Everybody Dies

"The crime scene routine's changed since my day," I said. "It seems to me they shoot a lot of videotape these days. And they keep getting more scientific."

"Though what's the need for science in this? One man sprays a room with. bullets and another hurls a bomb. I wonder have they finished carrying out the dead yet. I wonder how many dead there were, and others dying."

"We'll hear it on the news."

"Too many, whatever the number. A whole row drinking their pints at the bar, and a stream of bullets to knock them off their stools. Not Eamonn Dougherty, though. Never a scratch on him. Did I not once tell you he'd outlive us all?"

"I believe you did."

"The murderous wee bastard. I wonder how old he is. Jesus, he was in Tom Barry's flying column. He has to be ninety, and he could be ninety-five. A long life to live when you've all that blood on your hands. Or do you suppose the blood washes off after so many years?"

"I don't know."

"I wonder," he said, and looked down at his own hands. "You saw the gunman. Vietnamese, Andy thought. Or Thai, or God knows what else. Did you get a look at the one that threw the bomb?"

"No."

"He got away, and I scarcely saw him myself. There was his big face, looming over the other's shoulder, and then he threw the bomb and after that I never saw him again. It seems to me he was a very pale washed-out sort of white."

"And partnered with an Asian."

"It's the entire United fucking Nations arrayed against me," he said. "It's no more than luck they weren't trying to kill me."

"You mean all that was just to get your attention?"

"Oh, they came to do murder, and it was murder they did. But I'd say the man who sent them never expected to find me there, or yourself either. He sent those two to destroy the place and kill as many people as they could." He hefted the weapon he'd taken from the dead Asian. "If I hadn't shot the fucker," he said, "he'd have gone on firing until he killed everyone in the room."

And if he hadn't been quick as a cat, knocking me down even as he drew the gun…

"A big moon face pale as death. Does that sound like anyone you know?"

"A cop said the moon's full tonight."

"Then maybe that was himself. The man in the moon, come down to pay his respects. What about the two who waylaid you the other night?"

I described them as well as I could and he just shook his head. They could be anybody, he said. Anybody at all.

"And it was a black man did the shooting at the Chinese restaurant. It makes a man long for the old days, when the only people I had to worry about were the Eyetalians. And they may have been bad bastards but you could reason with them. Now it's the Rainbow Coalition, with all the races of man uniting against me. What's next, do you suppose? Cats and dogs?"

"Are you safe here, Mick?"

"Safe enough, for as long as I'll be here. I didn't want to go to any of my apartments. There's people who know about them. Only a few people, and they're people I trust, but how do I know who's to be trusted? Andy Buckley's almost a son to me, but who's to say what he'll do if some bastard puts a gun to his head?"

"That's why you wouldn't let him drop us off."

"No, I wanted a car handy, and a less noticeable car than the Cadillac. But he's no need to know where I am. He can't reveal what's been kept from him."

"Couldn't you go to the farm?"

He shook his head. "There's altogether too many know of the farm. And it's too far away from everything." He took a drink. "If I wanted to be away from it all," he said, "I could stay with the brothers."

That puzzled me for a moment. Then I said, "Oh. The monastery?"

"The Thessalonians, of course. What were you thinking?"

"You said the brothers, and we were talking about the shooter being black and the Rainbow Coalition, and…"

"Ah, that's rich," he said. "No, it's the brothers on Staten Island, not the brothers on Lenox Avenue." He looked at his hands again. "I'm a terrible Catholic," he said. "Ages since my last confession, and a soul well blackened with sins. But I could go there, to the brothers, and they'd take me in and ask me no questions. Whoever he is, he'd never think to hunt me there. He'd not be sending his black and brown shooters, or his pale white bomb throwers, either."

"Maybe that's not a bad idea, Mick."

"It's no idea at all," he said, "because I can't do it."

"Why not? Suppose you just walk away from it all."

He shook his head. "There's nothing to walk away from. I don't know who he is or what he wants, the man who's set all this in motion, but it can't be anything I have. Am I a crime boss with a great territory? I'm nothing of the sort. I own a few pieces of property, I have some business interests, but that's not what he wants. Don't you see? It's personal with him. He wants to destroy me." He uncapped the bottle, took a drink. "And all I can do," he said, "is try to get him first."

"Before he gets you."

"Is there another way? You're the policeman."

"Years ago."

"But you can still think like one. Give me a policeman's advice. Shall I go swear out a complaint? Against person or persons unknown?"

"No."

"Or ask for police protection? They couldn't protect me if they wanted to, and whyever should they want to? Haven't I lived my whole life on the other side of the law? And now it's kill or be killed, and how can I be hoisting a white flag and asking them to change the rules?"

A door at the left rear corner of the basement opened onto a flight of steps leading up to the air shaft. Mick unbolted the door and asked me again if I didn't want to catch a few hours' sleep before I went home. I could have the couch, he said. He was drinking, he'd just sit in the chair and sip whiskey until he dozed off.

I told him I didn't want Elaine to wake up before I got home. She'd turn on the news and hear what had happened at Grogan's.

"'Twill be everyone's lead story," he said. "I'd put on the radio to learn the number of dead, but I'll know soon enough." He gripped my shoulder. "Go on home. And keep your eyes open, will you?"

"I will."

"And pack your bags and take herself off to Ireland or Italy or wherever she wants to go. Just so you get the hell away from here. Will you do that?"

"I'll let you know."

"That's what I want to hear from you, that you're at the airport waiting for your flight to board."

"How will I call you? What's the phone number here?"

"Wait a minute," he said, and scribbled on a piece of paper, straightened up and handed it to me. "The cellular phone. I never give out the number because I don't want a fucking telephone ringing in my pocket. I just bought the creature because you can never find a pay phone that works, or if you do you've no quarters for it. I don't know how much time I'll spend here, and I don't want to answer the store phone anyway, with people calling to inquire about doorknobs and strap hinges. Call me from the airport, eh? Will you do that?"

He didn't wait for an answer, just gave me a pat on the back and a shove out the door. I headed up the dark stairs and heard the door close, heard the lock turn.

"He saved my life," I said. "No question. The one guy was spraying the room with bullets, trying to kill everything with a pulse. There was a couple two tables away having a low-voltage lovers' quarrel. Killed, both of them. Same thing would have happened to me if I'd stayed in my chair."

"But not if you'd stayed in bed."

"I'd have been fine," I said. "Until the next time I walked out the door."

She'd been sleeping when I got home, but not deeply. The sound of my key in the lock was enough to wake her. She got up, rubbing sleep out of her eyes, put on a robe and followed me into the kitchen. I made the coffee for a change, and while it dripped through I told her everything that had happened.

She said, "Bombs and bullets. I'd say it sounds like The Godfather, Part Four, except it doesn't, not really. It sounds like a war."

"That's what it feels like."

"Welcome to Sarajevo. Or isn't there a bar in the East Village called Downtown Beirut?"

"On Second Avenue, if it's still in business."

"Two people go out for a beer so they can talk about their relationship, and the next thing you know they're wearing toe tags. Caught in the crossfire. Was there any crossfire?"

"Not from me. Mick emptied his gun at him. He was the one who shot the shooter. My gun never made it out of the holster, and Tom and Andy were all the way in the back, so I don't think anybody else on our side got any shots off."

"'Our side.'" She sipped her coffee and made a face. It was too strong. When I make the coffee it always comes out too strong.

She said, "He was saving his own life, you know."

"He covered me with his body. Flopped on top of me, deliberately shielded me."

"But it must have been reflexive, don't you think? Something happened and he simply reacted."

"So?"

"So he didn't consciously think, Matt's in danger and I have to knock him down and shield him from bullets. He just did it."

"Would the act have scored higher on the nobility charts if he'd thought it over first? If he'd stopped to think we'd both be dead."

"You're right," she said. "You see what I'm doing, don't you? I'm trying to minimize what he did so you won't feel obligated to him. You almost got killed twice in one night. I want you to quit the game before your luck runs out."

"I don't think I can do that."

"Why not? How does what happened change anything? If Mick saved your life it was because he wants you to live, not so you can stand shoulder to shoulder with him on the battlefield. Didn't he tell you to take me to Ireland?"

"That's what he said."

"I've never been there. And I get the feeling we're not going."

"Not right now."

"Want to tell me why?"

"Because it really is a war," I said, "and nobody's going to let me be Switzerland. What were we saying before? My name's in the shawl. The only way I could stay neutral at this point is to pack up and leave the country."

"So? Your passport's in order."

I shook my head. "I can't sit on a stone fence in County Kerry, hoping my problem will solve itself."

"So you're going to be involved."

"That's got to be better than sitting around with my thumb up my ass waiting for something to happen."

"Besides, the man saved your life."

"That's a factor."

"And a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Does that get factored in, too?"

"It's probably part of the equation," I admitted. "I may think most of that guy stuff is bullshit, but that doesn't render me immune to it. And it's not all crap. If I'm going to live in this town I can't let people scare me out of it. And I have to live in this town."

"Why? We could live anywhere."

"We could, but we don't. We live here."

"I know," she said. "This is home." She tried her coffee again, then gave up and carried her cup to the sink. "It's a shame," she said. "I don't know about sitting on stone fences, but it would have been fun to go to Ireland."

"You can still go."

"When? Oh, you mean now? No thanks."

"Or Paris, or anywhere you want."

"Where I'll be out of harm's way."

"That's right."

"So you won't have to worry about me."

"So?"

"So forget about it. If I'm gonna sit around waiting for the phone to ring, I'd just as soon stay where it's a local call. Don't try to talk me around, okay? Because it won't work. I may not be a Taurus but I'm just as stubborn as you are. If you won't go, neither will I."

"It's your call. Will you close the shop?"

"That I'll do. I'll even hang a sign that says I'm off on a buying trip until the first of October. Will this be over and done with by the end of the month?"

"One way or another."

"I wish you hadn't put it that way."

I said, "That couple I mentioned? At Grogan's?"

"The low-level lovers' quarrel? What about them?"

"She's someone we used to know."

"Oh?"

"Lisa Holtzmann."

The two women had met in an art history class at Hunter. That's how I came to know her husband, and how she came to call me after he was killed.

"My God," she said. "And she was killed?"

"Instantly, from the look of things."

"That poor girl. What a life and what a death. Where was it we saw her?"

"Armstrong's, and it was awhile ago."

"And we didn't bother saying hello. Who knew we'd never see her again?" She frowned. "What was she doing at Grogan's? I know what she was doing, but you wouldn't think that would be her kind of place, would you?"

"As far as I know, that's the first time she ever went there. No, that's not true, because they were there the other night."

"The night before last?"

"No, the night the whole thing started. Wednesday, it would have been. Before we went over to the storage place in Jersey. She was there with the same guy, and it may have been the same table. And it wasn't his kind of place, either."

"Who was he?"

"His name was Florian."

"Florian? First name or last?'

"First, I assume. 'Matt, this is Florian. Florian, this is Matt.'"

"Snappy dialogue. Florian. Did he have long hair and play a Gypsy violin?"

"He had a wedding ring."

"He did and she didn't."

"Right."

"So he was married and she wasn't, and maybe that's why they were in a low-down boozer instead of some more gentrified establishment." She put her hand on mine. "First Jim and then Lisa. This has been quite a night for you, hasn't it?"

"There were a lot of others killed at Grogan's, too."

"You mentioned the bartender. Burke?"

"And people I knew by sight, and others I didn't know at all. So much death."

"I'm reeling from it myself and I wasn't even there. You were there both times."

"It doesn't feel real."

"Of course not. It's too much to take in. And you must be exhausted. Did you get any sleep at all before you went out to get shot at?"

"That's not why I went out. And no, I couldn't even keep my eyes closed."

"I bet you could now."

"I think you're right," I said, and got to my feet. "You know, I used to be able to miss a night's sleep now and then and just keep going. Of course I had an engine back then that burned alcohol for fuel."

"Your engine didn't have quite so many miles on it then, either."

"You think that's got something to do with it?"

"Of course not," she said. "You haven't lost a step. Get some sleep, slugger. Now."

I dropped off right away, and I don't think I so much as changed position until my eyes snapped open a little past noon. I hadn't awakened that abruptly in years. It wasn't like waking up, it was like coming out of a blackout.

When I'd showered and shaved, Elaine met me with a cup of coffee and told me the phone had been ringing all morning. "I let the machine pick up," she said. "A lot of people who wanted to know about Jim, or who wanted to tell you about Jim. And other people, too. Names I didn't recognize and some I did. Joe Durkin, and that other cop, the one from last night."

"George Wister?"

"That's the one. He called twice. The second time I thought he could see me. 'Please pick up the phone if you're listening to this.' Very stern, very parent-to-child, and just the sort of thing guaranteed to elicit a strong fuck-you response from moi. Needless to say, I did not pick up."

"What a surprise."

"I didn't even pick up when it was for me. It was Monica, and I wasn't in the mood to hear about her latest married boyfriend. The one time I did pick up, though, was when TJ called. He'd seen the news and he wanted to make sure you were all right. I told him you were, and I also told him not to open up today. In fact I had him put a sign in the window."

"'We Be Closed for the Month So's We Can Be Buyin' Some New Stock, Jock.'"

"I also called Beverly Faber. You can imagine how much I wanted to make that call, but I figured I had to. She sounded sedated, or maybe she was just groggy from shock and lack of sleep. The cops had her up until all hours answering questions. The impression they left her with, or maybe it's the one she wanted to be left with, is that Jim's murder was a case of mistaken identity."

"Well, it was."

"Right now she seems to see it as the workings of random fate. Do you remember when that actress dropped something out a window? I think it was a flower pot."

"God, that was ages ago. I was a cop when it happened. In fact I was still in Brooklyn, I hadn't transferred to the Sixth. That's how long ago it was."

"The flower pot fell something like sixteen stories and killed a guy walking home from dinner. Wasn't that it?"

"Something like that. The question at the time was how the flower pot got out the window. Not that she was aiming at the poor jerk, but did it really just happen to fall or did she pick it up and throw it at somebody?"

"And he ducked and it went out the window?"

"Maybe. Whatever it was, it was a hell of a long time ago."

"Well, Beverly remembers it like it was yesterday. Her Jim was like the guy who got hit with the flower pot, just minding his business until God's thumb came down and squashed him like a bug." She made a face. "You know," she said, "I never liked Beverly. But I certainly felt for her, and I really wanted to like her for the duration of the phone call."

"I know what you mean."

"She's not an easy woman to like. I think it's her voice, she sounds like she's whining even when she's not. Listen, are you hungry?"

"Starving."

"Well, thank God, because I was afraid I was going to have to tie you down and force-feed you. Go listen to your messages while I fix you something."

I played the messages and jotted down names and numbers, even though I didn't much want to return any of the calls, especially the ones from either of the cops. Wister's second message was as Elaine had described it, and drew much the same response from me as it had from her. Joe Durkin's call, logged in just half an hour before I'd opened my eyes, sounded at once urgent and irritated, and didn't make me eager to get him on the phone.

I deleted the messages- you can't really erase them, it's digital, so there's no tape to erase. I went into the kitchen and ate everything Elaine put in front of me, and when the phone rang again I let the machine screen it. The caller hung up without leaving a message.

"There were a lot of those," she said. "Hangups."

"There always are. A lot of the time it's telemarketers."

"God, do you remember my brief career as a telemarketer? What a washout I was."

"That wasn't telemarketing."

"Of course it was."

"It was phone sex," I said.

"Well, it's the same thing. Either way you're jerking people off over the phone. God, that was funny, wasn't it?"

"You didn't think so at the time."

"I thought it was something I could do, and it turned out it wasn't. That was around the time I met Lisa."

"Right."

"Before you and I moved in together, and before I opened the shop. I'd stopped seeing clients and I couldn't figure out what to do with the rest of my life."

"I remember."

"Matt?"

"What?"

"Oh, nothing."

I rinsed my plate at the sink, put it in the rack to dry.

She said, "You'll want to call TJ."

"In a little while."

"And did you want to catch the TV news? New York One had a lot of crime scene footage."

"It'll keep."

She was silent for a moment, gathering her thoughts. Then she said, "You and Lisa were close, weren't you?"

"Close?"

"Look, do me a favor, okay? Tell me to shut up and mind my own business."

"I'm not going to tell you that."

"I wish you would."

"Ask your question."

"Was she the one you were sleeping with? God, I can't believe I said that."

"The answer's yes."

"I know the answer's yes. It ended awhile ago, didn't it?"

"Quite a while ago. I hadn't seen her since before the two of us saw her at Armstrong's."

"That's what I thought. I knew you were seeing somebody. That's what I meant when I said…"

"I know."

"That marriage didn't have to change anything. And I meant it. Did you think I was being noble? Because I wasn't."

"I figured you meant it."

"And I did, and I was not for one minute being noble. I was being realistic. Men and women are different, and one of the ways they're different is sex. They can throw me out of the Sisterhood for saying so, but I don't care. It's true. And I ought to know, right?"

"Right."

"Men screw around, and for years I made a very nice living being somebody they screwed around with. And most of them were married, and none of it had anything to do with their marriages. They screwed around for a lot of reasons, but all of them added up to one reason: Men are like that."

She picked up my hand, turned my wedding ring around and around.

She said, "I think it's probably biological. Other animals are the same way, and don't tell me they're all neurotic or responding to peer pressure. So why should I expect you to be different, or why should I even want you to be different? The only thing to worry about is if you found somebody else you liked better than me, and I didn't think that would happen."

"It never will."

"That's what I decided, because I know what we've got. Did you fall in love with her?"

"No."

"It was never a threat, was it? To us."

"Not for a minute."

"Look at me," she said. "I've got tears in my eyes. Can you believe it?"

"I can believe it"

"The wife crying over the death of the mistress. You'd think they'd be tears of joy, wouldn't you?"

"Not from you."

"And 'mistress' is the wrong word for her. You'd have to be paying her rent, and seeing her every afternoon from five to seven. Isn't that how the French manage these things?"

"You're asking the wrong person."

"Cinq à sept, that's what they call it. What'll we call her? How about the Designated Girlfriend?"

"That's not bad."

"I just feel so sad. Oh, yes, hold me. That's better. You know how I feel, baby? Like we lost a member of the family. Isn't that ridiculous? Isn't that nuts?"

One of the first calls I returned was from Ray Gruliow. "I need your professional services," he said, "and for a change I've got a client with reasonably deep pockets, which means you can bill at your full hourly rate."

"I don't suppose he can wait a couple of weeks."

"I wouldn't even want to wait a couple days on this one. Don't tell me you're booked up."

"That's what I just told another member of your profession. I'll be a little more candid with you."

"In light of our warm personal and professional relationship."

"That's the idea. I've got some personal business, Ray, and I can't even think about work for the time being."

"Personal business."

"Right."

"Some would call that oxymoronic, don't you think? If it's personal, how can it be business?"

"How indeed?"

"Wait a minute. This wouldn't have anything to do with something that happened last night in your part of town, would it?"

"Like what?"

"You see the headline in the Post? 'Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,' they called it, with the originality for which they're famous."

"I haven't seen the papers yet."

"Or the TV?"

"No."

"Then you don't know what I'm talking about?"

"I didn't say that."

"I see," he said. "Very interesting."

I was silent for a moment. Then I said, "I think I need legal advice."

"Well, young man, today's your lucky day. I just happen to be an attorney."

"I was there last night."

"Are we talking about Tenth Avenue?"

"Yes."

"And you were there when the excrement hit the ventilating system?"

"Yes."

"Jesus Christ. You know the body count? The last I heard it stood at twelve dead and seven wounded, and at least one of the wounded is circling the drain. One of the morning news shows had an interior shot of the bar, and it looked a lot like Rotterdam after the Luftwaffe paid a call."

"It looked pretty bad when I saw it last."

"But you're all right?"

"I'm fine," I said.

"And you got out before the cops turned up."

"Yes," I said. "Earlier in the evening I had dinner with a friend at a Chinese restaurant."

"And in Beijing I understand everybody's favorite place is McDonald's. Go figure, huh?"

