'Pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. Now why in God's name would anybody do a thing like that?'
Gently I said, 'Ginnie, he'd be the one with the best reason.'
'What?'
'Maybe he did it himself.'
'Oh Christ,' she said, impatient with me. 'He was in a public place, Matt. You know that little park across the street from his building?'
'I don't know where he lived.'
'Horatio Street. Not the Van Gogh but the prewar apartment building next door to it. There's a little park across the street. Abingdon Square? No, that's the other one.'
'Jackson Square.'
'I guess so. He was sitting there this morning with a cup of coffee and the morning paper. And a man walked up to him and shot him dead.'
'Did they catch the shooter?'
'He got away.'
'But there were witnesses.'
'There were people in the park. It was early, so it was still comfortable. It's an oven but there now.'
'I know.'
'Thank God for air-conditioning. Byron should have stayed in his own air-conditioned apartment, but he liked the sun. He said he'd spent his whole life staying out of it, but now he seemed to get energy from it.
Solar energy. He said one good thing about being HIV-positive is you didn't have to worry about skin cancer. You didn't know him well, did you, Matt?'
'Hardly at all.'
'You know how he got the virus.'
'Sharing needles, as I understand it.'
'That's right. He wasn't gay.'
'I gathered as much.'
'Living in the Village and having AIDS, it'd be natural to assume that he was. But he was straight. Very much so.'
'Oh?'
'I was sort of in love with him.'
'I see.'
'What do you do when you fall in love with somebody and he's HIV-positive?' She didn't wait for an answer, which was just as well, because I didn't have one. 'Gay men have to face that all the time, don't they? I guess they practice safe sex, or else they just don't date across HIV lines. If they're virus-free they don't let themselves get involved with anybody who's not.' She was silent for a moment. 'Or they just go ahead and take chances.'
'Is that what you did?'
'Oh no. Me? What makes you say that?'
'Something in your voice.'
'It's probably envy. Sometimes I wish I were the kind of person who can act on that kind of impulse. I never was, not even in the bad old days. I liked Byron a lot and I had this kind of yearning for him, but his status put each of us off-limits for the other. We had one conversation about it, how if things were different we'd do something about it. But things weren't different, things were the way they were. So we stayed friends. Just friends, as the saying goes, but what's the word 'just' doing in there? Friendship's pretty rare, don't you think?'
'Yes.'
'I learned so much from him. He treasured each day. Do you think they'll get the man who killed him?'
'It sounds likely,' I said. 'He was killed in a public place with witnesses around. And that's the Sixth Precinct, it's not a high-crime area, so it won't get written off as drug-related. The odds are they'll have somebody in custody by the end of the week.'
'They might think it's drug-related.'
'Why?'
'He used to be a junkie. It'll be on his record, won't it?'
'If he was ever arrested.'
'A couple of times. He never had to go to prison, but he told me he'd been arrested a few times.'
'Then it'd be on his record, yes.'
'And there's drug dealing that goes on in that park. It's not swarming with dealers like Washington Square, but Byron told me how he would sit in the window and looked out at the street and watch people cop.'
After a moment I said, 'He didn't go back to using dope, did he, Ginnie?'
