New Haven Noir

Crossing Harry by Chris Knopf

Union Station

People tend to not like me because they think I smell bad, and I talk a lot, though not to them, but to other people they don’t know are there. I personally don’t see a problem with this, though there’s always somebody trying to fix me, or get me inside some building, or stick a bunch of drugs in me to make me better. When I don’t even think I’m sick from anything.

Though usually I’m pretty much left alone, because as a general rule people don’t even see me.

My house is this nice little spot under the railroad tracks that mostly keeps out the rain and snow. I got it from a guy who died there, and I only had to drag his body out to the street to take possession, and the dead-guy odor went away pretty quickly. I have room for my sleeping bag, books, lantern, some extra clothes for the cold weather, and other things, like a bag of bottles and cans I usually forget to turn in, and a cat that doesn’t take up hardly any space at all.

It’s not the world’s greatest existence, but I’m alive and free to move around the neighborhood, so things could be a lot worse. Eating is a bit of a problem, since I’m not keen on rotting food, which is plentiful but likely to land you in the hospital, where there’s a danger the psych people will trundle you off to a place where they feed you full of drugs and bore you with talk, talk, talk.

But I’ve got maybe a half-dozen restaurant dumpsters around New Haven that serve quite a lovely cuisine, delivered daily, fresh enough, and meticulously prepared. You have to be careful with your timing, though after a few years of this, I’m pretty good at it.

My friend Harry is a most excellent guide. He absolutely knows what gets tossed out, when, and where. Better yet, he never eats anything, since he lives in a different dimension, so I don’t have to share. Though I always offer.

My favorite place in the world is Union Station. It’s always warm in the winter and cool in the summer and the architecture is so soothing. It only takes about fifteen minutes to walk there from my house under the tracks, but it’s always worth the effort. My goal is to sit on the long wooden benches, comfy and smooth on the ass, for at least an hour before one of the transit cops tells me to get lost. I always go quietly, since their German shepherds look so kind and apologetic, and tell me through Harry that I really don’t have to worry. They know I’m only enjoying a little of the luxury of the inside world and have no animus toward anyone, man or beast.

It was one of those times, sitting happily on the bench, that the man in the beautiful dark-blue cashmere overcoat came through the doors leading from the tracks. He had excellent posture, and his shoes were very nicely polished. I didn’t see a single scuff. He carried an overstuffed canvas bag, zipped closed, on the side of which was a huge logo of a resort in Jamaica. Since it was February, I really liked examining the palm trees and the girl in a bikini, fake as they were.

He had the high cheekbones and swept-back gray hair of a European nobleman, but Harry said there was something wrong with his eyes. I said to him, too blue? He said too empty.

I kept staring at his face as he walked by, but he didn’t look back, probably for the same reason no one else looked at me. Except for the transit cops, who kicked me out of the station soon after that. With nothing else to do, I wandered down Church Street toward New Haven Harbor. Before I got there, I saw the cashmere coat coming toward me. He was carrying his Jamaica bag, though it looked a lot lighter. Harry told me to duck into a doorway and stay out of view. I said to Harry, why do that, since the guy wouldn’t see me anyway? Harry got a little testy about that, and told me to just shut up and do it.

It wasn’t until spring, when things had warmed up a lot, that I saw the stylish guy again. This time I was down along the harbor’s waterline, trying to catch a fish or two for the evening’s meal. A tall guy with a full head of gray hair, he was still dressed like a duke, with silk pants and a suede jacket that hung on him like it was draped there. I wondered how he managed to stay so fit, since he could eat anything he wanted, any time he wanted.

Harry reminded me that people like him could afford private fitness instructors, and I said, of course. That’s how he did it.

He still had the big canvas bag with the Jamaica tourism logo. I didn’t think he’d recognize me, especially since I’d shed my winter ensemble, so I didn’t try to hide myself. I just fished and watched him walk up to the edge of the water and open the canvas bag. He knelt down and pulled out a big sous vide bag.

You probably don’t know what that is, but one of my favorite dumpster stops is a French restaurant where they toss out these vacuum-packed plastic bags with the planet’s best food inside that you just drop in boiling water. I know, you’re thinking cheap rice meals and crap from the convenience store. But you’d be wrong. Sous vide is at the other end of the spectrum. It comes from France, a place that knows a thing or two about tasty food.

Thing is, it wasn’t even legal then for restaurants to serve food prepared sous vide, and all the health inspector had to do was peak into the dumpster. Just shows you what people like me know about what really goes on in a city. Not that anybody would bother to ask.

I watched the guy take a pair of little scissors out of his pocket and cut open the bag. Then he pulled out the stuff inside — it looked from a distance like nice veal cutlets or chicken marsala — and started chucking it into the water.

This was very intriguing to me. Why throw a perfectly good, gourmet-prepared, sous vide meat course into New Haven Harbor?

I don’t know what possessed me — unless it was Harry, who urged me in a pretty imperious way to walk up to the guy and ask him what the hell he was doing. I said no freaking way, but Harry kept at it. So I did, trying not to show how nervous I was.

The guy just looked through me, like the first time I saw him in the train station, though he didn’t seem bothered by the question. Maybe because it was being asked by a smelly homeless person.

“I’m concerned about the world’s crustaceans,” he said, turning back to his task.

“Like crabs?”

“Specifically crabs. They are in danger. Someone has to replenish the stock, return ecological vitality to their environments.”

“I didn’t know crab food came vacuum packed,” I said, pointing at the plastic sous vide bag in his hand.

He turned to peer down at me from his tall, haughty-guy perspective. “It doesn’t. I seal it myself. I am a virtuoso of the culinary arts, trained in France. Preparation and preservation is everything.”

“Sure thing,” I said. “I get it.”

He turned back to his work. “Of course you don’t,” he said. “How could you know that within a few days, all trace of this finely prepared select protein will be utterly consumed? Vanished, irretrievably. Could there be a more elegant, definitive resolution?”

Harry said, “Huh?”

I said, “That must be incredible food.”

“Indeed,” he said, his voice a low grumble.

I started to walk away, but he grabbed me by the arm, digging strong fingers into my bicep.

“This work is highly confidential,” he said, staring at me with those crazy blue eyes. “Not a word to anyone or there will be consequences. You understand?”

He let go of me when I said I did. Then I walked down the beach, acting like it all made sense, which of course it didn’t, since I’d studied crustaceans as a biology major at Yale and knew that secretly feeding them gourmet meals in the New Haven Harbor would have little impact on the ultimate survival of species infraorder Brachyura.

I began to spend a lot more time around Union Station, watching all the time for the gray-haired guy with the Jamaica tourism bag. This ultimately bore fruit, when one day I was in the station and saw him come through the doors that led from the tracks, holding his canvas bag and looking fresh as a daisy in a light-blue blazer, red-and-white-striped shirt, and pressed white pants.

This time, I didn’t want him to see me, so I ducked into the newsstand and pretended to leaf through the magazines on the big rack. After a few minutes, I was able to follow him down Church Street, keeping about a block between us.

As always, he went to the edge of the harbor, pulled out his sous vide bag, and tossed the contents into the water. I was close enough to hear the kerplunk, but far enough away to stay out of eyeshot. I have to admit, I was drooling a little over what was in those vacuum-packed bags, and determined this time to grab some of it before the so-called endangered crabs had a feast.

My clever disguise when he walked by was to turn my back and act like I was staring off into the distance. It apparently worked, because he just kept on walking. As soon as he was out of sight, I ran like mad down to the harbor, pulled off my shoes, and waded right in. Being summer and all, this was not that heroic of a thing to do, though it meant I’d be drenched to the bone on my walk back to my place under the railroad tracks.

Like before, I couldn’t find a thing, which didn’t surprise me, thinking that meat might be heavier than water, sinking pretty quickly. But I also had my feet, which I used to scrunch around the seabed, like I’d do to find clams. That’s how I struck gold, if you want to call it that.

My first thought was chicken. The flesh was slippery, and full of crunchy bones and cartilage. I’m okay with chicken, though I was disappointed, since I’d been hoping for filet mignon or a nice boneless pork cutlet. I took it anyway and searched some more, but that’s all I found.

When I got back to the beach, a little sorry that I was now soaking wet with only a hunk of chicken to show for it, I was able to take a closer look. This wasn’t any cut of chicken I’d seen before. It had no recognizable shape and the bony stuff was way too big. When I unsealed the bag, it didn’t smell like chicken either. In fact, it didn’t smell like anything I’d ever smelled before.

I stuck it in a plastic bag I found in a trash can at the edge of the beach. I carried the bag up Church Street, wondering what to do. Making a meal at this point was off the table, so to speak. Partly because my hunger was getting edged out by curiosity. Biology wasn’t only my major at Yale — I’d loved it since I was a kid. I’d absolutely be hunched over a lab counter right now if I hadn’t had that little hiccup with the voices in my head and the collusion of the Yale Board of Trustees, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and the Satanic Monks of Aquitaine to deprive me of my undergraduate position.

As usual, Harry had a great suggestion: go to the post office and send the bag of meat to my old faculty adviser in the Yale Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

It was a major hike to the post office, which was on the Yale campus. But when we got there, I realized I needed a box to put the bag in. And an address to write on the box, and the money to pay for postage. I had none of these things. Harry berated me, saying any normal person would have no difficulty managing this situation. The more he yelled at me, the harder it was to think, so I started yelling back at him, which is always a mistake.

I’m a guy people try to ignore, so I can tell you this is a surefire way to get a little attention. Definitely the wrong kind.

This got me pretty anxious, so I clamped my hand over my mouth and just kept walking. Pretty soon, I realized I wasn’t all that far from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology itself. Part of me, I admit, just wanted to chuck the bag full of slimy meat into a trash can and walk back to my house under the tracks. But something else pushed me along. Maybe to prove to Harry that I was capable of completing a project even if I hit a snag or two.

When we arrived, I thought about the lady at the desk near the faculty offices who scheduled time with the professors. I was hoping she didn’t remember me when I handed her the bag and told her my old adviser might find the contents interesting. I prayed she wouldn’t say something like, he’s in his office, just go on back and say hello. Especially after that last class when all those insects were jumping out of the specimen containers and trying to eat my flesh.

No worries there. She took the bag, dropped it on her desk, and told me in so many words to hit the pike. I didn’t give her my name, but I had a plan. Wait about a week, then call the professor. Surprise! It was me that brought in the sample. What the heck is it?

And that’s what I would have done, only I never got around to calling, because a few days later the New Haven Register had a headline that said, “Homeless Man Delivers Human Remains to Yale Professor.”

I was freaked out of my skull for a few minutes, too freaked to read the newspaper article. But when I did, I learned that neither the chopped-up person nor the chopper-upper had been identified, though an anonymous source close to the case assumed both were homeless people who got into a conflict while drunk, drugged-up, or crazy — or all of the above. Street people driven to unofficial body disposal was not unprecedented, apparently, especially when somebody ODs and panic sets in.

The question of who would pass along a chunk of said chopped-up person to a Yale biology professor was still open to conjecture.

I looked up and saw a transit cop approaching with his German shepherd. When they kept on walking, I glanced at the giant train schedule on the wall, wondering how far I could get with the little money I’d hidden away. Then I wondered if they’d even let me on the train, or what I would do when I got to wherever I was going. It had taken me a long time to find and perfect my house under the tracks and establish my activities of daily living. How was I going to start over?

Maybe I could just tell the cops what I knew, I thought for a brief second. No way in hell, said Harry, without hesitation. He said, you’re the guy who talks to invisible people, and now you’re going to accuse a fancy chef of serving selections of vacuum-packed Homo sapiens to our local sea life?

These are the kind of debates I get into with Harry all the time, and I have to admit, he’s usually right. But before I could concede to his argument, there was the guy again coming into the station from an arriving train.

I tried to disappear into the wooden bench, but he saw me and stalked right over. He didn’t have what you’d call a happy face. He sat on the bench, holding his Jamaica tourism bag in his lap.

“I’m terribly disappointed,” he said, watching the busy parade of train passengers.

“About what?” I asked.

“I can hardly promote a revival of the crustacean population if people are going to tamper with the food stock.”

“I get that.”

“Our work must remain confidential. I told you that. I thought you understood.”

“Absolutely. Understood,” I said. “Nobody’s gonna hear anything from me.”

Those lifeless blue eyes suddenly seemed very much alive. “Too late,” he said softly. “There will be consequences.”

That was when Harry decided to whistle for one of the German shepherds. The dog came over to us, dragging along a transit cop. The cop started to give me his usual polite but firm request that I vacate the premises, but the dog had different ideas, sniffing like crazy at the Jamaica tourism bag. The gray-haired guy tried to sneak away, but the hair along the dog’s back stood straight up and it lunged at the guy.

“What’s in the bag, sir?” the cop asked, pulling back on the leash.

Harry, by this point, was getting a little shrill and, despite all his talk about keeping our own counsel, started screaming about hacked-up people and sous vide bags and crab food, sounding about as looney as a person can sound.

People around us began to scatter and another cop rushed over. The gray-haired guy said something like, “Enough of this nonsense,” and tried again to walk away, but the German shepherd clamped his teeth down on the bag and held on.

By now, the transit cops were shouting things into microphones mounted on their shirtsleeves, and other cops were appearing out of nowhere; one of them grabbed my upper arm, even though I wasn’t trying to go anywhere. He unfolded a sketch of someone’s face and compared it to mine. It must have been a good match, since he wrenched both hands behind my back and stuck on a set of handcuffs.

They also cuffed the gray-haired guy, but he had his eyes locked on mine. He looked pissed, for sure, but something new was there. A kind of astonishment. A stunned disbelief.

And, for the first time, the whole world could see me.

Callback by Sarah Pemberton Strong

Audubon Arts District

I didn’t become a plumber because I like lying on my back in crawl spaces while fiberglass insulation and mouse turds fall on my face. I didn’t become a plumber because I like getting sprayed with black drain water, either. I became a plumber for the money, and because I like certainty. Plumbing’s not an ambiguous job — the pipe either leaks or it doesn’t, the toilet is clogged or it isn’t. Money and certainty and the satisfaction of a job well done.

I had to keep reminding myself of these reasons as I turned onto Audubon Street. I was on my way to a new customer’s house, and it was going to be hard to make a good first impression given that I was still covered in fiberglass and dirt and smelling of eau de drain. Once upon a time, being a woman plumber had seemed both transgressive and sexy: think girl driving a truck, think big pipe wrenches, think buff upper arms. But after spending half the morning lying under Lamar and Francine Bowman’s rotted pipes, I felt about as transgressive and sexy as a bucket of dirty water. I smelled like a sewer and I had a bad case of the creeps from accidentally grabbing a dead mouse when I reached for my wrench. I’d been wearing rubber gloves, but still. And to make matters worse, the Bowmans were broke, so when I wrote out the bill I charged them only half of what I usually do.

“Isn’t that illegal?” Charlotte asked me once when I confessed I gave discounts to poor people. “And besides, how can you tell who’s poor, anyway? Some people are millionaire skinflints — while they’re alive everyone thinks they’re paupers and it’s only after they’re dead that—”

“I can tell,” I interrupted. Charlotte has probably never even driven through the Bowmans’ neighborhood, not even with the windows rolled up and the doors locked. “Besides,” I said, “it’s gotta be less illegal than redlining.”

Charlotte hates it when I talk like this. Part of my appeal to her is that when she’s with me she feels like she’s slumming, and if I start going all analytical on her it messes with this. To shut me up that time, she poured me a drink. It was Charlotte who taught me to appreciate extremely good whiskey, which is a problem in that she’s no longer my girlfriend and I’m too much of a cheapskate to buy it myself. I also have a rule about drinking alone — I don’t. But as I sped away from the Bowmans’ that day, it occurred to me for about half a second that I might stop by Charlotte’s condo and ask her to let me take a shower. A shower and a splash of her famous Scotch to take away the feeling of having picked up a dead mouse. She lived right in Audubon Court and I knew she’d be there. Charlotte works from home, doing some kind of stock trading from her bedroom. She lies on her bed and looks up at this enormous projection of her laptop screen on the bedroom ceiling and talks on the phone and makes about a zillion dollars an hour. You can tell Charlotte is rich just from the way she talks to people, even if you only happen to overhear her ordering coffee in a Dunkin’ Donuts. Except Charlotte would never go into Dunkin’ Donuts. She only drinks Willoughby’s.

The idea of using her shower was pure fantasy, though. In the first place, I was too filthy — she wouldn’t have let me into her bathroom, which has white fluffy everything — and in the second place, there wasn’t time. I have a thing about being late — I’m not. Ever. It’s OCD, I know, but it’s also one of the reasons I don’t have to advertise. I looked longingly up at Charlotte’s window as I drove through the Lincoln Tunnel, which is what we call the illegal cut-through on Lincoln with the private footbridge arching across it, and I kept going. I’d rather be dirty than late. I turned the corner and parked, then appraised myself in the rearview mirror. Dirty hair, stained hoodie. Spattered jeans, cracked steel-toed boots. I ran my fingers through my fiberglassy hair. I look good in my work clothes, actually, if you like women who look like scruffy teenage boys, but I didn’t smell so hot. I did a hasty cleanup, scrubbing my face and hands with a few baby wipes. Then, hoping I smelled more like baby fragrance than old drains, I went to the door.