"I guess it didn't make the news."

"You guess what didn't make the- This is a restaurant in the same neighborhood as the other place?"

"More or less. Eighth Avenue."

"It made the news, all right, probably because it was in the same neighborhood. Lone gunman shoots a lone diner for no reason at all. He ran a copy shop in the neighborhood, if I remember correctly."

"Well, a printshop."

"Close enough. So?"

"You met the guy."

"I met him?"

"You heard him qualify six months ago at St. Luke's," I said. "He had seventeen years. Jim F."

"Your sponsor."

"Right."

"He's the guy you have dinner with every Sunday. They said he was a lone diner, but I guess he wasn't."

"He was alone when it happened. I was washing my hands. Ray, the two things are related and I'm the link. I held out on the cops last night, and then I got the hell out of Grogan's before they arrived on the scene. They've been leaving messages on my machine and I don't want to talk to them."

"So don't talk to them. You're under no obligation to do so."

"I'm a licensed private investigator."

"Oh, that's a point. That does obligate you in certain ways, doesn't it? On the other hand, if you're working for an attorney, you're shielded to a degree by lawyer-client privilege."

"You want to hire me?"

"No, this time around I'm going to be your lawyer. Is your friend still ably represented by the resourceful Mark Rosenstein?"

"I believe so."

"Have him call Mark," he said, "and have him tell Mark to hire you to investigate various matters in connection with pending legal action. Can you remember all this?"

"I'm writing it down. The only thing is, my guy could be hard to reach."

"I'll call Mark. It's not as though he has to do anything. Meanwhile, you might want to read the papers and look at the television."

"I suppose I'll have to."

"New York One profiled your friend in the course of a stand-up in front of what's left of his place of business. They made him sound like Al Capone out of Damon Runyon. Bloodthirsty but somehow engaging."

"That's fair enough."

"That great piece of theater with the bowling ball. Did that really happen?"

"I wasn't there," I said. "And you never get a straight answer from him on the subject."

"If it didn't happen," he said, "it damn well should have. Remember, don't tell them a thing. And call me if you need me."

I called TJ, and he picked up the papers and brought them over. We sat in front of the TV and he channel-surfed while I saw what the tabloids had to say. They both gave it the front page- the News just slugged it hell's kitchen- but it had broken too late to get the full treatment inside, and must have missed the early editions altogether. The columnists and feature writers would be all over it tomorrow morning, but for now there were just the bare facts. The body count varied, the Post had one more dead than the News, and names were withheld pending notification of kin.

The TV reporters didn't have a whole lot more hard news, aside from more recent numbers for the casualties. But they had names and photos of some of the dead. Some of the photos looked familiar, but otherwise none were of people I knew. They evidently hadn't identified Lisa or her friend yet, or hadn't managed to notify family members.

The interior shots of Grogan's were as described, and as I remembered the place when Mick was dragging me out of it. And the exteriors were what you'd expect, with one reporter after another doing a stand-up in front of the sweet old saloon, its windows swathed in sheets of plywood now, the sidewalk in front still carpeted with debris and broken glass.

TV's edge was in sidebars and backgrounders, in interviews with survivors and neighborhood residents, in profiles of Michael "The Butcher" Ballou, Grogan's legendary unofficial proprietor, and heir to a long-standing tradition of savage Hell's Kitchen barkeeps. They trotted out the old stories, some truer than others, and of course they didn't fail to include the one about the bowling ball.

"That happen?" TJ wanted to know.

According to all versions of the tale, Mick Ballou had had a serious difference of opinion with another neighborhood character named Paddy Farrelly, who disappeared one day and was never seen again. The day after Farrelly was last sighted, Mick allegedly made the rounds of the neighborhood ginmills (including Grogan's, no doubt, which had not yet come into his hands) carrying the sort of bag in which a bowler carries his ball.

What he did in the various saloons, aside from having a glass of whiskey, depended on which version of the story you were hearing. In some he simply made a show of setting the bag significantly on top of the bar, then asking after the absent Farrelly and drinking his health "wherever the dear lad may be."

In other renditions he opened the bag, offering a look within to those who wanted it. And in one over-the-top version he went door to door, saloon to saloon, each time yanking the severed head of Paddy Farrelly out by the hair and showing it around. "Doesn't he look grand?" he said. "When did he ever look so fine?" And then he invited people to buy old Paddy a drink.

"I don't know what happened," I told TJ. "I was over in Brooklyn, still in uniform, and I'd never heard of Paddy Farrelly or of Mick, either. If I had to guess, I'd say he did make the rounds and he did have a bowling bag with him, but I don't believe he opened it. He might have, if he was wild and drunk enough, but I don't think he did."

"And if he had? Where I'm goin', what you figure was in the bag?"

"He could have had the head in there," I said. "I don't doubt for a minute that he killed Farrelly. I understand they really hated each other, and if he got the chance he probably killed him with a cleaver, and wore his father's apron while he did it. He might well have dismembered the body for disposal, and that would have involved cutting the head off, so yes, he could very well have had the head in the bag."

"Never found the body, did they?"

"No."

"Or the head, I guess."

"Or the head."

He considered this. "You ever been bowlin'?"

"Bowling? Not in years and years. There was a cops' league in Suffolk County when I lived in Syosset. I was on a team for a few months."

"Yeah? You have one of those shirts, got your name on the pocket?"

"I don't remember."

"'I don't remember.' That means you did, Sid, and you don't want to admit it."

"No, it means I don't remember. We ordered shirts for everybody, but I had to quit the team when I got a gold shield and my hours changed."

"And you didn't bowl no more after that?"

"Once that I remember. I was off the police force and living at the hotel, and a friend of mine named Skip Devoe was always organizing things." I turned to Elaine. "Did you ever meet Skip?"

"No, but you've talked about him."

"He was an owner of a joint on Ninth and a hell of a fellow. He'd get a bee in his bonnet, and the next thing you knew we'd all be traipsing out to Belmont for the racing, or to Randall's Island for an outdoor jazz concert. There used to be a bowling alley on the west side of Eighth two or three doors up from Fifty-seventh, and he got it in his head we had to go bowling, and the next thing you knew half a dozen drunks descended upon the place."

"And you just went the once?"

"Just the one time. But we talked about it for weeks after."

"What became of him?"

"Skip? He died a couple of years later. Acute pancreatitis, but then they never put on the death certificate that the deceased died of a broken heart. The story's too long to tell right now. Besides, Elaine's already heard it."

"And the bowlin' alley's gone."

"Long gone, along with the building it was in."

"I bowled once," he said. "Felt like a fool. Looked so easy, and then I couldn't do it."

"You get the hang of it."

"I can see how you would, and then you just be tryin' to do the same thing over and over again. I see 'em sometimes on television, and those dudes are really good at it, and I keep waitin' for 'em to nod off in the middle of the game. How'd we get on this subject?"

"You brought it up."

"The bag. They never found the head, I was wonderin' did they ever find the bag. Don't matter if they did or didn't. Point is, that's a nice friend you got."

"You've met him."

"Yeah."

"He's who he is," I said. "He can be very charming, but he's a lifelong criminal and he's got a lot of blood on his hands."

"Times I met him," he said, "was when I was with you, an' we fell by that place of his that got trashed."

"Grogan's."

"Didn't see a lot of black folks there."

"No."

"Not workin' there, not havin' a drink there."

"No."

"Dude was polite to me an' all, but all the time I was there I was real conscious of what color I was."

"I can see how you would be," I said. "Mick's an Irish kid from a bad neighborhood, and those were the people who hanged black men from lampposts during the Civil War draft riots. He's not likely to decorate the windows for Martin Luther King Day."

"Probably uses the N word a lot."

"He does."

"Nigger nigger nigger," he said.

"Sounds silly when you say it over and over."

"Most any word does. What you say, he's who he is. We's all of us that."

"But you might not care to work for him."

"Not in his bar, Lamar. But then it don't look like it gone be open for business anytime soon. But that ain't the way you mean."

"No."

"We was workin' for him a couple days ago, wasn't we? He much more of a racist now than he was then?"

"Probably not."

"So why would I all of a sudden not want to be workin' for the man?"

"Because it's dangerous and illegal," Elaine said. "You could have some major trouble with the police, and you could even get killed."

He grinned. "Well, all that's cool," he said, "but I just know there's gotta be a downside."

"You think that's funny, don't you?"

"So do you, or you wouldn't be tryin' so hard to keep from laughin'." To me he said, "What we gonna do, exactly? Grab some guns and head for the OK Corral?"

I shook my head. "I don't think either of us is cut out for that," I said. "There will probably come a time for that, and it'll be tip to somebody else to do it. Right now, though, nobody knows where the OK Corral is, or who's holed up there."

"Was the Clantons, way I remember it."

"This time around the Clantons don't have names or faces. What's called for is some detective work."

"An' we the detectives," he said. He scratched his head. "We didn't get too far with E-Z Storage. Fact, we took it as far as we could and signed off the case."

"We haven't got much more now than we did then, but there are a few things."

"Dude who shot your friend."

"That's one. Right now the main thing we know about him is he's black."

"Narrows it down."

"It does, as a matter of fact, because we also know he's a professional. And he screwed up, he shot the wrong person."

"Word might get around."

"It might," I agreed. "Second, there's the gunman at Grogan's."

"Asian dude."

"Southeast Asian, from the looks of him."

"That's right, you saw the man. I was thinkin' they didn't show his face on the TV, but you got to see him up close."

"Closer than I'd have liked. They haven't released his name or anything about him, but that doesn't mean they don't know it."

"Get his name, trace him back, see who he used to hang out with."

"That's the idea. Our third opening's the two guys who jumped me a few blocks from here."

"Pounded on you, till you went and pounded on them."

"I got a good look at one of them," I said. "I'd recognize him again."

"You figure he lives in New York?'

"He'd pretty much have to. Why?"

"'Cause that's how we'll do it, Hewitt. Just drive around lookin' at people, an' pick him out of the eight million faces we see."

"Well, that's one way."

"But you can think of another."

"I can," I said. "The trouble is, it's not a whole lot better than your way."

"Well, we flexible," he said. "We try your way, an' if it don't work we try mine."

"George Wister's not a bad guy," Joe Durkin said. "A good cop and a bright fellow. He doesn't know what to make of you. You want to know something? I'm not so sure I know what to make of you myself."

"What do you mean?"

"You were having dinner with your friend last night. You went to the can and he got shot. And you couldn't think of a reason on earth why somebody'd want to kill good old Jim."

"I still can't."

"Bullshit," he said. "That the same jacket you were wearing last night?"

"So?"

"Same as your friend had on. Don't jerk me around, will you? You were the intended vic. Only reason you're here now is you picked the right time to take a leak."

We were in a Greek coffee shop on Eighth, just a block down from the Lucky Panda. I'd have preferred a different meeting place, but I'd already rejected his first suggestion, the squad room at Midtown North, and he hadn't liked my idea of getting out of the neighborhood altogether and meeting somewhere down in Chelsea or the Village.

When I'd got there he was at a back booth, drinking coffee and halfway through a piece of cherry cheesecake. He said it was good and I ought to have some, but I told the waiter I'd just have a cup of coffee. Joe said it was good we'd stayed in the neighborhood, that it was going to rain. I said they kept predicting rain and it kept not raining. He said they'd be right sooner or later, and the guy brought my coffee and we got down to it.

Now I said, "I guess that's true. I was evidently the shooter's actual target."

"It took you until today to figure that out?"

"Wister suggested as much last night. In an offhand way, after he'd gotten through floating the idea that Jim had been printing up green cards and bearer bonds for the Five Families. I took it about as seriously."

"When did you change your mind?"

"When I talked to Mick Ballou."

"Your friend,"

"He's a friend of mine, yes. You know that."

"And you know what I think about it. A lot of guys on the job have made themselves grief that way, having friends like that. Buddies from the old neighborhood, guys who went one way while they went another."

"I'm not on the job anymore, Joe."

"No, you're not."

"And Ballou and I don't go back that far. I put in my papers years before I met him."

"And the two of you just hit it off, huh?"

"Since when do I have to explain my friendships to you? You're a friend of mine, and I don't get a grilling from Ballou on the subject."

"Is that a fact? I guess he's more broad-minded than I am. Where were we? You were saying you changed your mind when you talked to your good friend the murderer. When was this?"

"After I finished with Wister. I stopped at his place on my way home."

"Not exactly on your way. You walked over to Ninth and turned left instead of right I don't suppose you dropped in for a drink."

"I'd just lost one friend and felt the need to say hello to another," I said. "And when I got there he told me how he'd been having problems."

"Oh?"

"There was a fellow who did some odds and ends for him who wound up in a garbage can on Eleventh Avenue."

"Peter Rooney, and the odds and ends had to do with Ballou's shylocking operation. What'd he do, hold out a few dollars and Ballou put him in the Dumpster?"

"He didn't know who'd killed Rooney, but I gather there had been other incidents as well, and the implication was somebody was trying to muscle in on him. His take on Jim's shooting was that I'd been the target, and it was because I was a friend of his."

"That's what he told you."

"Yes."

"And I don't suppose he mentioned who was putting the screws to him."

"He said he didn't know."

"Like getting roses from a secret admirer? Except instead of roses it's death threats?"

"Maybe he knew and didn't say."

"Yeah, and maybe he said and it's you that doesn't want to say. And then what happened?"

"What happened?"

"Yeah. What did you do next?"

"I went home. I can't say I took it all that seriously. Why should a friendship make me the target of a presumably professional hit?" I shrugged. "I couldn't sleep. I was up late, drinking coffee in the kitchen and grieving for my friend."

"That's your friend Jimmy."

"Jim. Nobody ever called him Jimmy."

"Your friend Jim, then. As opposed to your friend Mick."

I let that go. "Then Elaine woke me around noon," I said, "after she heard about the incident at Grogan's."

"The incident."

"The bombing, although I gather it was more than that. There was gunfire as well, wasn't there?"

"You tell me."

"How's that?"

He picked up his empty coffee cup and tapped it against the edge of the saucer. "The way I hear it," he said, "you were there."

"I just got through telling you I was there. Then I went home, and it must have been two hours later that the shit hit the fan."

"Two hours later."

"Maybe three."

"Not the way I heard it."

"You heard I was there when it happened?"

"That's right, Matt," he said, looking straight at me. "That's exactly what I heard."

"Who's saying that?"

"Information received. You want to rethink your story?"

"My story? I haven't got a story. I told you what happened."

"And you were nowhere to be seen when the crap was flying."

"No."

He frowned. "I blame it on all those years on the job," he said. "If there's one thing a cop learns it's how to tell a lie and stick with it. And it's like riding a bicycle, right? You never forget how."

"You think I lied to you?"

"What gives you that idea?"

"Well, I think you lied to me. 'Information received.' You never heard I was at Grogan's. You were on a fishing trip."

He spread his hands. "We had a description, couple of guys seen leaving the scene. One was Ballou and the other could have been you."

"What did they say, it was a white male with two arms and two legs?"

"All right, point taken. The description we had could fit half the precinct. If they'd thrown in pain in the ass, then I'd have no doubts. Maybe I was fishing, but that doesn't make me wrong. Goddamn it, I still think you were there."

"Well, it's a free country. You can think whatever you like."

"I'm glad I've got your permission. While you're at it, you want to give me your word you weren't there when it all went down?"

"What for? You just got through telling me my word's not worth shit."

"I guess it's still worth something," he said, "Or you wouldn't be reluctant to give it. I'm not sure what kind of a game you're playing, my friend, but I don't think I like it. What are you trying to do, do you even fucking know?"

"I'm not sure I understand the question."

"Maybe all you're trying to do is stay alive, and in that case I can't say I blame you. Here's a question you can answer straight. Have you been over there this afternoon?"

"Where, Grogan's?"

"Uh-huh. You happen to walk by, have a look-see?"

I shook my head. "I came straight over here. From what I saw on the TV, there's nothing to see but plywood at this point."

"It's a shame you didn't get to see it the way I did. I was there this morning right after my shift started. They'd removed the bodies by then, but I had pictures to look at."

"I don't envy you that."

"And I don't envy the poor bastards who were first on the scene, far as that goes. What a fucking nightmare." He cocked his head. "If it was you looking at the pictures, there might have been one you recognized."

"What do you mean?"

"Does the name Lisa Holtzmann mean anything to you?"

"Of course," I said without hesitation. "From a few years ago. She was a client, her husband got shot making a phone call."

"Killed by mistake, as it turned out. Like your friend last night."

"What about Lisa? She was at Grogan's last night?"

"You didn't know?"

"I didn't hear her name on the news."

"She was there," he said. "And come to think of it, maybe you wouldn't have recognized her from the picture. What I saw was strictly closed casket."

"I've seen her around the neighborhood a few times over the years. Never at Grogan's, as far as I can recall."

"She wasn't there when you dropped by earlier?"

"It's possible, I suppose. If she was I didn't see her."

"If she was, she should have gone home when you did. You could have walked her home."

"What are you getting at?"

"I don't even know. Matt, if you're holding out information that could help clear the case, you're not doing anybody any good. Straight answers for a minute, okay? Do you know who shot your friend Faber?"

"No. I heard it was a black man, but I can't even say that out of my own knowledge."

"Guy was a pro, way it sounds to me. You don't know who might have hired him?"

"No."

"Or who was behind the mess at Grogan's?"

"No, but I'm willing to believe it was the same person who hired the other shooter."

"And you don't know who that might be, and neither does Ballou."

"Not unless he's holding out on me."

"And you don't think he is?"

"I can't see why he would. Did they say on the news the shooter at Grogan's was Asian?"

"One of them was. We've got zip on the second man."

"I didn't know there was a second man."

"The bomb chucker. Unless there was just the one guy, did the shooting and threw the bomb, but that seems a little unlikely. The eyewitness testimony suggests a second man, but it's not conclusive."

"But the shooter was Asian."

"Vietnamese, as a matter of fact Wasn't that on the news?"

"If it was I missed it All I heard was Asian."

"Maybe they didn't release it yet. Don't ask me his name, but it's on file, along with his fingerprints and his pictures, full face and profile. Been on file a few years now."

"You've got a sheet on him?"

"He was a troubled youth," he said. "Remember Born To Kill? Slope gang based downtown, got a lot of press a few years ago for being more homicidal than the Viet Cong?"

"Weren't they the ones who shot up a wedding party in Jersey?"

"Was it a wedding or a funeral? Whatever it was, it had all the old Mafia guys shaking their heads, wondering what the world was coming to. BTK was mostly running protection gangs in Chinatown, giving the tongs some grief, the usual first-generation crap. Reason you don't hear about them anymore is they mostly wound up dead or in jail. Or both, like our friend from last night. He did three years upstate for robbery and assault, and then last night he was dead at the scene." He leaned forward. "Somebody shot his lights out. Maybe you, with what you got right there inside your jacket."

"It's a.38," I said. "Is that what you dug out of Mr. Dead at the Scene?"

"We left that little chore to the medical examiner. But no, he got punched out with three shots from a.45. When did you start carrying a gun?"

"When I saw the news this morning. I've got a carry permit, if that's been worrying you."

"Yeah, it's a load off my mind."

"What was his name?"

"Who, the dead shooter? They've all got the same name."

"That must be handy," I said. "You call out one name and they all come running."

"You know what I mean. They all got names like you'd order in a restaurant if you could just figure out how to pronounce it. This one, his name started with NG, so even if I remembered it I wouldn't know how to say it"

"If you get sick of being a cop, you can always go to work for the UN."

"Or the State Department, teaching 'em how to be diplomatic. What the hell do you care about the name of some dead slope?"

"It was just an idle question."

"Only it didn't sound that idle. What are you holding out?"

"Not a thing."

"Am I supposed to believe that?"

"Believe what you want."

"You know," he said, "you're licensed by the state of New York. You can't withhold evidence."

"I don't have any evidence to withhold. Any suspicions or theories I might have aren't evidence, and I'm under no obligation to pass them on."

