“Get a good shot of these.” Cardozo played the flashlight beam across two dark baseball-sized stains on the carpeting on the passenger side.

After Daniels had photographed the stains Cardozo took a penknife and began cutting the carpet away from the floor.

“Hey, Vince. Paydirt.” Daniels was holding a piece of rag. “This was under the seat.” He shook his head, turning the cloth in his hands. “Underpants.”

Cardozo grabbed the shorts. He felt something jump in his gut. They were stained with grease and with something else that had caked and was beginning to flake, and the India ink initials on the waistband were J.D.

“The bloodstains are all type O, same as Downs,” Lou Stein said two mornings later. “I recovered residual skin and urine from the fabric, chromosomes match. Downs used a lousy Laundromat. Sad for him, nice for us.”

“Thanks, Lou. Sorry to be throwing all this overtime at you.”

“I can use the extra income. The county reassessed my house.”

Cardozo broke the phone connection and punched another number. Judge Levin answered on the third ring.

“Tom, I need two arrest warrants.”

The hacksaw mimicked the screams of a skewered hamster. Claude Loring was lying on his back in the kitchen of apartment 11, cutting through a drainpipe. He was wearing a Levi’s shirt with the arms scissored off, and sinew tensed darkly under the tanned skin of his forearms.

“Claude.” Richards nudged a foot against Claude’s workboot.

Loring’s head came out from the cabinet under the sink. Wariness flickered over his features as he lifted off his Walkman earphones.

“Want to talk to you,” Richards said. “Down at the precinct.”

“I’m working,” Loring said.

“So am I. We have a warrant, Claude.” Richards turned slightly, nodding toward Ellie Siegel. “Claude, Detective Siegel; Ellie, Claude.”

The flat of Loring’s thumb ran back and forth over the edge of the saw. He heaved himself to his feet. He gathered up his Walkman and pushed a button, extinguishing the tiny voice of the soprano chirping from the earphones. “Let me wash.”

“Better help him wash,” Siegel suggested to Richards.

A woman came into the kitchen and shot the officers a look that was outraged and ice-cold. “Hey, the duke and duchess of Argyll and Diana Vreeland are coming to dinner—what about my sink?”

Cardozo borrowed a chair from the squad room and placed it against the cubicle wall, facing the desk. He fooled with the angle of the drafting lamp, swinging it up and down till it cast a glow that struck him as right.

“Close the window,” he told Richards. “We don’t want the air to smell too good.”

“Believe me, Vince, you got no worries.”

Cardozo took the evidence bag containing the black leather mask and placed it in the top desk drawer.

He surveyed the cubicle and nodded.

Richards went out and brought Loring in.

Loring looked uneasily around the cluttered little space of the cubicle.

“Have a seat, Claude.” Cardozo indicated the straight-backed wood chair against the wall.

Loring sat. There was a tightening of muscle in his face.

“Have a smoke.” Cardozo pushed the ashtray across the desk.

Loring fumbled a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket. He hung a cigarette inside his upper lip. Before he could light it Richards held out a flaming Bic. Loring bent into the light, inhaled, pulled back.

Cardozo started quietly. “How well did you know Jodie Downs?”

There was a blank on Loring’s face. Cardozo had seen a lot of blank faces in the line of questioning, and this was a very familiar sort of blank. It was a holding where a reaction should have been.

“I didn’t know him.” Loring’s eyes locked with Cardozo’s.

“Ever hear the name?” Cardozo asked.

“No.”

“You sure?” Richards asked gently.

Loring threw him a nervous little smile that wasn’t a smile, but it was a chance to get his eyes away from Cardozo’s. “Yeah, pretty sure.”

At that moment Richards became the good guy.

There was a good cop and a bad cop in every interrogation; the suspect always did the casting. These first few moments of sitting, looking around, always showed who he felt less threatened by. In a long interrogation cops might flip roles as a strategy to confuse the suspect and wear him down, but they always started by taking the parts he assigned.

“Ever see this face?” Cardozo handed Loring a photograph.

Loring looked at it. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“That’s Jodie Downs,” Cardozo said. “He was gay. You’re gay, aren’t you, Claude?”

Loring’s eyes were scooting around in a nest of unsmiling smile lines. “Doesn’t mean I knew him.”

“What kind of sex do you like to have?”

“Same as a lot of people.”

“Rough sex?” Cardozo asked.

There was a blaze of silence.

“You go to some pretty rough places,” Cardozo said.

“What’s rough?”

“The Inferno.”

“Yeah, I’ve been to the Inferno.”

“Jodie Downs was in the Inferno the night before he showed up dead in apartment six. So were you.”

Loring swallowed.

Richards stood before Loring and smiled at him. “Coffee?”

Loring nodded.

“Milk and sugar?”

“Thanks.”

Richards brought back coffees for everyone.

Cardozo stirred his coffee. “Claude, where were you Memorial Day weekend?”

“It’s in the report,” Richards said. “Claude was crashing at a friend’s.”

“Who was this friend, Claude?”

“It’s in the report, Vince. Her name’s Faye di Stasio.”

“You were there all weekend, Claude?”

“Yeah.” Loring’s voice had shrunk.

“Can you prove that?”

“Read the report, Vince. She backs Claude up.”

Cardozo shifted folders. “Jerzy Bronski’s interrogation says something else. It says that at two P.M. on Saturday, May twenty-fourth, Claude’s van was in the garage of Beaux Arts Tower.”

“I don’t have a van.”

“You have Faye di Stasio’s van.” Cardozo leaned back in his chair and looked at him. “Claude, why did you lie to us and say you spent the weekend at Faye’s?”

“It wasn’t a lie.”

“Then it was your ghost that bought a gram of coke from Hector Dominguez?”

Loring’s shoulders stiffened.

“Don’t fuck with me, Loring!” Cardozo shouted. “I didn’t bring you here to get jerked off!”

“Vince,” Richards said, “take it easy. Please.”

“I am taking it easy!” Cardozo opened the desk drawer and slammed the evidence bag down onto the blotter. “Where’d you get this, Loring?”

Loring stared blinking at the black leather mask. His voice was tight. “I gotta crap.”

“First you gotta give me some answers.”

“You let me go crap or you’re going to have one smelly office, Officer.”

“The name’s Lieutenant and you can shit in your yarmulke for all I care.”

“Vince, let him crap. He’s going in his pants already.”

“All right, crap. Go with him, Sam.”

Richards and Loring were back in six minutes.

Cardozo pretended not to notice Loring’s uneven breathing, the first sign of panic. “You might as well tell us about Hector, Claude. He’s told us all about you.”

Claude’s eyes went to the mask on the desk and then scooted away. “Okay, I buy coke from Hector.”

“You bought coke that Saturday.”

“I was strung out, I needed some.”

“When were you in the building?”

“Two o’clock.”

“I need the exact time, Claude. When did you drive your van into the garage and when did you drive it out?”

“I got there at quarter of two and I left at quarter after.”

Cardozo sat forward and gripped Loring’s face in his hands with barely contained fury. “Jerzy saw your van in the garage before noon.”

Loring threw Cardozo’s hand off. “Don’t you fuckin’ touch me, cop!”

“Then don’t you keep me hanging by my dick! Tell me the truth!”

Loring began to break. “Look, I was freaked, maybe I wasn’t certain of the time …”