Most of the big houses in this neighborhood have been converted into law offices or therapy practices, but not this one, a gorgeous three-story brownstone. And judging from the single nameplate, the Lancasters had the whole place to themselves. The door knocker was a big brass affair that probably weighed as much as my tool bag, and I heard it echo through what must have been a cavernously large hall inside. There was a long wait, during which I banged the knocker again.

The woman who finally answered had a bath towel wrapped around her head. She was wearing a leopard-print dress that looked painted on, though her face put her somewhere in her fifties. She was holding a mascara wand in one hand and her expression said that although she was annoyed at being called to the door in the middle of getting dressed, she was too well bred to say anything about it.

Rich. Very. You can tell, I thought again. Then I said, “Mrs. Lancaster? I’m the plumber. Nicky Biglietti.”

If she was surprised to see a female plumber, she didn’t show it. She invited me in and I followed her through the enormous entrance doors and down the hall. The brownstone’s ceilings were a good twelve feet high, and the walls were covered with big, imposing oil paintings in fancy gold frames. Beneath them, lots of antique furniture that looked like the real deal was strewn about.

I followed Mrs. Lancaster up a curving flight of stairs. The way she carried herself reminded me of Charlotte — she took up space like she knew the space liked her taking it. You could practically see the air molecules stepping aside to make room for her. It’s a money thing, I think. I followed her through the master bedroom, past an enormous boat of a bed that might have been teak, and finally reached the bathroom door.

“We had a plumber in here just a month ago,” she said, stepping aside, “and now the sink’s clogged again. She looked at me and smiled. “I couldn’t be shedding that much hair, could I?”

I glanced at the towel on her head. “I don’t know,” I replied, “I haven’t seen your hair.”

She reached up and pulled the towel off. Dark gold locks, still damp, fell down around her face and rested on her shoulders. I thought for a second about touching a curl. Her hair was thick and wavy and smelled somehow of damp grass.

“Well?” She caught my gaze and held it. I wasn’t expecting that, and I looked away.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just the plumber.”

She turned away too then, and her stockinged feet padded out of the room. A moment later I heard the sound of a blow-dryer.

The clog in the drain was hair all right, but something else too. When I pulled my snake out, a thin line of gold was tangled around the end of it, a necklace impossibly knotted up among a tangle of drain-colored hair that might have once been her shade of blond. There was a pendant strung on the chain, a gold heart with one small, clear stone set in it. It looked like the kind of necklace a teenage girl would wear, not a woman in her fifties, but on the other hand, Mrs. Lancaster was doing the leopard-print dress pretty well, not to mention the eye contact. I rinsed off the tangle of hair and chain, and when I did, little flickers of rainbow fire shot out from the jewel in the pendant.

I stuck my head out the door and called to her and the sound of the blow-dryer stopped.

“Look what I found,” I said, holding up the necklace as she came back into the bathroom. “It’s not every day I get to fish a diamond out of a drain.”

She looked at the pendant without touching it. I couldn’t say I blamed her. There were still bits of rusty hair tangled in the chain, and the whole thing looked mousy and sad and wretched. She examined it and then she touched her own hair. Now that she had dried it, it was the pale gold color of a little girl’s. A very good dye job can do that. She ran her fingers through her hair and the smell of her hair gave way to the scent of her perfume — something with musk in it, the real kind.

“You found that pendant in my drain?” she asked.

I grinned. “I bet you didn’t even know it was missing.”

She took her bottom lip between her teeth for a moment. “I didn’t,” she said. “Especially since it isn’t mine.” And she turned and walked out of the room.

I’m not dumb but it took me the whole time I was putting away my tools and wiping down the sink and washing my hands with some of her very nice sandalwood soap before I figured it out. I don’t suppose there’s a good way to find out you’ve been cheated on, but if there is, the plumber fishing another woman’s diamond pendant out of your bathroom drain isn’t it.

I found her in the kitchen, writing a check.

“I left the necklace on top of the toilet,” I said. “Maybe you can flush it down — accidentally, of course.”

She looked up at me and by this time she’d got her smile back on. Not unlike diamond light, that smile.

“You’re a quick study,” she said. “Have you ever been married?”

“No.”

“Cheated on?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll have a drink with me.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to because it was a command, not an invitation.

“Bourbon all right?” she asked.

“Scotch, if you have it.”

“Of course I have it.” She opened a kitchen cabinet. “I knew,” she said with her back to me, “that there were others. One after the other. But what I didn’t know,” she turned back toward me and handed me my glass, “is that he’s been fucking this one in my bed.”

I took a pull of the Scotch. It was even better than Charlotte’s. Mrs. Lancaster knocked hers back in a gulp and poured another, then went to the refrigerator and held her glass under the ice maker.

“I’m divorcing him, you know,” she said.

“Did you just decide this?”

“No, no. It takes me forever to decide anything. But this time I’ve had it.”

I swirled more of the Scotch around in my mouth and inhaled. Wood smoke and leather, very smooth, and something sweet I couldn’t place yet.

“I should have done it years ago. It’s my house and my money. I don’t need him. And he doesn’t need me, clearly. Not when there are so many lovely young grad students running around.”

“He’s screwing his students?”

“Not his students. Richard’s too smart for that. Nothing quite against the rules, nothing to interfere with his endowed chair. Nothing except me, maybe. But he’s married to me, unfortunately, and that was perhaps not so brilliant on his part, but he’s a brilliant man, my husband. Oh, yes. A brilliant gentleman and a brilliant scholar. It’s too bad nobody listens to me — I’ve been saying things for years. But now I have evidence. Unless I’m just inventing the whole thing, of course. Out of spite. The whole thing.”

Maybe it was humiliation and anger that was making her voice slide all over the place. Or maybe she was getting sloshed. I didn’t say anything. I was just the plumber. She looked at me as if considering something, and then she leaned toward me and her hand came up and pulled gently at the collar of my shirt. I don’t blush easily, but when her fingers grazed my neck I did. It was the scent of her. Then her hand came away again, a bit of pink fluff between her thumb and forefinger.

“You have a piece of cotton candy on you,” she said.

“It’s insulation.” I held out my hand, and she laid it on my palm like a gift. Her hand was cleaner than mine would ever be.

“Being a plumber, you must get into some interesting places.” She looked me straight in the eye as she said it. She seemed calm again. And very, very focused.

“I do,” I responded evenly, but my cheeks flushed some more. She saw it. And she kept her eyes on mine.

“Tell me: what kind of places?”

“What kind of places?” I repeated.

It wasn’t the first time this had happened to me on a job. Maybe it’s because I’m a stranger in a person’s private space — their bedroom, their bathroom — yet I’m also invited. I’m anonymous, yet intimate. It’s a turn-on for some people, I guess. Including me.

“Places — places that can get very dirty,” I managed. My face was burning up. I put some more Scotch in my mouth and breathed in again and leaned toward her. Wood smoke and leather, and dried cherries, that was it, and Mrs. Lancaster’s musky perfume, and her burning sorrow, I could smell that too, and the smell of her mouth that would be a little smoky from the Scotch, and I leaned in toward her mouth and then I smelled something else, the faintest edge of sulfur, a smell that sent a little jolt of fear through me and knocked all the other jolts away.

I put down my glass. “You have a gas leak,” I said.

She looked at me blankly.

“I smell gas. You have a gas leak somewhere in your house.”

She sat back in her chair, affronted. “I don’t smell anything.”

“I have an excellent nose.” Talk about a buzzkill. Even the greenest apprentice has heard stories of houses blowing up, entire buildings exploding, because of a gas leak. Sometimes it’s equipment failure, sometimes a homeowner’s bad handiwork. Sometimes it’s the plumber’s fault, and then careers and lives get ruined. I’ve seen it happen.

I sniffed the stove burners, opened the oven. Nothing there. “Is that the basement door?”

She nodded, and as soon as I opened it, the smell hit me stronger. I grabbed my tool bag and went down the stairs without asking and began soaping the gas pipes with leak detector. Upstairs I heard a door close, but it wasn’t the basement door. Then I heard Mrs. Lancaster say something, though she wasn’t talking to me. Another door closing, another voice, distant. I kept soaping, and after a few minutes I found it: a leak at the union joint near the furnace.

There was a creak on the stairs behind me and a pair of shoes appeared. Not Mrs. Lancaster’s size. These were big leather dress shoes, followed by khaki slacks, followed by a blue oxford shirt and a paisley silk tie and, finally, the face of Richard Lancaster, the guy who drills grad students in his wife’s bedroom.

“Helene said you smelled gas,” he said by way of greeting.

“I found the leak,” I replied, since it seemed we were skipping introductions. Nicky Biglietti, the plumber who tries to kiss married women in their kitchens. “Look at this.” Big rainbow bubbles were popping up through the leak detector suds.

He got down on his haunches, stiffly, so that his silver head was level with mine. He looked like someone who had an endowed chair: handsome face in a WASPy sort of way, his nose a little too long and bony, but smart blue eyes, good chin, hair that was silvering nicely. Aging but aging well, just like his wife.

“What are all those bubbles?” he asked.

“Soapsuds. If there’s a leak, the escaping gas blows bubbles in it. If there’s no leak, the suds just sit there — watch.” I hoisted my wrenches, gave a turn of the union, and the bubbling stopped. “Now it’s tight. I turn it the other way, the bubbles come back, see? Now it’s tight again.”

“I never smelled any gas leak,” he said.

“Your wife didn’t either. I’m guessing you don’t visit your basement much.” I picked up my bag and started for the stairs.

“Do you often find gas leaks in houses you’re working in?”

“It happens.”

“Good way to get a little extra money out of the customer, I imagine.”

I stopped on the bottom step. “The customer’s already paid me,” I said. I drew the check out of my breast pocket and unfolded it so he could see. “Richard and Helene Lancaster. I’ve met Helene, so you must be Richard. Mind if I call you dick?”

If I hadn’t had the Scotch, maybe I wouldn’t have said it. His face worked a little, but nothing came of it. He’d probably heard the crack a million times growing up, which made me feel not great.

“I checked out the gas leak as much for my sake as for yours,” I said, attempting to move on. “I used to know a contractor who did sloppy work and blew up an apartment building. He’s in jail now. Plumbing’s a riskier job than you’d think—”

“I’m sorry,” he said suddenly. He shifted in his dress shoes, uncomfortable. “We had another plumber here only last month about that same drain, and when it clogged again I thought maybe he hadn’t done it right — you know, hoping for more work. I was still thinking of that when I said...” He stopped, embarrassed.

“Skip it,” I said. “But he fixed it fine. The clog this time was a necklace.”

He let out a huff of exasperation. “Helene should really be more careful.”

And that was the point where I should have remembered something Charlotte used to tell me. That I have a smart mouth. Because if I hadn’t said what I said next, maybe things would have been different. But I did say it. I stood on the bottom step, and because I am barely 5'2" and he was a nearly a foot taller, our eyes were almost level.

“Your wife said the necklace wasn’t hers.”

He frowned again. “Well, who else would it belong to?”

The words were barely out of his mouth when a kind of wrinkle passed over his face. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was like a wrinkle on a bedspread that you smooth out with your hand until you come to the edge of the mattress and it disappears. It happened so fast it almost didn’t happen: half a second later, his face was perfect again. A freshly made bed, everything tucked in just so. With no expression at all.

He looked away first. “Helene says a great many things,” he said.

“I’ve heard some of them,” I answered.

And the bed came unmade, just like that. His right eye started twitching and his mouth started to open and then closed up into a tight line instead. His eyes flew up to the door at the top of the stairs behind me and across to the furnace and back to me and I just stood there, not moving and not sure what I was waiting for. Her, maybe.

“You like her?” he asked me.

I hesitated.

“Because lots of people do. Or should I say, she likes a lot of people.”

Maybe it was a game they played, each of them telling a stranger about the other’s infidelities. But I’d had enough. I hoisted up my tool bag and started up the stairs.

“Wait,” he said. “Let me pay you for your extra work on the gas pipe.”

“Forget it,” I replied over my shoulder. “It only took a minute.”

“No,” he said forcefully, “we’re grateful you found the leak. I’d like to pay you.”

“No need,” I replied again, and before he could stop me, I was up the basement stairs and through a kitchen that was empty except for two half-drunk glasses of Scotch, and past a couple of living rooms or sitting rooms or whatever they were, and out the front door and gone. I was a little creeped out, to tell you the truth.

I had lunch at Sababa and was walking back to my van when I spotted Cal Watkins on the other side of Whitney. He wasn’t wearing his plumbing clothes, which was unusual for a workday, and he was carrying a bouquet of pink roses wrapped in cellophane, also unusual. I called out to him and he crossed over to my side.

“Nicky Big, what’s up?”

“I’m freaked out from a job I just did. But look at you, fancy-dress man.” Cal had on a pair of very new-looking blue jeans and a gray blazer. “You buy those flowers for me?”

“Meri’s playing in her school concert. Are you busy? You should come with me — it’s right there at ECA.” He gestured toward a churchy-looking brick building at the end of Audubon Street. “You can tell me about your freak-out on the way.”

“Are you kidding? Look at me, Cal. I’m filthy and I smell bad.”

He sniffed in my direction. “I don’t smell anything. Come on, Nicky. Meri’s really good, and I’m by myself — Wanda couldn’t get off work.”

“All right, then.” I’ve known Cal since plumbing school, almost ten years. I was the only woman in the class and he was the only black man, and after a few weeks of no one speaking to either of us, we began speaking to each other. He’s older than me by a lot, and became a plumber after he got out of the Army, an experience he refuses to discuss. Like me, Cal works by himself, and we take turns calling on each other for favors.

We sat on the hard seats in the high school auditorium and I told Cal what had happened at the Lancasters’. By the end he was shaking his head.

“Nicky, Nicky, Nicky. Where do you find these people? The guy was trying to bribe you.”

“What? When?”

“At the end, when he offered to pay you extra. Since when do rich people do that? It was so you wouldn’t say anything about his girlfriends.”

“I don’t think so. His wife said she’s been telling people for years and no one believes her.”

The lights went down then, and a handful of teenagers walked onto the stage. I don’t know anything about classical music. Cal had to remind me that the instrument Meri was playing was called a cello. But the way she played it made her the only person in the auditorium. The music seemed to be coming out of her body as much as out of the instrument. It made me stop thinking about everything that was swimming around in my head and just listen, as if nothing was happening anywhere except this girl and her music. It got to me.

When the lights came on we went over to her, and watching Cal hug his daughter I realized that “beaming with pride” is not just an expression. Light seemed to be radiating out of his dark eyes, his high cheekbones, his split-open grin.

“Meri, you remember Miss Nicky? She helped me put in our boiler last summer.”

“Your playing was amazing,” I said.

She thanked me politely, ducking her head down toward the roses, hiding a smile that was just like her dad’s.

“I’m coming back tomorrow night to hear her again at the evening concert,” Cal said. Wanda and me will both be here.”

I left them then, excusing myself to go home and take a shower.

The next day was easier work. No drain cleaning, no dead mice, no accusations of infidelity. I had a couple of faucet installations in Fair Haven, got lunch at El Coquí, and then drove over to Prospect Street to investigate a complaint about noisy pipes for a sweet old lady named Mrs. Berger. It was while I was in her basement that Richard Lancaster called.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but I still smell gas.”

“From the furnace?”

“I don’t know where it’s coming from. Right now I’m standing in the living room.”

No plumber likes a callback. Especially not a callback about a gas leak. And especially not from a customer you don’t like. I could have told him to contact the gas company, but on the off chance I’d made some dumb mistake, I wanted to get back there myself and correct it.

“I’ll be there in an hour,” I said.

“I have to give a lecture in thirty minutes. Can’t you come now?”

Some people think I have no customers but them. “No,” I said. “I can’t come now. I’ll be there by three, but not sooner. Isn’t Mrs. Lancaster there?”

“I don’t know where Helene is. Look, I’ll leave a key under the mat for you. An hour will be fine.”

I tried to hurry up and finish at Mrs. Berger’s. I found the bad washer and installed a new one, but when I went to turn the water back on, the main valve broke. It happens in old houses sometimes, and it meant Mrs. Berger would have no water until I replaced it. It would be another hour of work at least, maybe two. I went upstairs and broke the bad news to Mrs. Berger, and then I called Cal.

“Would you have time to do me a favor?”

“Right now I’m sitting in my truck on State Street eating a honey-glazed donut,” he said. “But when I finish my donut, I might.”

I explained about Richard Lancaster smelling gas.

“All right,” he said, “but tell him who’s coming.” Cal is careful with white customers who don’t know him. I know he’s had trouble before, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. He makes a point of wearing a very official-looking uniform, with Watkins Plumbing emblazoned across his jacket in big red letters. I, on the other hand, don’t wear a uniform at all.

“I’ll tell him,” I said, “but he won’t be there. The key’s under the mat.”

I left Mr. Lancaster a message on his cell phone, and for good measure I looked up their home number and left a message there too.

About twenty minutes later, Cal called back. I knew it was him because my cell phone said so. But I almost couldn’t recognize the voice because I’d never heard Cal’s voice an octave higher than usual and talking so fast he tripped over his words. It scared me just listening to him, because even without being able to understand him it was clear he was terrified.

“Slow down,” I said. “Are you all right?” All I could imagine was that one of the Lancasters had been home and thought he was breaking in and pulled a gun on him, and what was I thinking, asking him to check on my customers for me when I knew shit like this could happen? That went through my brain in the half-second it took Cal to catch his breath.