"If you were there last night, what you saw is evidence."

"I was in the bathroom," I said deliberately, "and what I saw was my own face in the mirror, and I already told Wister- "

"I'm talking about Grogan's. You son of a bitch, you knew I was talking about Grogan's."

"I already told you I left before there was anything to see."

"You were home in your own kitchen."

"That's right."

"Drinking coffee. That what you do when you can't sleep? Drink coffee?"

"If only I'd checked in with you, you could have told me to make it warm milk instead."

"You're making a joke, but it's the best thing in the world before you go to bed. Even better, sweeten it with a stiff shot of scotch. But I guess you'd leave the scotch out, wouldn't you?"

"Probably."

"Or maybe not. Maybe you chip around. Is that why you like hanging out with your gangster friend? Do you sneak drinks from time to time?"

"So far I haven't."

"Well, give yourself time. What did your other friend think of you hanging out in ginmills with cheap crooks? Your friend Jim. I bet he thought it was a great idea."

"Is there a point to all this?"

"The point is I think you were there last night."

"No matter what I say."

"No matter what. You were at Grogan's when the shit hit the fan, and you must have been standing right in front of it, which is why you're so full of it right now. You know what he wants to do? George Wister? He wants to put out an order and have you picked up."

"I suppose he can do that if he wants."

"Nice of you to give him permission."

"But he's not going to learn anything he doesn't already know."

"Matt, Matt, Matt," he said. "I thought we were friends."

"So did I."

"Except they say a cop can only be friends with another cop, and that's not what you are anymore, is it?"

"I'm the same thing I've been for as long as we've known each other."

"Seems to me you've changed. But maybe not." He sat back in his seat. "Let's wrap this up, okay? I don't know how deep you're into all of this, but the main reason I'm here now is to warn you off. Stay the hell away from Ballou."

I didn't say anything.

"Because he's finished, Matt. Somebody came real close to doing the world a favor last night. He dodged the bullet, but he may not be that lucky next time. And you know there's gonna be a next time."

"Unless first-rate police work leads to the quick arrest of those responsible."

"And how can we miss, with the cooperation we're getting from the public? Not the point. Which is that he's going down. He's the focus of a major departmental investigation. If the next bomb or bullet doesn't get him, all that means is he'll do time."

"He hasn't yet."

"He's led a charmed life. Charmed lives don't last forever."

Neither did the other kind. I said, "He's a friend in need, so I should drop him."

"Like a hot rock. What he is is a friend in deep shit, and he earned every ounce of it, and you'll go down with him if you stand too close. Jesus Christ, Matt, are you too thick to get that I'm trying to do you a favor? Am I wasting my breath here or what?"

I went home, entering as I'd left, via the service entrance. There were two new messages on the machine. One was from Ray Gruliow, saying that he'd spoken to Mark Rosenstein, and I was now officially engaged to investigate in the interests of Rosenstein's client, one Michael Francis Ballou. The other was from Denis Hamill at the Daily News, hoping I could say something quotable for a column he was doing on the death of a great saloon. I called him back and told him Grogan's wasn't dead, it was only sleeping.

I called Ray Galindez at home after trying and failing to reach him at work. His wife, Bitsy, answered, and asked after Elaine, and brought me up to date on their kids. Then she said, "I suppose you want to talk to the boss," and I held until Ray picked up.

"I need your professional services," I said, "but it has to be off the record."

"No problem. Who'll I be working with?"

"Just me. I saw a guy the other day, and I wish I had a picture of him."

"That'll be great," he said. "You're easy to work with. Some people are just too eager to please you. 'Yeah, that's good, that looks like him'- except it doesn't, but they don't want to hurt your feelings. When do you want to do this? I'd say tonight, but we got this evening planned with Bitsy's sister and her dork of a husband. Do me a favor and tell me it's so urgent I've got to cancel."

"It's not that urgent."

"I'm sorry to hear it. In that case, is tomorrow okay? These days they've got me in Bushwick."

"I know, I tried you there first."

"Yeah, ordinarily I'd be working but I took a personal day. My older boy had a soccer game and I wanted to be there. I'll tell you, watching him play, I think he'll have to be an artist like his old man."

"There's worse things."

"I guess. You want me to come by your place tomorrow? I'm off at four and the station house is right next to the subway. I could be there easy by five."

"Maybe it would be better if I came to you."

"You sure? Because that's great as far as I'm concerned. Saves me a train ride. You want to come by the job? I got more time on my hands there than I know what to do with."

"It might be a little too public."

"Right, you wanted this off the record. So maybe that's not such a hot idea. That was quite a thing happened in your part of town last night."

"Terrible," I agreed. "Look, would it be an intrusion if I came to your house? You're off at four, so say five o'clock? Would that be all right?"

"That'd be fine. I know Bitsy'd love to see you. In fact why don't you bring Elaine with you? I've got some new work I've been trying to get up the nerve to bring in and show to her. Come around five and you'll stay and have dinner with us."

"I think, it'll just be me," I said, "and I don't think I'll have time for dinner."

I tried TJ across the street, and when he didn't answer I called his beeper number. I had the TV on when he called back, and I muted it while the machine picked up and told him to leave his message at the tone. "I know you there," he said, "on account of you just beeped me, so- "

"So you must be a detective," I said, "to figure that out. Where are you?"

"You a detective too. Can't you tell?"

He must have held the phone toward the crowd, because the background noise picked up in volume. "O'Hare Airport," I said.

"Morning Star restaurant."

"Well, I was close."

"An' I was slow callin' back, 'count of I had to wait on a lady to get off the phone. She had me goin' for a minute. What she did, she put in her quarter and dialed her number and then she just didn't say anything. Just stood there with the phone to her ear. I wanted to tell her, like, if they ain't answered by now ain't nobody home. How many times you gonna let it ring?"

"She was listening to her messages."

"Yeah, well, I doped that out, but it took me a minute. What I been doin', I thought I might learn something on the street but they just sayin' the same shit they sayin' on the TV news. You been over to Grogan's?"

"No."

"Well, don't be wastin' your time. Ain't nothin' to see. It's the same as we saw on TV, with the plywood panels up. And there's yellow crime scene tape over the plywood and on the doors, and notices posted sayin' to keep away."

"Which might not be a bad idea."

"Fine with me. Ain't nothin' there worth a second look. All I did was ask a few questions. I wore a button-down shirt and carried a clipboard, so they figured I had the right."

"From here on in," I said, "maybe you should stick to the kind of questions you can ask electronically."

"Like cyber questions? There still be things got to be done the old way. You got to ask a street question to get a street answer."

"I asked some coffee shop questions myself," I said. "The shooter at Grogan's was Vietnamese out of Born To Kill. He did time on a robbery and assault charge, and his name starts with NG."

"If that don't stand for No Good, it's probably Nguyen."

"It could be," I said, "or it could be something else. I don't know if it's his first name or his last name, and I'm not a hundred percent sure of the NG."

"Lot you don't know."

"Seems to be more every day."

"Far as first name or last, Asian names is hard to figure that way. Like the last name'll come first. Like Mao Zedong, Mao's his family name. But if you was on first-name terms with the dude, which'd be hard even if he wasn't dead, you'd call him Mao."

"That's fascinating."

"But it might be different for Vietnamese. And two letters is all we got of his name, first or last."

"A little social engineering might get you the rest of it."

"Might."

"And then if there was a way to find out where he went to prison, and who he met there…"

"Hard to do at your desk," he said. "Prisons and government agencies and like that, they got secure systems. Hard to hack your way in, and if you do you leave a trail and they can trace it back and see who came callin'. You say he was in Born To Kill?"

"So I'm told."

"Means I best be changin' my clothes, Mose. Blue button-down's too lame and too tame for where I be goin'."

"Be careful."

"Got to," he said. "What the dude said, ain't it?"

"What dude would that be?"

"One lived in the woods and didn't pay his taxes. Musta been before Lyme disease, when you could still get by with that shit. You know the dude I talkin' about. Said to watch out for jobs you got to dress up for."

"Thoreau."

"Yeah, that's him. I be dressin' down, not up, but it comes to the same."

I said, "You know, it's not video games out there. They use real bullets."

"You mean the players don't come back to life when you put in another quarter?"

"And I promised Elaine I wouldn't get you killed."

"You did? You promised her that?"

"Why is that so funny?"

"Well, see," he said, "she made me promise I wouldn't let nothin' happen to you. How we both supposed to keep our word?"

We ate at home. Elaine makes a mushroom-and-tofu Stroganoff that we both like, and she served it with a big green salad. After dinner I went into the other room and called Beverly Faber. I'd tried her a couple of hours earlier but hung up gratefully when the line was busy. This time she answered, and I hung in there and got through the phone call. By the time I returned to the kitchen to tell Elaine I'd called, I had already forgotten both sides of the conversation, what I'd said and what she'd said. Something about a private funeral for family members only, to be followed by a memorial service in a couple of weeks.

"He's at peace now," Elaine said.

"He was at peace all along," I said. "He was a pretty peaceful guy. He wasn't happy all the time, for that you pretty much have to be a moron, but he was good at taking things in stride. You were right before. She's a hard woman to like, our Beverly."

"I think she loved him."

"And he loved her. It wasn't always smooth sailing for the two of them, but they made it work. I think I'll go to a meeting."

I put on a sport jacket, a Harris tweed with elbow patches she'd picked out for me. I'd tried it on earlier, and it was a better fit over the holster than the blazer.

"Heavier than your windbreaker," she said, rubbing the sleeve, "but it doesn't zip up. Will you be warm enough?"

"I'll be fine."

"Take an umbrella. It's not raining yet but it will before the night is over."

I opened my mouth to argue, then shut it and took the umbrella. "I may not be back till late," I said.

"I won't wait up," she said. "But call anytime. I'll let the machine screen the calls, so stay on the line and give me time to answer."

"I will."

She squeezed my arm. "And don't you dare get killed," she said.

There's a meeting every weeknight at my home group at St. Paul the Apostle. A home group is like family, and I wanted to be there, but it was too soon to face a lot of shared memories of Jim and questions about what exactly had happened to him. In a small town I'd have had a problem, but I was in New York and had dozens of meetings to choose from.

I caught the IRT at Columbus Circle and got off at Ninety-sixth and Broadway. The meeting was in the church basement- they very often are- and I got there a few minutes early and helped myself to a cup of coffee. I didn't know anybody there, and I was just as glad. I wanted to be in a meeting, but I didn't want to talk to anybody.

At eight o'clock the chairman opened the meeting. He had somebody read the preamble and then introduced the speaker, a woman who looked like a young suburban matron with two kids and a golden retriever. She told a harrowing story, mostly drugs but with plenty of booze in it, told of rapes at knifepoint while trying to score smack in Harlem, told of trading blow jobs for hits on the crack pipe in Alphabet City hell-holes. She was two years sober now and she had her life back. She also had HIV, and a T-cell count that was not so hot, but so far she was otherwise asymptomatic and she had high hopes.

"Anyway," she said, "I've got today."

During the break I put a dollar in the basket and had another cup of coffee and a stale oatmeal cookie. There were some announcements- the annual dinner dance six weeks away, some openings on the outgoing speakers' list, a member in the hospital who'd appreciate calls. Then the meeting reopened for a round robin.

If I'd known it was going to be a round robin I probably would have gone somewhere else. I grew oddly tense as my turn approached. I suppose I knew I ought to say something, and knew too that I didn't want to.

"My name is Matt," I said, "and I'm an alcoholic. Thanks for your qualification. It was very powerful. I think I'll just listen tonight."

Matt the Listener.

"Matthew Scudder," Danny Boy said. "First I heard you were dead. Then I heard you weren't. Logic told me that both of these reports could not be true."

"Where would we be without logic?"

He smiled and pointed to a chair, and I pulled it back and sat down. When the meeting ended I'd walked downtown on Amsterdam and looked for him at Mother Blue's. When I didn't find him there I walked the rest of the way to Poogan's Pub, on West Seventy-second. He was at his usual table, with a bottle of iced vodka in a hamper next to him and an unconvincing transsexual in the seat opposite him. She used her hands a lot while she talked, and what she said had Danny Boy laughing.

I drank a Perrier at the bar while she talked and gestured and Danny Boy laughed and listened. I didn't think he'd noticed me, but at one point he looked my way and caught my eye. A little later the TS stood up- she was tall enough for basketball- and extended a hand. It was a bigger hand than any woman ever sported, with long nails painted a bright blue. Danny Boy took her huge hand in his small one and pressed it to his lips. She whooped gaily and flounced away, and then it was my turn.

Seven nights a week he's at one place or the other, sitting at the table they reserve for him, listening to music (live at Mother Blue's, recorded at Poogan's), chatting up the Girlfriend of the Month, and brokering information. After the bars close- and both of his places stay open as late as the law allows- he's apt to hit an after-hours club uptown.

But he gets home before the sun comes up, and stays put until it goes down. Danny Boy Bell is African-American, and the cumbersome phrase fits him better than black, because in point of fact he's whiter than white, an albino with white hair and pink eyes and pale, almost translucent skin. Sunlight's dangerous to him, and any strong light bothers him. What the whole world needs, he has often said, is a dimmer switch.

I sat where the TS had been sitting, and Danny Boy picked up his glass of iced vodka and told me he was glad I was alive.

"So am I," I said. "Exactly what did you hear?"

"What I said. First the word came that you'd been gunned down in a restaurant. Then the bush telegraph ran a correction. It wasn't you after all. It was somebody else."

"A friend of mine. I left the table and the shooter made a mistake."

"And didn't know it until later," he said. "Because he must have reported a successful mission in order for your name to be in the first word that hit the street. Who was your friend?"

"Nobody you would have heard of."

"A square john?"

"A fellow Perrier drinker."

"Oh, and that's how you knew him? A close friend?"

"Very."

"I'm sorry to hear it. On the other hand, Matthew, I'm glad you're not on my list."

"What list is that?"

"Just an expression."

"It's a new one on me. What kind of list?"

He shrugged. "It's just something I did awhile back. I sat down and started writing down a list of everybody I could think of who was dead."

"Jesus Christ."

"Well, he might or might not belong on the list, depending on who you talk to. Same goes for Elvis. But this particular list was limited to people I'd known personally."

"And you wrote down their names."

"It sounds stupid," he said, "and I think it probably was, but once I got started I couldn't seem to stop. I got pretty compulsive about it. I'd think of a name and I'd have to write it down. It was sort of like the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, except those guys got a wall, not some pages in a notebook. And they had something in common. They all died in the same war."

"And the others were all friends of yours."

"Not even that. Some of them I couldn't stand and others were people I just knew to say hello to. But it was a trip, Matthew. One name would lead to another, and it was like dominoes tumbling over in your memory. I found myself remembering people I hadn't thought of in years. Neighbors from when I was growing up. My pediatrician. A kid across the street who died of leukemia, and a girl in my fifth-grade class who got hit by a car. You know what I realized?"

"What?"

"Most of the people I know are dead. I guess that happens when you've been around long enough. I once heard George Burns say something like that. 'When you're my age, most of your friends are dead.' Or words to that effect. The audience laughed, and I've never been able to figure out why. What's funny about it? Does it seem funny to you?"

"Maybe it was the way he said it."

"Maybe. And now he's dead. George Burns. But I never met him, so he's not on my list. And neither are you, because your heart's still beating, and I'm glad to know it."

"So am I," I said, "but somebody wants to put me on the list."

"Who?"

"I wish I knew," I said, and filled him in.

"I heard it got nasty at Ballou's joint," he said. "It's all over the papers. It must have been a bloodbath."

"It was."

"I can believe it. I didn't know you were there."

"A couple of hours ago I told a cop I wasn't."

"Well, I'll never say different. Ballou really doesn't know who's sticking it to him?"

"No."

"Got to be the same person that ordered you hit."

"I would think so."

"Whoever he is, he's an equal opportunity employer. Hires killers in every available color. Black, white, and yellow."

"A few white guys, if you count the pair who braced me on the street."

"And you didn't recognize anybody?"

"There was only one guy I got a really good look at. And no, I'd never seen him before. Next lime I see you I'll show you his picture. In the meantime, I'd like to know what you know."

"Less than you do, I'd have to say. The big news was that you were dead, and then the not-so-big news was that the big news was bogus."

"The fact that I was alive was less newsworthy?"

"What do you expect? Look at the Times. They print corrections all the time, but they don't stick them on the front page." He frowned. "The other big item is that somebody's going to war with Mick Ballou, and I have to say I know a lot more about that from TV than I hear through the grapevine."

"Somebody's got to know something."

"Absolutely. The question is where do you start, and I'm thinking the shooter."

"There were two shooters."

"The black one, because the yellow one's not talking, whereas the black one must be talking a blue streak, to add one more color to the palette. Incidentally, speaking of blue, how did you like Ramona's fingernails?"

"I was meaning to ask about those. Does she paint them or is that their natural color?"

"Matthew, if you asked her she'd think you were serious. She honestly believes she's got the world fooled. She doesn't think anybody can tell."

"Can tell what? That she paints her nails?"

"That she wasn't born with a pussy. That she didn't get those cantaloupe tits from a surgeon."

"She's what, Danny? Six-four?"

"In her nylons. And big hands and feet, and an Adam's apple, although that's in line for a paring as soon as she gets the money together. All that and she's still convinced the whole world thinks she's the real deal. And before you even ask, you prying son of a bitch, the answer is no, I haven't." He poured some vodka, held it aloft, looked at the world through it. "Not that I haven't thought about it," he said, and drank it down.

"You could hardly help thinking about it."

"She's a nice kid," he said. "She makes me laugh, which gets harder and harder to do. And the size, you know. That's an attraction in itself. The contrast."

"Whether it was God or the medical profession," I said, "somebody sure made a lot of her."

"Well, God made a lot of Texas, too, but that's no reason to go there. But she's attractive. Wouldn't you say she's attractive?"

"No question."

"And of course she's nuts. She is genuinely out there, and, you know, I've never regarded that as a fault in a woman."

"No, I've noticed that."

"So I'm tempted," he said, "but I've essentially decided to wait until she's had her Adam's apple done. You know, with the height difference and all, that Adam's apple would be hard for me to overlook." He frowned. "Talk about losing the thread of a conversation. Where were we?"

"The black shooter."

"Right, and here's what I was thinking. The word got around that you were dead. Now that word could only have come from the man who thought he shot you- before he learned otherwise. So he's a talker, and now he's got something new to talk about. It shouldn't be too hard to get a line on him. Sometimes you can backtrack a piece of information and see where it came from. Other times you sort of circle around it."

"Whatever works."

"Keep in touch, Matthew. And one other thing. The guy knows he missed, and whoever sent him knows he missed. Either he'll try again or somebody else will."

"I thought of that."

"Of course you did. That's why you've got a bulge under your jacket. Nice jacket, by the way, bulge or no bulge."

"Thanks."

"Anyway, be careful, will you? And stay off my list."

It was raining by the time I left Poogan's. That reminded me, and I went back for my umbrella, which I'd left at Danny Boy's table. The miracle was that I hadn't left it at the meeting.

Cabs disappear when it rains, and I guess it had been coming down long enough to thin their ranks. I'd just about decided to walk the fifteen blocks when a cab pulled up and let out a fat black man who looked a lot like Al Roker, the jolly TV weatherman, but who was actually a pimp named Bad Dog Dunstan. If he was jolly, he'd kept the word from getting out.

He had two girls with him, and weighed as much as the two of them together. They hurried into Poogan's, trying to keep their hair from getting wet, while he dug a roll out of his pocket to pay the driver and I held the door so the cab wouldn't take off without me.

Dunstan's eyes went wide at the sight of me, and I sensed that he'd heard the big news and missed the retraction. We knew each other only by sight and had never spoken, but I didn't stand on ceremony. A passed-along cab on a rainy night seemed to me enough of an introduction.

"False alarm," I said. "I'm not dead yet."

He smiled broadly, but the effect was somehow more savage than jolly. "Glad to hear it," he boomed. "We all dead soon enough. No need to rush the season."

