“I didn’t take the cards, Ray.”

“You took ’em,” he said. “You were mad at Stoppelgard. You prolly followed him to the Gilmartin place, an’ then when they all went to the theater you went right in. You got back at Stoppelgard by knockin’ off Gilmartin, an’ you got in quick an’ grabbed the first thing you saw that looked like it might be worth somethin’. An’ instead of takin’ the time an’ trouble to find out what you had, you dumped ’em fast an’ screwed yourself good.” He sighed. “You got one chance of gettin’ outta this clean. Have you got the cards?”

“No.”

“Can you get them?”

“No.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” he said heavily. “Well, in that case, I got a card for you. Where’d I put the damn thing? Here we go. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to consult an attorney. If you do not have an attorney…’ ”

“Before I forget,” Wally Hemphill said, “I called your therapist. So that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about.”

“Thanks,” I said. “What therapist?”

“Patience Tremaine.”

“You called her? I asked Carolyn to call her.”

“Well, Carolyn asked me to call her, so I did. I told her Mr. Rhodenbarr had to cancel his eight o’clock appointment, and he’d be calling to reschedule as soon as he was able.”

“That’s what you told her, huh?”

“Right, I kept it crisp and professional. I’ve got to say she seems to take more of a personal interest in her clients than most of the shrinks I’ve known.”

“She’s not exactly a shrink,” I said. “She’s a poetry therapist.”

“Oh, yeah? You been having trouble with your poems, Bernie?” He looked puzzled, then shrugged it away. “She seemed more concerned about your digestion than anything else. Something about knishes and burritos.”

“Oh.”

“But I cleared everything up for her. I explained that the cops had you in a holding pen charged with burglary, but that I was on my way to get a writ and I expected to have you out on bail in a couple of hours. Did I say something wrong?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Wally. Don’t you think you may have been overly discreet?”

“Bernie, she’s your therapist, right? Obviously she knows your history and what you do for a living. How else could you expect to get anywhere in therapy?”

“How indeed?”

“Though she did seem taken aback, come to think of it. Maybe she was upset that you were actually arrested and charged with a crime.”

“That must be it.”

“People outside of the criminal justice system, they don’t realize that’s all part of the deal. Anyway, she’ll be waiting for you to call.”

“With bated breath, I’ll bet. Wally, she’s not my therapist. She’s a woman I had a couple of dates with.”

“Oh.”

“We were just starting to get to know each other,” I said. “As far as she knew, I was just a bookseller with a slight case of Delhi Belly. She had no idea I was a burglar.”

“Well, she’s got a pretty good idea now,” he said. “Bernie, I’m sorry as all hell. I guess I really stepped in it.

“Forget it.”

“Were you, uh, sleeping with her?”

“No,” I said, “but I had hopes.”

“Rats. I’m sorry, I really am. But hey, you’ll call her in a day or two and you’ll think of something to say.”

“And so will she. Hers’ll probably be something along the lines of ‘Lose my number, asshole.’ ”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Talking to her, she didn’t seem like the kind of girl to use bad language. Outside of that, you’re probably right.”

“‘If you do not have an attorney,’” Ray had intoned, “‘one will be provided for you.’”

Fortunately, that hadn’t been necessary. I had an attorney. You can hardly be in business without one these days, and this is doubly true if your business comes under the broad heading of felonies and misdemeanors. You really need a lawyer you can call your own, and he ought to be the kind you have to pay. I’m sure the fellows and gals at Legal Aid do a commendable job for their clients, but I’m happier personally with legal counsel that’s just a little more upscale.

Besides, a successful professional criminal with a Legal Aid lawyer is like a billionaire collecting Social Security. Maybe he’s entitled to it, but so what? It’s still tacky.

For years my lawyer was a man named Klein with an office on Queens Boulevard, a wife and kids in Kew Gardens, and a girlfriend in Turtle Bay, just around the corner from the United Nations. Then one day a couple of years ago I got arrested, through no real fault of my own, and when I went to call Klein I found out he was dead.

Poof, just like that.

So I called Wally Hemphill. I knew him from the park, where we would encounter each other evenings, dressed in shorts and singlets and shod in state-of-the-art running shoes. We would jog along together for a mile or so, chatting companionably about this and that, until he sped up or I slowed down. When I met him he was training for the marathon. That was several marathons ago, and he’s never slowed down.

I, on the other hand, was a lot less dedicated. It’s hard to remember why I started running in the first place, although it may have been a natural outgrowth of the instinct for self-preservation. It’s nice to be able to run away if something takes it into its head to start chasing you. Still, I had never felt the urge to run twenty-six miles and change, or to transmute myself into a human whippet, and eventually the day came when running ceased to be one of the things I did and became instead one of the things I used to do, like reading comic books and collecting baseball cards. I still wear running shoes—they work just as well at low speeds—and I still own a few sets of running shorts and singlets, although I no longer get any use out of them. (If my mother lived with me, she’d probably throw them out.)

“I’m sorry it took so long,” Wally was saying. It was a quarter after ten Saturday morning, some eighteen hours after Ray Kirschmann had read me my rights, and we were in an Ethiopian coffee shop on Chambers Street. I think the restaurant’s previous owners must have been Greek, because they’ve still got spinach pie and moussaka on the menu.

Wally, who’d had an early breakfast before he came downtown, was working on a chocolate doughnut and a cup of coffee. I had coffee, too, along with a big glass of orange juice and a plate of scrambled eggs and salami and two slices of rye toast. Nothing builds an appetite like getting out of jail, even if you don’t pass Go and collect $200.

“They were being obstructive,” he explained. “Shunting you around from precinct to precinct like that so that I couldn’t get you out until morning. It’s a nuisance, but it’s actually a good sign.”

“How do you figure that?”

“What it tells me is they know they’ve got no case. What have they got? As far as evidence is concerned, they can demonstrate two things. One, someone called the Gilmartins from Carolyn’s apartment around midnight Thursday. They can’t even prove it was you that called, and the NYNEX records only show the one call that went through, so there’s no indication you’d been trying the number for hours. Two, they’ve got your doorman’s testimony that you left the building a little after one and didn’t get back until just before dawn. Well, so what? Leaving aside the fact that I could tie the guy in knots on cross, they can’t say you spent that time stealing Gilmartin’s baseball cards, because he had already reported them missing. You don’t have a working time machine, do you, Bernie?”

“I had one,” I said, “but I could never get batteries for it.”

“Their contention is you had the cards when you left your place and sold them during the night to person or persons unknown. But they have to do more than contend. Can they prove it?”