I didn’t know—”

“That it could possibly be this good,” he supplied.

“Yes.”

“It’s Jerry being dead that does it,” he told her. “Lovemaking as an affirmation of our own aliveness. He’s lunch meat and we’re still hot to trot. Get it?”

Her eyes widened. Oh, she was beginning to get it, all right. She was on the edge, the brink, the goddamn verge.

“I liked the bit with the bartender,” he said. “Kevin, right?”

“The bartender?”

“You got it,” he said, and grinned. “ ‘Oh, Kevvie, I haven’t got any money, so how am I going to get a little drinkie-poo?’ ”

“I don’t—”

“He phoned you,” he said, “after he got a peek at my wallet. He probably thought they were all fifties and hundreds, too.”

“Honey,” she said, “I think all that sweet love scrambled my brains. I can’t follow what you’re saying. Let me get us a couple of drinks and I’ll—”

Where was she going? Jerry’s gun was unloaded, he was sure of that, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a loaded gun stashed somewhere in the place. Or she might just open the door and take off. She wasn’t dressed for it, but he already knew she cared more for survival than propriety.

He grabbed her arm, yanked her back down again. She looked at him and got it. It was interesting, seeing the knowledge come into her eyes. Her mouth opened to say something but she couldn’t think of anything that might work.

“The badger game,” he said. “The cheating wife, the outraged husband. And the jerk with a lot of cash who buys his way out of a mess. How about you? Got any cash? Want to buy your way out?”

“Anything you want,” she said.

“Where’s the money?”

“I’ll get it for you.”

“You know,” he said, “I think I’ll have more fun looking for it myself. Make a game of it, you know? Like a treasure hunt. I’m pretty good at finding things, anyway. Got a sixth sense for it.”

“Please,” she said.

“Please?”

Something went out of her eyes. “You son of a bitch,” she said. “It’s not a game and I’m not a toy. Just do it and get it over with, you son of a bitch.”

Interesting. Sooner or later they let you know who they are. The mask drops and you see inside.

His hands went around her throat. “Jerry got a broken neck,” he said. “Strangulation’s not as quick. How it works, the veins are blocked off but not the arteries, so the blood gets in but it can’t get out. Remember those Roach Motel ads? Thing is, you won’t be pretty, but here’s the good news. You won’t have to see it.”

Jerry’s gun was unloaded. No surprise there.

Jerry’s wallet had a couple of hundred in it, and so did Lori’s purse, which suggested the ATM wasn’t down after all. And a cigar box on a shelf in the closet held more cash, but most of it was foreign. French 500-franc notes, some Canadian dollars and British pounds.

He showered before he left the house, but he was perspiring before he’d walked a block, and he turned around and went back for her car. Risky, maybe, but it beat walking, and the Olds was wonderfully comfortable with its factory air. He’d always liked the sound of that, factory air, like they made all that air in Detroit, stamped it out under sterile conditions.

He parked down the block from the Side Pocket, waited. He didn’t move when Kevin let out his last customers and turned off most of the lights, gave him another five minutes to get well into the business of shutting down for the night.

He was a loose end, capable of furnishing a full description. So it was probably worthwhile to tie him off, but that was almost beside the point. Thing is, Kevin was a player. He was in the game, hell, he’d started the game, picking up the phone to kick things off. You knocked down Jerry and Lori, you couldn’t walk away and leave him standing, could you?

Besides, he’d be expecting a visitor now, Lori or Jerry or both, showing up with his piece of the action. What kind of finder’s fee would he get? As much as a third? That seemed high, given that he wasn’t there when it hit the fan, but on the other hand there was no game if he wasn’t there to deal the cards.

Maybe they told Kevin he was getting a third, and then cheated him.

Guy in Kevin’s position, he’d probably expect to be cheated. Probably took it for granted, same way as Kevin’s boss took it for granted that not all of the money that passed over the bar wound up in the till. Long as the bottom line was high enough, you probably didn’t mind getting cheated a little, probably figured it was part of the deal.

Interesting. He got out of the car, headed for the front door. Maybe, if there was time, he’d ask Kevin how they worked the split. Good old Kevvie, with that big grin and all those muscles. While he was at it, why not ask him why they called it the Side Pocket? Just to see what he’d say.