He went into Poogan's. I got in the cab and went home.

Elaine was watching a Law amp; Order rerun on A amp;E, one of the earlier shows with Michael Moriarty and Dann Florek. We'd both seen the episode before, but that never seems to matter.

"I miss Michael Moriarty," Elaine said. "Not that there's anything wrong with Sam Waterston."

"They always get good people."

"But with Michael Moriarty, you can see the character thinking. You can just about see the thoughts."

And a little later she said, "Why does the judge always suppress the confession and the vital evidence?"

"Because it's true to life," I said.

It was one of the darker shows in the series; the Colombian enforcer gets acquitted and the prosecution's chief witness gets whacked after the verdict, along with what's left of his family. Elaine said, "Well, doesn't that just make you feel good all over?" and turned off the set and went into the other room. I picked up the phone and dialed the number Ballou had given me.

He answered on the third ring. "I hope you're at the airport," he said.

"How did you know it was me?"

"Nobody else has the number. It's only the second time I heard it ring, and the first time was when I called myself from another phone, just to make sure the fucker worked. It's a curious thing, having a phone go off in your pocket. I was a minute thinking what it was. What time's your flight?"

"I'm not at the airport."

"I was afraid of that. Are you at home?"

"I am, but why?"

"I'll call you back on the other phone," he said, and broke the connection. I hung up myself, and the phone rang almost immediately, and it was him.

"That's better," he said. "That's an awful little thing for a man to be talking into, and you never know who might be listening to you. Some fucker could pick us up on his car radio, or the fillings in his teeth. I talked to Rosenstein and he told me I'd hired you. That was days ago, says I, and how did you even hear of it? It seems your lawyer called him. You'd think one of us was getting ready to sue the other."

"I hope not."

"I'd say it was unlikely. I'm glad for your help, but I have to say I wish you were in Ireland."

"I may wish it myself before this is over."

"What are you doing now? I'll take the car out and pick you up, we can go for a ride."

"I think I'm going to make it an early night."

"I don't blame you, but I've the urge to be doing something. I didn't do a fucking thing all day."

"When I first got sober, my sponsor told me it was a successful day if I got through it without picking up a drink."

"Then I had a most unsuccessful day," he said, "for first I drank myself drunk and then I drank myself sober. Your sponsor. That's the Buddhist, the one who was killed?"

"That's right. And what he told me was perfectly true. If I didn't drink it was a successful day for me. And it's a successful day for you if you're still alive at the end of it."

"Ah. I take your meaning."

"You want to fight back, but first you have to know what you're up against. And that's where I come in."

"It's detective work, is it?"

"Yes."

"But you've nothing to work with. Are you getting anywhere?"

"It's hard to tell. But I'm working a couple of different angles, and if one of them doesn't work then another one will."

"Jaysus, that's the first good news I've had all day."

"It's not even news. I'm just getting started."

"You'll bring it off," he said. "Ah, I wish you were in Ireland but I'm fucking glad you're not. We'll find out who he is, this dirty bastard, and we'll get him. And we'll kill him."

"Yes," I said. 'We'll kill him."

George Wister had called while I was at Poogan's, and he called again Tuesday morning and told the machine he wanted to talk to me. He sounded as though he meant it. He left his home number and said to call him there up until noon, and at Midtown North after that.

I had breakfast and read the paper. A few minutes before eleven I called him at the precinct and whoever caught the call told me he hadn't come in yet. I left my name and said I was returning his call. "He has my number," I said, "but I'll be out all day. I'll try him again later."

I went and sat at the window and watched the rain.

Around twelve-thirty I called his home. The area code was 914, which would put him north of the city, most likely in Westchester or Orange County. A woman answered and said I'd just missed him. I left my name and said I'd try him at work.

Later on I called TJ to see if he wanted to take a run out to Williamsburg with me. He wasn't in his room across the street, so I called his beeper number. I hung around for fifteen minutes, then gave up. I put on my windbreaker and remembered to take an umbrella. Elaine caught me at the door and asked if I'd be home for dinner. I said I'd catch something on the run, and if TJ called to tell him it was nothing important, I just wanted company.

I rode the A train to Fourteenth Street and transferred to the L. My father died on the L train. He was riding between two cars, and he fell, and the train ran over him. I suppose he ducked out for a smoke, although it was no more legal to smoke on the platform between the cars than in the cars themselves. For that matter, you weren't allowed to ride between the cars like that, smoking or not. He was probably liquored up at the time, which may have had something to do with his decision to slip out for a cigarette, and with his falling, too.

I never ride the L train without thinking of that. I'd probably get over it if I rode it on a regular basis, but it's the line that runs across Fourteenth Street and under the East River, then through north Brooklyn until it ends up in Canarsie. I haven't been on it often enough over the years for my mind to tire of reminding me each time of how my old man died.

Not as though it were the L train's fault. I couldn't blame the train, and I couldn't really blame him, either. Shit happens.

Forty years ago, that was. More, closer to forty-five.

"A little different from the last time you saw it," Ray Galindez said. "We pulled off all the asphalt siding. I'll tell you, there must have been one hell of a siding salesman came through Brooklyn back in the early fifties. When me and Bitsy bought this place, I don't think there were two houses on the block didn't have some kind of siding covering up the brick. Now that green monstrosity across the street is the lone holdout. I don't know why anybody ever thought that crap was a good idea."

"Isn't it supposed to cut your heating bills?"

"That's what we've got global warming for. But it was some job, puffing it off and repointing the brick. I had help working on the brick, but me and Bitsy did the rest of the work ourselves."

"I guess that's where your summer went."

"Spring and summer both, but it's worth it, you know. And real satisfying. Which is more than you can say for the job these days. Come on in, and what can I get you to drink? There's coffee, but it's like superstrong. Except you like real strong coffee, don't you? You sure you're not Puerto Rican, Matt?"

"Me llamo Matteo," I said.

We sat in the kitchen. They'd bought a narrow two-story row house on Bedford Avenue, midway between the subway stop and McCarren Park. The neighborhood, Northside, was turning increasingly artsy, as were nearby Greenpoint and much of the rest of Williamsburg. Industrial buildings were being converted to artists' lofts, far more affordable than those across the river in SoHo and TriBeCa, and little houses like Ray and Bitsy's were shedding their siding like butterflies emerging from cocoons.

It was an unusual neighborhood for a cop to choose but a natural one for an artist, and Ray was both. A police sketch artist, he had an uncanny ability to render in black and white the images summoned up from a witness's memory. And there was a further dimension, a genuine artistry that had led Elaine to request a drawing he'd done of a chilling sociopath as my Christmas gift to her. Then she'd engaged him to draw her long-dead father, working not from photos but extracting the man's features from her memory. She'd since given Ray a show in her shop, and steered some commissions his way. Someday I wanted him to do a real portrait of her, but right now I needed him to do that same thing the city paid him to do.

"Two goons jumped me a few nights ago," I told him, "and I got a good look at one of them. But I didn't report it, and it's almost certainly connected to some other matters where I'm playing a lone hand."

"So the department's not supposed to know about this. I've got no problem with that, Matt."

"You're sure?"

"No problem at all. I'll tell you something, I'm sitting on the fence. I'd put in my papers tomorrow if money wasn't an issue." He waved a hand, brushing the whole subject aside. "Tell me about this mutt that wanted a piece of you," he said, pencil in hand. "What did you happen to notice about him?"

We had done this before, though not recently, and we worked well together. In this instance our task was an easy one, because I could close my eyes and bring the image into sharp focus. I could picture the face of the man who'd held a gun on me, could see the expression he'd shown when he set himself to take a swing at my middle.

"That's it," I said, when the pencil lines on the pad matched the face I remembered. "You know, no matter how many times we do this it never ceases to amaze me. It's like a Polaroid camera, the film pops out and turns into a picture before your eyes."

"Sometimes they'll catch the guy and you'd swear I drew him from life, it's that close. And I have to tell you that feels good."

"I can imagine."

"And other times they get the guy, and I see his photo, and I look back and forth between the photo and my drawing, and I swear there's no resemblance whatsoever. Like they could be members of different species."

"Well, that's the witness's fault, Ray."

"It's both our fault."

"He's the one who remembered the guy wrong."

"And I'm the one didn't dig out the right memory, which is part of what I do."

"Well, yeah, I see what you mean. But you can never expect to be a hundred percent."

"Oh, I know that. It's frustrating, that's all."

"And you're not crazy about the job these days."

"I'm marking time, Matt."

"How old are you and how close are you to your twenty?"

"I'm thirty-three and I've got eleven years in."

"So you're more than halfway there."

"I know, and I hate to give it up. And it's not just the pension, it's the benefits. I could quit now and cover the basics, paying the mortgage and putting food on the table, but what about medical insurance?"

I asked why the job was getting to him.

"I'm obsolete," he said. "When they had the Identi-Kits I thought, well, hell, it's Mr. Potato Head for cops. Paste on a mustache, paste on a different hairline, you know how it goes."

"Sure."

"I could run rings around that thing, and I knew it. Then they developed a computer program that did the same thing but was a lot more sophisticated about it, and now they got it so you can take an image and morph it. You know, stretching a feature, shrinking it, whatever."

"I can't believe it's better than you at getting a likeness."

"I have to say I agree with you. But the thing is anybody can do it. All they do is train you and you can do it. Maybe you can't draw a straight line with a ruler, but you can be a police artist all the same. And there's more. See, they like the way the computer likenesses present."

"How do you mean, present?"

"To the public. I do a drawing, people look at it, they say to themselves, oh, an artist did this, so it's just an approximation. But they can make that computer likeness come out looking like a photograph, and you see it and it seems authentic. It's got credibility. It may not look like the perpetrator, but it sure shows up nice on TV."

I tapped the sketch he'd done. "This one's never going to be seen on TV," I said, "and it looks just like the son of a bitch."

"Well, thanks, Matt. Now how about the other one?"

"The other goon? I told you, I didn't get a good enough look at him."

"Maybe you saw more than you think you did."

"The light was bad," I said. "The streetlamp was shining in my eyes and his face was in shadow. And he was only in front of me for a second or two anyway. It's not a question of memory."

"I understand," he said. "All the same, I've had some luck in similar situations."

"Oh?"

"What I think happens," he said, "is that the memory doesn't get suppressed, but it barely registers in the first place. You see something, and the image hits the retina, but your mind's on something else and you never know you see it. But it's there all the same." He spread his hands. "I don't know, but if you're not in a hurry…"

"I'm certainly willing to try."

"Okay, so just get comfortable and let yourself relax. Start with your feet and just let them go completely limp. This isn't hypnosis, by the way, which is to my mind a great way to get people to remember things they never saw in the first place. This is just to relax you. Now your lower legs, letting them relax completely…"

I didn't have a problem with the relaxation technique, having gone through something similar at a workshop Elaine dragged me to once. He led me through it, and he had me envision a canvas hanging on a wall, all in a gilded frame. Then he instructed me to see the face painted on the canvas.

I was all set to tell him it wasn't working, and then damned if there wasn't a face looking back at me on the framed canvas I'd constructed in my mind's eye. It didn't look as if it had been pieced together with an Identi-Kit, either, or morphed on a computer. It was a real human face with a real expression on it. And I knew it, by God. I'd seen it before.

"Shit," I said.

"You're not getting anything? Give it time."

I sat up, opened my eyes. "I got a face," I said, "and I was all excited, because it was like magic the way it appeared."

"I know, that's what it's like. Like magic."

"But it was the wrong face."

"How do you know?"

"Because the face I just saw belongs to somebody else. A few days prior to the incident I was in a bar, and I caught a glimpse of a guy. You know how you'll see a person and you know him but you don't know how you know him?"

"Sure."

"That's what happened. Our eyes met, and I knew him and he knew me, or seemed to. But I can't think how, and the fact of the matter is I probably saw him once on the subway and his face imprinted itself in my memory. New York's like that. You'll see more people in a day than the entire population of a small town. Except it's in passing. You don't really see them."

"But you saw this face."

"Yes, and now I can't get it out of my mind."

"What's it look like?"

"What's the difference, Ray? It's just a face."

"It's just a face?"

"You know what I mean."

"Why not describe it a little?"

"You want to sketch the guy? Why?"

"To clear the slate. Right now you try to picture a face and that's the face that comes up. So if we get that face on paper we'll be getting it out of your mind." He shrugged. "Hey, it's only a theory. I got the time, and I always enjoy working with you, but if you're in a big hurry…"

"There's no hurry," I said.

And the face seemed eager to be drawn. I watched it emerge as we worked together, the head very wide at the top and tapering sharply like an upside-down triangle, the exaggerated eyebrows, the long narrow nose, the Cupid's bow mouth.

"Whoever he is," I said, "that's him."

"Well, it's an easy face to draw," Ray said. "A caricaturist would have a ball with him. In fact this here comes out looking like caricature, because the features are so prominent."

"Maybe that's why I remembered it."

"That's what I was thinking. It stays with you, if it was a meal you'd say it sticks to your ribs. It'd be a hard face to forget."

Bitsy came home while we were working, but she stayed out of the kitchen until we were done. Then she joined us and I had another cup of coffee and a piece of carrot cake. I left the house with the two sketches, sprayed with fixative and tucked between two sheets of cardboard inside a padded mailer. Elaine would want the originals. She'd frame them and hang them in the shop, and sooner or later somebody would buy them.

I gave Ray $300, and I had trouble getting him to take it. "I feel like a thief," he said. "You come to my house and I get more enjoyment than I've had in the last two months on the job, and on your way out the door I pick your pocket." I told him I had a client and he could afford it. "Well, I won't pretend I can't find a use for it," he said, "but it still doesn't seem right to me. And I collect again when Elaine sells the originals. How can that be right?"

"She collects, too. She's not a charity."

"Even so," he said.

I walked through the rain to the subway and got downstairs just as a train was pulling out. I sat there while three outbound trains came and went before I caught one back to the city. I could have transferred at either Sixth or Eighth to a train that would take me to Columbus Circle, but what I did was get off the train at Union Square and walk over to the Kinko's at Twelfth and University. I made a dozen copies of the sketch of the guy who'd punched me in the stomach. I didn't have any use for copies of the other sketch, but I made a couple anyway while I was at it.

Some years ago I'd spoken at a group called Village Open Discussion, and I seemed to remember that they met on Tuesday evenings at a Presbyterian church just a block west of the copy shop. It was a big meeting, a young crowd. There was a show of hands after the speaker, and there were always plenty of hands in the air. Matt the Listener sat back and listened.

It was still raining when I left, so I passed up the outdoor pay phones for one in a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue. I dialed my own number, waiting for the machine, and Elaine picked it up on the first ring.

"That's a surprise," I said. "I thought we were screening our calls."

"Oh, hi, Monica," she said. "I was just thinking about you."

I felt a chill, and tensed my stomach muscles as if in anticipation of a blow. I said, "Are you all right?"

"Oh, never better," she said. "I could do without the rain, but other than that I've got no complaints."

I relaxed, but not entirely. "Who's there with you?"

"I was going to call," she said apologetically, "but then these two friends of Matt's dropped by. Did you ever meet Joe Durkin? Well, he's married, so forget it."

"You're good at this," I said. "But that's not the Monica I know. She's only interested if they're married."

"Yeah, he's kind of cute," she said. "Hang on and I'll ask him… My friend wants to know your name and if you're married."

"Don't get too cute or he's gonna want to talk to me."

"He says his name is George, and the other is classified information. But there's a ring on his finger, if that means anything." She laughed. "You'll love this. He says he's working undercover and it's part of a disguise."

"Yeah, I love it," I said. "How long are they likely to hang around, do you have any idea?"

"Oh, gee," she said. "I really couldn't say."

"Anybody call?"

"Yes."

"But you don't want to say the names, so just answer yes or no. Did Mick call?"

"No."

"TJ?"

"Uh-huh, a little while ago. You know, you really ought to get back to them."

"I'll call him."

"There was something else I had to tell you, but I can't think what it was."

"Somebody else called?"

"Yes."

"Feed me the initials."

"Absolutely, baby."

"AB?"

"Uh-huh. That's right."

"Andy Buckley?"

"I knew you'd understand."

"Did he leave a number?"

"Sure, for all the good it does."

"Because he left it on the machine and you don't have it handy. Never mind, I can get it. If those two get on your nerves, tell them to get the hell out."

"My sentiments exactly," she said. "Look, sweetie, I have to go now. And I'll tell Matt what you said."

"You do that," I said.

I knew Mick would know Andy's number, so I tried him first on his cell phone. When it went unanswered I tried it again in case I'd dialed wrong, and after six rings I gave up.

Bronx Information didn't have a listing for an A or Andrew Buckley, but I'd figured the phone was probably in his mother's name, and there were two Buckleys listed on Bainbridge Avenue. I wrote down both numbers, and when I called the first a youngster said, "Naw, that's the other one. Next block up and 'cross the street."

I called the second number and a woman answered. I said, "Mrs. Buckley? Is Andy there?"

He picked up and said, "Yeah, Mick?"

"No, it's Matt Scudder, Andy."

He laughed. "Fooled me," he said. "She said, 'A gentleman for you,' and that's what she always says when it's the big fellow. Just about anybody else, she goes, 'It's one of your friends.'"

"The woman knows quality when she hears it."

"She's a pistol," he said. "Listen, have you talked to Mick lately?"

"No, I haven't."

"I thought I'd hear from him but I haven't. Where's he staying, do you happen to know?"

"I don't."

"Because I want to switch cars with him. What I did, I went down and got his Cadillac out of the garage, and I don't want to park it on the street. That's fine with the bucket of bolts I drive, but a car like that parked out in the open is what the fathers call an occasion of sin for the kids around here. It's in front of my house right now, and I gave a kid from down the block twenty bucks to watch it, and you want to know what I'm doing? I'm sitting in the window watching him."

"I think Mick wants to hang on to your car," I said. "He said his is too visible."

"Oh, yeah? Fine with me, only I thought we were supposed to switch. You got his cell phone number?"

"He doesn't seem to give it out."

"I know, he just uses it when he can't find a pay phone. You want to know, what I think is he lost the number of his own phone and doesn't know how to find it out. Hey, don't tell him I said that."

"I won't."

"Let's you and I stay in touch, huh? I'll call you if he calls me, and you do the same. I mean, I'm sitting tight here and that's cool, but I wish I knew what was going on."

"I know what you mean."

"You up for anything? You want me to drive you anywhere?"

"You should have asked me sooner. I just got back from Williamsburg."

"You don't mean Williamsbridge, do you?"

"No, I mean Williamsburg in Brooklyn."

"'Cause the Williamsbridge neighborhood's just the other side of the Bronx River Parkway, though I can't think why you'd want to go there. And neither could you, obviously, because you didn't. Why Williamsburg, and what did you do, take the Williamsburg Bridge? They been fixing that thing forever."

"I took the L train."

"You should have called me. You know what I think I'll do? I think I'll put Mick's car back in the garage before my twenty bucks runs out and it gets swiped by the kid I hired to watch it. But I'm serious, you want a ride, gimme a call. There's always a car I can take."

"I'll keep it in mind."

"And keep in touch," he said. "What happened the other night…"

"I know."

"Yeah, you were there, weren't you? Stay close, Matt. We got to watch each other's back, next little while."

I caught TJ in his room and met him at the Starbucks on Broadway and Eighty-seventh. He was already there when I arrived, sitting at a table with an iced mochaccino, wearing black jeans and a black shirt with a pink necktie an inch wide, all topped off with a Raiders warm-up jacket and a black beret.

"Had to stop and change clothes," he said, "an' I still beat you here."

"You're greased lightning," I said. "What did you change out of that was less appropriate than what you've got on?"

"You don't think this here's appropriate? For where we goin'?"

"It's fine."

"It's as appropriate as that sad old zip-up jacket of yours. What I had on earlier was camo pants and my flak jacket, and that was very appropriate for where I was at, but not for Mother Blue's."

"And where was that?"

"Flushing. See a girl I know."

