SINCE THE TIME, a couple years ago, when Anne Marie Carpinaw’s husband, Howard, decided to walk out on her in the middle of a vacation trip to New York City from their home in Lancaster, Kansas, and while drowning not her sorrows but her befuddlement in the hotel bar she had met and taken up with Andrew Octavian Kelp, life had become odder and more interesting than it had ever been with Howard or in Lancaster (or in D.C., for that matter, where she’d also partly grown up while her daddy the congressman was still alive), which meant things were usually pleasant and went a long way toward making life worthwhile. But now and again, in the orbit of Andy Kelp, life became a little too interesting, and this was one of those moments right now.

The guy in the living room wasn’t menacing, exactly, but he wasn’t explainable either, and that’s what had Anne Marie upset. The doorbell had rung, and when she’d opened the apartment door there he was, short, aged maybe fifty, bandy-legged and skinny-armed but with a big barrelly torso, like a cartoon spider. He was balding, with very pale skin that had maybe never seen the sun, plus watery blue sunny-side-up eyes and a kind of blunt fatalistic manner, as though he would be hard either to surprise or please. There was something in his manner that reminded her of John Dortmunder, except that John almost never got mad, but you could imagine with no trouble at all this guy getting mad.

At the moment, he was cheerful, brisk, and indifferent to her. “Hi,” he said, with a smile, when she opened the door to him. “Andy in?”

“Not at the moment. I’m—”

“I’ll wait,” the guy said, and slithered in past her.

“But—”

It was too late; he was across the threshold. With an empty smile over his shoulder at Anne Marie he said, “I’ll just sit in the living room here, wait’ll he comes back.”

“But—” Helplessly, she watched the guy look at the available furniture and go directly to the chair she thought of as hers. “I don’t know you,” she said.

Settling into Anne Marie’s chair, the guy said, “I’m a friend of Andy’s.” He smiled at the living room: “Very nice. The woman’s touch, huh?”

“Is he expecting you?”

“Not for maybe twenty years,” he said, and laughed. “Don’t mind me,” he advised her. “You go on what you’re doing.”

“I’m not sure when Andy’s coming back.”

“I got nothing but time,” he said, and suddenly looked bitter, as though he’d reminded himself of something unpleasant. Something that might make him mad.

“Well…” She thought, maybe she should placate him somehow. Even though he wasn’t at all threatening, he did look as though he might get mad, even if not at her. The truth was, he barely seemed to notice she was there. She was, she knew, an attractive person, but he gave no indication at all that he’d remarked it. Which was also unsettling.

So, not wanting to, but feeling she should, she said, “Do you want a cup of coffee? Glass of water?”

“No, I’m fine,” he said, and pulled a Daily News out of his jacket pocket, all folded in on itself like origami. Unfolding it, he said, “I’ll just sit here, read my paper, wait for Andy.”

So that’s when she left him there, went to the kitchen, and called John and May’s place, because Andy had told her he wanted to see John today, so maybe he was still there. She got May, and Andy was still there, “but I don’t need to talk to him,” Anne Marie said. “Just tell him what the situation is here.”

May said, “What is the situation there?”

So Anne Marie told her, and May said, “Ooh. I wouldn’t like that.”

“Neither do I.”

“I’ll send Andy home right now.”

Which meant Anne Marie spent the next fifteen minutes in the kitchen, a place where she normally didn’t spend a whole lot of her time. It was very small, to begin with, and what could you do in there except cook and eat?

What she did do, for the next quarter hour, was fret. Was this man a friend of Andy’s? Was it Andy he was potentially mad at? Had she inadvertently permitted all kinds of trouble into the house? It was so hard, sometimes, to know what to do in Andy’s world.

Finally, she heard the apartment door open, so she hurried out to the living room to be present for whatever happened next, because, of course, she was partly responsible for whatever happened next. As she entered the living room, suddenly breathless though it was a mere half-dozen steps from one room to the other, she saw that Andy was here, that John had come along with him and was closing the apartment door, and that the stranger was getting to his feet, doing origami again with his newspaper. And he was smiling.

And so was Andy! It was with great relief that Anne Marie saw that smile, and heard Andy say, “Chester! Whadda you doing out?”

“Believe it or not,” Chester said, “I been out almost four years.”

“Well, I’ll be.” Andy seemed genuinely happy to see this strange man, which Anne Marie knew shouldn’t surprise her, though it still did. Shaking hands with Chester, he said, “You met Anne Marie?”

“I didn’t wanna push myself forward,” Chester said, and turned to offer a smile and a nod and a “How are ya?”

“Anne Marie Carpinaw,” Andy introduced, “Chester Fallon.”

“Hello,” she said, thinking, You didn’t want to push yourself forward? You walked right into the house!

On the other hand, it was now clear Chester Fallon was not a threat or a problem, but a friend of some sort. And once he was Chester, somehow, he became much less threatening.

Meantime, Andy was saying, “I don’t think you know John,” and made the introductions, and Anne Marie noticed that John was very neutral toward Chester, like herself, shaking Chester’s hand, looking him straight in the eye, and contenting himself with a “Harya.”

“Not so good,” Chester told him, and said to Andy, “I take it Anne Marie’s with you, and John’s one of us guys.”

“You wanna tell a story?” Andy asked him. “In confidence? Be confident. Siddown. Everybody wanna beer? I’ll get them.”

So Andy left, and the other three sat, and Anne Marie said to Chester, “I wish you’d told me.”

Chester looked surprised. “Told you what? I’m a friend of Andy’s, I said that.”

“But there was no … conversation.”

“Well, Anne Marie, if I can call you Anne Marie—”

“Of course.”

“I didn’t know you, did I? It could be you’re the lady of the house, it could be you’re a bill collector, process server. No offense, I seen cops look like you.”

“Not enough of them,” John said.

“Very true,” Chester told him. “John, is it? You’re right when you’re right. Most cops, what they look like, they look like what you would look like if, your whole life, you never ate anything but Big Macs.”

Andy came back then to distribute beer, take his own seat, and say, “Chester, I haven’t seen you in years. More.”

“You know I went up,” Chester said.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Andy assured him.

“Of course it wasn’t my fault,” Chester said, “but I was still doing large time.” Including John and Anne Marie in his explanation, he said, “I’m the driver, it can’t be my fault, unless I turn around and drive back to the bank. The thing is, I started in life as a stunt driver.”

Anne Marie, surprised, said, “Really?”

“You may have seen the one,” Chester said, “where the guy’s escaping in the car, they’re after him, the street becomes an alleyway, too narrow for the car, he angles sharp right, bumps the right wheels up on the curb, spins sharp left, the car’s up on two left wheels, he goes down the alley at a diagonal, drops onto four wheels where it widens out again, ta-ran-ta-rah.”

“Wow,” Anne Marie said.

“That was me,” Chester told her. “We gotta do it in one take or otherwise I’m gonna cream the car against some very stone buildings. I liked that life.”