You Don’t Even Feel It

She found them at the gym, Darnell in sweatpants and sneakers, his chest bare, Marty in khakis and a shirt and tie, the shirt a blue button-down, the tie loose at the throat. Marty was holding a watch and Darnell was working the speed bag, his hands fast and certain.

She’d been ready to burst in, ready to interrupt whatever they were doing, but she’d seen them like this so many times over so many years, Darnell working the bag and Marty minding the time, that the sight of them stopped her in her tracks. It was familiar, and thus reassuring, although it should not have been reassuring.

She found a spot against the wall, out of his line of sight, and watched him train. He finished with the speed bag and moved on to the double end bag, a less predictable device than the speed bag, its balance such that it came back at you differently each time, and you had to react to its responses. Like a live opponent, she thought, adjusting to you as you adjusted to it, bobbing and weaving, trying not to get hit.

But not hitting back...

From the double end bag they moved to the heavy bag, and by then she was fairly certain they had sensed her presence. But they gave no sign, and she stayed where she was. She watched Darnell practice combinations, following a double jab with a left hook. That’s how he’d won the title the first time, hooking the left to Roland Weymouth’s rib cage, punishing the champion’s body until his hands came down and a string of head shots sent the man to the canvas. He was up at eight, but he had nothing left in his tank, and Darnell would have decked him again if the ref hadn’t stopped it.

“The winner, and... new junior middleweight champion of the world... Darnell Roberts!”

He’d moved up two weight classes since then. Junior middleweight was what, 154? And middleweight was 160, and he’d held the IBF title for two years, winning it when the previous titleholder had been forced to give it up for reasons she hadn’t understood then and couldn’t remember now. The sport was such a mess, it was all politics and backroom deals, but all of that went away when you got down to business. You sweated it out in the gym, and then you stepped into the ring, you and the other man, and you stood and hit each other, and all the conniving and manipulation disappeared. It was just two men in a pure sport, bringing nothing with them but their bodies and whatever they had on the inside.

He was a super middleweight these days. That meant he’d have to be under 168 when he weighed in the day before the fight, and seven to ten pounds more when he actually stepped into the ring. You wanted those extra pounds, she knew, because the more you weighed the harder you punched.

Of course your opponent had those extra pounds, too, and punched harder for them.

Darnell had run through his combinations, and now he was standing in and slugging, hitting the bag full force with measured blows that had all his weight behind them. And Marty was standing behind the bag, holding on to it, steadying it, while Darnell meted out punishment.

Marty saw her then. Their eyes met, and she didn’t see surprise in his, which meant she’d been right in sensing he knew she was there.

Other hand, Marty hardly ever looked surprised.

She drew her eyes away from Marty’s and watched Darnell as he hit the bag with measured lefts and rights. He weighed what, 185? 190? But he wouldn’t have trouble making the weight. He had two months, and he was just starting to train. All he had to do was work off twelve or fifteen pounds. Rest was water, and you sweated it out before you stepped on the scales, then drank yourself back to your fighting weight.

She always used to love to see him hit the heavy bag. It was fun to watch him train, watch that fine body show what it could do, but this part was the best because you saw the muscles work beneath the skin, saw the blows land, heard the impact, felt the power.

Early days, watching this, she’d get wet. Young as she was back then, it didn’t take much. And, young as she was, it embarrassed her, even if nobody knew.

Fifteen years. They’d been married for twelve years, together for three before that. Three daughters, the oldest eleven. So she didn’t get wet pants every time she watched him work up a sweat. Still, she always liked the sight of him, digging in, setting himself, throwing those measured punches.

She wasn’t liking it much today.

“Time,” Marty said, but he went on holding the bag, knowing Darnell would throw another punch or two. Then, when his fighter’s hands dropped, he let go of the bag and stepped out from behind it, smiling. “Look who’s here,” he said, and Darnell turned to face her, and he didn’t look surprised, either.

“Baby,” he said. “How I look just now? Not too rusty, was I?”

“I heard it on the news,” she said.

“I was gonna tell you,” he said, “but you was sleepin’ when I left this morning, and I didn’t have the heart to wake you.”