"Oh."

"What you mean, 'Oh'? I was on the clock, Brock. I was gettin' the job done."

"How so?"

"Girl's got a black daddy, Vietnamese mama. Her face tends to break out. Wasn't for that, she could be a model. Girl is seriously fine lookin'."

"Vietnamese…"

"You got it. She had a brother was in Born To Kill, an' she used to know all those dudes. Guy who shot up the bar Sunday was Nguyen Tran Bao. Very violent cat, what she said, but we already knew that."

"I don't know," I said. "He seemed like such a nice quiet boy."

"He did his robbery and assault bit at Attica, an' when he came back he wasn't exactly rehabilitated. Matter of fact, he was hangin' out with a white dude he got to know upstate, and the general impression was the two of them was doin' bad things."

"A white dude."

"Very white, and what you call moon-faced."

"The bomb thrower."

"What I was thinkin', Lincoln."

"Did she happen to know his name?"

He shook his head. "Only way she knew what Goo been up to since prison is she made some phone calls. She pretty much lost touch with BTK when she moved out of Chinatown."

"Goo? Is that what they call Nguyen?"

"What I call him, 'cause it a whole lot easier to say. Anyway, I be callin' her tomorrow, see if she found anybody could come up with a name to go with his face. Even if she can't, we got Goo's full name an' we know where he went to college."

"Maybe the dean will give us a transcript of his record," I said. "You did good work."

"Just part of the service," he said, and lowered his head and sucked up the rest of his mochaccino. "Now what? We gonna hear some old people's music?"

The group on the small stage was a quartet, an alto sax and a rhythm section, and they were as white as I was and almost as white as Danny Boy. They all wore black suit jackets and white dress shirts and faded jeans, and I somehow knew they were European, though I'm not sure how I could tell. Their haircuts, maybe, or something in their faces. They finished the set and the audience, about three-quarters black, was generous with its applause.

They were Polish, Danny Boy told me. "I have this mental picture," he said. "This kid's sitting in his mother's kitchen in Warsaw, listening to this tinny little radio. And it's Bird and Dizzy playing 'Night in Tunisia,' and the kid's foot starts tapping, and right then and there he knows what he wants to do with his life."

"I guess that's how it happens."

"Who knows how it happens? But I have to say they can play." He glanced across the table at TJ. "But I suppose you're more a fan of rap and hip-hop."

"Mostly," TJ said, "Ah likes to go down by de river an' sing dem good ol' Negro spirituals."

Danny Boy's eyes brightened. "Matthew," he said, "this young man will go far. Unless, of course, someone shoots him." He helped himself to a little vodka. "I made some inquiries. The person who caused that unpleasantness in the Chinese restaurant the other night is a disillusioned and bitterly disappointed young man."

"How's that?"

"It seems he got half his money in advance," he said, "upon acceptance of the assignment, with the balance due on completion. As far as he's concerned, he completed the job. He went where he was told to go and did what he was supposed to do. How was he to know there were two gentlemen in the restaurant fitting the same description? There was in fact only one such gentleman to be seen when he entered, and he dealt with the man accordingly."

"And they don't want to pay him the rest of his money?"

"Not only that, but they've had the effrontery to ask for a refund of their initial payment. Not, I shouldn't think, with any realistic expectation of receiving it, but as a sort of counter to his demand for payment in full."

TJ nodded. "Somebody ask you for money, you turn around an' ask him for money. An' maybe he go away."

"That seems the theory," Danny Boy said. "I think they should have paid the man."

"Keep him from runnin' his mouth."

"Exactly. But they didn't and he did."

"What do they owe him?"

"Two thousand dollars," Danny Boy said.

"Two thousand still owing? Out of four?"

"Guess you ain't worth much," TJ said.

"You get what you pay for," Danny Boy said. He took a sheet of paper from his wallet, put on reading glasses and squinted through them. "Chilton Purvis," he read. "My guess is they call him Chili, but maybe not. He's living at 117 Tapscott, third floor rear. I never heard of Tapscott Street myself, but it's supposed to be in Brooklyn."

"It is," I said. "Right around where Crown Heights butts up against Brownsville." His eyebrows rose, and I said I'd worked there years ago. "Not in the same precinct, but close enough. I don't remember a thing about Tapscott Street specifically, and I suppose it's changed since then anyway."

"What hasn't? A lot of Haitians in the area these days, and Guyanese, and folks from Ghana and Senegal."

"All looking to make a better life for themselves," TJ said, "in this land of opportunity for all."

"He's afraid the police are coming for him," Danny Boy said, "or that his employers will show up to seal his lips with a bullet. So he stays in his room all the time. Except when he gets the urge to party and smoke crack and run his mouth."

"Suppose he could pick up the two thou he's got coming just by fingering the man who stiffed him. You think he'd go for that?"

"He'd be a fool not to."

"We already know he a fool," TJ said. "Killin' folks for chump change."

"I'll want to show him a sketch," I said. "But first let me show you, Danny Boy." I opened the envelope, got out one of the copies of Ray's drawing of the slugger. He studied it through his reading glasses, then took them off and held it at arm's length.

"Nasty," he decided, "and not too bright."

"And nobody you know?"

"Unfortunately not, but I wouldn't be surprised if he and I have friends in common. May I keep this, Matthew?"

"I can let you have a couple of extras," I said. I counted out three or four for him, and passed one to TJ, who was edging over for a look.

"Don't know him," he said without hesitation. "Who the other dude?"

"What other dude?" Danny Boy wanted to know.

I produced the second sketch. "Just an exercise," I said, and explained how Ray Galindez had drawn it to clear my mind. But it hadn't worked, I said, in that I'd still been unable to summon up the face of the second mugger.

Danny Boy looked at the second sketch, shook his head, passed it back. TJ said, "I's seen him."

"You have? Where?"

"Round the neighborhood. Can't say where or when, but he got one of those faces sticks in your mind."

"That must be it," I said. "I caught a glimpse of him last week in Grogan's, and I thought he looked familiar, and it's probably because I'd seen him the same as you did. And you're right, he's definitely got one of those faces."

"All those strong features," Danny Boy said, "and you don't expect to find them all on the same face, do you? That nose shouldn't go with that mouth."

I gave TJ a sketch of the slugger and folded one and tucked it in my wallet. As an afterthought I added a copy of the second sketch as well. I put everything else back in the padded mailing envelope.

I looked at my watch, and Danny Boy said, "The band'll be back in a couple of minutes. You want to catch the next set?"

"I was thinking I might go over to Brooklyn."

"To see our friend? You might find him in."

"And if not I could wait for him."

"Keep you company," TJ said. "He ain't in, you can tell me stories to pass the time, an' I can pretend I ain't heard 'em before."

"Past your bedtime," I said.

"You need someone to watch your back, Jack, 'specially when you's the wrong skin tone for the neighborhood. An' if you's to brace this dude Chili, you got to know two's better than one." At the concern in my face, he said, "Hey, I'll be safe. You armed and dangerous, man. You'll protect me."

"Just stay away from parked cars," Danny Boy said, and we both stared at him. "Oh, from when I was a kid," he said. "I told you about my list, right? Well, when I was growing up there were always a few kids every year who got run over by cars, and the cops sent someone around every spring and every fall to tell the schoolkids about traffic safety. You ever pull that detail, Matthew?"

"I was spared."

"There'd be this slide show, and an explanation of how each victim bought it. 'Mary Louise, age seven. Ran from between parked cars.' And half the time or more, that was it, running out from between parked cars. Because the motorist didn't see you coming."

"So?"

"So in my young mind, it was the parked cars that were dangerous. I'd sort of slink past them on the street, like they were crouched and ready to spring. Wasn't until later I realized that the cars that were parked were essentially benign. It was the moving ones that would kill you."

"Parked cars," I said.

"That's it. A fucking menace."

I thought for a moment, then turned to TJ. "If you really want to tag along to Brooklyn," I said, "why don't you do me a favor? Go to the men's room and stow this under your shirt."

He took the padded envelope, weighed it in his hand. "Don't seem fair," he said. "You got your state-of-the-art Kevlar vest, an' I got cardboard. You think this'll stop a bullet?"

"It's so you'll have your hands free," I said, "although I'm not sure that's an advantage. And put it in back, not in front, so that it doesn't spoil the lines of your shirt."

"Already planning on it," he said.

When he was out of earshot, I said, "I've been thinking about your list, Danny Boy."

"Just so you stay off it."

"How's your health?"

He gave me a look. "What did you hear?"

"Not a thing."

"Then what's the matter? Don't I look good?"

"You look fine. The question is Elaine's, as a matter of fact. It was her first reaction when I told her about your little list."

"She was always a perceptive woman," he said. "She's the real detective in the family, you know."

"I know."

"Well," he said, and folded his hands on the table. "I had this little operation."

"Oh?"

"Colon cancer," he said, "and they got it all. Caught it early and got it all."

"That's good news."

"It is," he agreed. "The surgery got it before it could spread, and they wanted to do chemo afterward just in case, and I let them. I mean, who's gonna roll the dice on that one, right?"

"Right."

"But it was the kind of chemo where you get to keep your hair, so it wasn't all that bad. The worst part was the colostomy bag, but there was a second operation to reattach the colon- Jesus, you don't want to hear this, do you?"

"No, go on."

"That's it, really. I felt a lot better about life after the second operation. A colostomy bag puts a crimp in a man's love life. There may be girls who are turned on by that sort of thing, but I hope I never meet one."

"I never heard a word, Danny Boy."

"Nobody did."

"You didn't want visitors?"

"Or cards in the mail, or phone calls, or any of that shit. Funny, because information's my life, but I wanted a lid on this. I trust you'll keep it quiet. You'll tell Elaine but that's all."

"Absolutely."

"There's always a chance of a recurrence," he said, "but they assure me it's slim. No reason I can't live to be a hundred. 'You'll die on someone else's specialty,' the doc tells me. I thought it was a nice way to put it." He poured himself some more vodka and left the glass on the table in front of him. "But it gets your attention," he said.

"It must."

"It does. That's when I started making the list. I knew all along that nobody lives forever, but I guess I didn't quite believe that it applied to me. And then I did."

"So you started writing down names."

"I suppose every name I put down was one more person I'd outlasted. I don't know what I thought that would prove. No matter how long your list gets, sooner or later you get to be the final entry on it."

"If I made a list," I said, "it'd be a long one."

"They all keep getting longer," he said, "until they don't. Here comes TJ, so we'll talk about something else. He's a good boy. Keep his name off the list, will you? And your own, too."

The rain had quit, at least for the time being. There were cabs cruising on Amsterdam and I hailed one. "Waste of time," TJ said. "He ain't about to go to Brooklyn."

I told the driver Ninth and Fifty-seventh. TJ said, "Why we goin' there, Claire?"

"Because I don't happen to have two grand on me," I said, "and Chilton Purvis might want a look at it."

"'Show me the money!' Mean to say we actually gonna pay him that much?"

"We're going to say so."

"Oh," he said, and thought it over. "You keep that kind of money 'round your house? I'da knowed that, I'da stuck you up."

We got out of the cab on the northeast corner and walked to the hotel entrance. "Let's go up for a minute," I said. "I want to use the phone to make sure I haven't got cops in the living room. And you can get that envelope for me. I'll leave it across the street."

Upstairs in his room he said, "If you was all along meanin' to leave the envelope at your house, why'd I have to stick it up under my shirt?"

"To make sure you wouldn't leave it in the cab."

"You wanted to talk private with Danny Boy."

"Go to the head of the class."

"I been at the head of the class all along, so ain't no need for me to go there. Wha'd you an' him talk about?"

"If I'd wanted to share it with you," I said, "I wouldn't have sent you to the men's room."

I called across the street, and talked to the machine until Elaine picked up and said the coast was clear. TJ and I went downstairs, and he waited at the hotel entrance while I crossed the street and entered the Parc Vendôme lobby. I went upstairs, got twenty hundred-dollar bills from our emergency stash, and told Elaine not to wait up.

Three cabbies in a row passed up the added incentive of a twenty-dollar tip for a ride to Brooklyn. There's a regulation, they have to take you anywhere in the five boroughs, but what are you going to do if they won't?

"That dude just now," TJ said. "He was tempted. He wouldn't do it for twenty, but he'da done it for fifty."

"The city'll do it for a buck and a half each," I said, and we walked over to Eighth and caught the subway.

There may have been a closer subway stop than the one where we got off. We wound up walking eight or ten blocks on East New York Avenue. It wasn't the best neighborhood in town, nor was this the best time to be in it- well after midnight when we left the subway station, and close to one by the time we found Tapscott Avenue.

Number 117 was a brick-and-frame house three stories tall. The siding salesman had evidently missed this part of town, and his efforts might have helped. As it was, the structure and the ones on either side of it looked abandoned, the ground-floor windows covered with plywood, some of the other windows broken, and a sour air of neglect that hovered like fog.

"Nice," TJ said.

The front door was open, the lock missing. The hall lights were out, but it wasn't pitch black inside. A little light filtered in from the street. I could see from the buzzers and mailboxes that there were two apartments on each of the three floors. Third-floor rear shouldn't be all that hard to find.

We gave our eyes time to get accustomed to the dim light, then found the stairs and climbed the two flights. The building may have been abandoned but that didn't mean it was empty. Light seeped from under the front and rear doors on the second floor, and someone had either cooked an Italian meal or ordered in a pizza. The smell was there, along with the smells of mice and urine. There was also what I took at first for conversation, but then they cut to a commercial and I realized it was a radio or TV set.

There was more light on the top floor. The front apartment was dark and silent, but the door of the rear apartment was ajar, and light poured through the inch-wide gap. There was music playing at low volume, too, something with an insistent beat.

"Reggae," TJ murmured. "He supposed to be from the islands?"

I approached the door, listened, and heard nothing but the music. I weighed my options, then knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked again, a little louder.

"Yes, come on in," a man said. "You can see it is open."

I pushed the door open and walked in, TJ right behind me. A slender dark-skinned man rose to his feet from a broken-down easy chair. He had an egg-shaped head topped with short hair and a button nose over a pencil-line mustache. He was wearing a Georgetown University sweatshirt and powder-blue double-pleated slacks.

"I fell asleep," he explained, "listening to the music. Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my house?"

He came across as more curious than outraged. The accent may have had something to do with it. He would have sounded West Indian even without the background music.

I said, "If you're Chilton Purvis, then I'm the man you've been hoping to see."

"Tell me more," he said. "And tell me who is your darker companion. Can he be your shadow?"

"He's a witness," I said. "He's here to make sure I do what I'm supposed to do."

"And what are you supposed to do, mon?"

"I'm supposed to give you two thousand dollars."

His face lit up, his teeth gleaming in the light from a battery-operated lantern. "Then you are indeed the mon I hope to see! Close the door, sit down, make yourselves comfortable."

That was easier said than done. The room was squalid, with crackled plaster and water-stained walls. There was a mattress on the floor, with a couple of red plastic milk crates stacked beside it. The only chair was the one he'd recently vacated. TJ did draw the door shut, or as close to shut as it went, but we stayed on our feet.

"So they saw the rightness of my position," Chilton Purvis said. "And quite proper, too! I went where I was supposed to go, I did what I was supposed to do. Did I leave the mon alive? No. Did I leave a trail? No. How am I supposed to know there is another mon? Nobody tells me. There is one mon in the restaurant who fits the description. I do my job. I put him down. And they do not wish to pay me?"

"But you're going to get paid," I said.

"Yes! And that is excellent news, the most excellent news. Give me the money and we will smoke some herb, if that is to your liking. But the money, before anything else."

"First you'll have to tell me who hired you."

He looked at me, and it was like what Elaine said about Michael Moriarty. You could see him think.

"If you do not know," he began, and stopped, and thought some more.

"They wouldn't pay you," I said. "But I will."

"You are the mon."

"I'm not the police, if that's what you mean."

"I know you are not the police," he said, as if that much was obvious. For the longest time people looked at me and knew I was a policeman. Now this one looked at me and knew I was not. "You," he said, "are the mon I was supposed to kill." His smile was sudden, and very wide. "And now you bring me money!"

"The world is a curious place."

"The world is strange, mon, and every day more strange. You pay me the money to point my finger at the mon who paid me to kill you. I say that is very strange!"

"But it's not a bad deal," I said. "You get your money."

"Then I would say it is a good deal. A fine deal."

"Just tell me who hired you," I said, "and where I can find him, and you'll get paid."

"You have brought the money?"

"I've brought the money."

"Ah," he said. "I can give you this mon's name. Would that be good?"

"Yes."

"I wrote it down," he said. "On a slip of paper, along with his address. You want that as well? His address?"

"That would be useful."

"Also a phone number. Just let me see where I put that slip of paper." He fumbled in the topmost milk crate alongside the bed, his back to me, then spun around suddenly, a gun in his hand. The first two shots he snapped off went wide but the third and fourth hit me, one in the center of the chest, the other a few inches below and to the right.

I'd had my jacket unzipped, and I guess I must have sensed something, because I had my gun in my hand by the time he started shooting and I was squeezing the trigger and returning fire about the same time I got hit. I was wearing the Kevlar vest, of course, and its manufacturer would have been proud of it. The slugs didn't penetrate. This is not to say they bounced off like spitballs off an elephant. The effect was like getting punched with considerable force by someone with tiny hands. It didn't feel good, but knowing that it had worked, that the vest had stopped the bullets, felt wonderful.

He wasn't wearing a vest. I fired twice and both bullets went home, one high on the right side of his chest, the other in the solar plexus two inches north of his navel. He threw up his hands when the bullets hit him and the gun went flying. He staggered, doing the little dance they do when they score a touchdown, and then his feet went out from under him and he sat down hard.

"You shot me," he said.

I caught my breath and went over and knelt next to him. "You shot me," I said.

"It did me no good. Bulletproof vest, yes? A.22 will not penetrate. Head shots! That is what one must have. But when you are forced to hurry your shot…"

"Why shoot me in the first place?"

"But that was my job!" He might have been explaining it to a child. "I try, I fail. Not my fault, but still. Then you come in my door and I have another chance. If I kill you they will pay me my two thousand dollars!"

"But I was going to give you the two thousand."

"Be serious, mon. How I know you will give me the money? All I got to do is shoot you. That way I make sure. I take the money off your corpse, and I collect the money that they owe me." He winced as pain gripped him, and blood seeped from his wounds. "Besides, you think I know their names? You hire a killer, you do not tell him your name. Not unless you are a crazy mon!"

"And you didn't have a phone number for them?"

"What you think?" He winced again and his eyes rolled. "I'm shot bad, mon. You got to get me to a hospital."

I got the sketches from my wallet, unfolded them, showed him the one of the slugger. "Take a look," I said. "Have you seen this man before? Is he one of them?"

"Yes, he is one. Him I know, but not his name. Now you must get me to the hospital."

I wondered if he'd even looked at the sketch. I showed him the other one. "And this man?"

"Yes! Him too! Both of them, they are the men who hired me, said come shoot this mon when we tell you."

"You're useless," I told him. "If I showed you a hundred-dollar bill you'd swear Ben Franklin hired you."

I put the sketches away. He said, "I am hurting bad, mon. Now you take me to the hospital?"

I looked at him for a moment, and then I got to my feet. "No," I said.

"No! What are you telling me, mon?"

"You son of a bitch," I said. "You just tried to kill me and now you expect me to save your life? You killed a friend of mine, you son of a bitch."

"What are you going to do with me?"

"I'm going to leave you here in your blood."

"But I will die!"

"Good," I said. "You can be on the list."

"You would leave me to die?"

"Why not?"

"Fuck you, mon! You hear what I'm saying to you? Fuck your mother and fuck you!"

"Well, fuck you too."

"Fuck you! I hope you die!"

"Everybody dies," I said. "So fuck you."

I turned at a sound. Like a cough, but not a cough.

TJ was down, his back against the wall. His skin was gray, his face twisted in pain. He had both hands pressed to his left thigh, and blood, nearly black in that light, seeped between his splayed fingers.