Then he said, still high and fast, “Nicky, you got a fucking body over here, and gas pouring out the basement, and I called 911 and pulled her out but you better get over here NOW, I think she’s dead, Nicky, and gas everywhere, oh, here they come.”

He hung up, but not before I heard the sirens behind him.

I don’t know how I made it there in one piece. I was shaking so bad I could hardly hold the wheel steady and I don’t remember driving that half-mile, only that I didn’t stop for lights and it was like one of those dreams where you’re running but can’t move, as if the air has turned into molasses and you’re stuck in it. But somehow I was eventually parking behind an ambulance and two fire trucks and running toward the house where a group of firefighters was kneeling in a circle on the front lawn. I could see something on the grass in the center of that circle. Something gold, her hair in the sun, and that gold was the only bright thing on that lawn, almost lost among the dark heavy coats of the men around her. I ran toward her and it was like dream running. It took forever. One of the firemen stood up and then I saw she was lying on her back, and as I ran I saw the gash on her head, the blood drying in a rusty stain across her forehead and into her hair. One of her arms was flung out to the side as if she were pointing. Pointing at me. I ran toward her until someone called my name, and only then did I turn and see the police car.

It was parked on the far side of the fire trucks. There was a cop standing with his back to me, and in front of him, pinned between him and his cruiser, was Cal, jammed spread-eagled against the door, his face turned sideways against the vehicle’s roof. The officer was patting him down.

“Nicky,” he called again, and my legs worked and I ran up to them, yelling.

“Officer, stop!” I said. “Cal didn’t do anything! I sent him over here, I’m the plumber, he’s a plumber too, his name’s Cal Watkins, see on his jacket, but it’s not his job, it’s my job, I asked him to check on my job for me, everything was fine yesterday, he didn’t do anything, he just got here.”

I went on like that while the cop put Cal in handcuffs and told him not to move. Only then did he turn and look at me. Crew cut, blue eyes, baby-faced, still young. We could have gone to high school together.

“Officer.” My voice was really shaking. I took a breath and tried to focus. K. Milner, his name tag said. “Officer Milner. I was working in that house yesterday and I found a gas leak and fixed it. But the homeowner called me back and said he still smelled it. I was busy and I asked Cal to go. He has nothing to do with this.”

“I told you,” Cal said to the cop, his face still pressed against the top of the cruiser, “I found a lady laying at the bottom of the stairs in a house full of gas and I carried her out. I’m a veteran. I’m the one who called you.”

Milner ignored this. He was looking at me. “You were working in there yesterday?” he asked.

“Yes, but I fixed the gas leak. They couldn’t even smell it. I found it and I fixed it and I don’t know what happened, but—”

“Nicky,” Cal said hoarsely, “stop talking.”

It was too late.

“Turn around,” Milner said to me. “Hands behind your back.”

I didn’t move. A sick feeling broke over me like a wave and for a second I thought I might pass out.

“Why?” I asked.

“A lady’s dead in a gas-filled basement and you’ve just admitted you’re the one who worked on the gas.” Milner’s baby face looked harder suddenly. “Hands behind your back,” he repeated. “You’re under arrest for criminally negligent homicide.”

I saw a flash of silver in his hands, and a flash of light zigzagging off the silver like the beginnings of a migraine. I’d never been in real handcuffs before, and they hurt.

He left us in the back of the cruiser while he went to talk to the firefighters. I was crying and shaking and couldn’t stop doing either. Cal was silent and rigid beside me.

“Cal,” I tried through chattering teeth, “I am so sorry.”

“I don’t need your apologies, Nicky, I need your lawyer.”

“I swear there was no gas leak when I left yesterday. I tested it and everything.”

“All I know is, I knock on that fancy door and nobody answers, I let myself in like you said, and the smell of gas is so bad my eyes water. I open the basement door and the gas just about knocks me over, and at the bottom of the stairs is a lady lying crumpled in a heap. So I run down the stairs coughing my lungs out and carry her out of there and dump her on the lawn and call 911 and now I’m in cuffs in the back of a cop car. Meri’s concert is tonight, Nicky. Am I gonna see Wanda and Meri again?”

“Of course you are, Cal. I promise. It’s my fault you—”

“It might be your fault, but you can’t promise anything. Once they separate us down at the station, anything can happen. To me, not to you.” He shook his head. “You don’t know.”

“I know I fixed that leak, Cal. I know I—”

“You think that matters? When a few months ago I’m working and a guy calls the cops and says there’s a black man impersonating a plumber breaking into his neighbor’s house? Lucky for me the customer was home to explain to the cops I was her actual fucking plumber, but you understand what I’m saying? Anything can happen, Nicky, to me. And right now I’m sitting here in cuffs for trying to save a lady I never saw before in my life. Am I gonna get out of this? Alive? That’s on you.”

I couldn’t answer.

We sat there on the vinyl seats of the cop car, staring out the window, watching the paramedics load Helene Lancaster onto a stretcher. I saw again her blond hair smeared with blood as they covered her up.

We sat on the vinyl seats and I wanted to believe the cops would realize there was no way I could have left gas pouring out like that. And that Cal had nothing to do with it. And that the person who should really be arrested wasn’t sitting in the back of the police car. I wanted to believe that Cal would be safe, that I would be safe. I like certainty. I wanted to look at the back of Milner’s neck as he drove us downtown and feel certain that like me, he wanted to do a job he could be proud of, and that once he’d done it, if something wasn’t right he would go back and fix it.

But I didn’t feel certain at all.

Some things you can tell just by looking at a person.

Some things you can’t.

A Woe for Every Season by Hirsh Sawhney

Dwight

I used to want to be a writer. But then life happened. Now I just teach. I’m a plain old high school English teacher. Nothing fancy, like Jenny and her academic friends — if you can call them friends, with all their backstabbing and five-syllable words. I sleep easy at night knowing I work at a real-deal public high school. Wilbur Cross on Cold Spring. I sleep easy despite the yes-men administrators and all that George W. Obama testing. But something happened the other day, a conversation with my old friend Josh Kagan. It worked me up and pissed me off. Jenny said, Talk it out, baby; I’m here if you wanna talk. I told her there was nothing to say, and she said, What a shocker. I said, Who’s being passive-aggressive now? and then took off with Ralphie. When I got home, she’d already left for the library. The next morning, she’s snoring when I roll out of bed. I go down to the kitchen and there’s a brand-new leather notebook in a red bow on the counter — a granite countertop, mind you, yet another amenity made possible by Jenny’s perfect job. A note on top says, A little something to get it all flowing. I shake my head and grin. Maybe she still cares. Maybe there’s still hope for us. But this story isn’t about me and Jenny. It’s about Josh Kagan and James Farrell. It’s about the three of us and a kid named Ink.

Me and Josh and James grew up a few miles away in the burbs. Lots of Catholics and Jews; Italians, Poles, and Irish. And then there was my sore-thumb family, half-Muslim, half-Hindu, all curry. (Yes, Jenny, self-loathing trickles through my veins.) Now I live in the Westville section of New Haven, in a sweet little Cape Cod. A $240K mortgage with $60,000 down, mostly paid for by Stale University, the imperialist overlords of Elm City, thanks to Jenny’s assistant professorship. We’ve got a hammock and a gas-powered grill, something my dad would have blown up if he’d pawed it with his immigrant hands. We’ve got a nice little patch of lawn that I cut with a hand-powered mower. And even though little Ralphie could easily do all his shitting and pissing at home, I take him for a long walk every morning. Ralphie’s our little mutt — part corgi, part dachshund, all monster. Our miscarriage dog, I call him. Like so many of the couples around us — straight, in their thirties — we got him after Jenny lost a fetus.

So it’s a Saturday, my least favorite day to walk the dog. All the doctors and lawyers and corporate warriors are out with their perfect pooches, all smiley and self-contented about living in such a beautiful area and having worked hard all week to make the world a better place. And they’re starving for small talk. But I’m walking Ralphie anyway, because Jenny’s presenting a paper at some coma-inducing conference. And who comes hulking toward me with his dopey, sweaty beast of a dog? Josh Kagan. Josh was one of my best friends between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Despite his unabating addiction to Xanax and whiskey, he has recently come into a fair amount of cash working as a foreman at a company that installs solar panels on the roofs of gullible elderly suburbanites. Ralphie goes berserk on Josh’s dumb-ass English mastiff, and Josh says something like, Guess you never ended up calling that dog trainer. I’m like, Josh, maybe if my dog cost five thousand dollars he wouldn’t bark as much, and by the way, I still can’t figure out how you managed to turn into such a fucking asshole. But of course I don’t say that. What I really say, is, My Ralphie, he’s still a bit traumatized from his shelter days. And guess what comes out of my mouth next: I say, Yo, if you got any training tips, I’m all ears. As soon as I utter those words, I want to barf my eggs and masala chai all over Josh and his dog, and Jenny’s voice starts buzzing in my head. Maybe she’s right. Maybe being the child of immigrants has me choking on my own shame. Nah, fuck her victimizing bullshit. All humans suffer, even the 1 percent.

Josh gets talking the usual sleepwalker middle-age crap. He’ll move to Canada if Trump gets elected. He tells me I should have bought a two-family house; the rental market’s gonna boom because middle-class people can no longer afford homes. And then he gets started on the topic, the one that lately leaves a lump in my throat, though I’d never say so to Jenny. He talks about his two chubby brats and how fast they’re growing up. Next comes the state of the schools, as if he’s a Noble Prize — winning educationalist. He says he hates to be that guy, but he’s gonna switch his kids to private schools. He gets that it’s wrong, but his hands are tied. I lie, tell him I get it, and this is a green light for him to putter down Racist White Guy Boulevard.

The thing is, Josh tells me, the New Haven public schools aren’t like the ones we went to; the students in these schools are different. It’s not their fault, he clarifies. It’s their families. These families, they’re not like ours. They don’t care about their kids. They don’t know how to support them. So the kids around here, they grow up like a bunch of animals.

I’m standing there staring at Ralphie, who has condescended to let Josh Kagan’s dunce of a dog sniff his asshole. And I’m absolutely livid. I’m thinking, Josh, what you’re really saying is that you think you’re better than black people, but you don’t even have the balls to say your ugly feelings out loud. I’m thinking, Do you remember how we grew up? Do you remember the things that we did? The tanks of nitrous oxide? The quarter-pounds of BC bud? What about what we got up to right here in New Haven, just a short walk away? Do you remember Ink? Do you ever think about him when you drive by the corner of Gilbert and Sherman in your tank-sized pickup? I must have started smirking or something, because Josh says, What’s so funny? I keep this all to myself though and tell him I gotta run — wifey’s waiting, or some sexist tidbit like that. As I walk away, he says, Yo, you talk to James lately?

James Farrell was the third member of our little posse, in and out of rehab for as long as I can remember. I didn’t take his last couple of calls as I no longer have the stomach for quotations from the AA handbook or pipe-dream plans. Josh tells me that James is clean. Again. That he has a good job selling insurance. He even has a girlfriend. She’s Thai and actually went to college. Ralphie’s pissing on some freshly planted petunias. I yank the leash and shake my head. The thought of James Farrell in a dress shirt and slacks makes me wanna hurl for a second time. If one of my students did what he’s done, you know what would happen to him? Kid would be rotting in a prison cell alongside ten thousand other black kids, stuck inside the slammer until he’s too old to do any good or harm. I feel like punching Josh. I’d punch James, but then I’d actually have to see him.

I knew pint-size James Farrell well before I met gigantic Josh Kagan. His dad was an old-school New Haven Italian whose grandparents had worked the gun factories way back when. James’s father made his money selling Cold War widgets for some forgettable corporation — the kind of deadening white-collar job that doesn’t really exist anymore, which rewards talentless upper-middle-class white people for being just that. His mother was a dental hygienist who smiled all the time, ever since she found a Protestant Jesus. James and I coughed on our first Camel Lights together back in elementary school, lifted our first Playboys from the bookshop in the Post Mall when we were twelve or thirteen. Why did we fall head over heels for ganja, that five-fingered green goddess? I dunno. Pot was easier than booze. It was easier to get your hands on, and easier to transport with our parents driving us around. It was a hobby, an extracurricular activity — a sport for two kids who were scrawny, shy, and not especially good-looking.

Me and James Farrell, we liked each other’s company because together we could embrace the goofiness and apathy that came so naturally to us both. And if I’m being totally honest with myself, it was easy to be around him because he was so passive. He was such a shy, quiet kid. He did have his talents — he could fix anything with his hands, from the carburetor on my rusty old Civic to his grouchy old Italian grandfather’s hearing aid — but various undiagnosed learning disabilities condemned him to a high school career of Cs and Ds in level 3 classes. Let me come out and just say it then: being around Josh made me feel smart. Smart and in control.

James and I met Josh Kagan during the first couple weeks of tenth grade, when we were sparking up a shitty metal bowl full of seeds and stems underneath the bleachers at a high school football game. Josh said, Yo, you shrimps better share that shit, unless you want a beating. Or something along those lines. He was flashing his irresistible Judas Biden smile, so we hoped that he was joking.

Josh was my first Jewish friend, or my first good one at least. His ancestors had ended up in New Haven via Stalin’s gulags and then London, or at least that’s what he told us. Josh’s father was an optometrist and his mother a realtor, and yet they were always broker than a junkie on payday. We’re talking six credit cards perpetually maxed out and the power being shut off on more than one occasion. They squandered their dough on leather interiors for their luxury sedans, and saunas and hot tubs that Josh and us weren’t even allowed to breathe on — things my good immigrant parents would never have dreamed of getting.

During Josh’s ninth-grade year, before we’d even met him, he’d already tongued more than a hundred tabs of acid, and then he dropped out of school. When he returned for tenth grade, they placed him in the alternative high school, for kids who were less bright and more fucked up than he was. But he still read more than anyone else I knew, except possibly my own father. He got me hooked on Kesey and Kerouac. He got me thinking about what Brave New World had to say about capitalist America and its retarded culture of media. And the fact that he could talk so smoothly about books had a way of legitimizing all the illegal and immoral shit we got up to back then. James and books, though, were like oil and water. Yes, James might have been able to grow out his dirty white-boy dreads when my parents would have shit bricks if I’d have tried the same thing. He might have been game to try Special K when I was too scared. But James hadn’t read a book since Dr. Seuss on the knee of his Jesus-loving mother.

Josh was 6'3" and handsome, and the girls, they really liked him. Even though he was crude and rude. Even though he’d deflowered several young women without ever speaking to them again. Yeah, Josh, he got lots of sex. Jenny insists his stories are boyish exaggerations. But they’re not, and I know that for a fact. I used to wake up drunk in the middle of the night, on the floor of some kid’s basement next to a Ping-Pong table, or the sofa of some kid’s older sibling’s apartment in the Taft Building — don’t get me started on that racist bastard of a Supreme Court justice — and I’d see Josh sitting there getting a blowjob, or doing some girl from behind, and he’d give me that Biden grin. I’d smile back and shake my head, and for a few moments it was as if I were the one who was getting the girl. I, of course, never got the girl. Josh got girls, and even little James got laid by the second month of eleventh grade. But not me. The girls would be my friends, but they didn’t want my body. Jenny used to say it’s because I signified so differently from their pasty-ass fathers and brothers. That she would have wanted to jump my bones had she known me in high school. These days, she doesn’t come close to jumping my bones. She says there’s too much distance. That I oscillate between three modes of repugnant behavior: shutdown, passive-aggressive, and just plain mean. Unlike her, who has only one mode: ass-kissing schmoozer.

Forgive me for rambling. Old wounds run deep. The one thing you do need to know about Josh — Josh back then, at least — was that when he was around, you felt safe. You always felt like you were a part of something bigger, part of a weird newfangled family or something. (Or maybe it was more like a cult?) With Josh Kagan in our lives, James and I got to walk around our suburban school with a don’t-even-think-about-fucking-with-us swagger. So when Josh suggested the three of us start selling a little pot to fund our weekends of beer and bong hits, neither one of us said, Really, Josh, do you think that’s wise? No, in fact, I got a notebook from my L.L. Bean backpack and started crunching numbers, like the good subcontinental that I am. I figured that if we got an ounce of pot and sold half that ounce as eighths, and a few stray grams at ridiculously high prices, we could smoke the other half for free and still have some money to spend on ales and stouts, on cheeseburgers at Paulie’s Lunch, where we ended most of our weekend nights. How’s that for immigrant ingenuity?

We had a nice system going by the middle of eleventh grade. Before we met Ink down on Gilbert, there was this dealer, Nick DeLuca, who Josh called DeMookfuck. James’s older sister Beverly used to date him, and now he was selling weight so that he could live large while taking classes at UNH, where my father taught civil engineering. DeMookfuck rented an old colonial on Fountain Street, near Dayton Street Apizza, which used to serve decent pie. Speaking of pie, let me be clear about something: I’m a Sally’s man all the way, no corporate or soggy pie for me. The Stalies may put up with those two other spots, but not someone who knows their ass from their elbow when it comes to New Haven pizza.

Anyhow, our trio would stop by DeMookfuck’s apartment on most Fridays. He’d smoke a bowl with us out of one of his many handblown glass pipes, which we found both impressive and cheesy. Then he’d front us an ounce of midgrade seedless greens. We’d sell the stuff cheap to a few friends, and rip off a few athletes or girls. The following week we’d bring DeMookfuck back his money, and he’d hand us over another fat satchel of pot. Once he’d gotten to know us, he’d always throw in a bonus. A small bag of mushrooms or little yellow pills that were allegedly made of THC. The funny thing about the whole situation was that after a while DeMookfuck only wanted to deal with me. He only made eye contact with me, and he would only accept cash from my hands. No wonder I got so deep in that world. It was the only club that wanted me, that didn’t make me feel like some Jungle Book pariah.

