the two grand Whitfield paid me starts bothering me I can always give it away.'
'Or try to earn it.'
'By chasing Will,' I said, 'or by hunting for the man who shot Byron Leopold.'
'On Horatio Street.'
I nodded. 'Whitfield suggested there might be a link, that maybe Will killed Byron at random, more or less for practice.'
'Is that possible?'
'I suppose it's possible. It's also possible Byron was gunned down by an extraterrestrial, and every bit as likely. It was his way of telling me to keep his money and investigate whatever the hell I wanted to investigate. It made as much sense for me to be working one case as the other. Either way I wasn't going to accomplish anything, was I?'
'That's it, isn't it? That's what's making you taste alcohol that isn't there. That you can't accomplish anything.'
I thought about it. I sipped some coffee, put the cup in the saucer.
'Yeah,' I said. 'That's it.'
* * *
Outside, I took her hand as we waited for the light to change. I glanced at the building diagonally across the street, and my eyes automatically sought out a window on the twenty-ninth floor. Noticing my glance, or perhaps just reading my mind, Elaine said, 'You know what that shooting in the Village reminds me of? Glenn Holtzmann.'
He'd lived in that twenty-ninth-floor apartment. His widow, Lisa, had gone on living there after his death.
She hired me, and after I was through working for her I continued to return occasionally to her apartment, and to her bed.
When Elaine and I were married we went to Europe for a honeymoon. We were in Paris, lying together in our hotel room, when she told me that nothing had to change. We could go on being ourselves and living our lives. The rings on our fingers didn't change anything.
She said this in a way that made the unspoken subtext unmistakable. I know there's someone else, she'd been saying, and I don't care.
'Glenn Holtzmann,' I said. 'Killed by accident.'
'Unless Freud's right and there's no such thing as an accident.'
'I thought about Holtzmann when I was poking around the edges of Byron's life. The idea of someone killed by mistake.'
'It's bad enough being killed for a reason.'
'Uh-huh. Somebody heard the shooter call Byron by name.'
'Then he knew who he was.'
'If the witness got it right.'
We walked the rest of the way home, not saying much. Upstairs in our apartment I put a hand on her shoulder and turned her toward me, and we were in each other's arms. We kissed, and I put a hand on her hindquarters and drew her against me.
Nothing has to change, she'd told me in Paris, but of course things change over time. We have been many things to each other over many years, Elaine and I. When we met I was a married cop and she was a sweet young call girl. We were together, and then we were apart for years, until the past drew us together again. After a while she quit hooking. After a while we found an apartment together. After a while we got married.
Passion, after all those years, was different from what it had been when I'd made those first visits to her Turtle Bay apartment. Then our desire for each other had been fierce and urgent and undeniable. Now it had been tempered by time and custom. The love, present from the beginning, had grown infinitely broader and deeper with time; the delight we had always taken in each other's company pany was keener than ever. And our passion, if it had grown less furious, was richer as well.
We kissed again, and her breath caught in her throat. We moved to the bedroom, shed our clothes.
'I love you,' I said. Or maybe she said it. After a while you lose track.
* * *
'You know,' she said, 'if we keep on like this, I can see where we might acquire a certain degree of proficiency.'
'Never happen.'
'You're my bear and I love you. And you're about to drop off to sleep, aren't you? Unless I keep you awake by glowing in the dark. I almost could, the way I feel. Why does sex wake women up and put men to sleep? Is it just bad planning on God's part or does it somehow contribute to the survival of the species?'
I was turning the question over and over in my mind, trying to form an answer, when I felt her breath on my cheek and her lips brushing mine.
'Sleep tight,' she said.
8
The big news over the weekend had to do with the results of the autopsy performed on Adrian Whitfield. The cause of death was no surprise. It had been confirmed as having resulted from the ingestion of a dose of potassium
