"I hear you, Billy. Tell me you're not still doing work for Tony Celli. Tell me that."

His eyes retained that gleam of dim cunning, but the smile faltered a little. "I don't know no Tony Celli."

"Let me refresh your memory. Tall wiseguy out of Boston, calls himself Tony Clean. Started off running whores, now he wants to run the world. He's into drugs, porn, shylocking, anything there's a statute against, so his hopes of a good citizen award are currently so low they're off the scale." I paused. "You used to work for him, Billy. I'm asking if you still do."

He twitched his head as if trying to dislodge water from his ears, then looked away. "Y'know, I did stuff, maybe, sometimes, y'know, for Tony. Sure, sure I did. It beat hauling junk. But I ain't seen Tony in a long time. Long time."

"You'd better be telling the truth, Billy, or else a lot of people are going to have some harsh words to say to you."

He didn't respond and I didn't push it. As I took the bills from his hand he moved closer to me and I brought the gun up again. His face was an inch from mine, the muzzle of the gun against his chest.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked, and I could smell his breath and see the embers of that red glare flickering into life again. The smile was gone now. "She can't afford no private dick."

"It's a favor," I said. "I knew her family."

I don't think he even heard me.

"How's she gonna pay you?" His head turned to one side as he considered his own question. Then: "You fucking her?"

I held his gaze. "No. Now back off."

He stayed where he was, then scowled and moved slowly away.

"You better not be," he said as I backed out of the trailer and into the dark December night.

The money should have alerted me, of course. There was no way Billy Purdue could have come by it honestly, and maybe I should have pushed him on it, but I was sore and just glad to be getting away from him.

My grandfather, who was himself once a policeman, until he found the tree with the strange fruit far to the north, used to tell a joke that was more than a joke.

A guy tells his buddy that he's heading off to a card game.

"But it's crooked," protests his buddy.

"I know," says the guy. "But it's the only game in town."

That joke, a dead man's joke, would come back to me in the days that followed, as things began to fall apart. Other things that my grandfather had told me came back to me as well, things that were far from jokes for him, although many had laughed at them. Within seventy-two hours of the deaths of Emily Watts and the men at Prouts Neck, Billy Purdue would be the only game in town, and an old man's fancies would flame into violent being.

I stopped off at the bank at Oak Hill and withdrew two hundred dollars from my account through the automatic teller. The cut beneath my eye had stopped bleeding, but I figured if I tried to clean away the encrusted blood it would start bleeding all over again. I called into Ron Archer's office on Forest Avenue, where he saw patients two nights a week, and he put in three stitches.

"What were you doing?" he asked, as he prepared to give me a shot of anesthetic. I was going to ask him not to bother, but I figured he'd just think I was playing up to him. Dr. Archer was fifty, a handsome, distinguished-looking man with fine silver hair and the kind of bedside manner that made lonely women want him to climb into bed beside them and conduct intimate and unnecessary medical examinations.

"Trying to get an eyelash out," I said.

"Use eyedrops, you'll find they don't hurt as much and you'll still have an eye afterward."

He cleaned the wound with a swab, then leaned over me with the needle. I winced a little as he delivered the shot.

"That's the big, brave boy," he muttered. "If you don't cry I'll give you an M &M when it's all over."

"I'll bet you were the talk of med school with your doctor-patient wit."

"Seriously, what happened?" he asked, as he began to stitch. "Looks like someone stuck a sharp blade into this and you've got some bruising coming up on your neck."

"I tried to put an armlock on Billy Purdue. It wasn't a big success."

"Purdue? The crazy sonofabitch who nearly burned his wife and child to death?" Archer's eyebrows shot to the top of his forehead like a pair of startled crows. "You must be even more postal than he is." He began stitching. "You know, as your doctor, I should advise you that if you keep doing things like that you're likely to need more specialized treatment than I can offer." He slipped the needle through once more then cut the thread. "Although, given the dumb actions you're already taking, I imagine you'll find the transition to senility pretty smooth."

He stepped back and examined his handiwork proudly. "Wonderful," he said with a sigh. "A lovely piece of embroidery."

"If I look in the mirror and find you've stitched a little heart on my face, I'll have to burn your office down."

He wrapped the used needle carefully and dumped it in a protective container. "Those stitches will dissolve in a few days," he said. "And don't play with them. I know what you kids are like."

I left him laughing to himself and drove to Rita Ferris's apartment, close by the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and the Eastern Cemetery, where the two young fools Burrows and Blythe were buried. They died in an unneccessary naval combat between the American brig Enterprise and the British Boxer, of which they were the respective captains, off Monhegan Island during the War of 1812. They were interred in the Eastern Cemetery after a huge double funeral that paraded through the streets of Portland. Close by them is a marble memorial to Lieutenant Kervin Waters, who was mortally wounded in the same battle and took two agonizing years to die. He was just sixteen when he was injured, and eighteen when he died. I don't know why I thought of them as I approached Rita Ferris's apartment. Maybe, after meeting Billy Purdue, I was acutely conscious of young, wasted lives.

I turned into Locust, passing St. Paul 's Anglican on my right and the St. Vincent de Paul thrift shop on my left. Rita Ferris's building was at the end of the street, across from the Kavanagh School. It was a run-down white three-story, with stone steps leading up to a door lined on one side with buzzers and apartment numbers and on the other with a row of unlocked mailboxes.

A black woman with a small girl, probably her daughter, opened the door of the building as I approached and looked at me with suspicion. There are comparatively few black people in Maine: in the early nineties, the state was still 99 percent white. It takes a long time to catch up on that kind of lead, so maybe she was right to be cautious.

I tried to give the woman my best smile to reassure her. "I'm here to see Rita Ferris. She's expecting me."

If anything, her features hardened even more. Her profile seemed to have been carved from ebony. "She's expecting you, then ring the buzzer," she said, as she closed the door in my face. I sighed and rang the buzzer. Rita Ferris answered, the door clicked and I headed up the stairs to the apartment.

Through the closed door of Rita's second-floor apartment I could hear the sound of Seinfeld on the TV and a child's soft cough. I knocked twice and the door opened. Rita stood aside to let me in, Donald, dressed in blue rompers, resting on her right hip. Her hair was tied back in a bun and she wore a shapeless blue sweatshirt over blue jeans with black sandals. The sweatshirt was stained with food and child spit. The apartment, small and neat despite the worn furniture, smelled of the child as well.

A woman stood a couple of feet behind Rita. As I watched, she placed a cardboard box filled with diapers, canned food and some fresh produce on the small couch. A plastic bag filled with secondhand clothes and one or two used children's toys lay on the floor, and I noticed that Rita was holding some bills in her hand. When she saw me, she blushed bright red, crumpled the cash and shoved it into the pocket of her denims.