“It’s always on. Can I go now?”

“One condition.”

“Go on.”

“I want you to come over to the house tonight.”

“I’m sorry, Walter, I don’t make social calls anymore.”

He looked hurt. “Don’t be an asshole. This isn’t social. Be there, or Ross can lock you in a cell till doomsday for all I care.”

I stood up to leave.

“You sure you’ve told us everything?” he asked to my back.

I didn’t turn around. “I’ve told you all I can, Walter.”

Which was true, technically at least.

Twenty-four hours earlier, I had found Emo Ellison. Emo lived in a dump of a hotel on the edge of East Harlem, the kind where the only guests allowed in the rooms are whores, cops, or criminals. A Plexiglas screen covered the front of the super’s office, but there was no one inside. I walked up the stairs and knocked on Emo’s door. There was no reply but I thought I heard the sound of a hammer cocking on a pistol.

“Emo, it’s Bird. I need to talk.”

I heard footsteps approach the door.

“I don’t know nothin’ about it,” said Emo, through the wood. “I got nothin’ to say.”

“I haven’t asked you anything yet. C’mon, Emo, open up. Fat Ollie’s in trouble. Maybe I can do something. Let me in.”

There was silence for a moment and then the rattle of a chain. The door opened and I stepped inside. Emo had retreated to the window but he still had the gun in his hand. I closed the door behind me.

“You don’t need that,” I said. Emo hefted the gun once in his hand and then put it on a bedside cabinet. He looked more comfortable without it. Guns weren’t Emo’s style. I noticed that the fingers of his left hand were bandaged. I could see yellow stains on the tips of the bandages.

Emo Ellison was a thin, pale-faced, middle-aged man who had worked on and off for Fat Ollie for five years or so. He was an average mechanic but he was loyal and knew when to keep his mouth shut.

“Do you know where he is?”

“He ain’t been in touch.”

He sat down heavily on the edge of the neatly made bed. The room was clean and smelled of air freshener. There were one or two prints on the walls, and books, magazines, and some personal items were neatly arrayed on a set of Home Depot shelves.

“I hear you’re workin’ for Benny Low. Why you doin’ that?”

“It’s work,” I replied.

“You hand Ollie over and he’s dead, that’s your work,” said Emo.

I leaned against the door.

“I may not hand him over. Benny Low can take the loss. But I’d need a good reason not to.”

The conflict inside him played itself out on Emo’s face. His hands twisted and writhed over each other and he looked once or twice at the gun. Emo Ellison was scared.

“Why did he run, Emo?” I asked softly.

“He used to say you were a good guy, a stand-up guy,” said Emo. “That true?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to see Ollie hurt, though.”

Emo looked at me for a time and then seemed to make a decision.

“It was Pili. Pili Pilar. You know him?”

“I know him.” Pili Pilar was Sonny Ferrera’s right-hand man.

“He used to come once, twice a month, never more than that, and take a car. He’d keep it for a couple of hours, then bring it back. Different car each time. It was a deal Ollie made, so he wouldn’t have to pay off Sonny. He’d fit the car with false plates and have it ready for Pili when he arrived.

“Last week, Pili comes, collects a car, and drives off. I came in late that night, ’cause I was sick. I got ulcers. Pili was gone before I got there.

“Anyway, after midnight I’m sittin’ up with Ollie, talkin’ and stuff, waitin’ for Pili to bring back the car, when there’s this bang outside. When we get out there, Pili’s wrapped the car around the gate and he’s lying on the wheel. There’s a dent in the front, too, so we figure maybe Pili was in a smash and didn’t want to wait around after.

“Pili’s head is cut up bad where he smacked the wind-shield and there’s a lot of blood in the car. Ollie and me push it into the yard and then Ollie calls this doc he knows, and the guy tells him to bring Pili around. Pili ain’t movin’ and he’s real pale, so Ollie drops him off at the doc’s in his own car, and the doc insists on packing him off to the hospital ’cause he thinks Pili’s skull is busted.”

It was all flowing out of Emo now. Once he began the tale he wanted to finish it, as if he could diminish the burden of knowing by telling it out loud. “Anyway, they argue for a while but the doc knows this private clinic where they won’t ask too many questions, and Ollie agrees. The doc calls the clinic and Ollie comes back to the lot to sort out the car.

“He has a number for Sonny but there’s no answer. He’s got the car in back but he doesn’t want to leave it there in case, y’know, it’s a cop thing. So he calls the old man and lets him know what happened. So the old man tells him to sit tight, he’ll send a guy around to take care of it.

“Ollie goes out to move the car out of sight but when he comes back in, he looks worse than Pili. He looks sick and his hands are shakin’. I say to him, ‘What’s wrong?’ but he just tells me to get out and not to tell no one I was there. He won’t say nothin’ else, just tells me to get goin’.

“Next thing I hear, the cops have raided the place and then Ollie makes bail and disappears. I swear, that’s the last I heard.”

“Then why the gun?”

“One of the old man’s guys came by here a day or two back.” He gulped. “Bobby Sciorra. He wanted to know about Ollie, wanted to know if I’d been there the day of Pili’s accident. I said to him, ‘No,’ but it wasn’t enough for him.”

Emo Ellison started to cry. He lifted up his bandaged fingers and slowly, carefully, began to unwrap one of them.

“He took me for a ride.” He held up the finger and I could see a ring-shaped mark crowned with a huge blister that seemed to throb even as I looked at it. “The cigarette lighter. He burned me with the car cigarette lighter.”

Twenty-four hours later, Fat Ollie Watts was dead.

WALTER COLE lived in Richmond Hill, the oldest of the Seven Sisters neighborhoods in Queens. Begun in the 1880s, it had a village center and town common and must have seemed like Middle America recreated on Manhattan ’s doorstep when Walter’s parents first moved there from Jefferson City shortly before World War II. Walter had kept the house, north of Myrtle Avenue on 113th Street, after his parents retired to Florida. He and Lee ate almost every Friday in Triangle Hofbräu, an old German restaurant on Jamaica Avenue, and walked in the dense woods of Forest Park during the summer.

I arrived at Walter’s home shortly after nine. He answered the door himself and showed me into what, for a less educated man, would have been called his den, although “den” didn’t do justice to the miniature library he had assembled over half a century of avid reading: biographies of Keats and Saint-Exupéry shared shelf space with works on forensics, sex crimes, and criminal psychology. Fenimore Cooper stood back to back with Borges; Barthelme looked uneasy surrounded by various Hemingways.

A Macintosh PowerBook sat on a leather-topped desk beside three filing cabinets. Paintings by local artists adorned the walls, and a small glass-fronted case in the corner displayed shooting trophies, haphazardly thrown together as if Walter was simultaneously proud of his ability yet embarrassed by his pride. The top half of the window was open and I could smell freshly mown grass and hear the sound of kids playing street hockey in the warm evening air.

The door to the den opened and Lee entered. She and Walter had been together for twenty-four years and they shared each other’s lives with an ease and grace that Susan and I had never approached, even at the best of times. Lee’s black jeans and white blouse hugged a figure that had survived the rigors of two children and Walter’s love of Oriental cuisine. Her ink black hair, through which strands of gray wove like moonlight on dark water, was pulled back in a ponytail. When she reached up to kiss me lightly on the cheek, her arms around my shoulders, the scent of lavender enfolded me like a veil and I realized, not for the first time, that I had always been a little in love with Lee Cole.