“And I guess it was news to you this morning,” she said, “even if you signed the papers yesterday afternoon.”

“Well,” he said.

“Last I heard,” she said, “we were thinking about quitting.”

“I been thinkin’ on it,” he said. “I not ready yet.”

“Darnell...”

“This gone be an easy fight for me,” he said. He had the training gloves off now and he was holding out his hands for Marty to unwind the cotton wraps. The fingers that emerged showed the effects of all the punches he’d landed, on the heavy bag and on the heads and bodies of other fighters, even as his face showed the effects of all the punches he’d taken.

Well, some of the effects. The visible effects.

“This guy,” he said. “Rubén Molina? Man is made for me, baby. Man never been in against a body puncher like me. Style he got, I can find him all day with the left hook. Man has this pawing jab, I can fit a right to the ribs in under it, take his legs out from under him.”

“Maybe you can beat him, but—”

“Ain’t no maybe. And I won’t just beat him, I’ll knock him out. All I need, what you call a decisive win, an’ then I get a title shot.”

“And then?”

“Then I fight, probably for the WBO belt, or maybe the WBC. And I win, and that makes three belts in three different weight classes, and ain’t too many can claim that.” He beamed at her, and she saw the face she’d seen when they first met, saw the face of the boy he’d been before she ever met him. Under all the scar tissue, all the years of punishment.

“And then I hang ’em up,” he said. “That what you want to hear?”

“I don’t want to wait two more fights to hear it,” she said. “I worry about you, Darnell.”

“No call for you to worry.”

“They had this show on television. Muhammad Ali? They showed talking before the Liston fight, and then they showed him like he is now.”

“Man has got a condition. Like that actor, used to be on Spin City.”

“That’s Parkinson’s disease,” Marty said. “That Michael J. Fox has. What Ali has is Parkinson’s syndrome.”

“Whatever it is,” she said, “he got it because he didn’t know when to quit. Darnell, you want to wind up shuffling and mumbling?”

He grinned, did a little shuffle.

“That’s not funny.”

“Just jivin’ you some,” he said. “Keisha, I gonna be fine. All I’s gonna do is win one fight and get a title shot, then win one more and get my third belt.”

“And take how many punches in the process?”

“Molina can’t punch worth a damn,” he said. “Walk through his punches, all’s I gotta do.”

“You think Ali didn’t say the same thing?”

“It may not have been the punches he took,” Marty put in. “They can’t prove that’s what did it.”

“And can you prove it isn’t?” She turned to her husband. “And Floyd Patterson,” she said. “You don’t think he got the way he is from taking too many punches? And that Puerto Rican boy, collapsed in his third professional bout and never regained consciousness.”

“That there was a freak thing,” Darnell said. “Ring ropes was too loose, and he got knocked through ’em and hit his head when he fell. Like gettin’ struck by lightin’, you know what I’m sayin’? For all it had to do with bein’ in a boxin’ ring.”

If the boy hadn’t been in the ring, she thought, then he couldn’t have got knocked out of it.

“You worry too much,” Darnell said, and gathered her in his arms. “Part of bein’ a woman, I guess. Part of bein’ a man’s gettin’ the job done.”

“I just don’t want you hurt, Darnell.”

“You just don’t want to miss the lovin’,” he said, “the whole last month of training. That’s what it is, girl, innit?”

“Darnell—”

“All that doin’ without,” he said, “just make it sweeter afterward. You think about that, help you get through the waitin’ time.”

“Tell her,” Darnell said. “Tell Keisha how it went.”

“He had a brain scan and an MRI,” Marty told her. “This was to make you happy, because he had a scan after his last fight and there was no medical reason for another one.”

“He’s been slurring his words,” she said. “Don’t you call that a reason?”

“He sounds the same as ever to me,” Marty said.

“Maybe you don’t listen.”

“And maybe you listen too hard.”

“Hey,” Darnell said. “Maybe I gets a little mushmouth some of the time. Sometimes my lips be a little puffy.” He tapped his head. “Don’t mean anything’s messed up inside.”

