"Leonid McGill," newly promoted homicide detective Bethann Bonilla said. It was neither a greeting nor an accusation; just a statement like an infant might make, mouthing a phrase and learning about it at the same time.

Before responding I took in the murder scene.

Equidistant between the baby-blue couch, kitchenette, and window lay the corpse of a blond woman in a brown robe that had opened, probably at the time of her death. The window looked out on the buildings across the street. The dead woman was certainly young at the time of her demise, she might have been pretty. It was hard to tell because half of her face had been shot off.

She lay on her back with one thigh crossed over her pubis as if in a last attempt at modesty. Her breasts sagged sadly. It's always upsetting to see the details of youth on a dead body.

In a corner, behind the blue couch, was what is now commonly called an African-American male in a coal-gray suit. This man was lying on his side. He had been a tall and lanky brown man with a face that was serious but not intimidating. There was the handle of a butcher's knife protruding from the left side of his upper torso. The haft stood out at an odd angle, as if someone had wedged the blade into the man's chest. There wasn't much blood under the wound.

"Congratulations," I said to the detective, who stood only half a head taller than I.

"What?"

"You're a lieutenant now, I hear."

"I work hard," she said as if I were insinuating her position was somehow unearned.

"Yes," I said. "I've experienced that work firsthand."

Four months or so before, Bonilla had been working on a series of murders. For a while she liked me for the crimes. It's a hard business, but even in the worst places you meet people you like.

"Why are you here?" she asked.

Bonilla wore clothes that made her look, for lack of a better word, bulky. A discerning eye could tell that she had a slender figure but in her line of work that didn't get a girl very far. The pants suit she wore was dark green and the shoulder pads made her look like a high school football wannabe.

"I got a call," I said.

"From who?"

"She said her name was Laura Brown." Lying is the private detective's stock-in-trade. I jumped into the role with both feet. "She told me that she needed to find a missing person rather quickly. I told her my day rate and she said she'd double it if I came here tonight."

There were plainclothes detectives standing on either side of me. I pretended that they were straphangers and I was taking the A train at rush hour.

"What was the name of the person she wanted to find?"

"She didn't say and I didn't ask. I figured we'd get down to details when I arrived."

The detective's Spanish eyes bored into me. I noticed that she'd trimmed her black mane but decided that this was not the moment to talk about hairstyles.

"And what are you doing here?" she asked again.

"I just told you."

"Don't get me wrong, Mr. McGill, but you don't seem like the kind of guy who would come into a room where your profit had been cut short."

"I didn't know when I was downstairs what had happened. My client might have been alive. For all I knew the crime was unrelated to my business. I still don't know. What's the victim's name?"

The lieutenant smiled.

I hunched my shoulders.

"What else did this Laura Brown tell you?"

"Not a thing. She said that someone had recommended me but she didn't give a name. That's not unusual. People don't like me thinking about them, I've found. I can't understand why."

"Did she mention anyone?"

"No."

Bonilla squinted and, in doing so, came to a decision.

"We figure the guy for being the shooter," she said, "but there's no gun in evidence. She certainly didn't stab him."

"Anyone hear shots?"

Bonilla shook her head slightly.

"Wow," I said. I meant it. A hit man with a silencer getting killed with a kitchen utensil seconds after he makes his bones.

At that moment I really hated Alphonse Rinaldo.

When I was maybe five, my father, an autodidact Communist, took me down to Chinatown. He was always trying to teach me lessons about life. That day he bought me a woven finger-trap. I pressed my fingers in from either side of the bamboo tube at his request.

"Now pull them out," he said.

I remember smiling and yanking my hands apart, only to have the fingers tugged at by the stubborn toy. Try as I might the cylinder held like glue to my fingers. My father waited till I was near tears before telling me the secret: you had to press both fingers toward each other, increasing the size of the tube, before you were able to get free of it.

The humiliating experience left me in a sour mood.

"What have you learned from this?" my father asked after buying me a ten-cent packet of toffee peanuts from a street vendor in Little Italy.

"Nuthin'," I said.

Tolstoy McGill was tall and very dark-skinned. I inherited his coloring. He laughed and said, "That's too bad because I just taught you one of the most important lessons that any man from Joe Street Sweeper to President Kennedy needs to learn."

Like all black children, I loved President Kennedy, and so my father had my interest in spite of the mortification I felt.

"What?" I asked.

"It's always easier getting into trouble than it is getting out."

I WAS REMINDED OF my father's lesson while wondering how to get away from Detective Bonilla and her investigation.

"Maybe you should come down to the precinct with me," she suggested.

"No," I said, feeling the bamboo walls closing in.

"Material witness," she said. Those were her magic words.

"So is this Laura Brown?"

"Doesn't matter," Bethann said. "She told you her name was Laura Brown."

"I've given you everything I have."

Bonilla was one of the new breed of cops who didn't see the world in black and white, so to speak. My actions in the last case she worked, the one that, no doubt, earned her the promotion, were inexplicable. On the one hand, I had beaten a much larger, much stronger man to death; on the other hand, I had saved the life of a young woman by putting myself into jeopardy.

"Come in here," she said, leading me into the bedroom.

The other cops stared at us but little Bethann was made from stern stuff. She wasn't intimidated by the men she worked with.

THE BEDROOM WAS SLOPPY the way some young women are. There were clothes everywhere. Pastel-colored thong panties and stockings and shoes were scattered across the floor. The bed itself was unmade. Open makeup containers were spread across the vanity.

"There's a standing order to bring you in if there's ever a chance to do so," Bethann said to me when we were out of earshot of the rest of New York's finest.

"If you say so."

"Why is that?"

"Haven't they told you?"

"I'm asking you."

I looked at the thirty-something officer, wondering about the possibilities for, and ramifications of, truth.

"THE TRUTH," MY IDEOLOGUE father once told me, "changes according to what point of view is beholding it."

"What does that mean?" I must have been about twelve because not too long after that Tolstoy was gone forever. My mother soon followed him the only way she could-in a casket.

"A dictator sees the truth as a matter of will," he said. "Anything he says or dreams is the absolute truth and soon the people are forced to go along with him. For the so-called democrat, the truth is the will of the people. Whatever the majority says is the law and that law becomes truth for the people.

"But for men like us," my father said, "the only truth is the truth of the tree."