Shit. That’s Jenny’s voice again. I wish I could get it to stop. The point is, our little business came to a standstill when DeMookfuck got busted. All he got was ten thousand hours of community service, probably because he was white. Back then the rumor was that he had ratted out some big dealers above him in exchange for a light sentence. All we were sure of that summer was that we couldn’t even get our hands on a single nickel bag of Mexican schwag. We couldn’t get stoned, and neither could our friends. We had no funds for our weekend antics. This got old after a couple of weeks, and eventually Josh says, Yo, Ray — that’s me, it’s short for Rehan — we should drive down to Gilbert Street to score some weed.

This was one of the worst I ideas I’d ever heard, but I just shrugged and said, Sure. Why not?

Gilbert Avenue is in West River section of Dwight, but for some reason, in the drug-addled suburbs where we grew up, the dumb-ass dope-smoking kids called it Gilbert Street. The other kids — the straight ones — didn’t call it anything, because they didn’t know it even existed. When they drove down Congress Avenue through that part of New Haven, they locked their car doors to avoid one of the mythic carjackings their parents had warned them about; their parents had learned about the carjackings from trashy movies like Grand Canyon. When I walk Ralphie around this neighborhood now, on one my forget-about-miscarriages-and-failing-school-systems walks, I can’t help but gawk at its hundred-year-old homes, most of them Victorians, most decaying or in a state of total disrepair. You stare at these elegant monsters, and you think, What a utopia this all must have been. Where did it all go? Why did it all vanish? America’s best days have passed, but we all just showed up to the dance. And you wonder why Trump has gotten them so fired up.

Don’t get me wrong, Dwight’s a bit cleaner these days, thanks to a local mosque, which has slowly but surely spruced up the neighborhood. (What do you Trump fascists think about that?) You can tell that some bureaucrats have been holding meetings about beautification and development. I notice an attempt to rebrand parts of the neighborhood West of Chapel, or some Waspy shit like that. And there are also big posters of allegedly local celebrities hanging from neighborhood buildings. There’s this one of Paul Giamatti, whose father was some bigwig at Stale. I can’t help but roll my eyes when I see Giamatti’s ugly mug grinning down upon the streets of Dwight. If I was a kid from the ghetto, I’d throw a bucket of paint on that face. I’d throw a bucket of the paint on the dumb bureaucrats who used taxpayer money to put up those bloody posters.

Stale University will probably wanna take some credit for cleaning up the area, though no bona fide New Havenite would agree with them. Stale, for example, recently took over St. Rafael’s Hospital, where yours truly slithered out into this world, and now the snotty Stale crest — a shield with the words Light and Truth — has been ironically stamped onto the placard in front of the place. My neighbor, who has a tough little beagle with a missing leg, is a nurse at St. Raf’s; she tells me that things have gone from dawn to dusk since the coming of Stale — that the university has no respect for its employees or their wisdom. You see, we are all really sick of our tax-exempt imperialist overlords here in New Haven. But when they get wind of our words, what do they say? They say, Quiet down, plebs of New Haven; the gold in our East India Company coffers is what keeps you from becoming Bridgeport. And if you’re batting above double digits in the IQ department, you’ll have to admit that the Stale folks have a point.

Back in the day, when we got up to no good down in Dwight, things were much worse. It was on the corner of Gilbert and Greenwood that I saw my first real-life prostitute. It was a total shock to me that she looked nothing like Julia Roberts. It was down by the delis on Dwight, where we’d stop to buy Snapples or rolling papers after scoring, that I learned that food stamps looked nothing like actual postage — that those fake flowers — the ones that come in little glass vases — they’re not for decoration, they’re crack pipes.

The first time we go to buy drugs down on Gilbert, my hands get cold and clammy as I steer the Civic across Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, which marks the unofficial end of suburbia. I know this is all wrong. I know we’re gonna get busted and I can imagine my stern-eyed immigrant father picking me up at the police station in one of his dust mite — infested tweed jackets, one with patches on the elbows. Josh tells us we got nothing to worry about though. He says they only bust dealers. I say, Yeah, Josh, but don’t we sell drugs? Little James chimes in here, says, Kid, we’re not real dealers. I’m outnumbered, I have no choice but to keep on driving. I pull up to a corner where a bunch of black kids are standing — some are older than us, but a few haven’t even hit puberty yet. This is all sad and troubling, but I don’t do much thinking about social ills at this point in my life. No, racist little me is waiting for a gun to be pointed at my face. For sirens to start wailing. Josh rolls down his window, and one of the older black kids approaches. He says, I got dimes and nickels, what do you want? Josh hands him two tens rolled up in a tight cylinder. I turn to my left, and a twerpy little black kid is standing there looking at me with a no-nonsense face. I think, This is it. This is when they rob us. The dealer on Josh’s side says, Yo, white boy, roll down your window. It takes me a few seconds to realize he’s talking to me, but then I roll down my window a few inches, and the little hopper outside throws two tiny bags onto my lap. The bags are blue and stuffed fat with schwag. The older guy, the main dealer, says, We all good then?

Josh says, I got a question for you, homey.

Oh yeah, homey, says the dealer. And what’s that?

I’m not thinking about Josh’s inappropriate use of the word, about how the dealer called him out on it. All I can think about is how cool and great Josh is. I’m like, How can he be so natural right now? Where did he learn how to do this? My fear fades, and I’m just proud — proud that Josh Kagan has agreed to let me be a part of his life. It feels like being friends with a movie star.

Josh says, I’m wondering, brother, can you get us some weight?

The dealer says, Kid, next time you’re down here, come straight to me. Ask for Ink, that’s what they call me. We don’t do weight, but I’ll take good care of you.

We got to know Ink well that summer. Or maybe that’s not accurate. I never did learn anything about his parents, if he had any brothers and sisters or anything. But I did find out that he was eighteen years old, because on his eighteenth birthday — July 4 — he gave us an extra nickel bag of something special, free of charge. After a while, whenever we showed up on Gilbert, the hoppers would start yelling, Go get Ink! or, Ink’s white boys are here! before we’d even rolled down our windows.

Doug E. Fresh high-top fades were still popular among black men back then, but Ink’s head was totally shaved. He had a quarter-sized blotch of a birthmark on one of his cheeks, I can’t remember which one, but I’m assuming that’s where he got his nickname from, though I never had the balls to ask. He wore two pieces of jewelry around his neck: a ropelike silver chain and a black leather string with a few beads on it, beads that had something to do with Rastafari, I think. Ink was a bit overweight, and he always had a smile for us. We’d sell his five-dollar nickels of schwag — which Josh said got you fucked up because they were dipped in something funky, maybe formaldehyde — for twenty bucks to the kids in the burbs. Which meant we were on easy street again, smoking and drinking for free, with plenty of money to spend on Sally’s pie or Paulie’s burgers.

We’d be so baked by the time we got to Paulie’s that Donny, the owner’s son, would say, You clowns, in the back right now, pointing toward a dimly lit room reserved for parties and VIPs. It’s not that we were important; he just wanted to keep us away from the cops who frequented his business. We’d go back there and pound the cans of Guinness we’d smuggled in, smiling and laughing at nothing whatsoever. We felt so alive, that we knew so much more than everyone else about the world — more than the people on the news, our teachers, our parents. They were all living on the surface; we were down deep in the fucking marrow.

Ink would always have a word for us about that music that was playing in my car. He once said, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts. Now there’s something I can dig.

I remember being surprised that a young black guy listened to the Beatles. I remember being surprised that he even knew who the Beatles were. I’m not proud of my gerbil-brained perspectives. But you develop strange and distorted notions of black people when you grow up in a whiter-than-snow world. Especially when you’re the only brown kid there. Ink didn’t like the Grateful Dead. He called them a bunch of thieves. But he was impressed when I once had a Miles Davis CD playing on my portable Panasonic Discman.

The next time we came down, just two days later, he dropped a cassette on my lap with the words Bitches Brew on the label in neat, bubbly handwriting. He said, You fucking white boys gonna bust a nut for this shit. His gift made me smile, but what really had me pumped was that he kept on calling me white boy. I was so pleased that he couldn’t smell the curry wafting from my pores. That to him I was just another white kid from suburbia.

It’s been six whole days since I’ve written a single word. Thanks to Jenny. Fucking Jenny. She read my notebook, a gift she had supposedly given to me so that I could have a place to dispose of my most private and perturbed thoughts. What did I expect? Privacy is the purple unicorn of the land of long-term relationships. I walked into the kitchen, and there she was, gawking at my prose. I said, What the fuck are you doing? Nothing, she said. I knew her brain was going wild with opinions and criticism, so I told her to just come out and spill it. She said, Things seem to stop working when I say what I really think. And don’t swear at me. She was giving me that squinty-eyed glare to let me know I’d fucked up, and all I could think was: You read my private shit, and I’m supposed to be sorry?

She sighed, then told me she was proud that I’d picked up my pen. Relieved that I was finally opening up about the miscarriage. She said, If you want this marriage to last, you’re gonna have to start dealing with that. I slapped my hand against my forehead. Marriage? Miscarriage? Jenny, I said, I wrote something about James and Jimmy and how they’re a bunch of assholes.

For the next part of her speech, she switched into cold, condescending professor mode. She was impressed, she told me. Impressed that I was finally willing to take an honest look at my childhood. Impressed that I was — and here’s some classic Jenny bullshit — willing to finally look at the way being an immigrant exacerbated my feelings of teenage marginalization. And you did that with a nice touch of subtlety, she said. Her praise stopped there though. Surprise, surprise, she had big problems with Ink. She said, New Haven is filled with middle-class black families going about their business, trying to make ends meet. Why’d you choose to make your black character a drug dealer? Why do you have to perpetuate that stereotype? And there was more. Why did Ink have to be into music? Why did Ink have to teach you something about music? Can’t you see how you’re exoticizing him? Haven’t you ever heard of the magical Negro trope?

What the fuck?

I wanted to tell Jenny that this wasn’t a piece of fiction — it was the goddamned truth. Ink was real, so how could I change him? And if Ink being a drug dealer is a problem, it’s not my problem. It’s society’s problem. It’s a big bummer that the only way three well-heeled seventeen-year-olds from the suburbs can interact with a black kid from New Haven is through a financial transaction involving drugs. But at least the three of us — Josh, James, and me — we were pushing past our boundaries. Do you think the captain of our football team had anything to do with black kids from New Haven? Do you think our school’s honor society had any black members? We were integrating, I’d like to think. We were experiencing a form of multiculturalism that some pole-up-her-ass lit professor could only dream of.

Well, Jenny, there was this one time when we did try to take our relationship with Ink beyond the realm of commerce. One Friday that August, we drove down to Gilbert as usual, and it was nasty out. Humid, hazy air hanging over the asphalt, you couldn’t imagine that snow would coat these roads in just a few months. A couple of hydrants had been opened up, and all the city kids were jumping in and out of the spraying water. We’d only seen that in the movies, even though we lived six miles away; people cooled down in their pools out where we lived. Ink was at the corner with his hands on his wide hips and wearing a Red Sox cap. It was as if he was waiting for us, and he probably was — he definitely enjoyed the chitchat, and we were his best customers.

Once the day’s transaction was over, Ink said, So, ladies, any big plans this weekend? Josh said, Actually, there’s a party going on tonight, right here in New Haven. Ink said, A party? With actual people? I thought you guys just sat around getting high. Josh said, Yo, why don’t you join us, Ink? I’ll get you a little piece of blond pussy. As I write this, I remember being mortified by Josh’s statement — no, Jenny, not the fact that he had spoken about females in that despicable manner. But that he had so openly alluded to the race thing.

Later that night, we headed back to New Haven, to the East Rock section, an apartheid neighborhood mainly filled with Stalies. Close to a million bucks for a Victorian these days, and twenty thousand in taxes. Pay attention, Donald Trump: You don’t need real walls in postindustrial America. The economics of it all puts up perfectly suitable metaphoric ones. I should be honest though: I may mock those ponce East Rock phonies, but the second Jenny gets her tenure, I’m gonna use her raise to get us into a sweet two-family on the right side of Orange Street.

So this kid Fran — Greg Franford — was having a party, because his Stale professor parents were away for the weekend. Fran went to Snobkins, an ancient and prissy New Haven private school, and Josh knew him from Jewish camp. His dad was a real hotshot in the history department, and I actually read one of his books a couple of years ago — your basic justification for the righteousness of Euro-American rape, plunder, and pillaging, which is no surprise; that’s how academics earned their keep in the eighties. These days it’s the total opposite. You get promoted by talking about the undeniable awfulness of white people. Two sides of an elite and simplistic coin. I’m finding it harder and harder to fathom how Jenny can dedicate her life to all that drivel. Maybe that’s the problem. She still has faith in me, in what I do and who I can be. But I look at her and her colleagues and I see them for what they are — a bunch of conniving, careerist drones. They don’t care about art. About knowledge. They just care about grant money. About keeping their jobs and fertilizing their CVs.

So about twenty, twenty-five kids are smoking up and drinking down in Fran’s father’s mahogany-laden, enormous third-floor library, which has ornately framed paintings of dead white men on the walls. There’s also a painting of some natives near a bunch of huts, and someone tells me it’s a million-dollar painting by some guy named Gauguin. I don’t give a shit about art. I’m just worried that someone’s gonna see the link between my curried ass and those natives in the painting. Some cool dub music is playing, stuff that Fran probably picked up on a fancy teen tour in Paris or Amsterdam, stuff that me and my crew wouldn’t get our hands on for another decade or so. I’m sitting on an ancient Persian rug, rather awestruck by all these good-looking, cool, and precocious kids — boys and girls. Josh, James, and I have two friends who are girls — Caron and Olivia. They’re pretty, but total alcoholic waste products. Olivia, for example, thought she was pregnant in ninth grade — perhaps with Josh’s baby — so she drank an entire case of Natural Light to force a miscarriage. These girls here are different. They’re talking about French movies and punk concerts at underground clubs in New York City. James is next to me, packing bong hits for them, and they’re willing to talk to us so that they can ingest our free weed and learn how to work James’s TobaccoMaster. And then Josh walks in with Ink and a friend of Ink’s who I’ve never seen before.

I’d like to tell you that our attempts at socializing together went well. Maybe some literary journal would publish this story if I lied and said that we got together for a hike and found a sliver of something in common despite being from different sides of the tracks. But that’s not the way life works. That’s not the way it happened.

Ink is wearing an untucked polo shirt and a sun visor, the kind of thing someone would wear playing golf. His friend is tall and skinny, wearing a Malcolm X T-shirt and surprisingly tight-fitting jeans. I watch Josh introduce these kids to our host, Fran, who greets them with smiles and half-hug handshakes. Ink takes out a fat blunt, sparks it up, and passes it to Fran. Ink’s Malcolm X friend leaves the library. I’m wondering where he’s gone. Fran, Ink, and Josh are passing the blunt back and forth without talking, and slowly, the chatter of the party dies down. Everyone’s staring at them or trying really hard not to. I have to help be a host, I think. Josh has the balls to make Ink feel at home, so I should too. I get up, slap him five. I don’t know what to say away from Gilbert Street, so I’m like, Ink, mad kids here wanna buy bud; you’re gonna make some serious cash tonight. He raises one of his eyebrows and gives me a glance that I can’t really read, then places a hand on my shoulder. He says, Ray, no business tonight. Tonight’s about having fun.

And then everyone loosens up for a while, and it looks like, for a bit at least, tonight’s gonna be okay. A group of boys and girls start dancing in a corner of the library, and I wish I could join them. But I just stand beside Ink and keep on smoking. Some white girls go up to Ink and his friend and flirt with them. Josh has his arm dangling over Ink’s shoulder at one point. But then I see something weird out of the corner of my eye. Fran is whispering in Josh’s ear all seriously. Fran’s blue eyes are sharp and angry. Josh is listening intently, and he keeps brushing his brown locks behind his ear. That’s what he does when he’s nervous, which isn’t often, at least that’s what I used to think at the time.

Josh comes over to us and says, Look, Ink, Fran knows about the car. Ink says, What car? Some dumb-ass model car, Josh tells him, then pauses. I can tell he’s trying to choose his words wisely. Josh says, Some dumb-ass model car that’s gone missing. Ink says, Oh, a model car’s missing. What’s it gotta do with me?

My cotton mouth goes from New Mexico to the Sahara desert. I’m waiting for Ink to get belligerent; if Josh were in his position, he would definitely get belligerent. But Ink shouts, in a loud but calm voice, Hey, Franfuck!

Everyone stops talking and stares at Ink. I look over at little James, who’s still on the floor with the TobaccoMaster between the legs of his corduroys, which have been stitched up with paisley hippie patches. We exchange a commiserating glance. I think, James and I, we feel the same thing right now. We’re both afraid of Ink, but we both feel bad for him too. In that moment, I feel closer to James than I have ever felt before.

Ink says, Franfuck — that’s your name, right? You got something to say to me? Fran says, Why don’t we take this outside? Outside? says Ink. You wanna fight me? Fran tells him that he doesn’t want to fight. He just wants to talk. In private. Ink says, I got nothing to talk about with you. Fran looks down, grasps his neck, looks back up. Fran says, Yo, you can’t be disrespecting people like that in their own homes. Says, I know people, people you don’t wanna be messing with.