“All the punches you’ve taken—”

“Let me tell you something about the punches,” he said. “Gettin’ hit upside the head? Nine times, you don’t even feel it. It don’t hurt. Body shots, a man keeps beating on your ribs, man, that’s a different story. Hurts when he does it and hurts the next day and the day after. Head shots? Don’t mean nothin’ at all. Why you lookin’ at me like that?”

“Nine times.”

“Huh?”

“ ‘Nine times, you don’t even feel it.’ That’s what you just said.”

“So?”

“Nine times out of ten, you meant.”

“What I said.”

“No, you just said ‘nine times.’ ”

“Well, shit,” he said. “You tellin’ me you didn’t know what I meant?”

“I’m telling you what you said. You left out some words there.”

“Man, there’s a sign,” he said heavily. “I must have brain damage, leavin’ out ‘out of ten’ like that.”

“It’s cumulative, Darnell.”

“What you talkin’ now?”

“Punches to the head, the effect is cumulative. Even if you barely feel them—”

“Which I just said I don’t.”

“—they add up, and you reach a point where every punch you take does real damage. It’s irreversible, you can’t turn it back, and once you see signs—”

“Which there ain’t yet.”

“If you’re slurring words,” she said, “then we’re seeing signs.”

“What happens,” he said, grinning, “my tongue gets in the way of my teeth an’ I can’t see what I’m sayin’. Why you lookin’ at me like that?”

“Your tongue gets in the way of your eyeteeth,” she said, “and you can’t see what you’re saying.”

“What I just said.”

“Except you left out ‘eye,’ ” she said. “You said your tongue got in the way of your teeth, and that doesn’t mean anything.”

“But you know what I meant.”

“And I also know what you said.”

“Damn,” he said. “We just had the tests. Didn’t have to, had ’em strictly to keep you happy, and look at you. You ain’t happy!”

Marty said, “What’s that, a Coke? You want something stronger?”

“This is fine.”

“Because you’re not in training. You can have a real drink, if you want.”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Well, I want a drink,” he said, and ordered vodka on the rocks. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “I won’t pretend I wanted to be having this conversation, but we ought to have it. Because you really got to cut the guy some slack, Keisha.”

“I’ve got to cut him some slack?”

“Molina’s style is tailor-made for Darnell,” Marty said, “just like he says it is. You look at tapes of his fights, that jumps right out at you. But that doesn’t mean this is gonna be a walk in the park. Molina’s ten years younger.”

“Eleven. He’s twenty-six and Darnell turned thirty-seven last month.”

“Can we compromise? Call it ten and a half?” His smile was disarming. “Keisha, what I’m getting at, he should have training on his mind and nothing else, and what he’s got is you hammering away at him, telling him he’s slurring his words. He’s training hard, he’s tired by the end of the day, and is it any wonder his speech might be the least bit blurry? Time the day’s done, I’m slurring my own words, come to that.”

“Just let him see a doctor,” she said.

“Keisha, he saw one. He had a scan and an MRI, remember?”

“A doctor to test his speech,” she said. “There’s a specialist, I wrote the name down. All Darnell has to do is sit down and talk with him, and he can tell whether there’s been any damage.”

Marty was shaking his head. “We looked at the brain waves,” he said, “and he got a clean bill of health. No evidence of damage.”

“Or proof there hasn’t been any.”

“You can’t prove a negative. There’s no evidence of any organic brain damage, Keisha, and he’s been pronounced okay to fight by experts. You sit him down, have some quack listen to his speech and measure how his tongue moves, and it’s a judgment call on his part, got nothing to do with anything you can put your finger on. And if he gets it into his head that there’s something wrong, the fight’s off. Doesn’t matter that your expert turns out to be full of crap. The fight’s off and Darnell’s chance at a third belt’s down the toilet.”

“He doesn’t need a third belt.”

“He wants it, Keisha.”

“And you? What do you want, Marty?”

“I want him to have a shot.”

She looked at him. “The money doesn’t mean a thing to you,” she said.

“Not as much as it means to Darnell,” he said. “His fight with Molina’s on the pay-per-view undercard. He’s getting eighty thousand dollars for it, Keisha. He’s had title bouts where he didn’t get that.”

“We don’t need the money.”

