"I just hope the police wrap up both killers in a hurry," I told Carolyn. "We're out of it for the moment, and if they close both cases we'll stay out of it, and that would be fine with me."

"And if they don't?"

"Well, we were at Abel's place the night before last, and if they really dig they might try showing my picture to the doorman, and he might remember me. I told Ray I haven't been over there since July. There's no law against telling a lie to a policeman, but it doesn't make them look on you with favor. I've got an alibi, but I don't know how well it'll hold up."

"What alibi?"

"Denise."

"That's for last night, Bern. We were at Abel's the night before."

"Denise is my alibi for both nights."

"I hope she knows it."

"We talked about it."

"She knows about the Colcannon job?"

"She knows they suspected me. I told her I had nothing to do with the murder. I didn't mention that I happened to burgle the place earlier."

"Because she thinks you're retired."

"Something like that. At least she tells herself she thinks I'm retired. God knows what women think."

"So the bony blabbermouth is your alibi. I wondered why you were seeing her last night."

"That's not why."

"It's not?"

"It's not the only reason. I don't know what you've got against Denise. She always speaks well of you."

"The hell she does. She can't stand me."

"Well-"

"I don't know what kind of an alibi she'll make. She doesn't strike me as the type to lie convincingly. I hope you won't need her."

"So do I."

She signaled for another round of drinks. The waitress brought them to our table, and Carolyn's eyes followed her as she walked away. "She's new," she said. "What's her name, did you happen to notice?"

"I think someone called her Angela."

"Pretty name."

"I suppose."

"She's pretty, too. Don't you think?"

"She's all right."

"Probably straight." She drank some of her martini. "What do you think?"

"About the waitress?"

"Yeah. Angela."

"What about her? Whether she's straight or gay?"

"Yeah."

"How should I know?"

"Well, you could have an impression."

"I don't," I said. "All I've noticed is what she plays on the jukebox. Fall in love with her and you'll spend the rest of your life listening to country and western. You'll have Barbara Mandrell coming out of your ears. Could we forget about Angela for a minute?"

"You could. I'm not sure I can. Yeah, sure, Bern. What is it?"

"Well, I was thinking about Abel. About the murderous coin collector who did him in."

"And?"

"And I don't believe it," I said. "The timing's no good. Say he goes to sleep right after we leave, gets up first thing in the morning and calls a collector. The guy comes over almost immediately, kills Abel and leaves. That's about how it would have had to happen, and Abel wouldn't work it that way. He'd have wanted to turn it over quickly, but not that quickly. First he'd want to convince himself the coin was genuine, and didn't he say something about x-raying it? He'd have done that first, and he'd have waited to see what kind of heat the Colcannon job generated, and if the theft of the V-Nickel was reported in the press. That would help determine the price he could charge for it, so he wouldn't sell it until he had the information. I don't think his murder had a damned thing to do with that coin, because I don't think anyone in the world outside of you and me had the slightest idea that he had it. Nobody followed us there. Nobody saw us walk in. And we didn't tell anybody anything. At least I didn't."

"Who would I tell? You're the only person who knows I ever do anything besides groom dogs."

"Then someone had another reason for killing Abel. Maybe it was a straight and simple robbery. Maybe somebody else tried to sell him something and they argued. Or maybe it was someone from his past."

"You mean Dachau? Someone he knew in the concentration camp?"

"It's possible, or maybe someone from his more recent past. I don't know much about him. I know Crowe's not the name he was born with. He told me once that his name was originally Amsel, which means blackbird in German. From blackbird to crow is a simple leap. But another time he told me the same story except the name wasn't Amsel, it was Schwarzvogel. That means blackbird, too, but you'd think he'd remember which one of the words was his original name. Unless neither was."

"He was Jewish, wasn't he?"

"I don't think so."

"Then what was he doing in Dachau?"

"You know the rye-bread ads? 'You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's.' Well, you didn't have to be Jewish to go to Dachau. Abel told me he was a political prisoner, a Social Democrat. That may have been the truth, or he could have landed there for some ordinary crime-receiving stolen goods, for instance. Or maybe he was gay. That was another good way to get to Dachau."

She shuddered.

"The thing is," I went on, "I don't know a hell of a lot about Abel's past. It's possible nobody does. But he could have made an enemy along the way. Or it could have been a robbery or a disagreement or any damned thing. If he was gay, for example, maybe he brought a hustler home and got killed out of simple meanness, or for the money in his wallet."

"It happens all the time. Do you really think he could have been gay, Bern? He kept trying to marry the two of us off. If he was gay himself, wouldn't he have been quicker to pick up on the fact that I'm not your standard marriage material?" She finished her drink. "And isn't the whole thing too much of a coincidence? His death and Wanda's death, one right after the other?"

"Only because we're the link between them. But we're not connected with their deaths, and we're the only link between them otherwise, you and I and the nickel. And that's no link at all."

"I guess not."

I made interlocking rings on the tabletop with the wet bottom of my Scotch glass. "Maybe I'm just telling myself this because it's what I want to believe," I said. "Except that I'm not altogether sure I want to believe it anyway, because of where it leads."

"You just lost me."

"The nickel," I said. "The 1913 V-Nickel, the Colcannon nickel, the one we could have taken $17,500 for if we hadn't picked pie in the sky instead."

"Don't remind me."

"If he wasn't killed for the nickel," I said, "and if he was murdered by some clown who didn't even know about the nickel, don't you see what that means?"

"Oh."

"Right. The nickel's still there."

I spent the evening at home. Dinner was a can of chili with some extra cumin and cayenne stirred in to pep it up. I ate it in front of the television set and kept it company with a bottle of Carta Blanca. I caught the tail end of the local news while the chili was heating. There was a brief and uninformative item about Abel, nothing about the Colcannon burglary. I watched John Chancellor while I ate, and I sat through half of Family Feud before I overcame inertia sufficiently to get up and turn it off.

I tidied up, stacked a mix of jazz and classical music on the record player, settled in with the latest Antiquarian Bookman, a magazine consisting almost exclusively of dealers' lists of books they wish to acquire for resale. I scanned the ads lazily, making a mark now and then when I found something I remembered having in stock. Several of the marks I made were for books presently reposing on my bargain table, and if I could sell them to someone who was actively seeking them I could certainly get more than forty cents apiece for them.

If I took the trouble to write to the advertisers and wait for their orders and wrap the books and ship them. That was the trouble with the used-book business. There were so many niggling things you had to attend to, so much watching the pence in hope that the pounds would take care of themselves. I didn't make a decent living from Barnegat Books, didn't even make a profit at it, but I probably could have if I'd had that infinite capacity for taking pains that success seems to demand.