I’m wondering what the hell Fran is talking about. The toughest kid that this Snobkins son-of-a-Stalie knows is Josh Kagan. Ink looks dead serious. I can practically see the smoke coming out of his ears. I’m sure he’s gonna do something. Charge at Fran. Pull out a knife. A gun. But he just lets out a disgruntled scoff. Shakes his head, takes off his cap. And leaves without saying a word. His tall skinny friend follows behind him. After they leave, I find out Fran’s famous father collects die-cast model cars, and his favorite one, a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, has disappeared.

The vibes are horrible at the party now, so me and my posse decide to leave. We get in my Civic, and since we’re in New Haven, we head toward Paulie’s for a couple of quick cheeseburgers to lift our spirits. As we’re driving, Josh, who’s in the backseat, says he feels rough, that he needs a quick bowl to chill out. He grabs James’s Jansport, but James starts bugging out. Says, Yo, pass me my bag, I’ll pack it up for you. But James can’t stop Josh, who’s digging around the bag looking for a lighter. But Josh doesn’t find a lighter. Instead he pulls out a model car, Fran’s father’s pint-size Rolls-Royce. Josh says, Are you fucking kidding me, James? You little fucking rat. James says, Fran’s a fucking prick; he deserved it.

I wish I could write about how Josh explained to James that it was wrong of him to let Ink take the blame, that James was torn up with guilt for the rest of the night. But none of that happened; we just drove in silence. When we got to the Green, which was desolate except for the sleeping drunkards and crazies, Josh rolled down his window and chucked the Silver Ghost onto the sidewalk, in front of one of those ancient churches.

I didn’t want to write in this diary ever again. Writing’s stupid. All it does is make you feel important for a second, when you’re really not. But then that decision came out, about the fat black guy in Staten Island. Eric Garner. And I felt so deeply bad about it. How could I tell my kids — my students, that is, because Jenny and I don’t have any kids — how could I tell my students to dream and hope and try when Eric Garner got murdered and his society said, Too bad you were black, better luck next lifetime.

I broached the subject in my first-period class yesterday, and more than half of them hadn’t even heard of Eric Garner. A few of the girls were aghast, though, and talked about making the world a better place. I smiled and nodded and tried to make them feel that I felt what they were saying. But a voice inside of me wanted to tell them, Girls, don’t even bother trying. One of my kids, Anthony — super smart and always getting into trouble — he says, Teacher, this isn’t anything new. Cops been beating on black folk since the beginning of time.

Now I definitely don’t have a problem with policemen. My neighbor’s a cop and he’s the most helpful guy in the world. Votes Democrat, opposes the NRA, which is the most you can hope for someone in this fucked-up postindustrial world. But Anthony was right. And the first time I learned the truth he was speaking was the last time I ever saw Ink.

The last time we ever saw Ink was during the second week of our senior year, a Friday in September. Since that East Rock party at Franfuck’s house, we’d been down to Gilbert two or three times. Things had definitely cooled with Ink. He still sold to us, still cut us the deal that had been previously arranged. But there were no niceties anymore. No more chitchat about food, music, or girls. It was an unpleasant change, but we got used to it quickly. As we rolled into Dwight that Friday, I didn’t notice anything strange in the air. I didn’t think that the gray van parked at the end of the block in front of a boarded-up Victorian was at all conspicuous. There were a couple kids throwing a football on the sidewalk. A cracked-out prostitute hobbled down the street in high heels, hopefully on her way to a shelter. I was ready for some fun after a boring week of my AP classes, and I honestly wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else in the world besides Gilbert Street with my boys Josh and James. I no longer felt any nerves about copping drugs down here. Anything becomes normal when you do it with some regularity. That’s why immorality is the norm, not the exception. That’s why genocide occurs.

Ink comes to Josh’s backseat window. Josh hands him the money, just two twenty-dollar bills today. They mutter a few words to each other, and Ink’s little helper drops the baggies of marijuana onto James’s lap. Ink starts walking away. And then there’s a boom, the sound of the rear door of that gray Chevy van bursting open.

Three plainclothes cops jump out. They’re wearing bulletproof vests; their medallions are dangling around their necks by strings of beads. Oh fuck, I think. Oh fuck, I really am fucked. I can still remember my childish, selfish thought processes so clearly. My father is going to find out about my secret life, the life that I have so carefully kept hidden. He is going to have a heart attack. He will die. My mother and sister will be sad and alone. They’ll be all alone, and I’ll have to care for them. If only I knew then how the justice system works in this country. If I knew then what I know now, I would have realized I had nothing to worry about.

One cop stands in front of my Civic and yells at us to stay put right where we are, hands on our heads, of course. Meanwhile, the other two cops pin down Ink. They grind his face into the gravel, give him a few kicks to the gut. His face puckers from the pain. It looks like he’s howling, but no sound comes out. That’s what happens when you get the wind knocked out of you, though maybe you haven’t gotten the wind knocked out of you since your days of playground tomfoolery. Our cop joins the other two, and it doesn’t seem at all weird to me that he has left us unattended. Together the three cops rough Ink up for what seems like a long while. But it’s probably just a minute. Then they stand him up and cuff him, and he’s all coughing and drooling.

I sit there frozen, barely breathing. I’m wondering if I would rather die than face my parents at a police station. I look around and see how I might be able to end everything right now, but the only people with any deadly weapons are the cops. Josh says, from the backseat, Throw the bags out of the car; get rid of them. But thankfully I know better than to listen to him in this moment. Josh reaches over my seat to grab the pot, and as soon as he does, our cop is back. And this time his gun is out. He’s telling Josh to freeze. He says, Out of the car, you dumb fucks, and keep your hands on your head. We get out, he pats us down. He tells us to keep our hands on the hood of my Civic. The hood is burning hot, but we have no choice but to keep our hands there. I glance around and notice a whole bunch of people are staring at us like we’re the worst people in the world — not just the hoppers and prostitutes, but a grandmother with a baby carriage.

Our cop grabs the dime bags from the car. I don’t see what he does with them. He grabs all my Grateful Dead and Phish bootlegs, even the Bitches Brew CD from Ink. He dumps them on the road and crushes them with his black boot. He takes out my Panasonic portable CD player, a birthday gift from my parents, and does the same thing with it. I’m thinking he’s gonna go for our backpacks, which have all sorts of booze, bongs, and bowls in them, but he lets them sit there. I shoot a glance at Ink. His cheeks are bloody, covered in sand, and he keeps on bending over and spitting out blood. He looks at me for a second, then goes back to his coughing and spitting.

The two cops with Ink are white and black. Our cop is white, but he might have a touch of color in him. He gets very close to my face. I can smell his stale breath, and yes, it does smell like coffee. He says, Listen very clearly. You little shits are gonna get in that shitty car. You’re gonna get the fuck out of here and never come back. And if I ever see any of you little brats again, you’ll be shitting from your mouth and pissing from your assholes for the rest of time.

Ink stops his coughing and stares at us. He says, You’re letting them go?

The cop who’s standing behind him and holding his cuffed wrists pulls something out — a bobby club maybe, I can’t really remember. All I know is that he pulls something out and whacks Ink hard across the face with it. And then on his chest. Ink keels over again, gritting his teeth and growling. We get in our car and drive away. And we never go back to Gilbert Street to score drugs.

I sometimes wonder what happened to Ink. Did he straighten out? Become a music producer? Stranger things have happened. But we all know the statistics. We all know that the sociologists’ models predict something different.

There was a time last year after some book came out when Jenny’s colleagues would talk about the prison-industrial complex at their eighteen-dollar-bottles-of-wine cocktail parties. They talked about the undying legacy of Jim Crow, something they might have read about but never actually experienced. During these Stalie convos, I took long sips of beer and tried not too think too hard about Ink and those fucked-up years. Luckily for me, all this talk only lasted a couple months — a surprisingly long time for these people. Soon they were onto a new topic. Syrian refugees maybe? Or no, it was the plight of Mexican tomato farmers. In Jenny’s world, there’s a woe for every season.

Sure Thing by David Rich

Long Wharf

If a leopard had strolled up the stairs and into the big room, or a giggling leprechaun had slid down a light beam, the reactions of the patrons at Sports Haven could not have been any stronger. Friends, who had sat next to each other through countless losses and victories and drinks and smoke breaks but never knew the color of each other’s eyes, checked now for confirmation that the vision was real and to show their own special, personal appreciation of it.

She was shorter than I expected, and leaner, but the muscle definition was there in her arms and her stride was long and cushioned. I turned away as she approached the bar, checked the ice for anything that needed killing, checked the glasses for the weather — partly cloudy — but that only took a few seconds. I didn’t have to check her progress anyway — I could watch Lou and Jerry at the end of the bar, as gape-mouthed and riveted as kids at the finish line at Saratoga.

At the sound of the chair scrape I turned and slid a napkin in front of her and met her eyes: blue, but not cool and not calm, and I was thankful for that flaw.

“Hi. What would you like?”

“What kind of wine do you have?”

“The kind that used to be red when I opened it three weeks ago and the kind that used to be white.”

“When was that one opened?” She had a way of playing straight as if she was confident of a payoff.

“No one is sure. It’s just always been here. Like them.” I nodded toward Jerry and Lou, each holding onto his beer for stability.

“Pour me something I won’t remember,” she said. “Maybe you have a specialty.”

I held up a bottle of Bud. She smiled and shrugged, then turned on the stool to look around. The eyeballs did not seem to bother her. I opened the bottle and placed a glass beside it. She asked to run a tab and said, “That the only door?”

“The only entrance. There’s a back way out through the kitchen if you need it.”

“I’m meeting someone.”

I knew who she was and suddenly it seemed important not to let her know that. I remembered seeing her in Transmission, Stiletto, and I Can’t Help You, all of them on DVD while killing time at various spots around the Middle East. None more recent than five years ago. In the movies, Addie Tarrant wore thigh-high boots with six-inch heels and eyelashes almost that long, and delivered devastating kicks to guys who just couldn’t decide to shoot her quickly enough. She drove fast, wore shiny dresses with slits up the side, flirted with confidence and impunity, and mastered many exotic and arcane weapons. She posed in colorful wigs. She purred.

She looked around for a moment, then said, “I’ve had a house in Connecticut, just down the road, for five, six years, and never knew we had off-track betting. I suppose most of the towns would rather we didn’t know.”

“Well, there’re casinos up the road and hedge funds down. This is just sort of a rest stop. I suggested they put that on the sign, but...”

The place sat next to I-95. It had been built for smokers, a big barn with a thirty-foot ceiling that dwarfed the enormous screens lining the catwalk and walls. Not that it mattered: the world’s biggest screen, curved with ten trillion pixels, wouldn’t have moved the plungers to a show of awe or appreciation. No matter the size of the presentation, they managed to find the exact dose of hope and disappointment required to keep them upright.

Jerry signaled for another beer. I brought it and said, “That’s number five, Jerry.”

“Thanks, Pete. Listen...” Instead of grabbing the beer as he usually did, he grabbed my wrist. His watery eyes oozed hope, the way they did when he touted a horse based on his great insight and drunken perspicacity. “That’s your girl, right?”

I shook my head. “But leave her alone anyway, Jerry.”

“Really?” He turned to Lou. “She went right to him.”

“That’s number five, Jerry.”

He nodded, obedient now because of my apparent magnetism, and limped to the men’s room. The signal inside him had been permanently muted, and a bartender who relied on Jerry’s own tally was usually sorry.

Addie Tarrant had barely touched her beer. I offered to replace it. She shook her head. “Can you show me how to bet?”

“Sure. There’re two ways to do this: you can open an account and place bets using your phone, or you can use cash.”

“What do you recommend?”

“Are you lonely enough to want to spend five or six hours on the phone with a guy not named Joe Smith in Mumbai?”

“So, cash?”

The screen to my left showed the feed from Santa Anita. Next to it was Golden Gate Fields. I laid out a racing form and turned to the Santa Anita pages. The fourth was going off in a few minutes. I began explaining how to read the form, check the past results, the class, the opening odds versus the real-time odds on the screen, the jockey and trainer standings.

She was watching me.

“Or you could simply choose a name you like. It works just as well.”

“I’d like to pick a sure thing,” she said.

“Doesn’t exist.”

“One of them is going to win.”

“You’re an optimist. There are no winners. There are horses that pay off, but the money just goes back in the system. You just prolong the agony.”

“A philosopher too.”

I walked her over to the teller and she bet a hundred dollars on Holyshirt to win. The odds were 25–1. As she slid over the money and waited for the ticket, she put her hand on my arm as if to steady herself.

“What do you usually do for good luck?”

“I kiss the ticket.” I hesitated and said unhappily, “I never told anyone that.”

She kissed the ticket and then made me do it.

“Do you really do that?” she asked.

“No.”

She looked me up and down as if she were considering casting me in one of her B movies. “You’re confident, aren’t you?”

“Not enough to keep me from wondering where that came from.”

“Too strong? It’s just that I’m around people faking it for a living, so when I see the real thing, I’m impressed.”

Real or fake, the openness and honesty was drowning my skepticism. Maybe she was a better actress than she was given credit for. When we turned we bumped against each other. She was looking at the ticket and I was looking back at the bar, so I saw the guy she was waiting for before she did. He was short, about her height. Muscles under a T-shirt and a tight cream-colored sport coat. His hair was carefully tousled.

He stopped and waited until she spotted him. She went to him quickly.

“What’s this?” His voice was breathy and low as if he had to struggle to get the words out.

“I just bet on a race at Santa Anita.”

“I’ve been waiting for you outside. I’ve been sitting there like an asshole.”

“I just assumed...”

He took her arm roughly and guided her to a table by the far wall. Then he turned and barked something at Shannon, the waitress, who promptly came to her station with the order. I went back and filled it and watched while she delivered it. The man swigged his drink. He said something and smiled with his mouth closed and his eyes narrowed. I lifted the gate to the bar. Addie stood. The man stood too and grabbed her. Addie slapped him and the man slapped her back. She staggered but caught herself and moved at him, pushing with two hands against his chest.

I caught his arm before he could slap again. I twisted it behind his back and pulled hard so it hurt. With my other hand I gripped his throat. I liked the sound of him straining to breathe and pressed for more. I was just pointing him toward the door when I felt the pounding on my back and heard her voice, shrill now and angry.

“Let him go! Let him go!”

Still holding him, I turned to her dumbly. She hit me on the jaw, but I hardly felt it. I let him go. She stepped past me and put an arm around him while he squeezed out a few curses in my direction. They were gone by the time I got back behind the bar.

I don’t know what anyone else saw, but I saw my anger get ahold of me and I didn’t like it. I knew that for the second time that night eyeballs had detached from the screens, all except mine. I glanced up at the finish of the fourth at Santa Anita.

“You gonna see her again? ’Cause they didn’t pay me,” Shannon said.

I laid a twenty down on her tray.

By dawn I was able to close my eyes and I pretended to sleep until morning passed me by. I deleted two messages from my day-job employer and went for a run. The black sedan settled in behind me not long after I passed the train station. I led it under the highway down to the water. It’s a filthy run. The path along the harbor — what the city of New Haven calls Long Wharf Park — is just an open trash can. The tide was out and seagulls stood on the marshy mud which somehow never clung to their feet or delayed their takeoffs. I ran west to the end of the path and turned back toward the pier. The sedan passed me and parked. There were three other cars in the lot, all empty. I ignored the sedan, ran until I reached the pier, then walked out past the Amistad to the end.

Two men got out of the sedan. They hesitated at the beginning of the pier. Behind them was the highway and beyond that, to the right, loomed the big red Sports Haven sign. If anyone was watching I should have been able to spot them. But no cars so much as slowed down. It took almost a minute for the men to reach a decision; one came toward me, one stayed put.

Dan Haley was a US attorney from the District of Columbia. His suit, too large as always, flapped in the wind and rustled his curly hair. He was a skinny guy with glasses — the type people think they can push around only to find out too late how wrong they were.

“Why are you following me, Haley? I’m on your side, remember?”

“I don’t hear from you. You don’t answer my calls. You’re supposed to check in. Are you going soft on me?”

“Just tell me when you’re ready to go to trial and I’ll be there. Just like I told you I would be.”

He didn’t answer.

I said, “But you’re not here because you’re worried I’m backing out. It’s something else.” I knew what else it was, but I wanted him to say it.

“There’s been a leak. We think there’s been a leak. We think they might know your name. Know you’re my witness. It won’t be long before they find you.”

“Who’s he?” I nodded toward the burly bald man Haley had left at the other end of the pier.

“US marshal.”

“And now you’re going to tell me to come with the two of you and you’ll put me somewhere safe...”

“It’s all arranged.”

“And when that leaks? I didn’t want to rely on you to keep me safe to start, and I certainly don’t now that you’ve proven how secure your office is. I told you how to contact me. Get me the court dates and I’ll show up.”

“I have no case without you, Petersen.”

“Then stay away from me, Haley.”

