And, of course, dozens of them did, flooding the police tip line, the number of which the paper had been considerate enough to furnish. When someone phones in a tip in a high-profile case, you can't dismiss it out of hand, even when it's the result of some journalist's fantasy. There's always the possibility that the tip's legit, that the caller's using the sketch as an excuse to point the police toward someone of whom he has reason to be suspicious. Every call gets checked out, not because those checking expect results, but because they know how they'll look if the tip they overlook turns out to be on the money. The first thing you learn in the NYPD, on the job if not in classes at the academy, is to cover your ass. And the job keeps on teaching it to you, over and over.

One caller said the cops ought to take a look at a guy named Carl Ivanko. It wasn't that the sketch looked like him, exactly, because Carl's face was sort of lopsided, as well as longer and narrower than the face in the sketch. And the caller didn't know if Carl had a beard. Facial hair was sort of an on-and-off thing with him, and it had been a while since the caller ran into Carl, and if he never saw him again, well, that would be fine.

So it was more the description than the sketch, really, that had brought Carl to mind, although there was something about the sketch that had triggered his action, even though it didn't bear much resemblance to Carl. The thing was, Carl had something wrong with his hip, and it gave him an awkward walk some of the time. It wasn't a limp, not exactly, but what it came down to was he walked funny.

But then a lot of guys have a bum hip or a trick knee, and maybe had a beard once. What made the connection, see, was the poker, and that wasn't based on anything that happened, not as far as the caller knew. It was what he'd said, Carl, and he'd said it more than once. Of a woman who'd failed to reciprocate his interest, and of another woman who'd caught his eye on the street. What I'd like to do, Carl said, I'd like to take a hot poker and shove it up her cunt.

Or words to that effect.

No one was hugely surprised to learn that Carl Ivanko had a sheet. His juvenile record was sealed, but since then he'd been arrested twice for burglary. He pleaded out on both occasions, drawing a suspended sentence the first time and doing three years upstate for the second charge. He'd also been picked up once for attempted rape, but the charges were dropped when the victim couldn't pick him out of the lineup.

The last known address for him was his mother's place onEast Sixth Street, four flights up, with an Indian restaurant on the ground floor. That was the block between First and Second, where almost every building had an Indian restaurant on the ground floor. Mrs. Ivanko didn't live there anymore, and no one in the building knew who Carl was, let alone what had become of him.

There are lots of ways to find someone when you want to badly enough, but Carl turned up on his own before they could try most of them.Brooklyn police officers responding to a complaint of a bad odor emanating from a locked ground-floor apartment in the 1600 block ofConey Island Avenue broke in to find two male Caucasians, ages twenty-five to thirty-five, who had apparently been dead for several days. Documents on the bodies, later confirmed by fingerprints, identified the two men as Jason Paul Bierman and Carl Jon Ivanko. Bierman's wallet held a driver's license with theConey Island Avenue address. Ivanko didn't seem to have a driver's license, but a generic Student ID card in his wallet supplied some information. It was the kind you can buy in souvenir shops, and gave Ivanko's college affiliation as "MeanStreetsUniversity" and his address as "the Gutters of New York." There was a space for someone to notify in case of accident or serious illness. "The

City Morgue" was Ivanko's suggestion.

Both men had died of gunshot wounds. Ivanko, sprawled full-length on the uncarpeted floor, had been shot twice in the chest and once in the temple, in a manner more or less identical to Byrne Hollander, and, ballistics later established, with the same.22-caliber automatic. The cops didn't have to look hard for the gun; it was still in Jason Bierman's hand. He was sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, his back against the wall, his gun hand in his lap. He had apparently put the barrel in his mouth, tilted it upward, and fired a single shot through the roof of his mouth and into the brain. Professional killers are supposed to favor.22s for head shots because the bullet typically caroms around inside the skull, with fatal results a strong possibility. It had worked for Bierman, but it might have worked whatever gun he used. Cops, drunk or depressed or both, have used their service revolvers in this manner for years; the. 38-caliber slugs may not bounce much, but they do the job.

Both of the pillowcases from the Hollander bedroom turned up in the Bierman apartment, one empty and wadded up on the floor, the other half full of stolen goods on the unmade double bed. The wooden chest of sterling silver, service for twelve, rested on top of Bierman's chest of drawers. Kristin Hollander was able to identify it, along with several pieces of her mother's jewelry and other articles taken from her home.

Forensic analysis established that the facial hairs found at the crime scene were from Carl Ivanko's beard, and the semen recovered from Susan Hollander's anus was his as well. Posthumous x-rays of Ivanko revealed deterioration of the hip socket that would account for the limp the witness had reported and the caller confirmed.

I didn't know all of this at the time, although it was all reported at considerable length on television and in the papers. By then I had something else on my mind.

Besides sending in a contribution, Elaine typically orders tickets to around a dozen concerts during the month-long Mostly Mozart festival. I keep her company more often than not, and when business or inclination keeps me away, she can always find a friend to use my ticket. Last year she took T J to one performance, a countertenor singing with a small orchestra of period instruments. I'd have enjoyed it myself, but I had a case I had to work. It was T J's first classical concert, as far as we knew, and she said he seemed to like the whole thing, music and all, but not to expect him to run out and buy a whole batch of CDs.

We went to the opening concert on Monday night, and our next tickets were for Thursday night, a sold-out affair with Alicia de Larrocha at the piano. By then we'd learned that the Hollanders had not only attended Monday's concert but had been at the patrons' dinner as well. The killers had not yet been found, and Avery Fisher Hall was buzzing with the story. As far as I could tell, it was all anyone was talking about.

I made a point of heading for the patrons' lounge during intermission, more for the conversation than the free coffee and Toblerone bars they give you. One couple we see there often enough to nod to asked if they hadn't seen us at the dinner, and if we'd seen or known the Hollanders. We said we hadn't known them, and we might or might not have seen them there, that it was impossible to say.

"That's just it," the woman said. "We sat with three other couples we didn't know. We could as easily have been seated with Byrne and Susan Hollander."

"We could have been Byrne and Susan Hollander," her husband said. He meant they could have suffered the Hollanders' fate. How convenient it had been, after all, for the killers to know that the Hollanders were out for the evening, and when they could be expected to return home. Was it impossible that they'd had a list of people expected to attend the patrons' dinner? And couldn't they have just as easily selected any of the names on that list?

It was a stretch, but I knew what he meant and how he'd gotten there. Any disaster- a crime or an earthquake, anything at all- has a lesser or greater impact upon us in proportion to the likelihood that it could have happened to us. The Hollanders were people like us, we might but for the luck of the draw have been seated next to them at dinner, and was it impossible that it was precisely what we shared with them that had gotten them killed? It was not impossible, so it could have been us instead of them- and we shivered with the odd blend of terror and relief that is so often the consequence of a narrow escape.