“That’s not how he sees it. What he sees is he can stand in there for ten rounds and put eighty grand in his pocket.”

“Minus your cut, and training camp expenses, and everything else that takes a bite out of his check.”

“Including taxes, which gets a lot more of his money than I do, and a lot more of mine, too. But ten rounds is what, thirty-nine minutes, start to finish? You do the numbers, Keisha, you’re the one’s good at numbers, but it’s better than anybody ever made bagging groceries at the Safeway.”

She looked at him. He met her gaze, then picked up his drink and drained it.

“And if he gets past Molina,” he said, “which he will, and it probably won’t take all ten rounds, either, I can get him a title shot, prolly WBO but it could be WBC, and for that he’ll make close to a million. And if he wins it, which there’s no reason why he can’t, then he’s a man won three different belts in three different weight categories, and he’s that much more desirable when it comes to endorsements and public appearances, because that’s the only way you can make any money after you hang the gloves up. You show up at a dinner, you make a little speech—”

“How’s he going to make a speech,” she demanded, “if he can’t talk straight?”

“He sounds fine to me,” Marty said. “Maybe you got ears like a dog, hear things I don’t, but he sounds perfectly fine to me. And nobody is gonna expect him to perform Shakespeare. All they want is for him to show up, three-time champion of the world, sign some autographs, and pose for some snapshots. Keisha, all this is beside the point. It’s what he wants, this fight and the fight after. Then he’ll quit winners and hang ’em up.”

“Will he?”

“He’ll have no choice,” he said. “I’ll insist on it. I’ll tell him I’m quitting him, and he’ll have to quit.”

“You could do that now.”

“There’s no reason.”

“I already told you the reason, Marty. His head’s the reason. All those punches he’s taken, aren’t they enough of a reason?”

“The man’s never been knocked down.”

“That Cuban fighter, had all those tattoos—”

“You didn’t let me finish. The man’s never been down from a blow to the head. The Cuban kid, what the hell was his name, they coulda called him the Human Sketchpad—”

“Was it Vizcacho?”

“Vizcacho, yes, and he had a funny first name. Filomeno, something like that. That was a shot to the liver put Darnell down, and that’s a punch’ll floor anybody, it lands right, and what did he do, Darnell? Got up, took an eight count, and hit Vargas hard enough to erase half his tattoos. Knocked him out, remember?”

“I remember.”

“He’s lost four fights, Darnell, his entire career. One early decision, it was the other kid’s hometown, no way on earth we were gonna get a decision there. You didn’t see that fight, Keisha, it was before you were in the picture, but believe me, we got robbed.” He shrugged. “It happens. It still pisses me off, but that’s the kind of shit that happens. He lost that fight, and he lost a decision to Armando Chaco that could have gone either way, and he was stopped twice. Once was a head butt, the other fighter couldn’t continue, and they went to the scorecards and two judges had the other kid ahead.” He closed his eyes, shook his head. “The other was when he lost the 160-pound title, and you couldn’t argue with it. Darnell was taking way too much punishment, and the ref was right to step in.”

“That’s not how you felt at the time.”

“Darnell wanted to go on, and he’s my fighter. I got to want what he wants. But we looked at the films afterward, and we both agreed it was the right thing, stopping it. Look, Keisha, do you have to make it harder for him? He’s gonna have this fight, and one more for the title. He’s got his hands full training for it. Why give him a hard time?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Marty. Maybe because I love him.”

“You think I don’t? Keisha, don’t be like that. Sit down, have another Coke, a real drink, whatever. Listen, Darnell’s gonna be fine.”

She started to say something, but what was there to say? She kept on walking.

She was seated at ringside when he fought Rubén Molina.

At first she hadn’t intended to be there. “I can’t watch,” she told him. “I can’t.”

“But you always there,” he said. “You my good luck, don’t you know that? How’m I gonna get in the ring, my good luck charm ain’t there?”

She didn’t believe she brought him luck, wasn’t sure she believed in luck at all. But if he believed it...

She kept opening and closing her eyes. She couldn’t watch, couldn’t not watch. Every time Molina landed to Darnell’s head, she felt the impact in the pit of her stomach. Molina didn’t have much of a jab, he just stuck it out and groped with it, but he had an overhand right that he sometimes led with, and he was able to land it effectively.

