"If I came from his kind of background, they'd call me a patron, too. It's all in the bloodlines, Chapman. You oughta know that by now. Sure, Joe Berk knows everybody."

"Any idea why he was at the Imperial today?"

"What do I care? I'm still trying to figure out why he thought he was entitled to take Talya out to dinner after her performance last Friday. Maybe Vicci called him, maybe Mona invited him. They'd probably be looking for him to pick up the tab for your girl, Lucy, if they really thought she had a future."

"The night she was killed?" Mike asked, aware that Alden had just claimed to us that he had been in Vail the night of the murder. "I had the impression Mr. Alden was out of town last weekend."

"Why? Because he told you that's where he was?" Berk shook his head. "If I tell you I'm the Count of Monte Cristo, you're gonna believe me? No, but him, you take his word for it."

"You know different?"

"When I got to Talya's dressing room, she was still onstage. I picked up her cell phone to call my driver. I saw she had a message, so I played it back. It was Alden, telling her he'd pick her up and take her for a late supper if she gave him a ring."

"How come you didn't tell us that when we talked to you on Saturday?"

"It slipped my mind, Mr. Chapman. My short-term memory is bad." He gave Mike his crooked smile, the one that expressed his delight at being a hard-ass.

"You didn't happen to collide with Mr. Alden backstage, did you, Joe?"

"I didn't stick around, buddy. I don't do time-shares with my ladies. I'm a very exclusive kind of guy."

Mike was sprawled on the sofa in my den while Mercer read to him from the delivery menu of PJ Bernstein's deli. I had just gotten off the phone with Maxine, who told me that Lucy was in the surgical recovery room. Her condition was guarded, and the doctors had decided to place her in what they called a controlled coma because of the concussion, the possible brain damage, and their ability to better manage her pain. It was clear she wouldn't regain consciousness for several days, and I told Max there was no reason for her to stay at the hospital any longer tonight.

Mercer had poured us each a drink. Just over an hour ago, the toxicologist had called to give him good news on the case of the two Canadian women. Large quantities of Xanax had been found in the residue of the blender and in two of the three drinking glasses that had been taken from the dirty sink of Dr. Selim Sengor.

He raised his glass to toast the results and I swirled my scotch around before enjoying its smooth taste.

"Cara and Jean are getting a bit stir-crazy. They were ready to hit the road and head for home," Mercer said.

"Now I can put them in the grand jury first thing in the morning."

"How about Sengor? You going to wait until his court date on Friday to give him the news?"

"Not a prayer. Eric's a decent guy," I said, referring to his lawyer. "I'll call him tomorrow, tell him I'm going toadvance the case and ask him to surrender Sengor first thing on Thursday. I not only get to raise the bail, but I get it out of Judge Moffett's courtroom and upstairs for a Supreme Court arraignment."

Mike was telling Mercer about the painstaking police work at the Met in the Galinova investigation while we ordered dinner and waited for the end of Jeopardy! He removed Joe Berk's plastic water cup from his pocket, holding it by its base in his fingertips.

"Bag it for me, Coop."

"What were you thinking when you took this?"

"When Berk said that he hadn't laid a glove on Lucy, it reminded me of the glove-you know, the man's glove the guys found at the crime scene at the Met. Serology developed two DNA profiles on that. Here we've got a little saliva from Joe's lips, just lor comparison. Piece of cake."

"I can't use this in court. You walked out of his house with it. And it's not like the night when we thought he was dead. This time you were standing right next to him."

"It's just a long shot, for investigative purposes only, I'm telling you, we can call it abandoned property. Thenurse had a whole stack of ' em there. He wasn't going to use this cup again, I just helped clean up after him."

"Toss it, Mike. If we're going that route, we'll do it the right way."

"And tonight's Final Jeopardy category," Alex Trebek said, interrupting our legal squabble, "is Geography."

We each had areas of strength, and this was Mercer's. His father's longtime job as a mechanic at Delta Airlines had exposed young Mercer to a world far beyond his middle-class neighborhood in Queens. He had studied the maps and charts his father used to bring home to him and knew about place-names in foreign lands of which I'd never heard.

Mike put his twenty on the coffee table and walked to the kitchen during the commercial break. "I'm going south on this one. Anything in the fridge?"

I had never mastered the basics of cooking and rarely had more than survival food, usually in the form of takeout from Grace's Marketplace, a block away. "Your favorite pate and some heavenly Stilton."

The answer to the question was posted for the three contestants: "In 1754, Horace Walpole coined this word, which refers to the original name of the country we now call Sri Lanka, and means 'accidental discovery.'"

"You can't trust this guy Trebek. He tells you it's geography and then he throws one right in the lap of the English Literature major," Mike said, slathering the rich cheese on a cracker and biting into it. "Coop's already spent the money on her next pedicure. You know this one, bro?"

"I couldn't do any better than that guy," Mercer said, laughing at the computer software designer from Michigan who guessed, "What is Ceylonese?"

"Well, for a time Sri Lanka was known as Ceylon, but that's not what we're looking for," said Trebek. "Sounds like an artificial fabric, doesn't it? You're thinking of Celanese, probably. Different spelling, of course."

"What is serendipity?" I asked. "If I'm right, Mike, I get you to come to the Vineyard with me this weekend."

"If you're right, you get your forty bucks and another chance for me to tell you that you spent way too touchtime with your nose in the books and not nearly enough in the local frat house getting some practical experience."

"You're exactly right about that, sir," Trebek said.

"The ancient name of Ceylon was Serendip," I said, picking up the two bills, "and there was this wonderfullywhimsical folktale about the three princes of Serendip and a lost camel, which Walpole came across in his reading. So he created this very expressive word, and now it's used for everything from the discovery of X-rays to penicillin, both accidental side effects of the things for which Wilhelm Roentgen and Sir Alexander Fleming were actually searching. You should spend more time reading and a little less on the bar stool at Sheehan's."

"And you need to get out a little more," Mike said, smiling at me as I got up to put more ice in my drink. "Youknow, Mercer, come to think of it, there might be a better way-perfectly legal-to get DNA from Joe Berk."

"You sound like a man with a plan."

"I think, Detective Wallace, that what Coop needs is to take one for the team."

"I what?"

"You should have seen the way that sleazebag was looking at her this afternoon. I'm telling you, Mercer, with very little effort and a little time on her back, she could wind up as the queen of Broadway. We'd kill two birds with one stone-get some valuable evidence from Joe Berk and improve Coop's disposition all at once."

Mercer was Mike's best audience. He was glad to see his grieving friend find humor in anything once again, happy that I was the target. "Now don't go rejecting it out of hand, Alex. Taking one for the team has a nice ring to it."