It was shaking him, Glitsky could tell. Whatever passed for logic in the brain of this poor sorry son of a bitch was being whacked out of kilter. “But I tole you I didn’t kill Sam Polk. An’ what crime?”

“Hey, Alphonse,” said Abe, his close personal friend. “You had a bag with like a hundred grand in it. You sell Girl Scout cookies for that? Sam give it to you?”

“Linda got it out.”

Abe shook his head. “Nobody’s gonna believe that. To a jury it’s gonna look like you stole it. You killed Linda for it, then you slammed the safe.”

“I didn’t mean to kill Linda! I mean, that was an accident.”

“You cut her throat by accident?”

Alphonse paused, maybe catching up to the fact that he’d just confessed to a killing. He shrugged as if to say “Hey, it happens.”

“So the thing is,” Abe continued, pressing his advantage, “that much money around, you’re dealing, right? You know it, I know it, so why argue about it. You didn’t kill Polk, maybe somebody else did, but it was about the dope. That’s what we want to know.”

What the hell, Abe thought, might as well go for it. They had him cold for Linda’s murder. Might as well collect some bonus points for DEA if he could, then work it around to the Cochran thing. He looked at his watch, then at Alphonse. “And I don’t got all night, okay?”

Alphonse was wrestling with the problem. The sweat was now pouring off him-Abe could smell it across the table-and his nose was running slightly. He sniffed and ran the back of his hand over his upper lip.

“I know what you’re thinking, Alphonse,” Abe said in his most gentle voice. “You’re thinking you talk and your friends find out, they’ll kill you, right?” The eyes across the table told him that’s what he was thinking. “Okay, that might happen. It might, you understand. But you don’t talk, and I guarantee- guar-an-tee-that you’re going down. No maybe, no if. You go down. We don’t get you for Sam Polk’s death, we definitely hit you for Eddie Cochran’s.”

Alphonse’s mouth just hung open.

“Now you’re going to tell me you didn’t kill Eddie. I know, Alphonse, you didn’t mean to kill anybody. Save it, though, huh, I’m tired.” Glitsky looked at his watch again. He wasn’t particularly tired, but it was closing in on four A.M. and he had his confession. He ought to go home. He pushed his chair back from the table and stood up.

“Where you goin’?”

“I said I’m tired. If you’re not gonna talk, I’m going home.”

Alphonse reached his hand out across the table. “Hey, I mean it. I didn’t kill Eddie. Sam mighta kilt him, but I didn’t.”

Abe pulled the chair around backward and straddled it. “We got your hairs in his car, Alphonse, the same ones we found on Linda. So don’t give me any more of this shit.”

“Hey, I swear to God.”

How many times had he heard this? Everybody was innocent of everything. Unknown was the man who said, “Yeah, I did that, and I did it because…” No, it was always an accident, or a mistake, or somebody else’s fault. Often, the denial got so vehement that the perp actually came to believe he hadn’t done it. And since more than four out of five were either drunk or on some controlled substance when the crime occurred, it wasn’t surprising that it might all seem like an hallucination or dream, that it hadn’t really happened.

“You swear to God,” Abe replied wearily. “But you got a better chance of talking yourself out of Sam Polk. We got you at the scene of Eddie’s murder.” Almost, he added to himself.

“I wasn’t there!” His eyes had widened. Abe found himself forced to look closely at him. There was something about this denial that was different. “Look, I rode in Eddie’s car most days, maybe even that day, I don’t know. But you gotta believe me. I liked Eddie, I didn’t kill him.”

Abe wasn’t about to get suckered by sincerity. He shook his head, made a production out of checking his watch. “You sure as fuck did.” Then he stood up, motioning to the deputy to turn off the recorder. “Take him upstairs,” he said.

He got his hand on the doorknob before Alphonse called out again. “Hey!”

Slowly, acting frustrated and exhausted (though his adrenaline was still pumping away-he wouldn’t need any sleep the rest of the night), Glitsky turned back.

“Look, I’ll talk, okay, but I didn’t kill nobody.”

“You killed Linda.”

He waved that off. “I just thought-I got people saw me that night Eddie got killed. Like all night.”

“Yeah? Who, your mother?”

“No, man. I play basketball, City League. That was a Monday, right?”

Abe nodded.

Alphonse rolled his eyes up again, straining for the memory. “Finals were that night. We played four games. Came in second.”

“Good for you.”

“Yeah, good for me. Who came in first?”

Abe glared at him, lips drawn tight.

Alphonse smiled. “Bunch of cops,” he said, “whole team full of cops.”

THE MORNING sun cast long shadows over the Cruz parking lot. It was barely seven A.M., and Hardy had been there for over an hour, taking the chance that Cruz had told the truth about one thing-working bosses’ hours.

He’d slept at Jane’s, gotten up early and decided to find out about Arturo Cruz once and for all. He wrote Jane a note, then drove across the wakening city to China Basin, where the whole thing had begun.

And it was, he thought, a whole thing, a whole new thing. Jane was right. It could be a pattern emerging. Two weeks before, he was a bartender, he wasn’t in love (either the feeling or the attitude), he hadn’t talked to Abe Glitsky in almost a year, or walked sharks or cared about some stupid idea of Pico’s to get them into the Steinhart.

He wasn’t sure what was going on, exactly. But having an hour alone to think about it, on a morning they were probably shooting postcards all over the Bay, made it all very real and a little scary.

It was just a favor for Moses and Frannie, he had told himself at first, but that wasn’t washing very well anymore. It had gotten inside him, this feeling that he might be doing something worthwhile. It reminded him of why he’d decided to join the police force and then go to law school what seemed about four lifetimes ago.

And it wasn’t that he wasn’t proud of tending bar. It took a certain kind of person to be good, he knew, and there was a simple and profound art to the pouring itself, especially of something like a draft Guinness. Also, there were principles, like you didn’t put a call liquor with a sweet mix-a Jack Daniel’s and Coke, a Tanqueray and tonic. No, you explained to your patron that the finest palate in the world could not tell the difference between a $2.50 call liquor and a ninety-cent well drink when it was mixed with some sugary bubbly stuff. Then you let them see for themselves. You even gave them that drink on the house. And then if they still wanted their Remy Martin VSOP Presbyterian, you directed them to another establishment. Hardy wouldn’t pour that shit, and McGuire supported him. Hell, McGuire had trained him.

But-no doubt of it-something else had been going on since he had started digging into Eddie Cochran’s death. As Jane had pointed out, he thought about the consequences of things, and he had a hard time just now envisioning going back behind the bar rail full-time. Or even part-time. Maybe he was getting a little old to be a bartender. He didn’t think he had wasted his life or anything like that, or wish he’d done things differently for the past few years-doing them had gotten him to here.

What really knocked him out-the surprise of it as much as anything-was that here, right now, felt so good. He wasn’t worried about being hurt, or failing, or anything. He wasn’t worried about his potential. He was having fun, getting to know who he was, not who he’d assumed he had become. It was interesting. In fact, he thought, it was a gas.