he first week in August I got a call around one in the afternoon. Joe Durkin said, "Matt, I'd like to talk to you. Why don't you come around the station house?"

"I'd be happy to," I said. "What would be a good time?"

"Now would be a good time," he said.

I went straight over there, stopping en route for a couple of containers of coffee. I gave one to Joe and he lifted the lid and sniffed the steam. "This'll spoil me," he said. "I've been getting used to squadroom coffee. What's this, French roast?"

"I don't know."

"It smells great, whatever it is."

He set it down, opened a drawer, took out one of the palm cards that had been circulating around town for a couple of weeks. It was on postcard stock and about the size of a standard postcard. One side was blank. The other showed James Severance as sketched by Ray Galindez. Beneath the sketch was a seven-digit telephone number.

"What's this?" he said, and flipped it across the desk to me.

"Looks like a postcard," I said. I turned it over. "Blank on the back. I guess you would write your message here and put the address over here on the right. The stamp would go in the corner."

"That's your phone number under the picture."

"So it is," I said. "But if the picture's supposed to be me, I'd have to say it's a lousy likeness."

He reached to take the card from me, looked at me, looked at it, looked at me again. "Somehow," he said, "I don't think it's you."

"Neither do I."

"Whoever it is," he said, "I got a snitch tells me the guy's picture's all over the street. Nobody knows who he is or why somebody's looking for him. So I figured I'd call the number and ask."

"And?"

"And I'm asking."

"Well," I said, "it's in connection with a case I'm working on."

"No kidding."

"And the subject of the sketch might be an important witness."

"Witness to what?"

"I can't say."

"What did you do, take holy orders? You're bound by the seal of the confessional?"

"I was hired by an attorney," I said, "and what was told to me comes under the umbrella of attorney-client privilege."

"Who hired you?"

"Raymond Gruliow."

"Raymond Gruliow."

"That's right."

"Hard-Way Ray."

"I've heard him called that, come to think of it."

He took another look at the sketch. "Guy looks familiar," he said.

"That's what everybody says."

"What's his name? That can't be confidential."

"If we knew his name," I said, "he'd be a lot easier to find."

"A witness saw him and sat down with an artist, and that's where the sketch came from."

"Something like that."

"I understand there's a reward."

I looked at the palm card. "Funny," I said. "It doesn't say anything here about a reward."

"I heard ten grand."

"That's a lot of money."

"It seems like a lot to me," he said, "when I think of what I've done for the price of a hat. What's funny is you never brought the sketch around here."

"I didn't think you'd recognize him. You don't, do you?"

"No."

"So there wouldn't have been much point in showing you the sketch."

He gave me a long look. He said, "When there's that much of a reward for somebody, it's generally somebody who doesn't want to be found."

"Oh, I don't know," I said. "What about that little boy who disappeared in SoHo? There were reward posters all over the place."

"That's a point. There aren't any posters with this fellow, are there?"

"I haven't seen any."

"Just cards you can tuck away out of sight. Nothing on the lampposts or mailboxes, nothing tacked up on bulletin boards. Just a lot of cards circulating quietly around the neighborhoods."

"It's a low-budget operation, Joe."

"With a five-figure reward."

"If you say so," I said, "but I still don't see anything here about a reward."

"No, neither do I. This is good coffee."

"I'm glad you like it."

"Last time we talked," he said, "you were looking into all these old cases. That painter and his wife, that gay guy who got more than he bargained for, that cabbie who picked up the wrong fare. Remember?"

"As if it were yesterday."

"I'll bet. This guy here tied in with them?"

"How could he be?"

"Why do you always answer a question with a question?"

"Do I have to have a reason?"

"Fucking smartass. What's the status of those old cases, anyway?"

"As far as I can tell," I said, "they're all still dead."

oOo

The waiting was hard to take.

We got the word out on the street a good ten days before I heard from Joe Durkin. I started with a few people like Danny Boy Bell who are professionally adept at spreading and gathering information, and I gave each of them a sheaf of palm cards bearing Severance's likeness and my phone number. TJ went to work on Forty-second Street, spreading the word among the people he knew on and around the Deuce and working the cheap hotels and SRO rooming houses in the neighborhood. Gruliow made a few phone calls and sent me off to see various criminals and political outcasts he'd defended over the years. Of one he said, "This one hugged me after the trial and said to call him if I ever wanted somebody killed. I've been tempted a few times, believe me. It's a good thing I don't believe in capital punishment, not even for ex-wives."

I was pretty sure he'd go to ground in Manhattan. If he'd ever lived outside the borough, I didn't know about it. In all the months he'd stalked Alan Watson, patrolling his streets in a Queensboro-Corona uniform, even (if he was telling the truth) having an affair with Watson's wife, he'd chosen to live in Manhattan. He could have found a cheaper and more comfortable room a few blocks from the Q-C offices, or within easy walking distance of Watson's Forest Hills home. But he'd moved instead to East Ninety-fourth Street. He'd have had to take two trains to get to work, and two more to get home.

