"It looks like he was killed on impact," one of the detectives said, as if this should be cheering news. Tess kept replaying the scene: Jonathan running toward open ground, trying to take refuge behind the parked cars on the other side of the street, the car bearing down on him, his graceless flight. He may have died instantly, but he had a lifetime to think about it. If she knew Jonathan he was composing his own obit just before the car caught up to him.

"It looked intentional," she ventured. Each time they asked her, she became a little less sure.

"What do reporters know?" Ferlinghetti asked, for once desiring no answer. "What can reporters do? They're just typewriters. You don't throw a typewriter out the window when it gives you bad news. You don't kick the floor because the roof leaks on it. You fix the roof. Am I right?"

"You're right," Rainer assured him.

The two detectives then looked sternly at Tess, waiting for her to echo her agreement. She wanted to, wanted desperately to be cooperative, if only so they would leave her alone with her scraped palms and splitting headache. But the events of the morning kept running through her head on an endless loop she could not control, or stifle.

"That car was aiming for us," she insisted.

"Hey, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it couldn't have been on purpose. I'm saying it's not a workman's comp case. Someone wanted to kill Mr. Ross, it probably had more to do with his hobbies. Does he have a wife? A girlfriend?"

Tess shook her head "no" to the first question, nodded miserably to the second.

"Maybe someone had the wrong idea." Ferlinghetti took a sip of Kitty's coffee and winced. "Maybe someone had the right idea."

He was repeating himself, or repeating what his partner had said. They had already discussed most of the particulars that led up to Jonathan being with her at 6 A.M., down to the scratches she had left on his face, the bruise on his cheekbone-but not the bite on his wrist. She had recited, like an inventory, every glass of wine they had drunk the night before, every bite of Swiss chocolate eaten. She had admitted they had an off-again, on-again sexual relationship. But she insisted it was off again, at least on this night. Jonathan had dropped by to sleep off a hard night of drinking. She didn't care what the detectives thought of her, but she did want to blunt the pain for Jonathan's girlfriend. Bad enough he was dead; did he have to be a cad, too?

"His girlfriend-Daphne-didn't like to see him drunk. At least that's what he said."

"And when you found him at your door, where were you coming from?"

"A date." Crow would have liked hearing that.

"Your date got a name?"

Tess, realizing she had no idea what Crow's real name was, looked blankly to Kitty for help, who swiftly provided the answer: "E. A. Ransome. He works for me. I can get his number if you want."

"It wasn't a date date, exactly," Tess confessed.

"What was it?" Rainer asked.

Oh, breaking and entering at the city's biggest law firm, a few drinks at a neighborhood bar. "He's a friend. We went to a bar and talked about books we liked. He's six or seven years younger than I am, for God's sake."

Kitty hid a smile behind her palm. Thaddeus nodded soberly, as if Tess had made an excellent point. He had long forgotten Kitty's chronological age.

"So he was a friend and Jonathan Ross was a friend. You have a lot of friends."

Tyner raised his right hand slightly, a signal to say nothing. Tess ignored him.

"I just want you to understand this isn't about Crow being jealous of Jonathan, or his girlfriend, Daphne, being jealous of me. Jonathan and I were old friends. There was nothing for anyone to be jealous of."

"You'd be surprised what makes people jealous. Sleeping with a woman's boyfriend, for example. A lot of women don't like that."

"Well, if she was the one, wouldn't she have run me down? It would have solved everything."

"Hey, women drivers." Ferlinghetti looked at his notes. "All I'm saying is, if you want to talk murder, don't tell me it was because Jonathan Ross was some big shot investigative reporter. Who do you think it was? An editor, the cops he covered? He wasn't that good a reporter."

Rainer snickered at that. "Not that good a reporter," he repeated. Tess remembered not all police officers had loved Jonathan. While he had ingratiated himself with homicide detectives, portraying them as hero-warriors on an urban battlefield, he had ignored the more prosaic cops. Traffic investigators, for example, many of whom yearned for assignments to homicide.

"What about me, then?" Tess asked. "Is it possible someone was trying to kill me, and Jonathan got in the way? Someone other than Daphne?"

"You piss a lot of people off as a bookstore clerk? What do you do-shortchange people? Refuse to gift wrap?"

She looked at Tyner, who again raised two fingers on his right hand, waggling them slightly. Don't tell them anything they don't know. Classic defense attorney, she thought. She yearned to brag to these unimpressed, smug detectives, and to Tyner as well. To tell them about her one-woman investigation into Michael Abramowitz's death, or her night raid on the Lambrecht Building. Then they might understand why she thought someone other than Jonathan was waiting for her in the alley last night. But why? What did she know? If someone thought she had discovered something, anything, they were sadly mistaken. She opened her mouth, ready to confess, eager to boast, then closed it again.

"No reason," she said. Tyner nodded his head slightly, happy she had taken his advice for once.

Tyner knew best. That's why Kitty had called him while Tess was in the emergency room, where the resident on duty stuck a tongue depressor in Tess's mouth, peered into her ears and eyes with the little light, and tried to convince her to have a series of X rays. Unsure if her HMO would pay for them, she refused and he gave her a faded pamphlet: What to do in case of concussion. When she asked for salve for her cuts, or a prescription for painkillers, or just some lovely tranquilizers to help her sleep, he shrugged and said: "Any over-the-counter antiseptic cream will work on the abrasions, and ibuprofen will take care of the aches. As for sleeping-try a shot of brandy in your coffee." She planned to do that as soon as the detectives left.

"I still think the car was trying to hit us," she said, but it came out as a question this time. She wasn't sure what she thought any more.

"Any other day of the week, I might agree with you," Rainer said. "But on a Sunday morning? In Fells Point? Hey, in this neighborhood it could have been some college kid who drank all night, then scored a little flake and was still flying. We see hit-and-runs around here a lot on the weekends-not usually fatal, I'll admit. Look, it's a hit-and-run, which is bad, and if we catch the person he or she faces some tough penalties. But it's not a homicide."

"Of course it's not, officers. Would you like some more coffee? Another pastry?" That was Kitty, in her silkiest tones, a smooth contralto a full octave below her normal speaking voice. Only Tess, and maybe Thaddeus, knew her well enough to realize how angry she must be. Impeccable manners were a danger sign with Kitty. She had been icily polite right before she bounced the rutabaga off that disgruntled parent's head. Apparently she was tiring of serving up pots of coffee and plates of kolaches to the good officers. Time to go, boys.

The detectives looked down into their mugs of coffee, too bitter to finish, and their kolaches, too hard to eat, and decided their stomachs could not afford any more of Kitty's hospitality. They left, promising to be in touch. As they walked out through the store, Ferlinghetti could be heard to say to Rainer, or vice versa: "This won't go in the pool."