He was a control freak and I could see the struggle inside him. He knew I was right, but trusting me was another matter. The case was against SteelShield, supplier of private soldiers and most everything else that can be sold in a war zone, and six of their contractors in Iraq. They were charged with raping teenage girls, imprisoning them, and eventually, and inevitably, torturing them. I saw it, spent about a minute considering who to report it to — even considered going to the owner and founder, Ian Finch — but decided I wanted to live, so I waited the two months until I got out of Iraq and then went to the US attorney when I returned home. I played a game with Haley from the start, meeting in cars, then in an apartment in Baltimore, all designed to show him that I was serious about keeping my identity secret. But I knew I would give in despite my doubts about Haley and his office. The vision of that makeshift prison nagged me with vicious, pinpoint insinuations that I could not escape. I doubted justice or peace would result from the prosecution of those six thugs or the company, but vengeance holds some satisfaction no matter what the philosophers claim.

Haley tried again to get me to come with him. I brushed past him. “They’ll be following you, Haley. Don’t bring them to me.”

I had come to New Haven to work as a research assistant for a professor whose specialty was post — WWII mercenaries. He had plenty of theories about the supply and flow of fighters for hire, and I was one of two assistants charged with tracking down evidence that tended to support his theories. As soon as Haley was out of sight, I called the professor and told him I wouldn’t be available for a few days. He didn’t seem to mind.

That night and the next day at Sports Haven, I kept an eye on the door and told myself it was out of fear rather than hope. No one came in who didn’t look like he belonged. A few of the regulars tried to bring up “the fight,” but I refused to answer them and their curiosity was muted by races going off every few minutes.

Marsha was counting the cash, wearing her waitress uniform and her don’t-mess-with-me smile, when the door at Cody’s Diner opened. It wasn’t supposed to. She was six feet and close to 250 pounds, but her hands were quick and the gun within reach under the counter.

“We’re closed. Get out.”

Addie stopped. She showed her hands and pointed toward the back of the long, narrow room to the last orange booth where I sat. Marsha looked at me and I nodded.

Addie slid onto the bench across from me. “Holyshirt won. Paid 22–1. And you said there were no sure things.”

“Maybe see it this way: the other six horses were sure things. Yours was a happy accident.”

“Jerry told me I’d find you here.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You look alarmed.”

“You would too if Jerry knew where to find you.”

She pointed to the book I had been reading. “What’s that?”

“The Assassination of Lumumba,” I said. I told her about my research job. Her left cheek showed just a faint redness. Her eyes had lost their humor. Uncertainty ruled. Marsha set a cup of coffee in front of Addie and a piece of pumpkin pie in the middle of the table. She walked away before we could react.

“That means she likes you... unless it’s poisoned. Sometimes I misread people.”

Addie sipped her coffee. “I didn’t go to Sports Haven just to cash the ticket... That pie for you or me?”

“Whoever’s first to it.”

She pulled it toward her and took a bite. “You seem like the type of guy who doesn’t want an apology.”

“Only when there’s something to apologize for.”

“I’d feel better if you let me explain.”

I said I wanted her to feel better. She started by telling who she was and I didn’t let on that I already knew. She had come to New Haven because her movie career was in the dumps — her last picture had flopped, even in Argentina — and she thought she could change the industry’s perception of her by going onstage. Tommy — that was the guy — got her an audition at the Long Wharf.

“He produced my first two movies. We used to be together. I ended it last year. I should have known... how he is. I knew what I was doing. Thing is—”

“Tommy thinks he got a second chance and has no intention of losing out again.”

She nodded.

“And you want to give me a second chance too. Where is he? Tommy.”

She wasn’t sure. She had ditched him to get here. Last night he tried to break into her house.

“Is he armed?”

She shrugged.

“I am. We can go back there if you want.”

“I thought maybe we could hang out for a while.”

Had anyone ever said no? I don’t know how to measure cruelty, but it seemed best to limit her humiliation. I said, “It was the slaps that gave you away. Yours was okay, but you leaned in to take his.”

Her eyes squinted as if a sharp pain hit behind them.

“I like the script, though. Audition at the Long Wharf? Was that meant to make you seem within reach?”

She looked around. I thought she might run. She should have run. She seemed like a young kid caught after curfew.

“Is it Finch himself? Did he put you up to this?” I said. “What’d he promise you? Something better than an audition in New Haven, I hope.”

Her mouth opened but the words wouldn’t form. At last she said, “They just want to talk to you. That’s all.” She mustered all the conviction of a drunk sipping her second glass of water.

I laughed. “These guys? They don’t want to talk to anyone. They want to fuck you and kill me — and if that means talking a little first, they’ll play along. They won’t want witnesses, no matter what they told you. Finch could make any promise because he knows you won’t be around to call him on it. They sent you into Sports Haven so people could see us together. When you’re found dead in my bed, it’ll make sense.”

“To who?”

“To anyone who knows me or anyone who knows you.”

She sighed and pushed the pie away and looked down long enough to make a decision. “It’s down to which horse to bet on again, isn’t it? You want something so much, you talk yourself into believing people. Lying off the lies. Finch said he was going to finance a new movie and I wanted to believe it. Funny thing is, if he told me the sky was blue I’d look up to check. Well, I’ve been taking improv classes. Here I go off script: don’t go back to your apartment. I’m supposed to take you there, leave the door unlocked. The rest is probably more like you said than what they said. I’m sorry.”

I checked my watch. “I have a train to catch.”

Addie caught my arm and turned briefly to look back at Marsha, who was watching closely. “For what it’s worth, I couldn’t have gone through with it.”

“Because I’m so... what? Charming? Confident?”

“Even if it was Jerry.”

I liked hearing that and believing it too.

Marsha was careful to lock up after us. Outside, Addie pulled me close. Her voice was just a soft whisper: “Where’s your train ticket? A kiss for good luck...”

I didn’t bother with the ticket.

It was just up Union and left on Water Street, under the viaduct, to the train station. Easy enough for an ambush, but I didn’t think Finch wanted my death to look like a hit. I made a quick phone call to my professor to inform him that I wouldn’t be around for a while. I told him I was taking a train out of town right away.

The station was quiet. A family of four was being escorted down the stairway toward the platform by a big man — one of Finch’s mercs, one of my former colleagues. Two more mercs flanked the stairway. Two more came inside behind me and guarded the door. The only other person in the huge, high-ceilinged hall was a bull-necked, crew-cut man sitting with his back to me on the middle bench. Finch. Owner of SteelShield. More petty tyrant commandeering the station than the great and humble general he wanted the world to see him as.

I checked the board: my train wasn’t due for almost ten minutes. I went back to the bench, as Finch knew I would.

“Sit down for a while, Pete,” he said, as if I’d run into him at lunch. His eyes were two dark threats and he had long since forgotten the difference between a smile and a sneer. I declined the invitation, though standing there only made me a better target. “I want you to take a vacation for a while. On me.”

“Overseas?”

“We take requests... when we can.”

“Let it go, Finch. It wasn’t you who tortured those women. Just let it go. A few bad apples.”

He had become world-famous. And he built the fortune on his own. What started out as a newsletter for former servicemen had turned into a behemoth stoking the ever-expanding demands of the government at war. Mergers had brought on-site services — food and lodging, transport and entertainment — into the fold, but mercenaries remained the top priority. He didn’t do it by letting go.

“Well, you’ve gotten to the heart of it, Pete. It’s about loyalty. I have to stand by my men. You don’t seem to get that concept. You could have come to me. Directly to me. And I would have taken care of the problem. The boys let off some steam. They’re under pressure. Not everyone reacts the way you and I do. But—”

“You would have done what you’re doing now — tried to kill me.”

“I don’t want to kill you, Pete. But I can’t let you testify, either. The company is too big for that now.”

“I have a train to catch. C’mon. You’ll walk me out there.”

I reached back and brought out my gun and pointed it at him. I didn’t try to hide it from anyone.

Finch was not impressed. He stood. He was about my height but had gotten thick through the middle. For some reason it dawned on me that he was close to sixty years old.

“Arms up?” he asked.

“If you want to.”

He raised his right hand. It was a signal. One of the men at the door went outside for a moment and seconds later two of his comrades escorted Addie inside.

“They have their orders,” Finch said.

I maneuvered Finch toward the stairs, keeping his men in front of me. Addie was working to hide her fear. This was the moment for her slick moves, vicious flying kicks. The moment for me to shoot five men before they could shoot me. Neither of us thought we could pull it off.

“Let her go, Finch. You don’t want to die in this train station. Not your style.”

I ordered the two mercs guarding the stairs to move aside. I gripped Finch tighter and stood with my back to the staircase facing the other mercs. The one with the gun on Addie had sleepy, calm eyes, the kind that don’t panic.

Finch said, “Hold her. Just hold her. He has to catch his train and he’s not going to shoot me like this. Not Pete. He’s not up to it.”

The clock was out of sight and that was fine because I had no idea how to proceed. I listened, hoping the train would arrive and force me into a decision. Instead, I heard footsteps behind me. Coming closer. Coming up the stairs. I remembered the merc who had escorted the family downstairs but couldn’t remember seeing him come up.

“Go ahead, Pete, prove me wrong. Show the boys you’re better than them,” Finch said. “You’ll save the girl. Give yourself up to save her.” But it seemed more for the mercs’ sake than mine.

The footsteps came closer. More than one set. I’m sure Finch heard them too. I don’t know what they did to him but each step was like an ice pick creeping up my spine disc by disc.

Suddenly the mercs lowered their guns and the front doors opened and four men with US Marshal windbreakers swept in.

From behind me, a hand rested on my shoulder and I heard Haley say, “Thanks for the tip, Pete. We’ll take it from here.”

My grip on Finch had gone rigid and the US marshals had to yank him free.

Addie stood alone, in limbo, looking at me, but before I got to her, Haley pulled me aside. “How did you know the professor would contact me?”

“C’mon, Haley. Who tipped you I was in New Haven? I have to go now.”

“Where?”

I stepped away. He grabbed my arm.

“And what about her?”

I shook my head and avoided her eyes. “She doesn’t know anything. They told her to go to Sports Haven and wait for that little jerk. She came around tonight on her own to apologize to me. They caught her and tried to use her. That’s all.”

Addie reached me at the top of the stairs. I took her hand and we walked down and then out to the platform. The red lights began blinking. The tracks curved just out of the station so I couldn’t see the light of the train yet. Now I hoped it would be late.

“You didn’t look scared,” I said.

“I tried not to lean in too much. Do they sell tickets on the train?”

I shook my head. “I have to try to lay low. Running around with a beautiful movie star is probably not the best way.”

The train came in sight but we both turned back to each other at the same moment.

“Maybe when it’s all over I’ll look you up. If you’re still interested...”

“Count on it,” she said. “It’s a sure thing.”

I boarded that train and rode a long way wondering whether I wanted the trial to come soon so I could find out if she was right, or to come later so I could hope she was.

I’ve Never Been to Paris by Amy Bloom

East Rock

I liked her right away. Or, I saw that she liked me right away, and I liked that. It’d been a bad year and any little expression of enthusiasm was gratifying. We walked into the East Rock Café at the same time, women in our thirties, double-knotted summer scarves and flat sandals on our dirty feet. We ordered identical lattes and avocado on toast. We rolled our eyes at the always likable yet glacially slow counter girl and took note of each other. She claimed a shaky little table and managed to drop her latte, step on her backpack, and trip over her pile of papers. I handed her a wad of napkins, smiled, and sat down at the opposite table, laying out David Gates in front of me, Khloe Kardashian’s secret heartache next to my latte, and the second section of the New York Times to my left. Who wouldn’t like me?

She glanced at my newspaper. “My God,” she said, “Oliver Bullfinch was killed. I knew him. I mean, I worked with him.” She looked tense and queasy. She told me he was her colleague, a lovable old coot. What a terrible, terrible thing, she said.

It was a terrible thing. It was also not a surprising thing. People had been hating Oliver Bullfinch for forty years (not always the same group of people, but always a robust cohort of colleagues and students and probably waitresses, bookstore clerks, and garage mechanics). I’d been hanging around New Haven for a long time and I’d never heard anyone call him lovable. I had taken a class with him (“Whales and Wilderness,” properly known as Melville and Thoreau, nineteenth-century American literary blah-blah) a million years ago. I’d sat in the same office in which Bullfinch had been found (310 Linsley-Chittenden, on High Street) while his grad student gave me an unmistakable smile and an A on a paper I’d written in the time it took to type it. I accepted the A. I returned the smile and my senior year was more fun than I’d expected.

“It says here bludgeoned to death with a bronze bust—” I began.

“Of Melville,” she interrupted flatly.

I liked the flatness. “—of Herman Melville. Yesterday afternoon. I mean, they’re guesstimating, I’m sure.”

“How are you sure?”

This was the embarrassing part. “I’m, like, I mean... I’m a private investigator. Custody, corporate stuff. Unfit parents, paranoid bosses. Not murder. I mean, I’m interested, but—”

“You’re a private eye?” Her eyes got warm and swimmy. “That’s cool.”

I liked that too. It didn’t feel cool. It felt pathetic. It felt hand-me-down, which it was. I have a PhD in psychology and I had a job at Wesleyan and then I made a series of errors in judgment (sexual, alcoholic, and vehicular) and did not get tenure. Worse than that, but let’s stick to the essentials. My Uncle Luis saw me through the bad times and, having used me to run his office and all googling since I was twelve, he died and left me Luis Gutierrez Private Investigations. So, boom. I had an office and a license and a copier from the eighties, and every once in a while people who had known my uncle called me for a job. Once in a while is the important phrase here. I needed an in with the police. I needed my fifteen minutes. I needed to pay my rent.

She held her phone to mine and we exchanged details. Then her phone beeped a reminder and she jumped up. “Jesus, that’s all I need. Late for my own class. Allison Marx.”

“Dell Chandler,” I mumbled.

I didn’t see her for a week. I made myself call three divorce lawyers about possible work, in a fast-paced game of Who’s the Better Bottom-Feeder? I let a nervous young wife know that her suspicions about her husband were well founded (that what he’d done to her predecessor, he was now doing to her) and I sent her to a better lawyer than the ones who used me. I played gin with Big Betty, making enough money to pay for one of her pulled pork platters, and I followed the Bullfinch case the way I read Travel and Leisure: glamorous places I wanted to go and delightful experiences I wanted to have (in this case, a regionally famous homicide investigation) — but couldn’t. I snooped around about Oliver Bullfinch, in case I could find a tidbit to bring to the police and worm my way into the investigation. I heard about ancient and deep office ressentiments, classic misogyny, garden-variety racism, and no sexual intrigue at all. He must have been one of the few old men, gay or straight, who had never laid a paw, even lightly, on an undergraduate in all Yale’s history. He was largely retired, with a dead wife, no kids — and however terrible his feuds may have been, most of the people who might have killed him were already dead and those who were alive were pretty firmly in the life of the mind, not the body. The New Haven Register stayed on it, sharing every police crumb with me. People’s alibis were intact. For two days, there was some steam over the Vietnamese woman on the cleaning staff who found his body, but once the police (and then the Register) had interviewed her 4'10" self and were persuaded that she had had no personal contact with Oliver Bullfinch, ever, things settled down.

I had no mouse to lay at the feet of New Haven’s finest.

“Hi. Here you go.” Allison bumped into me, spilling the latte she was trying to hand me. She dropped her scone and I caught it. “How’s the private-eye biz? Any suspects?”

“It’s not my case. Of course. But it is interesting.”

“That’s a little cold, considering an actual person is dead.” She lowered her voice. “I went to the funeral. You know who wasn’t there? Seriously?”

I asked who, seriously, and she got coy and I got persuasive and, after pulling apart her scone, she sighed and said, “It probably doesn’t even mean anything, but... Daniel Markham.”

She told me all about Daniel Markham, rising star in the English department. She couldn’t stop telling me. Her face went into a spasm when she said his name. I told her that every woman had one man like that, the one who makes us look crazy, and I told her an edited version of mine. She blushed for me and laughed. We ate three scones and we had two lattes and I thought, there is nothing like a good talk with a good woman to make you not miss men so much.

“He had a nasty temper and they had huge fights in the department meetings. You could investigate,” she said. “The police’ll probably bungle it. Years ago, there was that poor girl who got stabbed to death in the middle of Edgehill Road. They never found her killer.” She stretched in the chair, her arms grabbing the edge of her seat. Strong, defined arms and short, muscular legs.

“You are in great shape. Yoga? Pilates?”

She couldn’t be a dancer; no one could go through years of dance class and still move like a puppet with tangled strings.

“I do Krav Maga.”

“Really?”

She jumped up and jabbed her right hand toward my face, then moved to my chest and swung another fist to my face, stopping short. I tried not to flinch when she whipped her right leg up and out and rested her heel on my sternum. She smiled a real and satisfied smile.

“It’s all about threat neutralization. All women should take it. I love it. I go to class six days a week. My teacher says I’ve made great progress. I’m taking the test for my black belt in two weeks.”

Her phone beeped again and she ran to her bike, waving.

“Be careful,” I called out to her.

I put my feet up in my office, also lately, sadly, my home. A shitbox room in a shitbox building at the ass end of Whalley Avenue, between Big Betty’s Bar-B-Q and Ahmed and Paula’s Groceries. Allison texted me: Dinner with English Dept tonight. Wanna be my date & investigate? I appreciated the offer. I didn’t have any plans. Nothing in my bank account. One frozen waffle in the freezer. I texted back: Ready to go. Pick me up where? She texted back: I know where you live. Hehe.

I didn’t want her to see my office home. I liked how she thought of me. I ran down when she leaned on the horn, before Betty could tell her to pipe down or lose her windshield. Allison went into drive with a painful crunch and we jerked forward and stalled. A bottle of cheap white wine rolled out under my feet. Other drivers yelled at us, the nicest remark being, “Learn to drive, ya fucking blind snowflake!”

