I looked out the window, walked around the room,examined the contents of the closet and the small bureau. There were several photographs in drugstore frames on top of the bureau, and half a dozen unframed snapshots.Two different women, several children. In one snapshot, a man and woman in bathing suits squinted into the sun, the surf behind them. I showed the photograph to the woman and she identified the man as Herrera. I had seen his photo in the paper, along with Cruz and the two arresting officers, but he looked completely different in the snapshot.

The woman, I learned, was Herrera's girlfriend. The woman who appeared in some of the other photos with the children was Herrera's wife inPuerto Rico. He was a good boy, Herrera was,the woman assured me. He was polite, he kept his room neat,he didn't drink too much or play his radio loud late at night. And he loved hisbabies, he sent money home toPuerto Rico when he had it to send.

FOURTH Avenue had churches on the average of one to a block- Norse Methodist, German Lutheran, Spanish Seventh-Day Adventists, and one called the Salem Tabernacle. They were all closed, and by the time I got to it, so was Saint Michael's. I was ecumenical enough in my tithing, but the Catholics got most of my money simply because they kept longer hours, but by the time I left Herrera's rooming house and stopped for a quick one at the bar on the corner, Saint Michael's was locked up as tight as its Protestant fellows.

Two blocks away, between a bodega and an OTB parlor, a gaunt Christ writhed on the cross in the window of a storefrontiglesia. There were a couple of backless benches inside in front of a smallaltar, and on one of them two shapeless women in black huddled silent and motionless.

I slipped inside and sat on one of the benches myself for a few moments. I had my hundred-fifty-dollar tithe ready and I'd have been as happy giving it to this hole in the wall as to some more imposing and long-established firm, but I couldn't think of an inconspicuous way to manage it. There was no poor box in evidence, no receptacle designed to accommodate donations. I didn't want to call attention to myself by finding someone in charge and handing him the money, nor did I feel comfortable just leaving it on the bench, say, where anybody could pick it up and walk off with it.

I walked out of there no poorer than I'd walked in.

I spent the evening inSunsetPark.

I don't know if it was work, or if I even thought I was doing TommyTillary any good. I walked the streets and worked the bars, but I wasn't looking for anyone and I didn't ask a lot of questions.

OnSixtieth Street east ofFourth Avenue I found a dark beery tavern called the Fjord. There were nautical decorations on the walls but they looked to have accumulated haphazardly over the years- a length of fishnet, a life preserver, and, curiously, a Minnesota Vikings football pennant. A black-and-white TV sat at one end of the bar, its volume turned down low. Old men sat with their shots and beers, not talking much, letting the night pass.

When I left there I flagged a gypsy cab and got the driver to take me toColonial Road in Bay Ridge. I wanted to see the house where TommyTillary had lived, the house where his wife had died. But I wasn't sure of the address. That stretch ofColonial Road was mostly brick apartment houses and I was pretty sure that Tommy's place was a private house. There were a few such houses tucked in between the apartment buildings but I didn't have the number written down and wasn't sure of the cross streets. I told the cabdriver I was looking for the house where the woman was stabbed to death and he didn't know what the hell I was talking about, and seemed generally wary of me, as though I might do something unpredictable at any moment.

I suppose I was a little drunk. I sobered up on the way back toManhattan. He wasn't that enthusiastic about taking me, but he set a price of ten dollars and I agreed to it and leaned back in my seat. He took the expressway, and en route I saw thetowerofSaint Michael 's and told the driver that it wasn't right, that churches should be open twenty-four hours a day. He didn't sayanything, and I closed my eyes and when I opened them the cab was pulling up in front of my hotel.

There were a couple of messages for me at the desk. TommyTillary had called twice and wanted me to call him. SkipDevoe had called once.

It was too late to call Tommy, probably too late for Skip.Late enough, anyway, to call it a night.

I rode out toBrooklyn again the next day. I stayed on the train past theSunsetPark stations and got off atBay Ridge Avenue. The subway entrance was right across the street from the funeral parlor MargaretTillary had been buried from. Burial had been inGreen-WoodCemetery, two miles to the north. I turned and looked upFourth Avenue, as if following the route of the funeral cortege with my eyes. Then I walked west onBay Ridge Avenue toward the water.

AtThird Avenue I looked to my left and saw theVerrazanoBridge off in the distance, spanning the Narrows between Brooklyn andStaten Island. I walked on, through a better neighborhood than the one I'd spent the previous day in, and atColonial Road I turned right and walked until I found theTillary house. I'd looked up the address before leaving my hotel and now found it easily. It may have been one of the houses I'd stared at the night before. The cab ride had since faded some from memory. It was indistinct, as if seen through a veil.

The house was a huge brick-and-frame affair three stories tall, just across the street from the southeast corner of Owl'sHeadPark. Four-story apartment buildings of red brick flanked the house. It had a broad porch, an aluminum awning, a steeply pitched roof. I mounted the steps to the porch and rang the doorbell. A four-note chime sounded within.

No one answered. I tried the door and it was locked. The lock didn't look terribly challenging, but I had no reason to force it.

A driveway ran past the house on its left-hand side. It led past a side door, also locked, to a padlocked garage. The burglars had broken a pane of glass in the side door, and it had been since replaced with a rectangle of cardboard cut from a corrugated carton and secured with metallic tape.

I crossed the street and sat in the park for a while. Then I moved to where I could observe theTillary house from the other side of the street. I was trying to visualize the burglary. Cruz and Herrera had had a car, and I wondered where they'd parked it. In the driveway, out of sight and close to the door they'd entered through? Or on the street, making a getaway a simpler matter? The garage could have been open then; maybe they stowed the car in it, so no one would see it in the driveway and wonder about it.

I had a lunch of beans and rice and hot sausage. I got to Saint Michael's bymidafternoon. It was open this time, and I sat for a while in a pew off to the side,then lit a couple of candles. My $150 finally made it to the poor box.

I did what you do. Mostly, I walked around and knocked on doors and asked questions. I went back to both their residences, Herrera's and Cruz's. I talked to neighbors of Cruz's who hadn't been around the previous day, and I talked to some of the other tenants in Herrera's rooming house. I walked over to the Six-eight looking for Cal Neumann. He wasn't there, but I talked to a couple of cops in the station house and went out for coffee with one of them.

I made a couple of phone calls, but most of my activity was walking around and talking to people face-to-face, writing down bits and pieces in my notebook, going through the motions and trying not to question the point of my actions. I was amassing a certain amount of data but I had no idea whether or not it added up to anything. I didn't know what exactly I was looking for, or if there was anything there to look for. I suppose I was trying to perform enough action and produce enough information to justify, to myself and to Tommy and his lawyer, the fee I had already collected and largely dispersed.