oe Durkin said, "Tell me something, because I find myself wondering. Just how did I get to be your rabbi?"

"I suppose you went to yeshiva," I said, "and studied long and hard."

"You know," he said, "that's the kind of rabbi I should have been. Wear one of those little beanies, stroke my beard anytime I'm stuck for an answer. I wonder if it's too late for a career change."

"I think you have to be Jewish."

"I figured there was a catch. It sounded too good to be true." He leaned all the way back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his neck. "Seriously, though," he said, "how was I chosen to be your friend in high places? Your personal tapeworm, deep in the bowels of the NYPD bureaucracy."

"Tapeworm," I said. "Jesus."

He grinned. "You like that? I thought you would. My other choice was your cat's-paw, pulling your chestnuts out of the fire. I think I like the tapeworm better."

We were in the squad room at Midtown North. The desk next to Joe's was empty. Two desks away, a heavyset black detective named Bellamy was interrogating a skinny Hispanic kid with a wispy goatee on his sharp chin. The kid had a cigarette going and Bellamy kept waving at the smoke, trying to keep it from drifting in his face.

"Four homicide investigations," Durkin said. "Earliest one's twelve years ago, most recent's this past February. Four men and a woman killed in different ways in widely separated parts of the city over a twelve-year period. What, I asked myself, could these cases possibly have in common? You want to know what I came up with?"

"What?"

"All of the victims are dead. Still dead, like General Franco. You remember that from Saturday Night Live?"

"Vaguely."

" 'This just in from Madrid— Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.' " He made a show of shuffling the papers on his desk. "Here we go. Carl Uhl, killed by a lover in his West Twenty-second Street apartment. Victim was gay, apartment bore evidence of an S-and-M lifestyle, victim was secured with handcuffs and leather restraints, blah blah blah, multiple stab wounds, genital and pectoral mutilation. You need all this?"

"No," I said. "I know most of it, except for the details, and I can look at the notes later. What I want to know—"

"You want to know if the file's still open, right? The answer's yes. The guys from the One-oh picked up a couple of Uhl's acquaintances but their stories checked out. Every once in a while they collar a perp who's been doing gay men this way, picking up tricks in the leather bars on West Street and giving them more excitement than they wanted, and they trot out all their open files with a similar MO and try them on for size. So far Carl Uhl's still an orphan. Why? What do you know that the One-oh doesn't?"

"Not a thing," I said. "Is that how the killer got to Uhl? He picked him up on West Street?"

"Nobody knows. Maybe he came down the chimney carrying his bag of tricks. As far as finding out who he is, that's not gonna happen. Unless he gets picked up for doing it again, and he won't, because you know what? Odds are he's dead."

"How do you figure that?"

"How do I figure it? I figure that twelve years ago he was engaging in high-risk sexual behavior at a time when AIDS was spreading through the bathhouses and backroom bars, but before anybody knew what it was, let alone gave the first thought to precautions. Guy who did Uhl, he probably killed fifty times as many people by giving them the virus as he ever did with his little knife, and when he was done spreading it around he went and died of it himself."

"Did he leave semen behind?"

"No, he took it home in a doggie bag." He picked up the report and scanned it. "Semen traces on victim's abdomen, it says here. Probably Uhl's. His blood type, anyway. Of course this was before DNA testing. Forensics has come a long way, my friend."

"It certainly has."

"And that's why nobody gets away with murder anymore. Where'd that question come from, did he leave semen behind? What have you got?"

"Nothing," I said. "I just wondered if there was any concrete evidence that they'd had sexual relations."

"Well, it doesn't sound as though they were talking about the weather. With these leather boys, though, what they call sex might not be what you and I would call sex. One case I had, these two boys had a relationship, and how they worked it, the one would come over to the other's apartment and be told to strip naked and clean the toilet. Not with his tongue or anything, just grab a can of Comet and a roll of paper towels and clean the toilet. Meanwhile the other one sat in the living room watching Oprah. who cleaned it some verbal abuse and send him packing. It'd be like you or I having the cleaning lady come, an' when she's done instead of paying her you tell her she's a stupid cunt and to get the hell out."

"I wouldn't dare," I said. "It was bad enough the time I asked her to do the windows."

"As far as Uhl's concerned," he said, "somebody had sex, because the semen on Uhl's belly didn't just grow there. Either it's his semen because he had a good time before his friend got serious with the knife, or it was the killer's and he had the same blood type. Does it make a difference?"

"Not to me," I allowed.

