Morgan continued to nod but said nothing.

“Look, Hank, tell me about it, and I guarantee you won’t do any time. You had a tussle, and Sasha fell; no judge is going to send you to prison.”

At the word prison, Morgan’s body jerked convulsively. “I don’t want to go to prison,” she said.

Stone stared at her. The woman was starting to come apart; in another minute she would plead to the Kennedy assassination, if Dino wanted her to.

“I won’t let them send you to prison,” Dino said, “if you’ll just tell me the truth, tell me what happened. It was Sasha’s fault, wasn’t it?”

Morgan broke down now. The sobbing shook her body, and she made a terrible keening noise. She grabbed hold of Dino’s forearm. “I’ll say anything you want,” she wailed, “just don’t send me to prison.”

“All right,” Dino said, “I’m going to tell you what it was like, and we’re going to write it down.” He handed her a pen and shoved a legal pad in front of her.

Stone began to feel ill. He wanted to pick up a chair and throw it through the mirror. Then the door to the interrogation room opened, and Lieutenant Leary walked in, accompanied by Carlton Palmer.

“That will be quite enough of this!” Palmer shouted, going to Morgan’s side and putting an arm around her. “You’ve got a lot of nerve pulling this sort of stunt!” he yelled at Dino. “I’ll have your badge before I’m done.”

“Aw, go fuck yourself, Counselor,” Dino said, and walked out of the room, slamming the door.

Stone found him pacing up and down alongside his desk in the squad room.

“Two more minutes!” Dino said, slamming his fist into his palm. “Two more fucking minutes, and I’d have had her!”

“Come on, Dino,” Stone said. “It would never have stood up; you know that. She’d have recanted on the stand, and the jury would have believed her.”

“I’ve still got her for the gun, though,” Dino said. “I’ll nail her for that. I won’t let the DA deal on it either. I’ll send her up for it.”

“Dino, stop it. You’re dreaming. You can’t even convince me she had anything to do with Nijinsky, so how is the DA going to convince a grand jury, let alone get a conviction? The woman had nothing to do with it.” A hard voice behind him caused Stone to spin around.

“Horseshit,” Leary said. “You better get with the program, Barrington, or the world’s gonna fall on you.”

“You mean Deputy Commissioner Waldron?”

“And the chief of detectives, and the district attorney, and me, and the whole world. We’ve got a chance for a good bust on this one, after you’ve fucked around getting nowhere all this time, and you’d better not get in the way of it.”

Stone felt anger rush through him. “That woman had nothing to do with Nijinsky’s fall, and you’re not going to prove she did. If I thought you could make a jury believe it, I’d testify for the defense myself.”

“If you pull something like that,” Leary said, his voice low and cold, “I’ll take you out in the alley and shoot you myself.” The lieutenant turned and walked away.

Stone turned to Dino. “What about you? Is that how you feel?”

“I’ll hold you while he pulls the trigger,” Dino said, his voice shaking.

As Stone trudged up the front steps of the Turtle Bay house, his downstairs tenant, dressed in a white nylon coat, came out of the professional suite and caught up with him.

“Mr. Barrington?”

“Hello, Dr. Feldstein,” Stone said.

Feldstein was a short, stocky, pink-faced man in his late sixties. Stone had always liked him, not least because he had overlooked chronic problems with the downstairs plumbing in return for a reasonable rent. Feldstein thrust an envelope at Stone.

“What’s this?”

“It’s my notice of leaving, Mr. Barrington. Thirty days, as my lease requires. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you more notice, but my wife’s recent illness has made me decide to retire. We’re moving to Venice, Florida, next month.”

The news struck Stone like a spear in the ribs. That was twelve hundred dollars a month of income gone, and he knew he couldn’t rent the place again without major improvements, which he could not afford. “I’m sorry to hear you’re going, Dr. Feldstein. You’ve always been a good tenant.”

“And you a good landlord, like your great-aunt before you,” Feldstein said.

“I wish you and your wife a happy retirement in Florida.”

“She’ll like the sunshine; she always has.”

They both seemed at a loss for words for a moment, then Feldstein shook Stone’s hand and walked back down the front steps.

Stone let himself into the house and tossed Feldstein’s letter onto the front hall table with the mail. Nothing but bills there, and he didn’t bother opening them. He had a nearly overwhelming urge to call Cary; he needed desperately to talk with somebody, but he couldn’t forget that technically, at least, Cary was press, and he couldn’t let his thoughts escape in that direction. Normally, Dino would be the one to talk to, but he and Dino were on opposite sides this time. He wished his father were still alive.

He changed into jeans and a work shirt and went down to the kitchen. He had hardly cooked anything since the room had been completed, and now all he could manage in his mood was to microwave some frozen lasagna. He had a bourbon while he waited for the oven to do its work. He felt a curious numbness, a distance from reality. Not even the loss of his income-producing tenant, on top of everything else, could penetrate. He simply felt nothing. When the microwave beeped, he took out the lasagna and ate it immediately, in spite of the instructions to let it sit for five minutes. His was a simple, animal hunger, and he didn’t care what he was eating or how it tasted. It was like taking aspirin to make a headache go away. You don’t enjoy the aspirin.

He finished the meal and put his plate in the dishwasher, then poured himself another bourbon and went into the study. The room was spotlessly clean now, and an air cleaner was running to remove the dust caused by the constant sanding by his helpers for the past week.

The bookshelves stood empty and bare of finish, ready for varnish, the first of ten coats he planned. Tomorrow, the helpers would come back to sand again. He opened a gallon can of varnish, selected a brush, climbed the ladder, and started at the very top, spreading the sealer with long, straight strokes. It was simple, mindless work, the sort that he needed for thinking. He let his mind wander at will over the events of the past days.

Stone knew he was not the first honest policeman to find himself in this position. When a police department had a major crime on its hands, especially one where the victim was a celebrity, what it needed was an arrest – preferably, but not necessarily, of the actual perpetrator. As time passed without a resolution of the crime, pressure increased on the department to produce results, and after a while the pressure could become too much for certain of its members. Assignments were at stake – promotions, careers, pensions – and policemen, just like everybody else, would finally act to protect themselves. Stone reckoned that most of the innocent people in prison had been sent there by police officers and prosecutors who reasoned that these victims were, after all, probably guilty of something, and better a conviction of an innocent person than no conviction at all.

He had seen it happen, but always from a distance. Now he was involved, whether he liked it or not, and he had a decision to make: he could keep his mouth shut and let Dino, Leary, and their superiors try to railroad Hank Morgan; or he could speak up – go directly to the mayor or the newspapers and create a stink. The first course would protect his job, his career, and his pension; the second would subject him to the contempt that came to any policeman who went against his partner and his department. He would be transferred to some hellish backwater, shunned, ridiculed, perhaps even set up to be killed – sent first through some door with death waiting on the other side. It had happened before. Most of all, he would be separating himself from the work to which he had devoted his whole adult life. He would be a man alone, with enemies, and with no friends or support. It was the law of the cop jungle, and no man could last long on the force when he was subjected to it. It was time for him to decide if he was, after all these years, a cop.