In the third round, one of those right-hand leads snapped Darnell’s head back, and he grinned to show it hadn’t hurt. Fighters did that all the time, she knew, and it always indicated the opposite of what they intended.

Darnell stayed with his fight plan, working the body, punishing Molina relentlessly with hooks to the rib cage. In time, she knew, the body blows would get to Molina, taking the spring out of his legs and the power out of his punches, but meanwhile he kept landing that right, and Keisha winced every time he threw it, whether it landed or not.

Couldn’t watch, couldn’t not watch...

Midway through the sixth round, Darnell double-jabbed, then missed with a big left hook. Molina hit him with a right hand and put him on the canvas. She gasped — the whole crowd gasped, it seemed like — and he was up almost before the referee started counting, insisting it was a slip. He was off balance, that much was true, but it was a punch that put him down, and he had to take a count of eight, had to meet the ref’s eyes, had to assure the man that yes, he was fine, yes, he wanted to keep fighting. Hell, yes.

He kept his jab in Molina’s face for the rest of the round, and hurt him with body shots, but Molina landed an uppercut during a rare clinch and it snapped Darnell’s head back. And there was another right hand at the bell, caught Darnell flush, and she saw his eyes right before the ref sprang between the two fighters.

The doctor came over to the corner between rounds, said something to Darnell and to Marty, shined a flashlight in Darnell’s eyes. The ref came over to listen in. Oh, stop it, she wanted to shout, but she knew they weren’t going to stop it, and the doctor returned to his seat and the bell rang for the seventh round.

And the seventh round was all Darnell’s. He was determined to make up for the knockdown, and he pressed his attack, throwing three- and four- and five-punch combinations. The bodywork brought Molina’s hands down, and a right cross with thirty seconds left in the round sent the boy to the canvas.

Stay down, she prayed. But no, he was up at eight, and the bell ended the round before Darnell could get to him.

The round took a lot out of both fighters, and they both coasted through the eighth. Molina kept his jab in Darnell’s face through most of the round and landed the right once or twice, with no apparent effect.

At the bell, Darnell stood still for a moment, and she caught a look at his eyes. Then he recovered and loped over to his corner, and she got to her feet and pushed her way through, reaching a hand through the ropes and tugging at the cuff of Marty’s pants. He was busy, talking to Darnell, using the End-Swell to bring down a mouse under his right eye, holding the water bottle for him, holding the spit bucket for him. If he was aware of Keisha he gave no sign, but when the warning buzzer sounded and he came down out of the ring he didn’t look surprised to see her there.

“You got to stop it,” she told him. “He didn’t know where he was, he couldn’t find his corner.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told her.

“Marty, his eyes aren’t right.”

“They looked fine to the doc. Keisha, he’s winning the fucking fight. The other guy’s got nothing left and Darnell’s prolly gonna take him out this round, and if he doesn’t that’s fine because we’re way ahead on points.”

“He was knocked down.”

“He swung and missed, and it was his momentum knocked him down more than anything else. Next round he came back and knocked the other guy down, and came this close to knocking him out. Another thirty seconds in the round and the fight’d be over and we could go home.”

“Marty, he’s hurt.”

“I don’t agree with you,” he said. “And if I did, which I don’t, and I tried to stop it? He’d kill me. He’s winning the fight, he’s winning impressively enough to get a title shot, and — Keisha, sit down, will you? I got work to do here, I got to concentrate.”

Toward the end of the ninth round, Darnell caught Molina with a big left hook and dropped him. Molina got through the round, but in the tenth Darnell got to him early, putting him down with a body shot, then flooring him a second time with a hard right to the temple. The referee didn’t even count but stopped it right there, and the place went wild.

On his way out of the ring, Darnell told the TV guy Molina was a tough kid, and no, he himself was never hurt, the knockdown was more of a slip than anything else. “He hit me a few shots,” he allowed, “but he never hurt me. Man punches like that, hit me in the head all day long. You don’t even feel it, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Later, when they replayed the interview, they pointed out that Darnell had slurred his words, that his speech was hard to make out.