“That’s for the Freemans. Our hosts.”

“Great. I didn’t bring anything. I hope this isn’t too much out of your way.” I didn’t want to upset her. She was gripping the wheel so tightly, little drops of water slid down the steering wheel.

We made our way up Whalley, toward Yale. She was an unusual and terrifying driver: slow, blind, and anxious. At twenty-two miles per hour, we rolled through stop signs and red lights, brushed against sidewalks, and straddled the double yellow line all the way to Freemans’ house.

Since she couldn’t take her eyes off the road, and I couldn’t bear to watch our near misses, I studied Allison. She looked the way she did when we first met: Not glamorous. Purplish-brown circles under the eyes, premature creases on her eyelids, a little eczema in front of the ear closest to me. She wore a baggy dark-brown dress, with little gray and yellow flowers, which was too big for her, as well as being fugly. The neckline kept slipping, revealing sensible white bra straps and knobby yellow shoulders. How could anyone stand to go through life with all their waifish vulnerability hanging out, for all the world to see and step on? I resisted the urge to fix her dress.

“So, is their house far?”

“St. Ronan’s. We’re almost...” The effort of answering distracted her and she swerved toward a parked car.

Without thinking, I put my hand on the wheel and whirled it in the other direction. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was presumptuous. It was just a reflex.”

She smiled tightly. “It’s okay. I’m not a very confident driver. Daniel taught me to drive last fall. I grew up in Manhattan.”

Her driving steadied a little bit and I took my hand off the oh-shit strap. Maybe everything would work out, maybe we’d get to and from the dinner party intact, maybe I’d find the murderer and get more work and a place to live, maybe Allison would calm the fuck down and we’d go to Tanger Outlets and redo her wardrobe. Maybe.

Allison took a deep breath. “Freeman’s a Shakespearean. He got tenure as a wunderkind a thousand years ago and hasn’t published much since. He’s always talking about his new project. He’s going to do a valorium edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor. He says that he’s just an old-fashioned scholar, which means he thinks everything after 1780 is trendy garbage. And he calls women wenches. And he drinks too much. But, you know, he’s seventy.”

“Is there a Mrs. Freeman?”

“Oh, yeah. Lois.” So much for feminism. “I guess she’s younger. I think she was his student. She helps out in the alumni office. She’s, uh, very nice. Well, I mean, classic faculty wife.”

Huh.

“He’s not so bad, really. It’s surprising that he’s interested in Gertrude Stein.”

Old age had defused Freeman and he’d been clever enough to stroke Marx a little. For all her criticism, if there were a departmental conflict, she’d be in his camp.

“I’m leaving in two weeks to go to Paris, to work on a new project. I got a grant from the Omni Foundation — it’s on Gertrude Stein, her theater projects. The radical inconsistencies are fabulous.”

“Sure. Omni Foundation, that’s a big deal. Your letters must have been stellar.”

She clenched the steering wheel. “We’re here.” She slammed on the brakes.

“And so we are. Maybe we can have coffee tomorrow,” I said.

She shrugged and then softened. “I hate seeing Daniel. It makes me tense. He makes me tense.”

I patted her shoulder. We walked, arm in arm, right through the neighboring sprinklers, all working well and making things verdant in front of the stately homes.

The house was classic East Rock, circa 1927: a big two-story home with two wings off the center, both needing repair. Ghosts of live-in help fluttered by. The slightly warped black shutters framed big leaded windows and a chipped slate walkway led to a slate front porch, with two unnecessary columns and exactly enough room for two guests and the big Japanese urn with hopeful pink geraniums in it. Dusty panes of stained glass marked the second- and third-floor landings. There was the general air of past grandeur (and current deep, cossetted comfort and protection, which I wanted even more than I wanted grand). And lovely, blameless mountains of late roses and banks of hydrangeas, in full blooming white, pink, and lavender. I rang the doorbell and smiled reassuringly at poor Allison, who was holding onto her neckline.

“You look fine,” I lied. “Fuck him.”

A leprechaun opened the door.

Professor Freeman was as bald and red as an apple, just about 5'6", wearing the standard-issue hairy Harris Tweed jacket in a novel shade of avocado. His baggy brown corduroys drooped under his round belly and his tie was emerald green with brown and beige diamonds. I expected his socks to be green argyle and the toes of his wee boots to curl upward — and I was right about the socks. There was something irresistible about his delight in being such a snappy dresser at his age. He twinkled.

He ducked his head in a professorial half-bow and attempted to make eye contact with my breasts. “Artemis...” he murmured.

A lot of people find this kind of thing annoying, but I don’t mind it so much, nearing forty. “Professor Freeman,” I responded, grinning. “We brought wine!”

A faded pink wraith appeared next to my host. Mr. Freeman had used up their collective allotment of vitality and color. A little taller than he and ash-blond, she looked like a gladiolus at the end of the season. She tottered toward me on scuffed pink silk sandals and clutched her husband’s shoulder. My God, I thought, she must have muscular dystrophy or something. Then I examined her face and saw those wet, bluish-red eyes and knew she must have been downing vodka since lunch, if she’d had lunch. Mrs. Freeman stared at me, damply, for a long minute; we all stood very still while she tried to get into gear.

“Come in, come in,” she finally barked. “Don’t just gawk, Albert. Make them drinks.” She wasn’t able to do the hostess routine very well anymore, but she knew the basics and did what she absolutely had to do. “Dumb as a bucket of worms,” she mumbled, kicking their fat gray cat out of her path. I didn’t ask to whom she was referring.

The living room was cheerful, in its way. There was a shabby beige velvet couch (covered with gray cat hairs) and four matching armchairs, their nap rubbed off at all the corners. And everywhere there were bits of Ireland. Shillelaghs on the walls, four-leaf clovers in amber cubes, ceramic mugs with John Kennedy’s face, sepia prints of lasses and laddies kissing in the back streets of fair Dublin. The floor-to-ceiling curtains were green linen. It was a shrine to Irish kitsch and you knew that Albert Freeman had lovingly collected and arranged every bit of it. (Freeman, I thought. Irish?)

I sat down and jumped again. Underneath me was a horsehair cushion depicting the saint with embroidered snakes, 3-D style. I settled back in with the white wine Freeman handed me. I would have gone for a real drink or three, but then I would have gotten friendly, and then I would have gotten nasty. If I’ve learned nothing else in my thirties, it’s that I have to drink the way Allison has to drive — slow and worried. Allison, the party animal in question, drank apple juice. Mrs. Freeman continued to sip from a tall clear glass, with not so much as an ice cube or lemon slice for camouflage. Freeman (who was starting to seem more like “poor old Albert”) drank Connemara whiskey and discoursed about its pedigree as he gulped. There was no food on the table, except one small bowl of fuzzy cashews. I sniffed for a reassuring scent of cooking, but I couldn’t pick up anything. My stomach growled.

The doorbell rang and a man burst through the door. Apollo in white jeans, white cotton shirt, and blue blazer. No socks. No little tiny wings on his ankles. He hugged Mrs. Freeman, who smiled and said, “Daniel!” Daniel Markham focused a dazzling smile on me and gave the tail end of it to Allison, who started to perk up, then wilted back into her chair.

“Great to be here. Great whiskey, Al. How about on the rocks, with just a splash. Great.”

Just as Daniel, gleaming from tip to toe, settled into one of the armchairs, the doorbell rang again as our last guest arrived. Mrs. Freeman yelled, “It’s open!” and a dull mouse of a man came in.

“Hey, Jimbo,” Daniel said.

Poor man with thinning brown hair worn long and floppy, a pronounced overbite, little pink mouth, small, sharp nose, and an unfortunate tendency to wear gray. But his eyes were not unfortunate. They were shiny brown and bottomless, seeing everything and thinking, clicking on all cylinders, about all he saw. At the moment, he was fastened on Allison, whose gaze was locked onto Daniel’s perfect profile. Things happen in New Haven, don’t think they don’t.

Mrs. Freeman made the introductions in her abrupt way: “Jim, this is... Jesus, who? Wait, Allison told me. Dell Chandler. She didn’t make it in psych at Wesleyan, now she’s like a junior lawman or something. This is Jim Fiske, he was visiting this year. Rising star but not here. Don’t get attached. He’ll be gone in another week or two. The rest of the department? I guess all those fuckers are out of the country.”

She certainly didn’t make you squirm with her desperate efforts to please.

We sat around, passing the inedible cashews back and forth, and they talked about the kinds of things academics talk about: Albert’s latest bird-watching venture, the faulty transmission in Daniel’s old Honda, Jim’s love of all things Apple. Mrs. Freeman’s eyes closed, Allison couldn’t take her eyes off Daniel, and I was bored out of my mind, hoping that at any moment someone might leap up with that bloodstained bronze bust and head for the library, Colonel Mustard in tow. I thought about whiskey. I needed to focus.

Suddenly, Mrs. Freeman lurched out of her seat and headed toward the kitchen. She quickly emerged again, shouting, “Dinner!” I still didn’t smell anything.

We shuffled along to the dining room and stared at the table. The Freemans didn’t give us any indication of where to sit and, in any case, we were all mesmerized by the table laid with a huge platter of cold sliced corned beef, another of salami — both garnished with clumps of potato salad, with each clump topped by a big sprig of parsley (Mrs. Freeman, asserting something) — a third platter covered with slices of bologna, laid out like a mosaic, a tiny bowl of macaroni salad, a bigger bowl of coleslaw, and a breadbasket filled with sliced white bread. All in dusty Waterford glasses and Belleek plates.

“What lovely crystal,” I said, and maneuvered to sit next to Mrs. Freeman, who seemed a likely informant if I could get to her before the next six ounces of vodka. Allison slouched toward Daniel while looking elsewhere. Very I’m-not-really-doing-this. I understood.

“Do you get your corned beef from Katz’s? Or do you make your own?”

I wasn’t sure how far gone she was. Mrs. Freeman stared at me flatly and smiled a slow, shaky, genuinely amused smile. “Right,” she replied drily. “I don’t make my own anything anymore. I did beef Wellington with two screaming babies, I made salmon en papillote when that was the thing, until it was coming out of my fucking ears. I did baklava from scratch while carpooling my brats to violin and swimming lessons, so they could become swimming violinists or some goddamn thing. Now, one’s a what? — a hedge manager — and the other one, I think she is a swimming violinist. I don’t cook a goddamn thing.”

I smiled pleasantly. “That’s why God made takeout. I live for Royal Palace. So what do you do now that you’re no longer chained to the stove?”

“I drink, detective girl. My chains are right here.”

She waved her glass around, not spilling a drop. At the other end, Albert regarded me questioningly. I smiled back. He turned to Allison.

“Albert drinks a little too much and he paws the girls. Harmless, harmless, harmless. On the other...” She stared at her glass.

“On the other hand...” I prompted.

She paused, the way they do, as though they’re gathering their thoughts when all they’re really doing is trying not to drool or spill the drink. If I could knock over the glass, maybe we could get somewhere. If I could have met her before whatever it was that had shriveled her, maybe we could have gotten somewhere. Mrs. Freeman took a big gulp of her drink and glared at Allison, who felt it and turned toward our end. Mrs. Freeman opened her mouth, shut her eyes, and slumped back in the chair. Her night was over. For the first time since we arrived, Allison smiled. We ignored Mrs. Freeman’s little faux pas.

Albert got up to make coffee and, since the dinner partner on my right was no longer available, I turned to Jim Fiske. I have manners.

“So how do you find Yale after a year?”

The bright-penny eyes took me in with appreciation but absent the passion he had been casting at Allison. Takes all kinds. I needed to encourage the Jim-and-Allison thing.

“I find it interesting. Love Mamoun’s. And squirrel fish at Taste of China. I’ll miss that when I go to Iowa. I’ll miss the people here: some new friends, some of my colleagues. And you, how do you find it, from your novel perspective?”

“Well, this is my hometown. Elm City. I wish I’d known Professor Bullfinch before his death. His habits, his likes and dislikes, his congeniality or lack thereof. I’m sure he was a complex person and, honestly, I just find myself wondering, why would anyone, you know...”

“Murder him,” Jim said.

“What’d you think of him, just from faculty meetings and things like that? Did you hang out?”

Fiske snorted. I’d asked the right question. He told me about Bullfinch going all out to see that Allison was denied tenure, even undermining a summer grant to get her to Paris. That’s all she wanted, he said. She admired Sandrine Boulanger, the Omni’s director. He almost wept when talking about this vicious, doddering old man, vain about his reputation and indifferent to those of his junior colleagues while punishing Allison, cast in the part of Shirley Temple in The Little Princess — hard-done-by and plucky, brave and pure despite her shameful treatment. I looked at Allison, leaning toward Daniel, who never took his cerulean eyes off Jim and me.

“Did the police question you?”

He smiled. “Of course. Happily, I’m dull and predictable. Tuesday, I was eating a late lunch at Calhoun and meeting with students. I’m a fellow, so it’s free. Then I was in the Apple store from four until about six. It was a nightmare — but a great alibi. Afterward, I had dinner at the Belgian place. The tall black girl with the dreads served me. Melisandre. She’s waited on me before, and I left there before eight. Also, you probably know this but the man had no kids, no surviving relatives, and not a lot of money. If I was a PI like you, I’d be wondering about motive.”

I agreed and took us back to Daniel. Fiske said, after the usual disclaimers (“I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve it...”), that Daniel was the administration’s golden boy but not so well thought of in academic circles. He said administration the way my father says Internet, with a sort of envious loathing.

Daniel and Allison were talking softly across the big mahogany table and Allison looked moist. She choked on her coffee. Daniel didn’t seem worried. He put a hand on her shoulder, his long, thick fingers tucking away her bra strap. She froze, like a mouse tickled by a snake.

“Allie. Allie. Allie.” Daniel’s honey flowed and we watched him tranquilize her.

I couldn’t stand it. I went into the kitchen to see if there was any dessert. There was a Sara Lee pound cake on the counter and a carton of Ashley’s vanilla ice cream in the freezer. I went back into the dining room.

“Dessert in five minutes, everyone,” I sang out, like Ina Garten. Everyone brightened up a little, as if this were a normal dinner party. Then one of the murder suspects came in to help the detective dish out ice cream, while the hostess snored and the host brought his bottle of Connemara to the table.

I started slicing pound cake with a dull knife and putting pieces on little crystal plates. The plates were old and fragile, like dragonfly wings, probably given by someone’s grandmother to the young and hopeful Freemans. I think Mrs. Freeman must have once had great charm and her life with that perfectly adorable man just sucked it right out of her. Daniel took the ice cream out of the freezer and for a few minutes we sliced and scooped.

“I don’t know you,” he said.

“You don’t.”

“Allison isn’t my girlfriend.”

“She’s my friend,” I said, pleased with myself.

Unfortunately, just then the lightbulb fizzled in the kitchen, leaving us startled and stumbling to find the switch. We were chest-to-chest in the half-dark and he put one hand on the back of my neck and the other around my waist and we kissed. We kissed like movie stars. We kissed until Albert called out, “Boys and girls! Dessert?” We carried plates through the swinging door.

Everyone gobbled their dessert. No one wanted to prolong the evening. Fiske and Allison cleared as Albert poured himself another drink, leaving his cake untouched. He lifted his wife’s head and slipped a napkin under her cheek, tenderly.

Daniel turned to me and said, “Let me give you a ride home. Please.”

“You’re very kind.” I rose quickly, thanked Albert, apologized silently to Mrs. Freeman, and went into the kitchen to say good night to Fiske and Allison and tell them I had a ride with Daniel. Fiske was thrilled. Allison frowned and dropped one of the pretty goblets. Fiske helped her pick up the tiny pieces. That’s right, I thought. Let him do that.

Daniel held my arm lightly as we walked out of the house. We both sighed, standing for a moment in the warm night, breathing in the honeysuckle above the roses, and the cut grass. Other people still tended the lawns on St. Ronan’s.

“This is mine,” he said, pointing to a little blue MG. “I finally got rid of that old Honda I was telling everyone about.”

The car was dashing and silly. It could only be driven by Bertie Wooster or a seventy-year-old geezer with a checked touring cap perched on his bald head. I would have thought a man like Daniel would drive a mud-splashed Jeep or a Maserati bought for him by a grateful old lady.

“Adorable. It’s not what I would have envisioned for you.”

“Nice that you envisioned me and my car. I know what you mean — I wouldn’t have picked it out myself, but it’s what I got and I can’t complain.”

I opened the passenger door and plopped in; it would have been just as easy to toss myself over the side. I wondered if he’d take me straight to my place or suggest a drive to the top of East Rock, a favorite stop for sex and suicide. If the world was run properly, all men who looked like Daniel would be wonderful human beings and all the good-for-nothings would look like Jim Fiske or worse, and women would be able to focus all of their energy on their children, their careers, and world peace.

“Dell, I want to be open with you.”

Oh, that’s never good. “Yes. Good, ” I said.

“There’s something, well, in my past which most people don’t know about. I don’t want people to know. But I wanted to tell you about it so you didn’t hear it from someone else. Because I like you, and... well, that’s it, really. I just like you.”

“Daniel, if there’s something you want to tell me, I want to hear it. I’m not a cop; I’m barely a PI. I’m mostly just a nosy person. I’m just curious. You can tell me anything.”

