"That came from me," I said. "Was I totally off base?"

"Yeah," Welch said. "You were totally off base. I despise Plankton and his gang. I have to listen to their stupid crap every morning in the precinct house, and if somebody kicked the shit out of them, I'd hate to have to be the arresting officer. But am I a violent criminal? No, I'm not. I'm a cop."

Thad said, "But aren't cops sometimes violent criminals? I've read of a number of cases. The men who abused and tortured Abner Louima, for example."

"Yeah," Welch said, "this can happen. Psychopathic personalities slip through, like anywhere else. And any department gets its share of goons and bullies. But I ' m not one of either category. It's exactly what I ' m against, as a matter of fact."

"I'm glad to hear that," Thad said. "Because it seems to me that police departments shouldn't let any psychopathic personalities slip through. And if they do, they ought to be chucked out. All the goons and bullies, too."

Lyle said sarcastically, "Tell us about it." I had thought he'd been drinking, but he had a can of Coke in his hand and appeared weary but cold sober. Only Welch was drinking, although he was also coherent, even alert.

"If either of you have any doubts about my noninvolve-ment in the kidnappings,"

Welch said, "feel free to look around the house. You'll find evidence of a type of partying that Lyle's not crazy about, but nothing that's illegal in the state of New York. Nothing to speak of, anyway. One of the guys smoked a little weed, but that's about it. It's been ten or fifteen years since sodomy's been illegal in the state, so none of us will be doing time in Dannemora on that one."

Thad said, "Were you having a sex party? Lord, I haven't been to one of those for over twenty years. I'm as good as married now, but I harbor fond memories of my orgiastic youth."

"Fond memories!" Lyle spat out. "Jesus Christ!"

I said, "Thad, I take it that this wasn't back in Lancaster County."

"No, New York and San Francisco in my FFF days. You'll find homosexual dalliances among the Amish, like anywhere else, but no group activity, I think. Barn raising never turned into hayloft orgies among the Mennonite farmers that I heard about."

"Please explain," Welch said to me, "what it was besides my dislike of Plankton that made you think I was behind the kidnappings. This is really very weird. Lyle says he never believed you, but my poor bed-buddy here drove all the way out here from the city to-I think-confront me, search the house, and assure himself that I was no sadistic fiend and kidnapper. Now what was that about?"

Bed-buddy. What did that mean? Poor Lyle thought of Welch as his lover, or boyfriend.

I said, "First, just to add purity to your generally persuasive denials of complicity, Dave, I'd like to take you up on your offer of allowing us to look around your house. Okay?"

Welch shrugged.

"Triad, why don't you give the place a quick look while I backtrack and try to recall exactly what it was that led us out here in the middle of the night. You're the breaking-and-entering specialist. Do you mind?"

"I'd rather not do that."

"All right."

"If it were a rescue, sure. But if it's an orgy, I don't want to see it and experience temptation. Not that I would necessarily be invited to participate. Don't get me wrong."

"I think Delmar and Marty are asleep," Welch said. "But you would certainly be invited, Thad, if you were interested. That goes for you too, Strachey, despite your coming out here to malign my character."

At that, Lyle got up abruptly and went inside the house. "I can't take this," he said as he left.

After a moment, Welch sighed. "I'm sorry. I love Lyle, but I'm not about to settle in with one guy. I'm too restless. And I want to focus on my career and on reforming the department. Lyle's role models in love are his mother and father, and if any two guys or any two women want that, that's fine. But it's not for me."

"Apparently not," Thad said. "I'll go in and see how Lyle's doing. Maybe you need to just cut him loose. Or maybe he should cut you loose, if he can."

Welch did not reply, and Thad went into the house, where a light had come on in a distant inside room.

"Lyle is so upset with me," Welch said to me, "that you almost had him believing I was a major felon."

"And he's so smitten with yon that lie almost had me believing he was going to tip you off that I was onto you-or even that he was your accomplice."

Welch swigged more beer. "So," he said after a moment, "what made you decide I was a kidnapper?"

I explained how comments Lylc had made about Welch's rage over the J-Bird and his radio show had predisposed me to becoming suspicious of him, and how Lyle's apparently exaggerated remarks about Welch's drug use had fueled that predisposition. Then after Leo Moyle told of the powerful scent of fingernail polish in the room where he had been held, I connected that with Welch's use of poppers, which smelled like nail polish, and Welch and his mysterious cohorts suddenly became the obvious culprits.

"We do use poppers," Welch said. "They're probably not healthy, but they're legal.

None of us use fingernail polish, though. Delmar, Marty and I are all police officers, and colored nails would not go over big in the department."

"There was also," I said, "the fact that with Jay F'lank-ton's situation becoming increasingly desperate, some of us hired to find him probably started getting desperate, too. You heard about the tongue at the Post, I take it."

"I doubt if that's real," Welch said. "Who would do that? It's too wild, too much." "I hope so."

"Before you pulled up across the street, Lyle was on the phone with the other detectives working the case, including the feds, and he said everybody was sounding desperate.

The forensics weren't in on the tongue yet, and nobody could find a tattoo artist who looked like a good suspect for the Moyle inkwork. There are hundreds of licensed tattoo parlors in the metro area, and nobody knows how many unlicensed amateurs, it turns out. They'd been hoping that the tattoo search would churn something up. And I guess the FFF end of the investigation hasn't been productive either."

"Not so far," I said. "The harassment of Plankton, supposedly by FFFers, was just some angry kids in Massachusetts. And apparently the kidnappers then picked up on the FFF name, hoping the kids would be the prime suspects. But they weren't for long."

With faint light now discernible through the low clouds in the east, Welch and I reviewed the case for several minutes, until Thad and Lyle reappeared. Lyle seemed to have calmed down. To distract him, Thad had asked for a tour of the Welch house, ostensibly to reassure Thad that Jay Plankton was not bound and gagged somewhere. Thad reported to me that it was true-Plankton was nowhere in the house, and there was no evidence that he had ever been there.

"Upstairs there are two hunky naked guys on a big bed," Thad said, "snoring to beat the band. Earlier somebody had spilled a vial of poppers on a pillow, and the place still reeked. It's a powerful aroma, and I can understand, Strachey, why when you smelled the popper in the subway it triggered this really strong reaction on your part, like Marcel Proust's madeleine.

"But this stuff didn't really smell like nail polish. It's sweeter, and not so pungent. I was thinking, there's nothing that smells exactly like nail polish. So maybe what Leo Moyle smelled really was nail polish. Wouldn't Moyle and the J-Bird and those guys recognize nail polish when they smelled it? They've got all those girlfriends and ex-wives and ex-girlfriends who probably did their nails a lot. So the J-Bird gang would surely know that smell when they were near it," Thad said.