In his dressing room, Darnell was grinning and laughing and hollering, along with everybody else. Until his eyes went glassy and he mumbled that he didn’t feel so good. He collapsed, and was rushed to the hospital, where he died three hours later without having regained consciousness.

He was wearing khakis, she noted, and a shirt and tie, but he’d added a navy blazer with brass buttons, and brown loafers instead of his usual sneakers. He said, “Keisha, I don’t know what to say. I tried to see you, I don’t know how many times, but I was told you weren’t seeing anybody.”

“I had to be by myself.”

“Believe me,” he said, “I can understand that. I didn’t know whether it was everybody you weren’t seeing or if it was just me, and either way I could understand it. I left messages, I don’t even know if you got them, but I don’t blame you for not calling back.” He looked away. “I was going to write a letter, but what can you say in a letter? Far as that goes, what can you say in person? I’m glad you called me, and here I am, and I still don’t know what to say.”

“Come in, Marty.”

“Thank you. Keisha, I just feel so awful about the whole thing. I loved Darnell. It’s no exaggeration to say he was like a son to me.”

“Let me fix you a drink,” she said. “What can I get you?”

“Anything, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you’ve got.”

“Vodka?”

“Sure, if you’ve got it.”

She put him in the overstuffed chair in the living room, came back with his vodka and a Coke for herself. And sat down across from him and listened to him talk, or tried to look as though she was listening.

“Another drink, Marty?”

“I better not,” he said. “That one hit me kinda hard.” He yawned, covered his mouth with his hand. “Excuse me,” he said. “I feel a little sleepy all of a sudden.”

“Go ahead and close your eyes.”

“No, I’ll be fine. ‘Sfunny, vodka never hit me so sudden.”

He said something else, but she couldn’t make out the words. Then his eyes closed and he sagged in his chair.

She was sitting across from him when his eyes opened. He blinked a few times, then frowned at her. “Keisha,” he said. “What the hell happened?”

“You got sleepy.”

“I had a drink. That’s the last thing I remember.”

He shifted position, or tried to, and it was only then that he realized he was immobilized, his hands cuffed behind him, his ankles cuffed to the front legs of the chair. She’d wound clothesline around his upper body and the back of the chair, with a last loop around his throat, so that he couldn’t move his head more than an inch or two.

“Jesus,” he said. “What’s going on?”

She looked at him and let him work it out.

“Something in the vodka,” he said. “Tasted all right, but there was something in it, wasn’t there?”

She nodded.

“Why, Keisha?”

“I didn’t figure you’d let me tie you up if you were wide awake.”

“But why tie me up? What’s this all about?”

That was a hard question, and she had to think about it. “Payback,” she said. “I guess.”

“Payback?”

“For Darnell.”

“Keisha,” he said, “you want to blame me, go ahead. Or blame boxing, or blame Darnell, or blame the Molina kid, who feels pretty terrible, believe me. Son of a bitch killed a man in the ring and didn’t even win the fight. Keisha, it’s a tragedy, but it’s not anybody’s fault.”

“You could have stopped it.”

“And if I had? You think it would have made a difference if I threw in the towel when you told me to? He didn’t get hit more than a couple shots after that, and Molina didn’t have anything left by then. The damage was already done by then. You know what would have happened if I tried to stop it then? Darnell would have had a fit, and he probably would have dropped dead right then and there instead of waiting until he was back in his dressing room.”

“You could have stopped it after the knockdown.”

“Was that my job? The ref looked at him and let him go on. The ringside physician looked at him, shined a light in his eyes, and didn’t see any reason to call a halt.”

He went on, reasoning with her, talking very sensibly, very calmly. She stopped listening to what he was saying, and when she realized that he was waiting for a response, an answer to some question she hadn’t heard, she got up and crossed the room.

She picked up the newspaper and stood in front of his chair.

He said, “What’s that? Something in the paper?”

She rolled up the newspaper. He frowned at her, puzzled, and she drew back her arm and struck him almost gently on the top of the head with the rolled newspaper.

“Hey,” he said.

She looked at him, looked at the newspaper, then hit him again.

“What are you doing, trying to housebreak me?”

