Father had left the second half of the sandwich (had she made it too big?), and didn’t open the other beer. Maybe what she was telling him was important.

“You might be right, Rose,” he said when she’d finished. His lips were tight, the wide forehead creased in concentration. “I’d better call the sergeant in the morning.”

“I’m sorry, I just thought.”

He patted her hand. “Nothing to be sorry about. You did the right thing. Exactly. I’m sorry I cost you some sleep.”

She sat back in her chair, relieved, but only for a moment, then reached for the dish. Father held her hand again.

“I’ll get the dishes, Rose. You get some sleep.”

INSPECTOR SERGEANT Glitsky answered the telephone on the first ring, his adrenaline pumping. Calls in the middle of the night meant one thing-one of his cases had come in.

He kissed Flo, who didn’t even stir anymore when the phone rang after midnight, and looked in on the three kids, two in bunkbeds and one in a crib all in the same twelve-by-fourteen room (and they did have to get moving on a new house, even if they couldn’t afford it, if he didn’t make lieutenant). In the kitchen, sucking a quick microwaved cup of mud, he called Dismas Hardy as a courtesy. The phone rang four times and then the machine clicked on and Abe said, “Hardy, Glitsky. They got Alphonse.” Then he hung up.

Now he was looking through the small hole in the door of the interrogation room at the Hall of Justice. It was, by his watch, exactly 3:11 A.M.

A familiar and therefore not ominous silence prevailed all around him. The silence was familiar, in this place normally strafed by obscenities and bedlam, because Glitsky had done this many times since becoming a homicide inspector-come down in the middle of the night to interrogate a suspect still without his lawyer and therefore perhaps likely to talk if, as was also likely, his IQ didn’t hover much above room temperature.

If he waited until the morning, even a rookie court-appointed defense attorney would tell Alphonse to say nothing, and that would be that until the trial. This was the prosecution’s one big chance to break something in any case, and if an inspector wasn’t willing to forego a night’s sleep for it, he was in the wrong job.

Alphonse slumped, maybe sleeping, at the small table. His hands were not visible-it was likely they were cuffed to the chair behind him. A deputy, hands folded, also perhaps dozing, sat at one end of the table. Glitsky knocked.

“Alphonse, my man, how you doin’?”

Abe’s voice boomed in the small room. Everybody was awake now. Alphonse even managed a more or less welcome look, possibly relieved that he was getting questioned by one of his brothers, a notion Glitsky was not above using but that, all in all, he found pretty funny.

“Hey, we got you, huh?”

Alphonse shrugged. He had abrasions on his forehead and cheek, a swollen mouth, a little clotted blood under his nose. “You get caught in a door or something?” Abe asked.

“Airport cops hurt me,” he muttered. Glitsky glanced at the deputy, making a clucking sound. “We’ve got to do something about those airport cops. He been Mirandized?”

The deputy nodded. “ ’Bout five times.”

“Does he want to talk?”

“Ask him.”

“Alphonse, you want to talk to me?”

“Yeah. You wanna do something about them beating me up?”

He flipped on the tape recorder, an old, squeaking reel-to-reel. Glitsky turned back to Alphonse. “Says in the report you resisted arrest and necessary force was used to restrain you.”

Alphonse rolled his eyes. He had a way of saying “shit” that took about two seconds and didn’t end in “t.”

“Shi…”

“So why’d you run?”

“I knew you was after me.”

“Saw your picture in the paper, huh? Hey, you got your hair cut. Looks bad, man.”

Alphonse bobbed his head at the compliment.

“So why’d you have to kill her?”

“I didn’t kill nobody.”

Glitsky smiled, warm and inviting. “Oh, that’s right. Somebody planted your knife there, smeared her blood on the pants we got out of the hamper in your mother’s house.” Glitsky raised his eyebrows.

Alphonse’s brain squeaking made almost as much noise as the reel-to-reel. Finally he said, “What if I don’t wanna talk to nobody? What if I wanna see my lawyer first?”

“Then absolutely it’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna stop right now and get you a lawyer in here.”

There was a long pause. Abe waited it out. Finally Alphonse said, “I got rights.”

“No question.”

“I don’t like one lawyer, I can get another.”

“Righteous. Right on!” Glitsky gave him a sarcastic black power fist, then folded his hands on the table and just sat there. After about thirty seconds Alphonse said, “What?”

“What do you mean, what?”

“What you just starin’ at?”

“I’m just waiting. I thought you were thinking about it.” Alphonse strained, stretching against the cuffs. Glitsky, Mr. Nice Guy, turned to the deputy. “Can’t you undo those?”

Alphonse rubbed his hands together when the cuffs were off. He gingerly touched the bump on his forehead. “Thinking about what?” he asked.

Abe thought he ought to get his attention again. “You know Sam Polk’s dead, too.”

“Sam ain’t dead.”

“He ain’t breathin’.”

Abe grinned now, the tight-lipped grin that showed his scar. His eyes didn’t grin. His hands were still folded, calm, in front of him. He twiddled his thumbs, slowly, finally resting his eyes on them, his thumbs.

“Hey, I didn’t kill any Sam Polk. You not layin’ that on me, too.”

Glitsky shrugged. “I didn’t say that.”

“Who killed him?”

“I didn’t say he was killed. What made you think he was killed?”

“You just said…”

Glitsky shook his head. “Uh-uh. I didn’t say anything about him being killed. You did.”

Glitsky had him on the ropes. It was almost depressing, how dumb these guys were. Alphonse didn’t even know what was happening, but Glitsky knew that Alphonse understood one thing-he was in deep shit.

“Alphonse, talk to me, man. If you didn’t kill him, I’m the only friend you got.”

“Shi…”

“No shit, for real.”

Alphonse put his hands back up to his face, rubbing his eyes, craning his neck. “I didn’t kill no Sam Polk.”

“Okay.”

Abe sat there. Sometimes sitting was the best technique in the world. He looked somewhere midway between them with no expression at all on his face. He kept twiddling his thumbs. Alphonse fidgeted as though he had a hemorrhoid. “How we work something out?” he asked at last.

“We trade.”

“Trade what?”

“You tell me what happened. You didn’t kill him, I prove it and you don’t go to the gas chamber. That sound fair?” Glitsky kept smiling. It was good, he knew, to drop the old gas chamber in there. Keep the intensity at the proper level. “You know we got a new court now, Alphonse. We got judges now believe in the death penalty.”

Alphonse swallowed hard, touched his forehead again. He was beginning to sweat. Glitsky was, if anything, cool. The tape recorder spun around and around, squeaking, a little like the steady drip of Chinese water torture. It was the first time Abe remembered having a squeaky reel-to-reel in an interrogation, but he thought he might request one in the future. He wondered, waiting for Alphonse, whether there might be something like WD-4O in reverse-make things squeak. That made him smile again. He ran with it, the humor. “Alphonse, I got to draw you a picture or what?”

“What? What you want? I don’t know nothin’.”

Truer words, Abe thought, were never spoken. “See, the thing is, when we got multiple murders in the course of a crime, like we do here, it’s the death penalty. Special circumstances, they call it, like if you kill a cop, that kind of thing.” His eyes crinkled up. “You hear me? They find you guilty and you could fry. If you’re lucky, you go to the joint and you never get out. They don’t even talk about it.”