"Direct pressure on the wound," I said. I'd torn the pocket off my shirt, and now I placed his fingers on the wad I'd made of it. "Can you hold it there good and tight?"

"Think so."

"You're not gushing blood," I said. "It didn't hit an artery. How do you feel?"

"Hurts."

"Try to hang on," I said. "Try to keep pressure on the wound."

"'Kay."

I took a quick tour around the room, running the sleeve of my jacket over any surfaces where we might have left prints. It didn't seem to me we'd touched anything. The squalid little room didn't invite touching.

Chilton Purvis lay where he'd fallen. There was a pink froth bubbling out of the corner of his mouth, and I guessed that one bullet had hit a lung. His eyes stared accusingly at me and his lips worked but no words got past them.

His gun had caromed off a wall and landed on top of his mattress. I thought, That's the gun that killed Jim. But of course it wasn't, he'd dropped that one at the scene. I left this one where it lay, left the little portable radio playing reggae, left everything where it was, including Chilton Purvis. I knelt down, got one hand under TJ's legs and the other beneath the small of his back, and got him up over my shoulder in a fireman's carry.

"Keep the pressure on the wound," I said.

"We goin'?"

"Unless you like it here."

"We just leavin' him?"

"One's all I can carry," I said.

I made it down the stairs and onto the street. Light still showed under the doors of some of the other apartments, but none of the doors flew open, and no one rushed out to see what all the shooting was about. I guess you learn to keep a damper on your curiosity when you're living in an abandoned building.

We weren't going to find a cab cruising on Tapscott Street. I headed for East New York Avenue, a block and a half away, but at the corner of Sutter I caught sight of a gypsy cab and hollered at it.

The car was an old Ford, the driver a Bangladeshi. TJ was at my side when the cab pulled up to us, keeping all his weight on the uninjured leg, maintaining pressure on the wound. I had an arm around him to steady him as I reached for the cab door with the other hand.

"What is the matter with that man?" the driver demanded. "Is he sick?"

"I have to get him to a doctor," I said, and lifted TJ into the back seat and crawled in after him. "I want to go to Manhattan, to Fifty-seventh Street and Ninth Avenue. The best way to go- "

"But look at him! He is injured. Look! He is bleeding!"

"Yes, and you're wasting time."

"This is impossible," he said. "I cannot have this man bleeding in my cab. It will stain the upholstery. It is impossible."

"I'll give you a hundred dollars to drive us to Manhattan," I said. I showed him the gun. "Or I'll shoot you in the head and drive us there myself. You decide."

I guess he believed I'd do it, and for all I know he was right. He put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. I told him to take the Manhattan Bridge.

We were on Flatbush Avenue crossing Atlantic when he said, "How did he hurt himself, your friend?"

"He cut himself shaving."

"I think he was shot, yes?"

"And if he was?"

"He should be in a hospital."

"That's where we're going."

"There is a hospital there?"

Roosevelt is at Tenth and Fifty-eighth, but that wasn't where we were going. "A private hospital," I said.

"Sir, there are hospitals in Brooklyn. There is Methodist Hospital quite near here, there is Brooklyn Jewish."

"Just go where I said."

"Yes, sir. Sir, you will try to keep the blood to a minimum? The cab is my wife's brother's, it does not belong to me."

I got out a hundred-dollar bill and passed it to him. "Just so you know you're getting this," I said.

"Oh, thank you, sir. Some people, they say they will pay extra, you know, and then they do not. Thank you, sir."

"If there is any blood on the seat, that should pay for cleaning it."

"Most certainly, sir."

I had my fingers on top of TJ's and kept pressure on the wound. I felt his grip slacken as I took over. He was in shock, and that can be as dangerous as the wound itself. I tried to remember what you did for shock victims. Elevate the feet, I seemed to recall, and keep the patient warm. I didn't see how I could manage either of those things for the time being.

The driver was right, he belonged in a hospital, and I wondered if I had the right to keep him away from them. Bellevue was probably tops for gunshot trauma, and we were on the bridge approach now. Easy enough to redirect the driver to First Avenue and Twenty-fifth.

For that matter, Roosevelt's ER was first-rate, and closer to home. And I could delay the decision until we got uptown.

I managed to delay it all the way to the Parc Vendôme. When the cab pulled up in front of our entrance I gave him a second $100. "This is so you can forget all about us," I told him.

"You are very generous, sir. I assure you, I have no memory at all. Can I help you with your friend?"

"I've got him. Just hold the door."

"Certainly. And sir?" I turned. "My card. Call me anytime, any hour, day or night. Anytime, sir!"

The doctor was a spare, trim gentleman with perfect posture. His hair and mustache were white but his eyebrows were still dark. He came out of the bedroom carrying his disposable Pliofilm gloves and some other sickroom debris, and Elaine pointed him to a wastebasket.

"Wait now," he said, and fished around in the basket. He straightened up, holding a chunk of lead between his thumb and forefinger. "The young man may want this," he said. "For a souvenir."

Elaine took it, weighed it on her palm. "It's not very big," she said.

"No, and he can be grateful for that. A larger bullet would have done more damage. If you're going to get shot, always go for small caliber and low muzzle velocity. A BB from an air rifle would be best, but they always seem to find their way into children's eyes."

Elaine had known whom to call, as I'd guessed she would. What we needed was a doctor who wouldn't insist on moving TJ to a hospital, a doctor prepared to ignore the regulation requiring him to report all gunshot wounds to the authorities. I knew that Mick had a tame physician, if he was still alive since he patched up Tom Heaney a few years back, and if a few more years on the booze had left him with hands still capable of keeping a grip on his forceps and scalpel. But Mick's doctor was upstate. I needed somebody here in the city.

Elaine had called Dr. Jerome Froelich, who I gathered had performed more than his share of abortions in the pre-Roe v. Wade days, even as he'd written more than his share of morphine and Dexedrine prescriptions. It was around two in the morning when she called him, and he grumbled but he came.

She asked him how bad it was.

"He's resting comfortably," he said. "I sedated him and dressed the wound. He probably ought to be in a hospital. On the other hand, maybe he's lucky he's not. He's lost some blood, and they'd most likely give him a unit or two of whole blood, and you know what? If it was me, I'd just as soon not have some stranger's blood dripping into my veins, thank you just the same."

"Because of HIV?"

"Because of any number of goddamn things, including ones they can't test for because nobody knows what they are. I just don't have a lot of faith in the blood supply these days. Sometimes you've got no choice, but if all you are is down a pint or so, I'd rather give the body a chance to make its own. You know what I want you to do?"

"What?"

"Go out and get a juicer. Then- "

"We've already got one," she told him.

"I'm not talking about citrus, I mean a vegetable juicer. You got one of those?"

"Yes."

"Well, good for you," he said.

"We don't use it much, but- "

"You should. Things are worth their weight in gold. What you do, buy beets and carrots. Organically grown's best, but if you haven't got a source- "

"I know where I can get them."

"Beet juice is a blood builder, but don't give it to him straight. Mix it half and half with carrot, and prepare it fresh each time before you give it to him. It's not as quick as a transfusion, but nobody ever got hepatitis from it."

"I knew beet juice was supposed to be a blood builder," she said, "but I don't know if I would have thought of it. And I never expected to hear it recommended by a doctor."

"Most doctors never heard of it, and wouldn't want to hear of it. But I'm not like most doctors, my dear."

"No, you're not."

"Most doctors don't take care of themselves the way I do. Most doctors don't look or feel this good at my age. I'm seventy-eight. Assure me I don't look it."

"You know you don't."

"You should see me after I've had an uninterrupted night's sleep. I'm even more gorgeous then. I'm expensive, though, day or night. This is going to cost you two thousand dollars."

"All right."

"Look at her, she doesn't bat an eye. It's a ridiculous price, but here's something even more ridiculous. If you'd taken the young fellow to a hospital it would have wound up costing you that and more by the time you got out of there."

I didn't have to hunt for the money. I'd taken it along in case I had to show it to Purvis, and now I counted it out and handed it to Dr. Froelich.

"Thank you," he said. "I won't give you a receipt, and neither will I report it, to the police or to the IRS. The price includes aftercare, incidentally. I'll drop around sometime late afternoon to check on him and change the dressing. Check his temperature every couple of hours, give him aspirin when he needs it for pain, and call me if his fever spikes. If it does, but I don't think it will. And don't forget the beet juice. Beet and carrot, equal parts, all you can get into him. It's good to see you, Elaine. I've often thought of you, wondered what became of you. You're as beautiful as ever."

"More," I said.

He cocked his head, looked at her. "You know," he said, "I believe you're right."

"I don't know," I said after he'd left. "Maybe I should have taken him straight to a hospital."

"You heard what Jerry said. He's probably better off here, and drinking beet juice instead of getting a transfusion."

"That's good to know," I said. "But the thing is I didn't know it at the time. I could see the bleeding wasn't too severe, and I didn't think he was in any immediate danger. If a doctor looked at him and saw that hospitalization was necessary, there'd be time to get him to an ER then."

"That makes sense."

"Gunshot wounds have to be reported," I said, "and I didn't want that. He's a young black male without a police record, and that's the sort of distinction you don't want to give up for no good reason."

"I know he'll be glad he wasn't hospitalized."

"I was probably thinking of myself as well. The slug Froelich took out of him may make a nice souvenir, but if they'd dug it out at Bellevue or Roosevelt or Brooklyn Jewish they wouldn't have let him keep it. They'd have turned it over to the cops, and a ballistics check might show an interesting matchup."

"With the bullets that killed Jim Faber?"

"No, because he left the gun at the scene. But with a gun found in an apartment in Brooklyn, along with a dead body with a couple of other bullets in it. Bullets from a.38 revolver, and that reminds me. I'm going to have to get rid of this gun."

"Because it leads straight to the dead man in Brooklyn. You want me to take it out and drop it down a storm drain?"

"Not until I find a replacement for it. I thought about leaving it at the scene and taking his gun, but what do I want with a dinky little.22?"

"Mah man wants a man's gun," she drawled. "I'll tell you one thing you can get rid of right now, and that's the shirt you're wearing. It's got bullet holes in it. Well, not holes, because the bullets didn't go through, but bullet marks. How about the jacket? No, he missed that, but it's got bloodstains, and so do your slacks. Why don't you take a shower while I run all your clothes through the washing machine? Or is it a waste of time? I can get the stains out, but are there still traces that show up in a test?"

"There may be," I said, "but if the stains are invisible to the naked eye I'd say that's enough. If we get to the point where they do spectroscopic tests on everything in my closet, it won't matter what they find. TJ left some blood on the floor at Tapscott Street, and they can tie him to it with a DNA match, so I'm not going to worry about blood traces that nobody can see."

I took a shower, then put on clean clothes and had a look at TJ. He was sleeping soundly and his color looked better. I put a hand on his forehead. It felt warm, but not dangerously so.

In the living room, Elaine told me I shouldn't have bothered getting dressed. "Because you have to sleep," she said. "You can catch a few hours on the couch. I'll sit up with him, and then you can take over when the stores are open, and I'll go buy beets and carrots. I almost fell over when Jerry started telling me about beet juice." She took a moment, then said, "He performed one of my abortions, but before that he was a client."

"I wasn't going to ask."

"I know, but why should you have to wonder? Speaking of having to wonder, do you think he's dead? The man in Brooklyn?"

"He was well on his way when I left. I'd say he's probably dead by now."

"Unless someone phoned for an ambulance."

"That seems unlikely. Even if they did, my guess is he'd be dead at the scene or DOA at the hospital."

"Does it bother you?"

"That he's dead?"

"And that you didn't try to save him."

"No," I said. "I don't think so. He killed Jim, you know."

"I know."

"You'd think that would have filled me with rage when I stood there in front of him, but it didn't. He was just a problem to solve. He had some information I wanted. Or at least I thought he did at the time. It turned out he didn't know anything. He identified one sketch and got my hopes up, but then I showed him one Ray and I did as an exercise, someone completely out of the frame, and he ID'd him, too. I could have shown him a picture of the Dalai Lama and he'd have sworn that was the guy who set me up."

"He just wanted to get to the hospital."

"That's it. But the point is I didn't walk in with vengeance in mind. I fully intended to stiff him on the two grand, but I wasn't planning to shoot him. If he hadn't started firing, my gun would never have left the holster."

"But he did."

"But he did, and I shot the son of a bitch, and then he expected me to get him patched up. Well, the hell with that. I don't think I could have if I'd wanted to, but why even make the effort? I hadn't been willing to kill him, but I was willing to let him die."

"He had it coming."

"You could probably say that about most people. Still, the guy's a poster child for the death penalty. He struck me as a pretty pure sociopath. He'd kill anybody, just so you paid him. God knows how many people he killed in his life, and Jim wouldn't have been the last. He wouldn't even have been the last this week if I hadn't been wearing the vest."

"I was thinking that," she said, "but I decided I'm not going to allow myself any thoughts that start with if. There are too many of them and they're too upsetting. You're alive, thank God, and TJ's alive. That's enough for now."

I got a few hours on the couch. They were fitful, with a lot of dreams that dispersed like smoke when I opened my eyes. TJ was alone in the bedroom, his features relaxed in sleep. For a moment he looked about twelve years old.

Elaine was in the kitchen watching the news. "Nothing about a dead man in Brownsville," she said.

"There wouldn't be. A black man dead of gunshot wounds in an abandoned building? Not the kind of item that makes a news director holler for a film crew."

"They'll investigate it, though."

"The police? Of course they will. You get any kind of a homicide, you try to clear it. This one's easy to read. Dead man on the floor, shot twice in the chest with a.38. Another gun nearby, a.22, recently fired, and several slugs from it there in the apartment."

"Oh?"

"The two that the Kevlar vest stopped, plus one that missed both of us. They can dig it out of the wall if they want to take the trouble. Blood- the dead man's, and another person's, presumably the shooter."

"But we know better."

"And a blood trail, I'd have to assume, leading out the door and down the stairs. Scenario's got to be that two men had an argument, probably over drugs or women- "

"Because what else do grown men argue about."

"- and they shot each other, and the survivor decided not to stick around. It's certainly the kind of case you try to clear, but you don't knock yourself out. You wait until somebody says, 'Listen, what for you want to hassle me about ten dime bags of product when I'm the man can give you the dude shot that Cayman dude over on Tapscott Street?' And you make your deal and pick up your perp."

"Cayman? Purvis was from the Cayman Islands?"

"Just a guess. He was wearing a Georgetown University sweatshirt."

"So? That's in DC."

"Keep going."

"Georgetown is the capital of the Caymans," she said, after some thought. "So if that's where you're from, a Georgetown University sweatshirt would be a hip thing to wear."

"Stands to reason."

"Of course it's also the capital of Guyana."

"It is?"

"Uh-huh. So maybe he's Guyanese."

"Maybe," I said. "Then again, maybe he stole the shirt."

"I used to like the Caymans," she said, "back when a suntan was considered sexy, instead of precancerous. He's been sleeping pretty soundly. He woke up one time when I was taking his temperature and I got him to drink some water, and then he went right back to sleep. He's running a slight fever, a little over a degree."

"I think that's to be expected."

"Yes, I'd say so. One of us has to go buy beets and carrots."

I said I'd go. The place she sent me was on Ninth Avenue near Forty-fourth. It was an oversized health food store with a big produce section and no end of herbs and vitamins. There was probably something on the shelves that would have him healed overnight without even a scar, but I didn't have a clue what it was or where to look for it. I bought enough beets and carrots to fill two shopping bags and took a cab home.

She had the juicer set up by the time I got there, and I watched as she washed beets and carrots and cut them up and ran them through the thing. The result may have been half carrot but all you could see was the beet, dark and purplish as blood from a vein.

She went into the bedroom with a big glass of the stuff and I tagged along to see how much of a fight he put up. "This is beet juice," she said, "mixed with carrot. The doctor said you have to drink it to replace the blood you lost."

He looked at her. "Like a transfusion?"

"But without the needles and tubes."

"Doc said so? Same one as was here before?" She said yes, and he took the glass from her and drank it off in two swallows. "It ain't bad," he said, sounding surprised. "Kind of sweet. What you say it was? Beet and carrot?"

"That's right. Could you drink some more?"

"I believe I could," he said. "Got a powerful thirst."

While she prepared it I helped him to the bathroom, then back to bed. He couldn't believe how weak he was, or how much the few steps to the john and back exhausted him. "It's just a flesh wound," he said. "Ain't that what they say? Then they up and runnin' like nothin' ever happened."

"That's in the movies."

"Anyway," he said, "they all flesh wounds, 'cause that's what folks is made out of. Wha'd the doe give me, you happen to know? A. person could do okay sellin' it on the street."

"Don't tell the doc," I said. "He might try it."

We nursed him through the day. Elaine napped on the couch and I took a turn watching him sleep and talking with him when he was awake. His fever rose during the afternoon, and when it hit 102° Elaine called Froelich. He said he'd be over in two hours, but to call him again if it reached 104° before then. But it broke, and when the doctor arrived and took his temperature it was normal.

Froelich changed the dressing, said the wound was healing nicely, and told TJ he should consider himself lucky. "If it had hit the artery," he said, "you could have bled out. If it hit the bone, you could be laid up for a month."

"If it missed me completely," TJ said, "I could be out playin' basketball."

"You're too short," Froelich told him. "These days they're all giants. Keep doing what you've been doing, and stay with the beet juice. Incidentally, it'll color your urine."

"Yeah, well, I found that out. Thought I was bleedin' to death, Beth, and then it came to me where I seen that color before. I'd been drinkin' it by the quart."

He dozed off after the doctor left, and I wound up taking an unpremeditated nap of my own in front of the TV set. When I woke up Elaine reported that he was starting to complain a little, and she took it for a sign of recovery. "He says if he was in his own place, meaning across the street, he could check his e-mail and keep up with some message boards, whatever they are."

"It's a computer thing," I said. "You wouldn't understand."

We spent a quiet evening at home. TJ had an appetite, and finished a second portion of the lasagna. He also had the idea he could get to and from the bathroom on his own, and asked if Elaine still had the cane she'd used in the spring when she sprained her ankle. She found it and he took a couple of hesitant steps with it and saw it wasn't going to work. His wound was too raw for him to put any weight at all on that leg.

The phone rang intermittently. We let the machine pick up, and half the time the caller rang off without leaving a message. Maybe it was some phone sales rep who wanted to talk us into switching long-distance carriers, or maybe it was someone reluctant to issue death threats to an answering machine. I didn't waste a lot of time worrying about it.

Then right around midnight it rang, and after the recorded message and the tone there was a pause that seemed eternal, but was probably only five or six seconds. Then a voice I knew said, "Ah, 'tis I. Are you there then?"

I picked up and talked to him, put down the receiver and found Elaine. "It's Mick," I said. "He's in his car, driving around. He wants to come by and pick me up."

"Did you tell him yes?"

"I haven't told him anything yet."

"TJ's much better," she said. "I can manage here. And it's not over yet, is it? TJ was shot, and the man who shot Jim is dead, but it's not over till it's over. Isn't that what they say?"

"That's what they say. And no, it's not over."

"Then you'd better go," she said.

I waited in the lobby and watched the street while the midnight-to-eight doorman shared his views on global warming. I can't remember the thread of his argument, but he saw it as a direct result of the collapse of world communism.

Then Andy Buckley's battered Caprice pulled up at the curb, and started rolling again as soon as I was inside it. The night was clear and cool and I caught a glimpse of the moon. It was gibbous, and just about the same shape as it had been the night we dug the grave. It had been waxing then and now it was on the wane.

"Andy was trying to reach you," I remembered to tell him. "He wanted your number, but I let him think I didn't have it."

"When was this?"

"Yesterday, early evening. Have you talked to him since?"

"Yesterday and today as well. He had the Cadillac and wanted to trade cars."

"So he said."

"I told him he had the better of the deal, but he was afraid to park the thing for fear some harm would come to it. Least of my worries, I said, but he would have none of it. He put it back in the garage and now he's driving some old wreck of his cousin's."

