When they left, the guy with the warm-up jacket got into the Z with Gerry, and the other two guys followed along behind in a metallic green Mazda sedan. Behind the Mazda, I made three. Back in Georgetown, Gerry put his Z away and the green Mazda parked outside his driveway. The four men went in and I stayed outside.

In about half an hour the two teenage girls I'd seen Gerry breakfasting with showed up and went in. They seemed highly animated when they went in and when they came out around four in the afternoon it was clear that they were drunk. They giggled as they swayed past me up Thirty-fifth Street. I watched them struggle up the incline, and looked back at the apartment and then back at them. They looked like a better bet, paragraph six. I hopped in my car and followed.

Up the hill the two girls separated. One of them kept going and the other turned right down O Street. I turned down O Street behind her.

Half a block down O she stopped to light a cigarette. She was having trouble in the wind when I came up close to her and stopped and got out of the car. She didn't even notice me until I was beside her. She was drunker than she had looked from a distance and kept holding the flame of her lighter two inches to the right of her cigarette. I took it from her and took the cigarette from her mouth and lit it and handed both back to her. I took my wallet from my hip pocket and while I did I let her see the gun on my belt. I opened the wallet, held it toward her, then flipped it closed.

"I'd like to talk to you," I said.

She squinted at me uneasily.

"Get in the car," I said.

"What'd I do?"

"You have the right to remain silent," I said. "You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be assigned you."

I opened the door. And with a hand on her arm ushered her into the car.

"Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."

I closed the door and went around the car and got in behind the wheel.

"What'd I do?" she said again. She was smoking the cigarette awkwardly, as though she hadn't much experience with it.

I put the car in gear and we rolled slowly along O Street.

"I've got a few questions to ask you," I said.

"I want to see my parents," she said.

"Okay," I said. "We'll go to your home and see them. I'll question you in their presence."

"No," she said.

"Okay then, let's cut the crap. You're drunk in public, you're underage, you've been to a sex orgy, and you're in big trouble."

The part about the orgy was a tribute to invention. Two high school girls with four college boys, drunk in the afternoon, made it a plausible guess. And even if it weren't true, the charge would scare her.

"You got no right to say that to me," she said. But her outrage was weak.

"What's your name?" I was very much the authority figure. "Linda."

"Linda what?"

She shook her head. I reached over and took her purse. "You can't do that," she said, and she got much more animated.

I ignored her. Holding the purse between my knees, I fumbled it open with one hand and shuffled through it as I drove.

In her wallet I found a District of Columbia automotive learner's permit that said her name was Linda Remmert and that she was sixteen and a half. I also found a small packet of cocaine.

I looked at her. She had shrunk back in the corner of the seat looking nowhere near sixteen and a half. There were tears on her cheeks. She had close-cut black hair and a slightly uptilted nose. She had obviously begun the day with makeup, but there wasn't much left. I turned left on Wisconsin Avenue without saying anything. I put the cocaine and her learner's permit into my shirt pocket.

"That's not mine," she said.

I didn't say anything.

"It isn't," she said. Her voice was snuffly and the tears continued to trickle down her cheeks.

"Honest to God," she said. "I don't know how it got there."

I kept driving.

"Where we going?" she said.

I shook my head. We drove some more. She had started to cry softly beside me. I felt like a child molester. Sometimes the end justified the means, sometimes it didn't. It seemed to me that lately I was having more trouble sorting out when it did and when it didn't. At the top of the hill on the right was Washington Cathedral. I pulled over in front of it and stopped.

Linda looked at me and tried not to cry.

I turned sideways and leaned my right arm on the back of the seat and said, "Linda, it's going to be all right."

She stared at me blankly.

"What d'ya mean?"

"I mean there's a way out of this for you."

She stared at me and didn't say anything.

"I don't want to put a sixteen-year-old kid in the house of blue lights. I'm after more important stuff. If you'll help me, I'll help you."

"What d'ya want me to do?"

"First I want you to tell me where you got the coke and then I want you to tell me what you were doing in there with Gerry Broz and then we'll go from there."

"I don't want to get no one in trouble," she said.

I nodded. "Least of all you," I said. "Listen, honey, I gotta have something out of this. I don't want it to be you, so give me somebody else. Somebody that deserves it more.

In twenty minutes I had it all.

Gerry Broz dealt coke. If you didn't have money for coke, he'd trade for sex.

"If he thought you were sexy," Linda said with pride.

"For himself?"

"For himself and his friends," Linda said.

"If they thought you were sexy."

Linda nodded. Broz also dealt among many of the Washington fashionables, Linda said. She didn't know who, but Gerry bragged of the people he sold to.

"Or traded with," I said.

"Not just kids," Linda said. "Grownups, middle-aged women."

"How do you know?"

"They have parties, granny parties they call them. Gerry calls the older women grannies. They let us come and watch."

"Watch?"

Linda nodded. She thought it was neat. "They have a way to peek. In the bathroom there's a one-way mirror. You can watch."

It was obviously the most interesting thing Linda did and she liked to talk about it once she got going. It was as if she'd forgotten why I was asking. She was an excited teenage girl telling about her adventures, except her speech was slurring while she talked. "Sonofagun," I said. "I'd like to see that." Linda nodded. "It's really bogus," she said. "Some of those women, really high-class women." She shook her head at the bogusness of it all. "Could you sneak me in?" I said. Her eyes widened.

"I'll bet you could," I said. "You sneak me in and you're home free. It'll be like I never saw you. I give you back the coke and the learner's permit as soon as we're out."

Linda said, "I don't know."

I said, "I'll bet you could. You can go right in the front door and through the living room and into the bathroom. If everything's happening in the bedroom, there's no way they'd see you."

Linda was silent. "Yeah, that's… How do you know what the place looks like?"

"There's not much I don't know," I said. "Keep it in mind." Delphic.

"I don't know."

"When's the next, ah, performance?" I said.

"Tomorrow morning," she said. "Eleven o'clock."

"The early bird catches the worm," I said. "I'll pick you up right here at ten of eleven. We'll slip right on in."

"Okay. I guess. I mean, what if I say no?" I smiled at her without warmth. Every year it got easier to smile without warmth. I was starting to feel like Jimmy Carter.

"Well, how will we do it?"

"You'll go in," I said. "Then when the action gets under way, you'll come and get me."

"I usually watch with my friend. What if she says something?"

"Tell her not to. Tell her I'm your dad and I believe in togetherness. That's your problem."