The building, a run-down old place wedged between two taller and wider buildings off South Broad, didn’t give her much comfort. Above the outside door was a stone lintel with the word apartments carved into it, as if to announce that the structure had never aspired to be anything grander than a cheap place to hang your hat. It now held a combination of longtime tenants lacking the wherewithal or the desire to find something better and transients struggling to slow the slide of their fortunes. By the yellowed state of the slip of paper with his name typed on it, she assumed that this Spangler was the former. The vestibule door was unlocked, the stairs were worn, the walls dark with decades of shoulders rubbing the paint on their way down, down.

When the door opened, Ramirez stood by the side of the doorway with her gun drawn, waiting for something lethal to come through. It turned out to be an old man, slight and harmless. He wore a wavy dark toupee on his large, round head and had red, blotchy skin on his face and his slightly palsied hands. The man stuck his head out the door, looked right and then left. When he found Ramirez, his gaze drifted down to the gun, and then he smiled thinly.

“There you are,” he said in a drawly, affected voice. “And you’re holding a gun. Oh, my. What terrible things must I have done.”

Gay? she wondered. With that mop of fake hair, probably yes. And definitely not frightening. If they got into a dustup, one elbow to that outsize head and he’d be on the floor in a heap.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she put the gun back into the holster. “In my business they train us to be careful.”

“As they should, Detective, because one never knows. One never does know. You said you had some questions?”

“Yes. Can I come in?”

“Of course. How rude of me.” He opened the door wider and beckoned her inside. “I wouldn’t want to be rude.”

She entered a dark old apartment, its walls papered in faded yellowed paisley, dusty red tassels hanging from its lampshades. There was a creepy, anachronistic feel to the place, as if by stepping through the doorway she had spiraled through time into some spinster’s house in the nineteen fifties. Black-and-white family photographs on the walls, an old-style console television, a loaded Super 8 projector set up behind the couch and pointed toward a stained white sheet tacked up on the wall above the television. A skirted couch and chair, upholstered in a greasy plaid fabric, was undoubtedly inherited from a grandmother and untouched out of sheer sentimentality. Ramirez wouldn’t have been surprised to find the grandmother herself in a closet, untouched just as long for the selfsame reason.

“Sit, please, make yourself at home,” said the man.

She did as he asked, sitting on the edge of the couch. The man was standing before her, in suit pants and a cardigan over a very nice shirt, with the soft folds of his cuffs just peeking out from the wool. He was younger than she had thought at first, maybe late fifties, early sixties. He leaned toward her, hands clasped together like an insect. He was a strange sight, with his gray pallor beneath the red and blistered skin, his bad toupee, his dark and arched eyebrows. She took a closer look and realized with a start that the eyebrows were drawn on, crudely, as if with a Sharpie. Her holstered gun began to dig into her hip.

“The face of the police department certainly has gotten prettier over the years,” said Spangler. “It’s a welcome change, I must say. Ver y welcome.”

Was he flirting? Ramirez fought against her instinct to cut him down with flippancy, even as she began to feel sorry for the man: stuck in this tomb of an apartment, desperately holding on to a self-image that was as sadly off base as it was ridiculous. She shook her head at the emotion, as if trying to shake Henderson out of her consciousness.

“That’s very nice of you to say,” she said. “I understand you’re a lawyer, Mr. Spangler.”

“That’s right,” he said as he backed away from her and sat down in the easy chair catty-corner to the couch. He settled in, tilted his head down, and put his hands on the armrests like Lincoln in his memorial. In that moment Ramirez had the sense that she had seen this man before.

She took another scan of the apartment. There was a kitchenette, its sink filled with pinkish soap bubbles, and at the end of a short hallway a bedroom. A black bag was sitting atop the bed. Spangler was about to take a trip. Interesting.

“Are you still practicing?” she said.

“Until I get it right.” His chuckle sputtered to life for a moment, like a sick outboard motor, and then ran out of gas. “But only odds and ends now. Just a little family business.”

“Do you have an office?”

He waved his hand around his entombed apartment. “I do most of my work here. I have a few friends remaining in the profession who let me use their clerical staffs if the need arises.”

“I’m wondering if you have a client named O’Malley.” “O’Malley?” he said. “No, I’m sorry.”

“Do you know a Mr. O’Malley? Thomas O’Malley, I believe it is.”

“O’Malley? O’Malley?” He exaggerated the name as if the query were one of the great mysteries of the universe. “No, I don’t believe I do. Why are you asking me these questions about a Mr. O’Malley?”

“There is a man named O’Malley that we are looking for in connection with a homicide.”

“A homicide. Oh, my. Who died? Someone I know?”

“Laszlo Toth,” said Ramirez. “Also an attorney.”

“Ahh, yes. I heard of his murder. I thought it was a robbery.”

“We’re still looking into it.”

“I didn’t know him personally,” said Spangler, “but by reputation, of course.”

“All we have to locate this O’Malley is a name and a phone number. From the phone records, the only calls he’s been getting have come from your phone.”

“My phone?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“And only mine?”

“The only ones we can’t account for.”

“Ah, I see. When did I make these calls to Mr. O’Malley?” said Spangler.

Ramirez took a sheet of paper from her pocket, unfolded it. “Last Friday, at 6:02 p.m., 6:49 p.m., 7:12 p.m. . . . I could go on. But you called that number repeatedly, Mr. Spangler, almost obsessively, one could say, over the course of two or three days.”

“Obsessively, hmm? That doesn’t sound like me. And those calls were to an O’Malley?”

“They were to a number that we have connected to a Thomas O’Malley, yes.”

“Because I was trying to call my brother.”