"That's what he said he was going to do."

We'd turned on Broadway and were heading downtown. "Now where'll we go?" he wondered. "Just so we're going somewhere and doing something. It's the inactivity drives a man mad. Knowing the other side is up to something, whoever they are, and not knowing what, and doing not a thing about it. I sat up all last night with a bottle and a glass. I don't mind drinking and I don't mind drinking alone, but I wasn't doing it for the pleasure of it. It was out of boredom, and that class of drinking is deadening to the soul."

"I know what you mean."

"You did some of the same in your day, did you? And lived to tell the tale. What luck have you had with the detecting? Are we any closer to knowing what we're up against?"

"We know more than we did," I said. "TJ found out a few things about the Vietnamese who shot up the bar, and we've got a line out for something on his partner."

"The bomb thrower, that would be."

"That's right. And I've got a sketch of one of the two men who mugged me."

"They were the ones mugged, by the time it was over."

I let that go. "I've got a sketch," I said, "but so far no one's recognized it. There were a lot of things I might have done today, but I had to spend it at home taking care of TJ."

"Why, for the love of God? Hasn't he managed for years taking care of himself?"

"Oh, of course, we haven't talked since then. How could you know?"

"How could I know what?"

"He was shot last night," I said.

"Fucking Jesus," he said, and hit the brake pedal. A car behind us braked hard, and the driver leaned on his horn. "Aaah, fuck yourself," Mick told him, and demanded to know what had happened.

I told him the whole story. I broke it off when we got to McGinley amp; Caldecott, resumed the narration after we'd stowed the car in its parking space and made our way down the stairs and through the narrow aisle to the office. He poured himself a drink, and from a table-model refrigerator he produced a can of Perrier.

"They didn't have bottles," he said. "Only the cans. It should be all right, don't you think?"

"I'm sure it'll be fine. I've been known to drink tap water in a pinch, as far as that goes."

"Nasty stuff," he said. "You don't know where it's been. Get on with it, man. You left him for dead, the black bastard?"

"He was on his way out. He couldn't have lasted long. It was black comedy, now that I think about it. The two of us stood there snarling 'fuck you' at each other. I can't swear to it, but I think those were his last words."

"I wouldn't doubt they're the last words of more than a few of us."

I told him how TJ'd been shot, and how I got him home. "I put a gun to the cabdriver's head," I said, "and at the end of the ride he gave me his card and said to call him anytime, any hour of the day or night. I love New York."

"There's no place can touch it for people."

When I was finished he sat back in his chair and looked at the drink in his hand. "It must have gone hard when you turned to the boy and saw he'd been shot."

"It was strange," I said. "I'd just been shot twice myself and watched the bullets bounce off. And I'd shot back and my bullets didn't bounce off, and I felt as though I was in charge of the world. Then I turned around and the bottom fell out, because while I'd been feeling like the master of the universe TJ's blood was oozing out between his fingers, and I didn't even know what was going on."

"He's a son to you, isn't he?"

"Is he? I don't know. I've already got sons, two of them. I wasn't around much when they were growing up and I don't see much of them now. Michael's out in California and Andy's in a different place every time I hear from him. I don't know that I've installed TJ in their place, but I suppose he's a sort of surrogate son. To Elaine, certainly. She mothers him, and he doesn't seem to mind."

"Why should he?"

"I don't know that I act like a father to him. More like a crusty old uncle. Our relationship's fairly ritualized. We joke around a lot, trade good-natured insults."

"He loves you."

"I suppose he does."

"And you love him."

"I suppose I do."

"I never had a son. There was a time I got a girl in trouble and she went off and had the baby and put it up for adoption. I never heard if it was a boy or girl she had. I never cared." He drank some whiskey. "I was young. What did I care about children? I wanted only to be left alone, and she went off and had the child and gave it away, and I heard no more about it. Which was as much as I cared to hear."

"It was probably best for the child."

"Oh, of course it was, and for the girl, and for myself as well. But every now and then I'll find myself wondering. Not what might have been, but just wondering how the wee one turned out, and what sort of a life it had. Night thoughts, you know. Nobody has such thoughts in the light of day."

"You're right about that."

"For all I know for certain," he said, "it may not have been my child at all. She was an aisy sort of a girl, if you know the word."

"Same as easy?"

"I'd say it's the same word, but there's a softer sense to it when you say it the Irish way. An aisy girl. She swore it was me put her in the club, but how could she be sure? And how could I?" He looked at my can of Perrier and asked me if I wanted a glass for it. "You can't drink water straight out of a can," he said, and found a clean tumbler in a cupboard, and poured the water into it for me, and assured me it was better that way.

"Thanks," I said.

"Years later," he said, "there was another one I got in the family way, and I never heard about it until she told me she'd got rid of it. Had an abortion, you know. Jesus, that's a sin, I told her. I don't believe that, says she, and if it is then the sin's on me. Why didn't you tell me, says I. Mickey, says she, to what end? You weren't about to marry me. Well, she was right about that. You'd only have tried to talk me out of it, says she, and I'd already made up my mind. Then why tell me at all, says I. Well, says she, I thought you'd want to know. I'll tell you, man, women are the strangest creatures God ever put on the earth."

"Amen," I said.

"There's a saying, or mayhaps it's the words of a song. It holds there are three things a man must do in the course of a lifetime. Plant a tree, marry a woman, and father a son. Well, I've planted trees. In the orchard, and then I put in a great windbreak of hemlock, and I planted horse chestnut trees along the drive. I don't know how many trees I've planted, but I'd call it a fair number." He lowered his eyes. "I never found a woman I cared to marry. And never fathered a child. Even if it was my baby she had, it takes more than that to make a true father of a man. So I'll have to be content with my trees."

"Then again, your life's not over yet."

"No," he said. "Not yet."

A little later he said, "You killed the man who killed your friend. Good for you."

"I don't know if it was good for me. It was better for me than it was for him, I'll say that much."

"I wouldn't have left him breathing, myself. Even if it was his last breaths he was taking. I'd have put one more bullet into him to make sure."

"It never occurred to me. I wasn't planning on killing him."

"How could you not? He killed your friend."

"Well, I've killed him now, and Jim's still dead. So what difference did it make?"

"It made a difference."

"I wonder."

"What the hell were you going to do? Pay him two thousand dollars and shake his bloody hand?"

"I wasn't going to shake hands with him. And I wasn't going to pay him the money. I was going to stiff him."

"And then turn your back on him and walk out the door? How did you expect him to take it?"

I was silent for a moment, thinking long thoughts. Then I said, "You know, maybe I set it up, and set myself up in the bargain. I didn't consciously intend to kill him. When I walked in there and saw him I couldn't even manage to hate him. It'd be like hating a scorpion for stinging you. It's what they do, so what else can you expect from him?"

"Still, you'd grind that scorpion under your heel."

"Maybe it's not a good analogy. Or maybe it is, I don't know. But I wonder if I knew all along that I was going to kill him, and if I stage-managed things to give myself an excuse. Once he drew on me, I had permission. I wasn't murdering him, I wasn't executing him. It was self-defense."

"And it was."

"Not if I made him draw."

"You didn't make him draw, for Jesus' sake! You offered him money."

"I told him I had the money on me, and I let him know I was the man he was supposed to kill. Isn't that baiting the trap? If I wanted to keep him from drawing on me, all I had to do was walk in there with a gun in my hand. I had every chance in the world to get the drop on him and I didn't take it."

"You didn't expect him to try anything."

"But I should have. What else could he be expected to do? And the fact of the matter is I did expect it. I must have, because I was already reaching for my gun by the time he came up with his. Somehow or other I anticipated his response or I could never have responded so quickly myself. He opened fire, and that was my excuse, and I gunned him down."

"I hear what you're saying."

"And?"

"And whoever knows the reasons why we do what we do? I'll say this much. If you blame yourself for killing the bastard, you're off your head."

"I blame myself for getting TJ shot."

"Ah, I never took that into account. Still, who's to say it's not for the best?" I looked at him, puzzled. "What the soldiers call a million-dollar wound," he explained. "For he's out of it now, isn't he? And should live to tell the tale."

A little later he said, "'Twas the vest saved you, was it?"

"The shirt I was wearing was ruined," I said. "But the vest stopped both rounds."

"They say it won't stop a knife thrust."

"So I understand. It's a kind of fabric, and evidently a knife blade can pierce it. I suppose the same thing would be true of an ice pick."

"Is it heavy? Like wearing a coat of mail?"

"It's not featherweight." I unbuttoned my shirt and let him examine the vest, then buttoned it up again. "It's an extra layer," I said, "and might be welcome on a cold day. On a warm day, you're tempted to leave it at home."

"It's a great thing, science. They make a vest that can stop a bullet, and next they make a bullet that can pierce a vest. It's the same as armies are forever doing, but on a more personal level. A good thing you were wearing one last night."

"Do you want one? Because they're easy enough to buy, and nobody has to teach you how to use it. You just put it on."

"Where would you get one?"

"The cop shops have them. I went downtown, but there's one on Second Avenue near the academy, and others in the other boroughs. What's the matter?"

"I'm just seeing myself walking into a cop shop. They'd never let me walk out again."

"I'd pick one up for you, if you want."

"Would they ever have my size?"

"I'm sure they would."

He thought about it, then let out a sigh. "I wouldn't wear it," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because I never would. Because I'm a fool, I suppose, but it's the way I am. I'd have it in mind that I was trying to get the best of the Lord, and that He'd show me who's boss by making sure I got shot in the head, or done with a knife or an ice pick."

"Like Achilles."

"Just so. The heel was the only vulnerable part of him. And so he was shot in the heel, and died of it."

"That's superstition though, isn't it?"

"Didn't I say I was a fool? And a superstitious one in the bargain. Ah, there's differences between us, man. When you get in a car you always fasten your seat belt."

"And a good thing, too, when you stop short the way you did tonight."

"Didn't you give me a turn, though, saying the boy was shot? But the point is that you always wear a seat belt and I never do. I can't bear the feeling of being confined that way."

"A vest wouldn't confine you any more than a shirt does. It would just keep bullets out."

"I'm not explaining it well."

"No, I guess I understand."

"I just don't want to do what I should," he said. "I'm a contrary bastard. That's all."

"There's just the four of us," he said. "Tom and Andy and yourself and myself."

"Don't you have anybody else?"

"I've people who work for me, or do the odd job. They'll head for the hills now there's a war on, and why shouldn't they? They're not soldiers at all, they're what you could call civilian employees. So that's four of us, and who knows how many there are of them?"

"Fewer than there used to be."

"We each did for one, didn't we? Though the one you shot was hired help, and the same could be true of the Vietnamese. Wasn't he the murderous little bastard?" He shook his head. "I wonder how many that leaves. More than four, I'd guess."

"You're probably right."

"So we're outnumbered, and outgunned as well if that automatic rifle of his is anything to go by."

"Except you took it, didn't you? So it's ours now."

"And small use to us, with the clip close to empty. I should have seen if he had a spare in his pocket. Although as I recall we were in a bit of a hurry."

"You saved my life that night."

"Ah, go on with you."

"Just stating a fact."

"What did we say when we were kids? 'I saved your life the other day, I killed a shit-eating dog.' I'm glad childhood comes early in life because I'd hate to go through it now. Tell me something. What did you think of that movie?"

"To change the subject."

"It could do with changing. Did you care for it?"

"What movie was that?"

"Michael Collins. Didn't you tell me you rented the video?"

"I thought it was good."

"Did you? It was all true, you know."

"I was wondering about that."

"They took the odd liberty. The scene in Croke Park, when the British rake the crowd with gunfire? In fact they used a machine gun, not the revolving gun in the armored car. It was an image sticks in your mind, the way they did it, but what happened was terrible enough."

"It's hard to believe it happened at all."

"Oh, it happened well enough. The other thing they did, they had his friend Harry Boland die in the fighting at the Four Courts. Collins's friend, he dives into the Liffey and a soldier shoots him?"

"I remember."

"'Twas years later he died, long after Collins was buried. He lived to be a minister in Dev's government. He was a sanctimonious bastard, Dev. Your man who played him had him just right. Even looked like him." He took a drink. "He was the best of them. Collins, I mean. He was a fucking genius."

"When he wiped out the British agents," I said. "Was that part accurate? Killing them all the same day?"

"That was the genius of it! He had his spy in Dublin Castle, yes, but then he gathered his information and bided his time. And killed all of the flickers of a Sunday morning. It was over before they knew it had begun." He shook his head. "Listen to me, will you? You'd think I knew him. He was dead and in his grave fifteen years before I was born. But I've studied him, you know. I've heard the old men's stories and I've read books. You start off with a lot of heroes, you know, and then you learn a bit about them and they're heroes no more. But I've never ceased to admire Collins. I wish… no, you'll think it too queer."

"What?"

"I wish I could have been him."

"Elaine's answer to that would be that maybe you were."

"In a past life, do you mean? Ah, it makes a nice story, but it's hard to believe in it, isn't it now?"

"This from a man who has no trouble with transubstantiation?"

"But that's different," he protested. "If the nuns had drilled reincarnation into my head I'd believe that, too." He looked away. "'Twould be pleasant to believe I was the Big Fella once. But what a fucking comedown for himself, eh? To be Michael Collins in one lifetime, and to come back as Mick Ballou."

He said, "We were talking of guns before. Are you still carrying the same one?"

I nodded. He held out a hand and I gave it to him. He turned it over in his hand, lowered his head and sniffed it.

"Cleaned it since you fired it," he said.

"Yes, and reloaded it. At least the cop who takes it off me won't know it's been fired recently. But I ought to get rid of it altogether."

"Ballistics."

"Yes. They wouldn't make the match unless they looked for it, but they might look for it. I'd have tossed it by now but I didn't want to walk around unarmed."

"No, you can't do that. But I can help you out." He opened the satchel he'd brought from Grogan's, pulled out guns and set them on the desk. "These automatics are good," he said. "Or are you partial to revolvers?"

"That's what I'm used to. And don't automatics tend to jam?"

"So they say, but I've never had it happen to me. Either of these would give you more firepower than what you've been carrying."

"I don't know if they'd fit in the holster." I tried one, and it didn't. I put it back and picked up a revolver not unlike the one I'd been using. It was another Smith, but chambered for magnum loads. I tried it in the holster and it was a perfect fit.

"I've no extra rounds for it," he said. "There'd be a box in the safe, and there they'll stay. Have you had a look at the old place?"

"The bar, you mean? Only on television."

"I drove past it. Sad to see it like that." He shook off the memory. "I ought to be able to get hold of some shells to fit this thing."

"I'll buy a box tomorrow."

"Jesus, that's right. You've a permit, they'll sell you whatever you want."

"Well, they won't sell me a bazooka."

"I wish they would. I'd buy one, if I knew where to point it. It's hard to fight what you can't see. Take this, in the meantime."

He handed me a little nickel-plated automatic that lay in the palm of his hand like a toy.

"Here," he said. "Put it in your pocket, it weighs next to nothing. There's only the clip that's in it, but it's not the sort of thing you'd be likely to reload."

"Where did you get it?"

"I took it away from a man years ago, and I can tell you he'll have no further use for it. Go ahead, put it in your pocket."

"Two-Gun Scudder," I said.

It was like one of our long nights at Grogan's, with the door locked and only the two of us left. There were people dead and the world going to hell around us, but for all that it was an easy night, or even an aisy one. The conversation flowed, and when it ran out from time to time there would be a long silence.

"When you die," he said thoughtfully, "'tis said you see your whole life. But you don't see it minute by minute, like a speeded-up film. It's like everything you ever did in all your days was a brushstroke, and now you see the whole painting all at once."

"It's hard to imagine."

"It is. What a picture that would be! 'Twould be worse than the dying, to have to look at it."

There was something I'd forgotten. I was wondering what it was and thinking I ought to get on home when Mick said, "So he was no help at all to you."

"Who are we talking about?"

"The man you left for dead. Did you ever tell me his name? I can't recall."

"Chilton Purvis."

"Ah, you told me. I remember now. He had nothing to tell you?"

"They never told him a name, or gave him a number to call."

"Or if they did he wouldn't tell it."

"He'd have told me anything at that point," I said. "All he cared about was getting to the hospital. When I showed him the sketch, he ID'd the thing before I got it unfolded. He'd have sworn that was the guy who shot JFK if he thought that's what I wanted."

"You mentioned a sketch," he said. "Just before you told me that the boy was shot."

"Which was right around the time you stood up on the brake pedal and gave the guy behind us a heart attack."

"Aaah, he should learn how to fucking drive. But this sketch. You never said your man in Brooklyn saw it."

"I don't know that he really saw it. 'Yes, mon, that's him'- but he barely looked at it. I showed him another sketch by the same artist, someone he couldn't possibly have seen, and yes, mon, that was him, too. Which one, I asked him. Both of them, he said. And anyone else I wanted to throw in the hopper, just so I hauled his ass to the ER."

"He's looked at another picture now," he said. "His whole life laid out before him. He'll identify that straight enough. Do you have that sketch on you?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake."

"No harm if you don't. Next time'll do."

"I've got it," I said, "and I meant to show it to you hours ago. He's hired help, but my guess is he's a lot closer to the top man than Chilton Purvis or the Vietnamese. Maybe you'll know him."

I got out my wallet, found the sketch of the man who'd hit me, showed it to him. It was well drawn, he observed. You got a real sense of the man. But it was no one he recognized.

"Now the other one," he said.

"It's just a face," I said. "Somebody I thought I recognized, but couldn't place. I couldn't get the face out of my mind, so my artist friend drew it."

He took the sketch and the color drained from his face. He looked at me and his green eyes were fierce. "Is this a joke?" he demanded. "Is this a fucking joke?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You've seen this man, have you?"

"At Grogan's, the night we buried Kenny and McCartney. I just had a quick glimpse of him but he's got a memorable face."

"Indeed he does. I'll never forget it."

"You know him?"

He ignored the question. "And you recognized him."

"He looked familiar to me but I couldn't place him. TJ says he thinks he's seen him around the neighborhood."

"And is that where you've seen him? Around the neighborhood?"

"I don't know. I almost think…"

"Aye?"

"That it's a face from the past. That I saw it years and years ago, if I ever saw it at all."

"Years and years."

"But who is he? You know him, obviously, but I never saw you react like that. It's almost as if…"

"As if I'd seen a ghost." He stuck out his finger, touched the sketch. "And what do you think that is? What's that if it's not a ghost?"

"You've lost me."

"I've lost it all," he said, "for how am I to contend with a ghost? What chance have I against a man who's thirty years dead?"

"Thirty years?"

"Thirty years and more." He took the sheet of paper in both hands, brought it closer, held it at arm's length. "Just the head," he said. "All you'd put in a drawing, isn't it? And it's how I saw him last, and how I see him in my mind. Just the head."

He threw down the sketch, turned to me. "Don't you see it, man? It's Paddy Fucking Farrelly."

"How old was he, this man you saw?"

"I don't know. Somewhere in his thirties."

"That was Farrelly's age when he died. I killed him, you know."

"That's what I always understood."

"By God, I have to say he had it coming. He was a bad bastard, that one. I had my troubles with him in school days. A few years older than myself, and a bully he was, a terrible bully. That ended when I got my size and gave as good as I got. He didn't care for that, the dirty bastard.

"'Tis a vast city, New York, but the old Kitchen's not so big, and the pool we swam in wasn't large at all. We were forever in each other's way, forever coming head to head with each other, and everybody knew how it had to end. By God, I thought, if someone's after getting killed it needn't be myself, and I laid for the bastard, and I did for him.

"You've heard the stories, and there's a mix of the true and the false in them. This much is true: I took his great ugly head off his shoulders. Do that, I thought, and your troubles with a man are at an end, for the best doctors in the world won't sew him together again.

"I never thought to run a stake through his heart."

"Let's figure this out," I said.

"It's a mystery," he said. "If you'd been brought up in the Church you'd know that mysteries can't be figured out. They can only be contemplated."

