"Kittredge!" Mike yelled as he swung open the car door.

The man looked in our direction and squinted, trying to make out whether he knew the person calling his name.

"Chapman. Mike Chapman. On the job."

"Fuck the job," Kittredge called out just as quickly, as he stuck his key in the vestibule lock and started inside.

Mike sprinted from the car to the steps and pushed in behind him. "I just need to talk to you about someone you know-an old friend."

"Haven't got any of those. Why don't you get lost?"

I was a few feet behind Mike as he tried to talk his way in.

"She thinks you're a friend. She needs your help," Mike said, pausing before he spoke her name. "Emily Upshaw."

Kittredge stopped and pointed at me. "Who's that?"

"Alexandra Cooper. Manhattan DA's office."

"I'm out of that game. What's with Emily? Back in her cups again?"

"Look, can you give us twenty minutes? I'm freezing my balls off out here."

Kittredge unlocked the door and let us trail him up to his apartment on the second floor. He switched on the light and threw his leather jacket on a chair. The charcoal gray walls were hung with paintings of nude women-or rather of one nude woman painted over and over again from different angles.

"They're mine, if that's what you're wondering. I paint. I work out at the gym two hours a day and I don't bother anybody. Next question."

"Why so hostile, pal?" Mike asked.

The workout time was obvious. Kittredge's five-foot-eight frame was solid and well muscled. His black T-shirt seemed molded to his overdeveloped chest, and tattoos covered his forearms up to the point where the sleeves of his shirt cut off. The wrinkles on his face made him look a decade older than what I guessed was the fifty hard years he had lived.

"You get my address from the department?"

"Yeah."

"Without the back story?"

"With nothing. I figure you're getting a pension check, so you couldn't have done anything to make yourself a pariah."

"I got a good lawyer. That's how come they reinstated my pension. Try living six years without one and sweating out a lawsuit."

Mike sat down on the sofa and I sat beside him. Kittredge stood in the archway between the kitchen and the living area. He took a protein drink from the refrigerator and chugged it from the cardboard container while he waited for Mike to talk.

"Why'd they-?"

"None of your business. What's the problem with Emily?"

"Don't you read the papers?"

"Only the days they got good news."

"Then you might have missed her obituary yesterday."

Kittredge took another slug of his protein. "You here to collect money for the flowers?"

"Emily Upshaw was murdered."

"And you're the hotshot who's gonna solve the crime? You must have some track record, Chapman, you're wasting time hunting me down. I haven't seen that dame in eighteen, twenty years. Can't even imagine how you hooked me up with her."

"She must have liked your brushstrokes. Court papers say she was living here when her shoplifting case was dismissed."

"I bought that sofa you're sitting on so Emily would have a safe place to sleep."

"Bring your work home with you?" Mike asked.

"It was here or a Bowery flophouse. The poor kid had nowhere to go. Her family didn't want to hear about her, the college wouldn't let her live in the dorms after she got busted, and the guy she'd been living with threw her out on-"

There was the sound of a key turning in the lock and Kittredge walked to the door as it opened. A brunette in her fifties with a well-toned body and a skintight ski outfit entered. She was the model for the paintings and looked as cold and hard in person as she did on every wall surface.

"Anything wrong?" she asked, looking from Kittredge over to Mike and back again.

Mike stood up and extended his hand. "Hi, I'm Mike Chap-"

"The Duke and Duchess of Windsor will be leaving shortly. Wait in the bedroom," Kittredge said, jerking his head in the direction of the other door.

The woman took another look at the two of us and patted his arm as she crossed in front of him to leave the room.

"It's the boyfriend we're interested in," Mike said, although I knew he was now every bit as interested in the disaffected Kittredge as he was in Emily's old beau. "What can you tell me about him?"

"Nothing. Never met the guy."

"Well, how'd you get pulled into the case?"

"I wasn't. Had nothing to do with the larceny she got locked up for. I worked in the Sixth Squad at the time," Kittredge said.

The theft was uptown, we knew from the police report, but Emily had been living in Greenwich Village, in the Sixth Precinct.

"She came to the station house with-well, with a pretty bizarre tale-and I happened to be the schmuck catching cases that day. You know what it's like, don't you, Chapman?"

"What was her story?"

Kittredge crumpled the empty drink container in his fist. "Poor little Emily was high as a kite. The desk sergeant kicked her upstairs. He wanted one of the women detectives to toss her for drugs 'cause she wasn't making much sense when she talked. Nobody was around but me. The kid said she had information about a murder. She knew a guy who had killed someone."

"True?"

"I gave it a shot. I asked her to start with the perp. Tell me about him. She was too frightened to do much of that. It was a boyfriend of hers, a guy she'd met in some kind of rehab program."

"Monty? Was his name Monty?" Mike asked.

"Nope. He may have had a nickname like that, that he called himself, but it's not how Emily knew him," Kittredge said, frowning and shaking his head. "Hey, I haven't thought about this for two decades. I'm supposed to remember the guy's name?"

"Didn't you meet him? Wasn't Emily living with him?"

"She'd moved out by then. Gone off the wagon and moved into the Y to live. She tried to point him out on the street to me one time, but I never got a clear fix on him. Looked like one more Village idiot to me. Doped-up rich kid trying to live like a hippie. Most of 'em outgrow it. I went back to question the guy, but he was gone. I think they had shared a place on Sullivan Street. Couldn't find a trace of him."

"Was he a student, too?"

"I think he was already out of school. Dropped out or kicked out. His family wouldn't pay the bills, I think she told me. Black sheep syndrome," Kittredge said, smiling at Mike. "Been there myself."

"Who'd he kill?"

Kittredge leaned back against the kitchen table. "She didn't know that either. Another junkie was all she said."

"Where'd it happen?"

"Well, if Emily Upshaw had the answer to that, I might have made a case, don't you think? Look, Chapman, here's this sweet kid strung out on dope who kept telling me that her boyfriend had buried someone alive. I didn't know who, I didn't know where, and I didn't even know whether the boyfriend had been one of her delusions. She had those, too, from time to time."

"Did she tell you why she thought it was true?"

He thought for a minute. "Yeah. One night, a few weeks after Emily had busted out of the program, the guy came home from a session-"

"You mean an AA meeting-Alcoholics Anonymous?"

"Like that. I think it was called SABA-Student Abusers Anonymous. I think he'd been clean and sober a little longer than Emily. He'd started in the group while he was still enrolled at NYU. Anyway, that night he spun out of control and brought home a few bags of coke. They got high together and that's when he broke down."

"How do you mean?"

"He wigged out. According to Emily, he was pretty frantic. He told her that he'd been having flashbacks ever since he'd been sober and dried out. He said that during that evening's session he'd admitted to a couple of the guys that he thought he had murdered someone. It was all visions and dreams, mumbo-jumbo, alcoholic blackouts. But as soon as he-what's the bullshit word they use now-shared? As soon as he 'shared' his story with his self-help group, he began to worry that one of the other guys would give him up. So he went a little berserk, picked up some drugs to get him through the night, and came home crying to lay it all on Emily's lap."