How do I know there’s no God? Because I wasn’t turned into a sizzling pile of ash right then and there.

He seemed indignant. “It doesn’t have anything at all to do with Bullfinch’s murder, Dell. It just doesn’t reflect very well on me.”

I nodded encouragingly, hoping that there’d be more excellent kissing and then he’d slip and tell me that he was Oliver Bullfinch’s bastard son and that he had killed him with the bronze bust.

He glanced and turned left, away from Whitney Avenue, away from the lights. I admired his beautiful forehead with one furrow creasing it, the thick golden-red brows, smooth fox fur above the strong Scandinavian nose, down to the movie-star jaw and the constellation of dimples from cheek to chin. Ridiculous. Like dulce de leche ice cream in human form.

“Can I ask you a question?” I was trying to keep my detective brain working while my downtown party district was figuring how we could take a little break from all this tedious good behavior.

“Sure. We’ll just drive. It’s easier to cruise and talk.”

“Did the cops question you?”

He frowned and pressed his foot down. The little blue toy took off like a kid was hurling it across the room. “Of course.” He smiled and put his hand on my thigh. “And would you like it if I told you what I told them?”

“I would.” And I would try really, really hard to concentrate.

“I was with Allison from two until about four. Then I went for a swim. Laps. You can check with her and with the kid at the desk at the gym. Lots of people saw me. I’m in the clear. Plus, I had no reason. I just got tenure.”

He shifted and patted my knee. It seemed premature to object. I didn’t want to object. I didn’t want to die, but he didn’t look like he was planning to kill me. Crush me, maybe, in his arms. Squeeze me where a woman wants to be squeezed. Please, I thought, let him not kill me too soon.

“I’m not like you — your professor father, your artist mother. You have a PhD of your own, is what Allison told me. You’re just slumming with this private-eye shit. I grew up in Rice, Minnesota, population seven thousand. The nearest big town was St. Cloud. My father drove a truck for the Prairie Potato Company and my mother worked at Katie Ann’s Country Pie. They are still there and I don’t visit the way I should. I got to Amherst because Katie Ann’s older brothers went there on hockey scholarships and she got them to take an interest. The MG was her brother Don’s — he died in May. If it wasn’t for Katie Ann and Don, I’d be the manager of Country Pie right now. When I got to Amherst, I had three pairs of pants, three shirts, one sweater, and my dad’s parka. No guitar. No bike. No car, no checkbook, and no ticket home.”

I felt his anger and loneliness, still hot after twenty years of practiced charm and simulated ease.

“I didn’t know what a salad fork was, you know? That was okay because at that time everybody who did know pretended they didn’t. But we all knew the difference between people who thought salad forks were bourgeois bullshit and people who just didn’t know what the hell those little forks were for. Anyway, my roommates were three very cool guys from Grosse Pointe and Hyde Park and Long Island. They were up and coming, and they made a consortium, started a business. Of course, I had no capital, so I was the legs. We sold dope and, for the first time in my life, I had money. I bought CDs. I bought a bicycle, I bought a box spring. I was as happy as a pig in shit.”

“And you got caught.”

“Yup, I got caught. They couldn’t expel the brains of the group since his father had just bought them a laboratory, so they just suspended all of us for a year. I waited tables.” He shook his head and chewed on a thumbnail. “When we got back to school the following year, the other guys moved into an apartment off campus. I couldn’t afford it. I was pretty upset. I did some damage to their apartment. And their car. And to the guys. They didn’t press charges.”

He pulled to the side of the road, turned off the lights and then the engine in two quick, smooth passes.

“It’s who you were a long time ago. Everybody has a past with something not so nice in it.”

“Whatever. Well, that’s my dirty secret — poverty and a temper. What’s yours?”

“I do have a PhD.”

He held onto my hand and pressed it to his lips. “I don’t mind. I’m very attracted to you, Dell. You know I am.”

He kissed me, warm, soft, firm, and I kissed him back.

“You’re very special. You are, even you think you are,” he whispered.

Not good. Whatever that was, that wish to demean and delight simultaneously, had made the hairs on my neck as stiff as quills. I began to think, with some urgency, about getting out of there.

“I’d like to lie in bed with you a few times — before we make love. Just lie with each other, get to know each other’s bodies, enjoy each other without sex, without pressure.” He was murmuring in my ear. “I want to appreciate you, watch you, I want you to teach me all about your body and I’ll teach you about mine. And then, when we’re ready, we’ll make love.”

Oh, that should have sounded good but it sounded awful. I’d have rather babysat Mrs. Freeman than listen to Daniel’s erotic plans. I’d have rather sat on the stoop with a warm beer, playing Fuck, Marry, Kill with Big Betty. I did want him to touch me — but without speaking. Sometimes men get upset when you say that.

“Oh wow, Daniel. Gee, I’m a little overwhelmed. Could you take me back to my place, please? I can’t even think straight.”

He laughed and started the car, snaking one hand under my shirt, stroking my stomach. My adrenaline was pumping along as visions of getting mutilated alternated with visions of Daniel’s golden head between my legs. I stumbled out of the car. Big Betty caught a glimpse of Daniel and gave me the thumbs-up.

What was that?

They arrested him for the murder of Oliver Bullfinch — bronze bust included — the next day. A big day for the New Haven Register. We made it to the Times again, which managed to cluck, in its way, that this tragedy happened at Yale, that murders of one scholar by another and that murders on Yale’s campus seemed to happen all the time. The bust of Melville got a tremendous amount of play. Someone made a GIF of it falling off a shelf. The motive seemed to be mutual dislike and Daniel’s hot temper. People were found all over town to remark on his snappishness, his unnervingly good looks (which were held against him), and his high-handed ways. Most Yale murders were committed by people described as “gentle loners” or “isolated geniuses.” But Daniel was described as being like the rest of us: poor impulse control leading to kicking the shit out of a hated boss. The implication was that it was a fight gone wrong, that Bullfinch’s death was an accident in the end. I turned on the local news and there was attractive, intelligent Ann Nyberg telling us that his bail was very high and the charge was criminal manslaughter. She turned over the interviews with his idiot neighbors to a reporter who was just like the neighbors, but better looking.

I wanted to cheer at justice done. I wanted to be unreservedly glad that the beautiful guy who creeped me out was getting what was coming to him. But all I could see was his alibi, Jim’s alibi, a big bunch of English professors, none of whom were persons of interest — and then way over in the corner and under the radar, little Allison. To the police, Paris denied and tenure denied might not add up to murder, but I could see it. See it? Hell, I’d felt it.

The sequence of events leading up to the crime unrolled in my mind: Allison spent a year facing the fact that she wouldn’t get tenure, a year of bitter acceptance and endless hustle. She comes to terms with it. She hustles. She stays friends with Daniel, who has sway. She doesn’t completely disappoint Jim Fiske, who’s admired in the department. She puts herself forward for every committee and conference in North America. None of it comes to anything but there’s still the Omni Foundation, which could add a little sparkle to her CV. Maybe she speaks French. She has a shot.

Omni says no. She knows — like you know when the airline says delayed but means cancelled — what’s happening. Bullfinch blocked her. She goes to his office and confronts him. He acknowledges it. He’s not sorry. Like the rest of us, he underestimates her. Her crush on Daniel, and those god-awful clothes, make her look weak. She’s not a weak person, in any sense. Bullfinch is infuriating. Maybe he grabs her shoulder to push her out of his office. She whips out a few Krav Maga moves, startling him the way she did me. She smashes his head on the desk. So far, not murder. He sinks to the floor. He loses consciousness. Or he doesn’t. He writhes and moans. The door is already closed behind her. She wrestles with her conscience, which she sees right now as a weakness, a hypocritical rag. She is not the kind of person who can easily bludgeon a man to death. But she does. She braces herself and bashes him in the side of the head one fierce, awkward time. He groans and lurches a little, away from her. She waits until he’s quiet. There are places near his body, under his shirt, where the blood is so deep, she can’t see the linoleum beneath it. She edges closer to his desk, avoiding the corner which shines with blood like jam on a knife.

So far, there’s nothing in the room to indicate that Allison has been a part of anything except a chat with a colleague. She carefully sidles over to the window to let in some of the humid air. It feels good, warm and scented. He has stopped making noise and his hands appear relaxed. She climbs over the furniture, avoiding the red floor. She stands behind his desk. His computer is on. His screen is open. It’s nothing to get into his e-mail, which is set up just like hers.

I imagine myself in front of the laptop. What would I do? I’d write the letter of recommendation I should have had in the first place.

Back in reality, I sent an e-mail to easy-to-find Sandrine Boulanger, using my old Wesleyan e-mail address, pretending I was still on the faculty. If I was wrong, that’d be good. If I was right, that’d be gratifying. Sandrine Boulanger wrote back promptly because I’d hit just the right time for a French office — August behind us, between coffee and lunch — and because I was a polite American professor.

Only recently. I was sure that meant the end of August. Bingo — or whatever they say in France.

Allison had known just what Bullfinch should have said. He apologizes for his previous opposition to Allison Marx (she doesn’t know if he wrote or made a call, so she doesn’t say) and blames it on ill health and a misunderstanding. It would kill him — I would have written — if his flu had interfered with Dr. Allison Marx’s well-deserved grant. He expresses regret that there was so much competition at Yale in her field that they could not offer her tenure. It’s a wonderful letter and if the miserable old fuck had written it in the first place, he wouldn’t have wound up the way he did. I would have wiped the keyboard with his old cardigan, which is always on the back of his chair. I’d wipe the window latches too, and put the cardigan back. I’d tiptoe to the door and close it behind me. It’s the first of September on a college campus. There’s not a soul around.

In the Harry Bosch novels, Michael Connelly often has his hero say, Everybody counts or nobody counts. I don’t quite understand that (does Hitler’s well-being have to matter?) but I appreciate the tone. I felt bad, meaning furious and stupid, that someone I knew (not just murderous thugs in other countries, or even murderous thugs in my own country) was actually getting away with murder. Allison Marx was getting away with it, I was now convinced. Her getting away with it was more upsetting to me than the snuffing-out of Oliver Bullfinch’s crabby, elderly candle. And the universe was rewarding her with a trip to Paris and a crack at tenure. I hadn’t killed anybody at all. I hadn’t even tried, and still, there was no trip to Paris for me.

Students were arriving up and down High Street, Elm Street, Church Street. Parents double-parked like crazy and five well-dressed, upper-middle-class white men screamed at each other to Move that fucking Volvo right now! Boxes, bags, baskets, and books came in waves. Parents and siblings and friends in little parades from the street to the door. Twin sisters from Shanghai in Chanel suits and killer heels, each carrying one small box while a member of their father’s staff lugged the large, matching suitcases. Two slim, dark boys in clean, new Yale sweatshirts, each carrying a battered suitcase and a garbage bag, exchanged looks of excitement and apprehension. Some, with experience, did a bucket brigade and let their parents take them out for lunch. A father and son opened their beers and sat on the wall while two burly uniformed men moved the kid’s stuff. The other families observed them with envy and resentment and disgust. The first-year students clung to every object as if only they knew where it should go and how it should be handled.

And here I was, unarmed and unofficial, ready to chat up Allison and see what conclusions we came to. I didn’t think I could stop her if she decided to Krav Maga me, but I thought a gun could. There’s no martial art better than a gun, which is why I don’t study karate. And it’s why I wish I had gotten around to cleaning and licensing Uncle Luis’s Glock.

I walked up Whitney and turned down Allison’s street, my favorite in New Haven: Autumn Street. A few blocks of houses, mostly classic New England with a few crazy reminders of seventies architecture. It was quiet but lively. Haimish, if you speak Yiddish. Gemütlich, if you speak German. You would walk your dog and talk to your neighbor. People had block parties there. If you were sick, a neighbor would watch you while your mother went to the store. Our particular neighbor read me Wind in the Willows and brought cookies with her. For a couple of years, when I was small, we lived at 175. Allison rented 236. Slate walkway, unpolished brass mail slot, charming wrought-iron bench.

She opened the door before I could knock. It wasn’t her usual hunch-and-skulk. Her clothing was a hipster hodgepodge: black-and-white gingham blouse tied above her waist, baggy olive-green corduroys, and her hair was piled on her head in a flattering Brooklyn ballerina updo.

“Come on in,” she said energetically. “Poor Daniel.”

Her face was different. She was shining and her rheumy, half-closed eyes were open and bright. Something was very becoming. Clothes were strewn all over the living room.

“I have to move these papers. I’m sorry, you know, I was in the middle of going to Paris and now I have an offer — associate professor at Iowa. Barbara Hill’s moving to Emory, she got one of those Coca-Cola chairs and she decided, last minute, to take it. I get to go to Paris and take her place in Iowa, if I want. What a lucky break. And poor Daniel. Do you know anything about it?” She almost winked.

“Word travels fast,” I said. “Iowa. Isn’t that where Jim Fiske is going?”

He set up Daniel and the payoff is they get married and move to Iowa? She set up Daniel, just because he was so handsome and annoying, and the payoff is Jim helps her get a tenured position at Iowa when the time comes? They always loved each other since they were kids way back when, and they set up Daniel together because once she’d killed Bullfinch, why not rid the world of another asshole? Okay, that would be more like me.

She glanced down. “Yes, it is, as a matter of fact. It’s very nice that I might end up there. Also, I FedEx-ed my manuscript to the department chair at Iowa. That helped. I was just so blocked until... really, just the last few weeks.” She said all of this with a chuckle in her voice, while Amy Winehouse filled the room.

“Allison, look, you’re out of here. What do you think about this? Do you really think he killed Bullfinch?”

“I guess so.” Her voice was low and sure. “I mean, who ever really knows another person, but... it seems clear that’s what happened. Doesn’t look like the police bungled this one.” She gave a small sigh and smiled in a worldly way. Apparently, murder and Paris were a cure for every single thing that had ailed her.

“Can I ask, where were you on August 26?”

“What? What difference does it make?”

“Were you alone?”

“Not at all. I was with Daniel for a few hours. It wouldn’t have taken him more than ten minutes to kill poor Oliver. Then I went off to be with Jim. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dell. With Jim and with Marilyn Kozlowitz from history, and Dick Price from astronomy. Jim made dinner for us all and we played bridge until midnight... You know, you’re not actually investigating a murder.” She chuckled as if I were such a goofball. She was so much more attractive now.

“And last night?” I just wondered. She looked so rosy.

“I wasn’t alone.” She smirked. “Life goes on.”

“Well, for you, yeah. Congratulations.”

She grinned a little at my tone, shifted her hips to “You Know I’m No Good,” and asked if there was anything else on my mind.

“I see you’re packing. Exciting, going to Paris. Your first time?”

She smiled again and answered in French, which I don’t speak.

“What’s that?”

“I said, you don’t know a fucking thing about me. All you saw was glamorous Daniel and poor klutzy me. I said, I’ve been to Paris more often than you’ve been to Pepe’s. My mother’s French.” She held up two passports.

“I don’t speak French. But the head of the Omni Foundation speaks — and writes — excellent English. I was in touch with her. Sandrine Boulanger, director of the Omni. I pretended I was a professor, looking to hire you. She wrote back. All excited about the great reference you got from the estimable Oliver Bullfinch. Shall we look at her e-mail together?”

She didn’t flinch. “Absolument.”

We stood close together, in the position of like-minded friends checking out a restaurant review or looking up an old acquaintance on Facebook together. Her eyes slid over the sentences.

“I don’t think it was right of you to lie to them, professor. Really. But you see what a lovely person she is. I can’t wait to meet her.”

“You don’t have anything to say about an e-mail from Bullfinch within hours of the time he was murdered?”

“No, I don’t.” She sighed. “I wish I’d known. I would have thanked him. We had such a hard time with each other. That was very sweet of him.”

“And odd,” I insisted. “He told everyone that he was going to block you for that big grant.”

“He did, I know. Maybe he changed his mind. Jim lobbied for me. I guess it worked, at the last moment.” Her eyes widened playfully. “Ohhh. You think it wasn’t Bullfinch. I mean, the time of death can’t be that exact, of course. You know that, right — even though you’re an amateur. But maybe you think someone wrote a recommendation from Bullfinch — meaning it wasn’t really from Bullfinch — after he died.”

I pocketed my phone. On television, people crumble when you show them evidence or an e-mail that could, conceivably, constitute evidence. “I do think that,” I said.

“Oh la la. It could be, but it seems unlikely. It’s much more probable and logical to conclude that having been pressed by me and Jim on this very subject, Oliver Bullfinch decided to do the right thing — at what turned out to be the last minute.” She sighed again, prettily. “That’s what I choose to remember. Or it could have been Daniel, crossing the line, like the police think. We had been very close at one time. And he killed poor Oliver in a rage. They had so many differences. Oliver was so insulting about Daniel’s work, about his intelligence, really. He may have been right. We’ll never know. That’s what’s so difficult about all this, right? We’ll never know.”

She stood a few inches away from me, aglow with her own cleverness.

“So,” I said. “Off to France. Great food and no extradition treaty?”

“None at all,” Allison replied. “But why would I care? Bon soir, Dell. D’accord, vas-y alors. That means, do what you have to do. I’ll be around for a while if you have more questions about Paris or Daniel or Iowa or the vagaries of human existence. You know, questions about shit that bothers you.”

She walked me to the front door.

“You know what movie we never saw together? Chinatown — Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown. Right? So great.”

She kissed me on both cheeks.