We were in an all-night diner he knew in Queens, way the hell out in Howard Beach not far from JFK. He'd wanted to get away from McGinley amp; Caldecott, as if Paddy Farrelly's ghost had itself taken up residence there. I don't know how he managed to find the diner, or how he knew of it to begin with, but I figured we were safe there. The place was as remote as Montana.

For a man who'd just seen a ghost he had a good appetite. He put away a big plate of bacon and eggs and home fries. I had the same, and it was good. I could probably be a vegetarian like Elaine, but only if bacon was declared a vegetable.

"A mystery," I said. "Well, I didn't have the advantage of a Catholic education. I think of a mystery as something to be solved. Can we agree that it's not a ghost I saw?"

"Then it's a resurrection," he said, "and Paddy's an odd candidate for it."

"I think it would have to be his son."

"He never married."

"Did he like the ladies?"

"Too well," he said. "He'd have his way with them if they liked it or not."

"Rape, you mean?"

"Words change their meaning," he said. "Over time. When we were young it was scarcely rape if they knew each other. Unless it was a grown man with a child, or someone forcing himself upon a married woman. But if a girl was out with a man, well, what did she think she was getting into?"

"Now they call it date rape."

"They do," he said, "and quite right. Well, if a girl was with Paddy, she ought to know what she was in for. There was one was going to press charges, but Paddy talked to her brother and her brother talked her out of it. No doubt he threatened to kill the whole family, and no doubt the brother believed him."

"Nice fellow."

"If I go to hell," he said, "as I likely will, it won't be his blood on my hands that puts me there. But, you know, there were enough he didn't need to force. Some women are drawn to men like him, and the worse the man the greater the attraction."

"I know."

"Violence draws them. I had some drawn to me that way, but they were never the sort of woman I cared for." He thought about that for a moment. Then he said, "If he had a son, he'd have no love for me."

"When did Paddy die?"

"Ah, Jesus, it's hard to remember. I can't be sure of the year. 'Twas after Kennedy was shot, I remember that much. But not long after. The following year, I'd say."

"1964."

"'Twas in the summer."

"Thirty-three years ago."

"Ah, you've a great head for mathematics."

"That would fit, you know. The man I saw was somewhere in his thirties."

"There was never any talk of Paddy having a son."

"Maybe she kept it quiet, whoever she was."

"And told the boy."

"Told the boy who his father was. And maybe told him who killed him."

"So that he grew up hating me. Well, don't they grow up in Belfast hating the English? And don't the Proddy kids grow up hating the Holy Father? 'Fuck the Queen!' 'Nah, nah, fuck the Pope!' Fuck 'em both, I say, or let 'em fuck each other." He drew out his pocket flask and sweetened his coffee. "They grow into good haters if you teach them early enough. But where the hell has he been all these years? He's spit and image of his father. If I'd ever laid eyes on him I'd have known him in an instant."

"I saw how you reacted to the sketch."

"I knew him at a glance, and I'd have known him as quick in the flesh. Anyone who knew the father would recognize the son."

"Maybe he grew up outside of the city."

"And nursed his hatred all these years? Why would he leave it so long?"

"I don't know."

"I could imagine him coming for me in his young manhood," he said. "'When boyhood's fire was in my blood'- you know that song?"

"It sounds familiar."

"That's when you'd think he'd have done it, when boyhood's fire was in his blood. But he's well past thirty, he'd have to be, and boyhood's fire is nothing but dying embers. Where the hell's he been?"

"I've some ideas."

"Have you really?"

"A few," I said. "I'll see where I can get with it tomorrow." I looked at my watch. "Well, later today."

"Detective work, is it?"

"Of a sort," I said. "It's a lot like searching a coal mine for a black cat that isn't there. But I can't think what else to do."

I was home and in bed before sunrise, up and showered and shaved before noon. TJ had had a good night, and was sitting up in front of the television set, wearing navy blue chinos and a light blue denim shirt. He'd told Elaine he had clean clothes in his room, but she'd insisted on buying him an outfit at the Gap. "Said she didn't want to invade my privacy," he said, rolling his eyes.

I brought him up to speed and let him have another look at the man I'd come to think of as Paddy Jr., whatever his name might turn out to be. I was hoping there was a computerized shortcut to the task at hand.

"The Kongs could probably do it," he said, "if we knew where they at, an' if they still into that hackin' shit. An' if the records you talkin' about's computerized."

"They're city records," I said, "and they're over thirty years old."

"Be the thing for them to do. Have some people sit down an' input all their files. Be a real space saver, 'cause you can fit a whole filing cabinet on a floppy."

"It sounds like too much to hope for," I said. "But if Vital Statistics has all their old files on computer, I wouldn't even have to hack into their system. There's an easier way."

"Bribery?"

"If you want to be a tightass about it," I said. "I prefer to think of it as going out of your way to be nice to people, and having them be nice in return."

The clerk I found was a motherly woman named Elinor Horvath. She was nice to begin with and got even nicer when I palmed her a couple of bills. If only the records in question had been in computerized files, she could have found them for me in nothing flat. As TJ had explained it to me, all she would have to do was sort each pertinent database by Name of Father. Then you could just shuffle through the F's and see exactly who had been sired by someone named Farrelly.

"All our new records are computerized," she told me, "and we're working our way backward, but it's going very slowly. In fact it's not really going at all, not after the last round of budget cuts. I'm afraid we're not a high-priority division, and the old records aren't high priority for us."

That meant it had to be done the old-fashioned way, and it was going to require more time than Mrs. Horvath could possibly devote to it, no matter how nice a guy I was. The money I gave her got me ensconced in a back room where she brought me file drawers full of birth certificates filed in the City of New York starting January 1, 1957. I couldn't believe he was over forty, not from the glimpse I'd had of him, nor could I imagine he'd been more than seven years old when Paddy got the chop. According to what I knew about the father, by then the son would have had enough neglect or abuse or both to have been spared a passion for revenge.

That gave me my starting date, and I'd decided I'd go all the way to June 30, 1965. The killing of Paddy Farrelly, which Mick recalled as having taken place during the summer, might have occurred as late as the end of September, and the darling boy himself might have been conceived that very day, for all I knew. It all seemed unlikely, but you could say that about the whole enterprise.

It was slow work, and if you sped up out of boredom you ran the risk of missing what you were looking for. The records were in chronological order, and that was the sole organizational scheme. I had to scan each one, looking first at the child's name on the top line, then at the father's name about halfway down. I was looking for Farrelly in either place.

I was fortunate, I suppose, in that it wasn't a common name. Had the putative father been, say, Robert Smith or William Wilson, I'd have had a harder time of it. On the other hand, every time I hit some inapplicable Smith or Wilson I'd have at least had the illusion that I was coming close. I didn't hit any Farrellys, neither father nor child, and that made me question what I was doing.

It was mindless work. A retarded person could have performed it as well as I, and possibly better. My mind tended to wander, it almost had to, and that can lead to a sort of mental snow-blindedness, where you cease to see what you're looking at.

One thing that struck me, wading through this sea of names, was the substantial proportion of children who had different last names from their fathers, or no father listed at all. I wondered what it meant when the mother left the line blank. Was she reluctant to put the man's name down? Or didn't she know which name to choose?

I was close to losing heart, and then Mrs. Horvath turned up with a cup of coffee and a small plate of Nutter Butter cookies, and the next file drawer. She was out the door before I could thank her. I drank the coffee and ate the cookies, and an hour later I found what I was looking for.

The child's name was Gary Allen Dowling, and he'd been born at ten minutes after four in the morning on May 17, 1960, to Elizabeth Ann Dowling, of 1104 Valentine Avenue in the Bronx.

The father's name was Patrick Farrelly. No middle name. Either he didn't have one or she didn't know it.

In myths and fairy tales, just knowing an adversary's name is in itself empowering. Look at Rumpelstiltskin.

So I felt I was getting somewhere when I hit the street with Gary Allen Dowling's birth certificate copied in my notebook, but all I really had was the first clue in a treasure hunt. I was better off than when I started, but I was a long way from home.

I bought a Hagstrom map of the Bronx at a newsstand two blocks from the Municipal Building and studied it at a lunch counter over a cup of coffee, wishing I had a few more of those Nutter Butter cookies to go with it. I found Valentine Avenue, and it was up in the Fordham Road section, and not far from Bainbridge Avenue.

I thought I might be able to save myself a trip, so I invested a quarter in a call to Andy Buckley. His mother answered and said he was out, and I thanked her and hung up without leaving a name. I was annoyed for a minute or two, because now I was stuck with a long subway ride and rush hour was already in its preliminary stages. But suppose he'd been in? I could send him to Valentine Avenue, and he could establish in a few minutes what I was already reasonably certain of- i.e., that Elizabeth Ann Dowling no longer lived there, if in fact she ever had, and neither did her troublesome son. But he wouldn't ask the questions I would ask, wouldn't knock on doors and try to find someone with a long memory and a loose tongue.

The house was still standing, as I thought it probably would be. This wasn't a part of the Bronx that had burned or been abandoned during the sixties and seventies, nor was it one where there'd been a lot of tearing-down and rebuilding. 1107 Valentine turned out to be a narrow six-story apartment house with four apartments to the floor. The names on the mailboxes were mostly Irish, with a few Hispanic. I didn't see Dowling or Farrelly, and would have been astonished if I had.

One of the ground-floor apartments housed the super, a Mrs. Carey. She had short iron-gray hair and clear unflinching blue eyes. 1 could read several things in them and cooperation wasn't one of them.

"I don't want to get off on the wrong foot with you," I said. "So let me start by saying I'm a private investigator. I've got nothing to do with the INS and very little respect for them, and the only tenants of yours I'm interested in lived here thirty-some years ago."

"Before my time," she said, "but not by much. And you're right, INS was my first thought, and as little love as you may have for them I assure you it's more than my own. Who would it be you're asking after?"

"Elizabeth Ann Dowling. And she may have used the name Farrelly."

"Betty Ann Dowling. She was still here when I came. Her and that brat of a boy, but don't ask me his name."

" Gary," I said.

"Was that it? My memory's not what it was, though why I should remember them at all I couldn't say."

"Do you remember when they left?"

"Not offhand. I started here in the spring of 1968. God help us, that's almost thirty years."

I said something about not knowing where the time goes. Wherever it went, she said, it took your whole life with it.

"But I raised a daughter," she said, "on my own after my Joe died. I got the apartment and a little besides for managing this place, and I had the insurance money. And now she's living in a beautiful home in Yonkers and married to a man who makes good money, although I don't like the tone he takes with her. But that's none of my business." She collected herself, looked at me. "And none of yours either, is it? Oh, come on in. You might as well have a cup of tea."

Her apartment was clean and cheery and neat as a pin. No surprise there. Over tea she said, "She was a widow too, to hear her tell it. I held my tongue, but I know she was never married. It's the sort of thing you can tell. And she had these fanciful stories about her husband. How he was with the CIA, and was killed because he was going to reveal the real story of what happened in Dallas. You know, when Kennedy was shot."

"Yes."

"Filling the boy's ears with stories about his father. Now how long was it she was here? Is it important?"

"It could be."

"The Riordans took her apartment when she moved out. No, wait a minute, they did not. There was an older man moved in and died there, poor soul, and you may guess who had the luck to discover the body." She closed her eyes at the memory. "An awful thing, to die alone, but that'll be my lot, won't it? Unless I last long enough to wind up in a home, and God grant that I don't. Mr. Riordan's still upstairs, his wife passed three years ago in January. But he never so much as met Betty Ann."

"When did he move in?"

"Because you'd know she was out by then, wouldn't you?" She thought a moment, then surprised me by saying, "Let's ask him," and snatching up the phone. She looked up the number in a little leather-bound book, dialed, glared in exasperation at the ceiling until he answered, and then spoke loudly and with exaggerated clarity.

"You have to shout at the poor man," she said, "but he hears better on the phone than face to face. He says he and his wife lived here since 1973. Now the old man who died, McMenamin was his name, it's an old Donegal name, if I'm not mistaken. Mr. McMenamin might have been here a year but he wasn't here two. It was vacant between tenants, but it wasn't vacant long either time, flats in this house are never vacant long. So my guess is your Betty Ann and her son left here in 1971. That would mean I had her in my house for three years, and I'd say that would be about right."

"And about enough, I gather."

"And you'd be right. I wasn't sorry to see the back of her, or the boy either."

"Do you know why she left?"

"She didn't offer and I didn't ask. To go with some man would be my guess. Another CIA man, no doubt. She left no forwarding address, and if she had I'd have long since tossed it out." I asked if anyone else in the building was still here from those days. "Janet Higgins," she said without hesitation. "Up in 4-C. But I doubt you'll get anything useful out of her. She barely knows her own name."

She was right. I didn't get anything useful from Janet Higgins, or in the house on either side, or across the street. I could have knocked on a few more doors, but I wasn't going to find Betty Ann Dowling on the other side of them, or her son either. I gave up and went home.

By the time I got home, Dr. Froelich had come and gone, changing TJ's dressing and pronouncing him fit for travel. He'd told him to keep the leg elevated as much as possible. "But not when you're walking," he said, "because it's awkward as hell, and it looks silly. So what's the answer? Stay off the leg. Give it a chance to mend."

Elaine had picked up a second cane, and he used both of them to get across the street to the hotel. I went with him, and sat in the armchair while he got on-line and checked his e-mail. He'd accumulated dozens of messages in the time he'd been gone. Most of them were Spam, he said, bulk e-mailers trying to sell him porn photos or enroll him in unlikely financial ventures. But he had correspondents all over the world as well, people he traded jokes and quips with in a half-dozen different countries.

It didn't take him long to catch up, and then I told him what I knew about Gary Dowling and his mom. The last address I had for them was twenty-five years old, and they could be using Farrelly as a last name.

"That F-A-R-L-E-Y?" I shook my head and spelled it for him, and he made a face. "Leave the Y off an' you got Farrell, rhymes with barrel. Put the Y on an' it's Farrelly, rhymes with Charlie. Don't make no sense."

"Few things do."

"If she got a listed phone, I can find her. Take awhile, is all. There's a site, got all the phone listings by state. You figure New York?"

"I suppose you have to try it first."

There was an Elizabeth Dowling in Syracuse, and a number of E Dowlings, including one in the Bronx. That was far too simple and obvious, of course, and it turned out to be Edward, and he'd never heard of an Elizabeth or a Betty Dowling and didn't sound as though he appreciated my call.

We tried New Jersey next, and then Connecticut. After that we skipped to California and Florida because they're states that people tend to go to. I got quite expert at my part of the program, dialing the numbers from the lists TJ printed out, saying, "Hello, I'm trying to reach an Elizabeth Dowling who resided on Valentine Avenue in the Bronx in the 1960s." It only took a sentence or two to determine that they couldn't help me, and I would get off the line in a hurry and move on to the next listing.

"Good we get to make our toll calls free," TJ said, "or we be runnin' up a powerful tab."

He got way ahead of me- the computer could find Dowlings faster than I could call them- and that gave him a chance to hobble over to the bed and elevate his leg. When I was between calls he said, "Meant to tell you, I phoned that girl this afternoon."

"And which girl would that be?"

"Sweetheart of BTK? Black father, Viet mama? She say she wonderin' why she didn't hear from me."

"So you told her you took a bullet in a shoot-out."

"Told her I had the flu. Vitamin C, she said. Yes, ma'am, I said, an' did you find out about the dude with the face like the moon? Found out his street name is all. You want to take a guess, Bess?"

"Moon," I said.

"Moon. Friend of Goo's from Attica, an' that be all anybody knows about him. Said thanks a lot, an' call me when them pimples clear up."

"You didn't say that."

"Course not." He cocked his head, looked at me. "You sick of makin' phone calls, ain't you? You got somethin' else to do, I can work the phone. I can even elevate my damn leg while I do it."

I left and started walking uptown. I hadn't eaten anything since Mrs. Horvath's Nutter Butter cookies, and I stopped in front of a Chinese restaurant on Broadway, a block or two beyond Lincoln Center. I hadn't eaten Chinese food since my last dinner with Jim ten days ago. I would never be having dinner with him again, and maybe I'd never be in the mood for Chinese, either.

Oh, get over it, a voice said, and it was Jim's voice, but it wasn't a mystical experience, it was my imagination, supplying the response I could expect from him. And he was right, of course. It wasn't the food or the restaurant, it was the guy who walked in with a gun, and he wasn't going to be doing that anymore.

Still, I couldn't eat a Chinese dinner without thinking about Jim. I had hot and sour soup and beef with broccoli, and I remembered how he'd told me he wanted to have that vegetarian eel dish one more time before he died.

The food was all right. Not great, but not terrible, either. I knocked off a pot of tea with the meal, and afterward I ate the orange wedges and cracked open the fortune cookie.

There is travel in your future, it advised me. I paid the check, left a tip, and traveled the rest of the way to Poogan's.

"The guy who hit you was Donnie Scalzo," Danny Boy said. "I thought I was going to come up empty, Matthew, and then one fellow turned up who looked at the picture and knew him in a heartbeat. He's a Brooklyn boy and I guess he never got across the bridge much, but this fellow grew up in Bensonhurst right near Scalzo. I think they got thrown out of the same grammar school."

"I hope it wasn't before they learned to diagram sentences."

"Do they still teach that? I remember my eighth-grade teacher standing at the blackboard drawing lines, taking sentences apart and putting them back together. Here's a subordinate clause angling off this way, and there goes a prepositional something-or-other slanting up toward the ceiling. Did you get that in school?"

"Yes, and I never knew what the hell they were doing."

"Neither did I, but I bet they don't do it anymore. It's another lost art. It would have been useful knowledge for Donnie, because he just recently got out of the joint. His sentence was five-to-ten, and he could have had fun diagramming that. Aggravated assault, so I guess you weren't the first guy he ever took a swing at."

"You don't happen to know where he served it, do you?"

"Tip of my tongue. Upstate, but not Dannemora, not Green Haven. Help me out here."

"Attica?"

"That's it. Attica."

I went home and called TJ. "Attica," he said. "We gettin' a lot of hits on that site. Too late to call, though."

"A call won't really do it," I said. "I think I'll have to go up there and talk to somebody."

"Attica," he said again, rolling the word on his tongue this time, as if looking for a name that rhymed with it. "How you get there, anyway?"

"Easiest thing in the world," I said. "Just hold up a liquor store."

Mick called, wanting to know if I'd heard anything from Tom Heaney, whom he'd been unable to reach. I said I hadn't, but that anybody who'd called would have had to talk to the machine. Tom, I pointed out, barely talked to people. I told him what I'd learned- about Moon, about Donnie Scalzo, and about Gary Allen Dowling.

I made it an early night, and I was at Phyllis Bingham's travel agency at nine on the dot. She was already at her desk. I told her I wanted to go to Buffalo, and while she brought up what she needed on her computer she asked how Elaine was doing on her buying trip. Of course she would have seen the sign in the shop window, it was just up the street, but for a minute I didn't know what she was talking about. I said it was going fine, and she said she could get me on a 10:00 a.m. Continental flight out of Newark, but that wouldn't give me any time to pack. Nothing to pack, I said. She booked me on the flight and on a return flight at 3:30 the same afternoon. If I missed it there'd be another two hours later.

"I guess you won't get to look at the Falls," she said.

I went out and got a cab right away, and I didn't even have to talk the driver into making the trip to Newark. He was delighted. I made my plane with a few minutes to spare and landed an hour later in Buffalo. I rented a car and drove to Attica, and that took another hour because I missed a turn and had to double back. I was there by noon and I was out of there by two, which put me way ahead of Gary Allen Dowling, not to mention Goo and Moon and Donny. It only took me forty minutes to get back to the Buffalo airport, where I had plenty of time to turn in the rental car and grab a meal before they called my return flight.

There was a long line for cabs at Newark, so I saved a few dollars and took a bus to Penn Station and the subway home. I walked in the door and Elaine said, "You said you'd be home for dinner and I didn't believe you. But you may not be able to stay."