The newspaper was starting to unroll. She left him there, ignoring what he was saying, and went into the other room. When she returned the newspaper was secured with tape so that she wouldn’t have to worry about it unrolling. She approached him again, raised the newspaper, and he tried to dodge the blow but couldn’t.

He said, “Is this symbolic? Because I’m not sure I should say this, Keisha, but it doesn’t hurt.”

“In the ring,” she said, “when a fighter tries to indicate that a punch didn’t hurt him, what it means is it did.”

“Yeah, of course, because otherwise he wouldn’t bother. And they all know that because they notice it in other fighters, but they do it anyhow. It’s automatic. A guy hurts you, you want to make him think he didn’t.”

She raised the newspaper, struck him with it.

“Ouch!” he said. “That really hurt!”

“No, it didn’t.”

“No, it didn’t,” he agreed. “Why are we doing this? What’s the point?”

“You don’t even feel it,” she said. “That’s what Darnell always said about blows to the head. Body shots hurt you, when they land and again after the fight’s over, but not head shots. They may knock you out, but they don’t really hurt.”

She punctuated the speech with taps on the head, hitting him with the rolled newspaper, a little harder than before but not very hard, certainly not hard enough to cause pain.

“Okay,” he said. “Cut it out, will you?”

She hit him again.

“Keisha, what the hell’s the point? What are you trying to prove, anyway?”

“It’s cumulative,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“The same as it is in the ring,” she said. “Rubén Molina didn’t kill Darnell. It was all those punches over all those years, punches he didn’t even feel, punches that added up and added up and added up.”

“Could you quit hitting me while we’re talking? I can’t concentrate on what you’re saying.”

“Punch after punch after punch,” she said, continuing to hit him as she talked. “Down all the years, from playground fights to amateur bouts to pro fights. And then there’s training, all those rounds sparring, and yes, you wear headgear, but there’s still impact. The brain gets knocked around, same as your brain’s getting knocked around right now, even if you don’t feel it. Over a period of years, well, you got time to recover, and for a while that’s just what you do, you recover each time, and then there’s a point where you start to show the damage, and from that point on every punch you take leaves its mark on you.”

“Keisha, will you for Chrissake stop it?”

She hit him, harder, on the top of the head. She hit him, not quite so hard, on the side of the head. She hit him, hard, right on the top of the head.

“Keisha!”

She sat down the rolled-up newspaper, fetched the roll of duct tape, taped his mouth shut. “Don’t want to listen to you,” she said. “Not right now.” And, with Marty silent, she was silent herself, and the only sound in the room was the impact of the length of newspaper on his head. She fell into an easy rhythm, matching the blows with her own breathing, raising the newspaper as she inhaled, bringing it down as she breathed out.

She beat him until her arm ached.

When she took the tape from his mouth he winced but didn’t cry out. He looked at her and she looked at him and neither of them said anything.

Then he said, “How long are you going to do this?”

“Long as it takes.”

“Long as it takes to do what? To kill me?”

She shook her head.

“Then what?”

She didn’t answer.

“Keisha, I didn’t hit him. And I didn’t try to make him do anything he didn’t want to do. Keisha, there was no damage showed up in the MRI, nothing in the brain scan.”

“I said for you to let an expert examine him. Study his speech and all. But you wouldn’t do it.”

“And I told you why. You want me to tell you again?”

“No.”

“Keisha, he had an aneurysm. A blood vessel in the brain, it just blew out. Maybe it was from the punches he took, but maybe it wasn’t. He could have been a hundred miles away from Rubén Molina, lying in a Jacuzzi and eating a ham sandwich, and the blood vessel coulda popped anyway, right on schedule.”

“You don’t know that.”

“And you don’t know any different. Keisha, you want to let me up? I gotta go to the bathroom.”

She shook her head.

“It’s your chair. You want me to make a mess on it?”

“If you want.”

“Keisha—”

“Some of them,” she said, “the ones who took too many punches, they get so they can’t control their bladders. But that’s a long ways down the line. Slurred speech comes first, and you aren’t even slurring your words yet.”

He started to say something, but she was pressing the tape in place. He didn’t resist, and this time when she picked up the rolled newspaper he didn’t even attempt to dodge the blows.