"And?"

"And dropped them off in front of the house on Coney Island Avenue and then got rid of the car. Lost it in another part of town, if it was stolen. Or, if it was his own car, found a place to park it."

"Ran it through a car wash, if he had any sense."

"Meanwhile, Bierman and Ivanko are in the apartment, and Bierman shoots Ivanko."

"For reasons which remain to this day unclear."

He sounded a little like W. C. Fields, and his tone told me we were friends again. "And likely to remain that way," I said, "barring the discovery of a dying message."

"Morse code. Dots and dashes, gnawed into the floorboards by the dying Ivanko."

"Maybe that's why he bolts the door," I went on. "So the third man won't come back in the middle of things."

"Or he shoots Ivanko on impulse, and then he bolts the door while he figures out what he's gonna do next."

Or so the driver wouldn't walk in on him while he was doing it, I thought. Or bolting the door was automatic, something he always did when he entered the apartment, because he felt safer that way.

"A third man," Iverson said. "I see where you're coming from here, and it does a lot to explain the car we never found, but do you have anything to back it up with?"

"Not really. At this point all it is is a theory."

"Nobody saw a third guy on the scene in Manhattan."

"Not so far as I know. The trouble with a case that's closed- "

"Yeah, I know. There's things you would follow up otherwise. There was a guy visited Bierman a couple of times. Maybe it was the third man, the mysterious Mr. X."

"When was this?"

"Who knows? Bierman was pretty mysterious himself, far as his neighbors were concerned. Kept to himself, just went out to buy beer and pizza. Word is he had a guy who dropped in a couple of times, but nobody could say just when. We more or less assumed the guy was Ivanko."

"The description fit?"

"Description? 'Dude was wearin' a baseball cap. Or, hey, wait a minute, maybe he wasn't wearin' no baseball cap. Maybe it was some other dude was wearin' a cap.' "

"Maybe the third man gave them the gun."

"Hey, if it was his car, why shouldn't it be his gun, too?" He laughed. "I always more or less figured the gun was Ivanko's."

"Bierman didn't own one?"

"Not that anybody knew, but would they? My guess is it came from a burglary. That's the way most crooks get guns, especially small-time skells like these two. Some concerned citizen buys one for his protection, and there's a burglary, and that's the last he sees of it. Unless he's home at the time, the sad bastard, in which case the last he sees is it's pointed at him, and the last he hears is bang."

"A little Italian twenty-two," Schering said. "Pellegrino ten-shot automatic. I bet you thought they only made soda water."

"Diversification is everything."

"Isn't that the truth? Gun was registered to a psychiatrist at 242 Central Park West, reported stolen in a burglary back in March. Shrink and his wife were at the theater, came back to find the place tossed, some jewelry and valuables missing. Well, this is cute."

"What's that?"

"In the list of what's missing- 'two white linen pillowcases.' That tell you anything?"

"That the psychiatrist and his wife were lucky they didn't get home early."

"Sounds like Bierman and Ivanko, doesn't it? Pillowcases slung over their shoulders like they're on their way to do their laundry. Gun wasn't in the initial report."

"Oh?"

"Reported everything else, the jewelry, the pillowcases. Three days later he called back about the gun. It took him that long to think of it and remember the locked desk drawer he kept it in, and guess what? The drawer wasn't locked anymore, and the gun wasn't in it. Why keep a gun under lock and key?"

"For safety reasons, I guess."

"But why have it at all, if it's going to be that complicated to get to it? A locked drawer in his office."

"The office where he saw his patients?"

I heard him shuffling paper. "It doesn't say," he reported, "but it makes more sense that way, doesn't it? He's seeing patients all day long, and they're not coming to him to have their tonsils out. Some of them have got to be real nut jobs."

"That must be the technical term for it."

"He's got someone coming in that he's a little worried about, he takes out the key and unlocks the drawer. Any problem, he can get to the gun in a hurry."

"It must be comforting for the patient," I said, "to have a shrink who can pull a gun on you if you start acting out."

Schering laughed aloud. "You're on the verge of this major breakthrough," he said. "Really getting in touch with your anger, or remembering what really happened when your uncle came into your bedroom that night. And you look up from the couch, and there's Dr. Nadler, and he's pointing a gun at you."

Dr. Nadler wouldn't talk to me, and I couldn't really blame him. Doctor-patient confidentiality aside, what did I expect him to tell me? That he'd had Bierman or Ivanko as a patient, stretched out on his couch for an hour every Thursday, reliving childhood trauma and recounting dreams? That he knew who broke into his apartment and stole his gun, but hadn't seen fit to mention it to the police?

I put the phone down and decided it was just as well he'd brushed me off. If he'd welcomed me warmly I'd have had to think up some questions to ask him, and I wouldn't have known where to start.

I kept finding things out, but what I learned was barely worth knowing. That's not an uncommon feeling in an investigation. You knock on a thousand doors and ask ten thousand questions, and the scraps of information you amass just pile up until something fits with something else. You learn to keep going, and you try not to listen when a little voice says the whole enterprise is pointless.

But this time the voice was hard to ignore. I didn't see how I could keep working my way around the edges, picking at loose threads here and there. I knew what I had to do.

I reached for the phone, then changed my mind and left it where it was. Rain, the forecast had said, and the skies looked dark enough. I went outside, headed uptown, and decided I should have taken an umbrella. It felt like rain, all right.

Well, maybe it would clear the air.

The ground-floor antique shop looked to be open. The lights were on, the window gates drawn back. But I couldn't see anyone inside. The door was locked, and there was a button to push for entry. I pushed it, and after a moment a woman appeared at the rear of the shop and squinted at me, holding her hand to her brow as an eyeshade. She gave a little shrug, as if it didn't matter whether I was a customer or a holdup man, and buzzed me in.

Her stock ran to small rural landscapes in elaborately gilded frames, French bronzes, mostly of animals, Royal Doulton figurines, Art Deco lamps. One shelf of an étagère was given over to cameos.

She was a dumpling, her hair an unconvincing red, her cheeks heavily rouged, her billowy print dress flowing. Her smile was guarded, and something about her stance suggested she was keeping close to whatever device she could use to summon help.

I said I had a few questions about what had happened upstairs.

She said, "You're a cop?" and her face relaxed for a moment, then tightened. "You're not a cop," she said, with such certainty she had me convinced.

"I used to be," I said.

She nodded. "That I can believe. You look like you used to be, but not like you are now. I used to be a teenager. I used to be skinny. What do you want from me, Mr. Used to Be? I wasn't here, I don't know anything, and I already told the whole megillah twenty times."

"Not twenty times," I said.

"So maybe it was nineteen. What can you ask me that nobody asked me already?"