So I centered the manhunt in Manhattan, and I put the most energy into those parts of town where someone like Severance wouldn't stick out like a white thumb. I hit the places that called themselves hotels or rooming houses, and I went to lunch counters and drugstores and asked if they knew where I could find a room for rent, because every neighborhood has some SRO hotels that don't hang out a sign.

And we left palm cards in delis and bodegas, too, and in shoeshine parlors and ginmills and numbers drops. And then it was time to sit back and wait, time to be home in case the phone rang, and that's when it got difficult.

Because it's easier when you're doing something. Sitting in my room at the Northwestern, watching a ball game or a newscast, reading a book or a newspaper, staring out the window, I couldn't avoid the thought that it was all misplaced effort, all a waste of time.

He didn't have to be in Manhattan. He could be lying on a beach in California, biding his time, waiting for the New York heat to die down. He could be in Jersey or Connecticut, stalking one of the club's suburban members. While I sat here, waiting for the phone to ring, he'd be sighting his target and making his kill.

The day after I spoke to Durkin, I picked up the phone and called Lisa Holtzmann.

I didn't even think about it. I had the phone in my hand and was dialing her number without having made any conscious decision. The phone rang four times and her machine picked up. I rang off without leaving a message.

The following afternoon I called her. "I was thinking of you," I told her, but I don't even know if that was true. She told me to come over, and I went.

Two days later I went to the 8:30 meeting at St. Paul's. I left on the break and called her from a pay phone on the corner. No, she said, she wasn't busy. Yes, she felt like company.

In her bed that night, she lay beside me and told me that she was still seeing the art director for the airline magazine. "I've been to bed with him," she said.

"He's a lucky man."

"I don't know why I bother planning conversations in my head. You never say what I expect you to say. Do you really think he's a lucky man? Because I don't."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm such a whore. I saw him the night before last. You came over during the afternoon, and then I went out to dinner with him that night. And brought him home and fucked him. I was still sore from the afternoon but I went ahead and fucked him anyway."

I didn't say anything and neither did she. Through her window I could see New Jersey all lit up like a Christmas tree. After a long moment I reached out and touched her. At first I could feel her trying to hold herself in check, but then she let go and allowed herself to respond, and I went on touching her until she cried out and clung to me.

Afterward I said, "Am I screwing up your life, Lisa? Tell me and I'll stop."

"Ha."

"I mean it."

"I know you do. And no, you're not. I'm screwing up my own life. Like everybody else."

"I guess."

"Someday you'll stop calling me. Or someday you'll call and I'll tell you no, I don't want you to come over." She took my hand, placed it on her breast. "But not yet," she said.

The days came and went and the summer slipped away. Elaine and I got out to a few movies and listened to some jazz. I went to meetings and, a day at a time, I didn't pick up a drink.

Wally called, but I told him I couldn't take on any per diem work, not until I cleared the case I was working on.

On Sundays I had dinner with my sponsor. Now and then I dropped in at Grogan's, usually after a midnight AA meeting. I would sit for an hour or so with Mick, and we always managed to find things to talk about. But we never made a long night of it, and I was always home well before sunrise.

A friend of Elaine's invited us out to East Hampton for the weekend, and I didn't feel I could afford to put myself a couple of hours away from the city. I told her to go by herself, and she thought it over and went. Perversely, I didn't call Lisa at all that weekend. I did go out for dinner with Ray Gruliow, to a seafood restaurant he liked. They didn't have his brand of Irish whiskey, but he made do with something less exotic, and drank a hell of a lot of it in the course of the evening.

I wound up telling him about Lisa. I'm not sure why. He said, "Well, what do you know? The guy's human."

"Was the issue in doubt?"

"No," he said, "not really. But I thought people quit doing that sort of thing when they joined AA."

"So did I."

"So we were both wrong. Well, that's good to hear. And good for you, my friend. You know the four things a man needs to sustain life, don't you?" I didn't. "Food, shelter, and pussy." That was only three, I said. "And strange pussy," he said. "That's four."

He was good company until the booze took him over the line, and then he started telling me the same story over and over again. It was a pretty good story, but I didn't need to hear it more than once. I put him in a cab and went home.

The Yankees were making it interesting in the American League East, winning a lot of games but having trouble gaining ground on the Blue Jays. In the other league, the Mets had last place pretty well sewn up. We stayed in the city for Labor Day, and Elaine kept the shop open the whole weekend.

On a Thursday afternoon in the middle of September, I was sitting in my hotel room watching it rain. The phone rang.

A woman said, "Is this the man looking for the man in the picture?"

There had been calls from time to time. Who was the man in the picture? What did I want with him? Was it true about the reward?

"Yes," I said. "I'm the man."

"You really gonna pay me that money?"

I held my breath.

" 'Cause I seen him," she said. "I know right where he's at."