"Doing murder in the daylight should be a bit more difficult than car theft. You think the killer belongs to the square, just blends in with the population?"

"There's no shortage of suspects in Gramercy," said Duffy. "The women left large estates. But there's nothing to tie the heirs to the crime, nothing that wouldn't be laughed out of court. If the heirs have alibis for at least one of the murders, and they do, the other murders would plant reasonable doubt even if you could get circumstantial evidence on one of them."

"This one's so clever," said Rabbi Kaplan, "Louis said he'd have to catch the killer in the act."

"Could there be two of them?"

"It's possible, I suppose," said Slope. "It wasn't Louis's theory. He always referred to one killer. He never said them or they. He called the killer a thing, a freak, an it?

The next hand was under way and Charles dealt the last card to the rabbi. "You were saying that Kathleen's behavior is roughly predictable?"

"If you knew more about Helen, you'd know more about Kathy."

"I'll stick with what I got," said Duffy, declining more cards. "When Kathy was little, she used to steal all kinds of presents for Helen. God, how she loved Helen. She just couldn't steal enough for that woman."

"Two cards," said Slope. "I think it was Kathy's way of paying Helen for loving her."

"Of course, the presents always made Helen cry. One card."

"Well, that confused the kid a lot," said Duffy. "I mean, it was free stuff, wasn't it? So why was Helen crying? Kathy was a good kid… in her own way. She did what Helen told her to do. But she didn't always understand the reasons. Finally, she arrived at a set of rules she could understand. She would never do anything that made

Helen cry, even if she didn't know why Helen cried. The kid never stole another thing."

"Cards, Rabbi?"

"Well, things. She never stole things. One card please. Kathy's moral loopholes were Helen's blind spots. Helen knew nothing about computers. So almost anything she could do with a computer was legal by Kathy's lights."

"And it never occurred to Helen that Kathy could kill," said Slope. "So she never told her not to."

Mallory was out the door, zipping and buttoning as she flew, and "oh, shitting" her damn luck as she pulled the straps of a student book bag over her shoulders. Of all the days to sleep through an alarm. Gaynor would be en route by now, but the subway could get her to the university campus ahead of him.

It was the eight-thirty rush hour when she boarded the subway car and sat cheek and thigh with the workadays who were lucky enough to find seats. Standing passengers were crushing back to the walls, already hassled and stressed by the cattle-car ambience, not wanting any trouble, yet all dressed up in their New York attitudes, up for the battle, the inevitable confrontation that followed the shove, the stepped-on toe, the briefcase pressed into back or gut.

When she got off at 117th Street, the subway's morning ammonia smell was beginning to accumulate more legitimate odors of authentic urine as she passed by a man pissing on the wall. It had become such a common sight, she had long ago forgotten it was a crime to use the city's walls for a toilet. She climbed up the stairs into the light of morning, cool air and a whiff of hot pretzels and coffee from a nearby sidewalk stand.

Limping towards her down the sloping sidewalk was a graduate of the New York School of Begging. He carried the requisite paper cup, and his foot was turned out in a convincing twisted handicap. As he approached Mallory, something in her eyes deterred him, and he veered off sharply on two good feet.

She passed through the familiar gates of the university campus and crossed the plaza to the cover of a doorway where she could watch the street. The cab dropped Gaynor at the same place each morning and never before nine. By Markowitz's watch, it was ten before the hour. The watch had never run when the old man carried it. Repairing the watch had been the topic of a decade-long conversation between the Markowitzs, a few words dropped by habit in the pie-and-coffee hour after dinner. She'd taken care of that old unfinished business for them and had the watch repaired the day it had been returned to her along with the other personal effects. When it came back from the jeweler it had been altered in another respect. Inside the gold cover and beneath the names of Markowitz's grandfather, his father and his own name, it said Mallory.

Her gaze wandered across the plaza to the canteen's wall of glass. Sleepy students were slogging back coffee. Other students carrying trays were lining up to pay the cashier. Over the next ten minutes, she watched a few of them leave without paying. The canteen was staffed with student workers who hated their jobs and could not care less if the other students walked off with the tables and chairs. It was easy theft, and not worthy of her respect.

She checked the pocket watch again. Gaynor was late this morning. She pulled her notebook out of her jacket pocket, and scratched a memo. Any break in a routine was noted.

But he was not late. He was early.

She watched him stroll out of the front door of the canteen and cross the plaza. He carried a covered paper cup and the brown paper bag which, according to her notes, usually contained one chocolate donut, one napkin and three sugar packets for his coffee which was on the light side.

She followed him to his office and leaned against a wall down the hall from his door, pretending interest in a bulletin board and waiting out his twenty-minute breakfast ritual. Exactly twenty minutes later, he emerged and locked the door behind him, slinging a book bag over one shoulder. She followed at a discreet distance as he walked to his first class.

His legs showed a decided preference for two different directions, and his elbows pointed east and west. Clearly, his four limbs were only going along with his torso under duress. It was predictable that he would trip on one paving stone and stumble on one marble step before arriving at the auditorium.

His first class was gathering as he arrived. Students straggled in by ones and twos. Gaynor arranged his notes on the podium to the sounds of young bodies hitting the seats, rustling paper, books slapping to laps, yawns and coughs, settling finally to absolute quiet as Gaynor smiled and wished them good-morning.

Mallory took her regular seat at the back of the lecture hall where she was lost in a sea of a hundred young faces. Notebook and pen in hand, she played the familiar role which had ceased to be pure role-playing from the first class she had attended. He was good. No one nodded off during his lectures.

When he dropped his chalk for the third time, Mallory noticed the student in the next seat was drawing a short line alongside two other lines at the top of a page. This boy would round the scorekeeping off at five before the class ended.

Gaynor was predictable in many ways, but never boring, and she was as attentive as the rest, listening to him, trying not to smile at his wry humor, trying very hard not to like him.

After a second class, they were walking back to his office again, Gaynor and his sun-gold shadow, without more serious mishap than his dropping a book and managing to trip over it.

She sat on a bench in the hall during the hours of student appointments. One after another, the students filed in and out. For the next two hours, he was never alone.

She made quick notes on the time his last student arrived, and then pulled her mail out of the canvas book bag. She looked at the letter she should have opened yesterday, weighing it in one hand. She knew, without opening the envelope, it was another request from Robin Duffy, lawyer and longtime friend of the small family that wasn't one anymore. She would have to do something about the house in Brooklyn, Duffy would say for the third time. She jammed the unopened letter into her pocket.