"Then can we move on? Six years later, 1987, and we've got Boyd and Diana Shipton murdered in their loft downtown on Hubert Street. Two theories on that one. One's they walked in on a burglary in progress."

"That was my impression from the news coverage."

"Well, there were things the press wasn't told. The brutality of the crime suggested a more personal motive."

"He was beaten to death, she was raped and strangled."

"He was beaten, but not just to death. His head was mashed to a pulp, the skull fractured beyond restoration, the face completely unrecognizable."

"But it was definitely him."

"Yeah, they had fingerprint ID, but what prompts a question like that?"

"Nothing in particular. When somebody tells me a corpse's face is completely unrecognizable, the first question that comes to mind—"

"Yeah, I see what you mean. But there's no question it was him. As to the wife, she was garroted with a strip of wire. Her head turned purple and swelled up like a volleyball. As for the rape, well, I don't know if you'd call it that, but it was certainly a violation. She had a fireplace poker thrust up her vagina and well into the abdomen."

"Jesus."

"She was already dead when it took place, if that makes a difference. The whole bit with the poker was withheld from the press for obvious reasons, but even if they had it they couldn't have printed it. Though nowadays I'm not so sure anymore."

"Nowadays they'll print anything."

"Did the news stories say that some of the paintings were vandalized? What they didn't let out was that they'd been defaced with satanic symbols. The consensus of some experts— " he rolled his eyes "— is that these were not the work of authentic satanists. I suppose an authentic satanist would have done something horrible to the Shiptons, whereas these fake satanists were just out to have some innocent fun."

"How many killers?"

"Best guess seems to be two or three."

"Could one person have done it unassisted?"

"You can't rule it out," he said. "The cops in East Hampton had somebody they liked for it, a local contractor who had been having an affair with Mrs. Shipton, or else it was the other way around, Boyd was dicking the guy's wife. It could have been done by one person acting alone, lying in wait. One blow to the skull knocks Boyd out, then he gets the wire around her neck and kills her, then he pulps Boyd's head, and finally he does his stupid pet trick with the fireplace poker."

"Do they still like the contractor?"

"No, his alibi was solid, you couldn't knock it down. There was a ton of theories. The guy was a prominent artist, the wife was a former ballet dancer, they had pots of money, the loft downtown, the beach house in East Hampton, they hung out with a moneyed and talented crowd. What does that suggest to you?"

"I don't know. Cocaine?"

"A big play in the media and a ton of cops assigned, both here and out on the island, that's what I was getting at. Cocaine? I suppose they had a toot now and then, but if there was a major drug element in the case I never heard about it, and the guy I talked to yesterday didn't mention it. Why?"

"No reason. I know there hasn't been an arrest, but do they think they know who did it?"

He shook his head. "Not a clue," he said. "Well, plenty of clues, but none of them led anywhere. Why? What does your snitch say?"

"What snitch?"

"Your snitch, whoever's got you barking up four different trees. Who does he like for the Shiptons?"

"I don't have a snitch, Joe."

He looked at me. Two desks away, Bellamy picked a burning cigarette from the ashtray and stubbed it out. "Hey," the kid with the goatee said. "I wasn't done with that, man." Bellamy told the kid he was lucky he hadn't ground it out on his forehead.

Durkin said, "All right, we'll let it pass for now. Next up is four years ago, 1989, Thomas P. Cloonan. Nice decent Irish fellow, driving a cab, trying to put food on his table. Nobody tied him up, nobody jerked him off, and nobody shoved a poker up his ass. I'll tell you, I'm surprised a guy like yourself's got any interest in him at all."

oOo

According to his log sheet, Tom Cloonan had picked up the last fare of his life at 10:35 on a Tuesday night. He'd just dropped a fare at the Sherry-Netherland hotel, and he made his pickup a few blocks downtown, across the street from St. Patrick's Cathedral. The destination he entered on the sheet was Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, up in Washington Heights.

It was impossible to know if he got there. At approximately 12:15, acting on information received through an anonymous phone tip, a radio car from the Thirty-fourth Precinct found Cloonan's taxi parked next to a fire hydrant on Audubon Avenue at 174th Street. Cloonan, fifty-four, was slumped behind the wheel with bullet wounds in the head and neck. He was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics.

"Two shots fired at close range, weapon was a nine-mil, and death was instantaneous or close to it. Wallet was missing, coin changer was missing, murder weapon was not left at the scene— no surprise there— and the only question is did the shooter ride all the way up from Saint Paddy's with him or did he drop his long-haul at Columbia Presbyterian and make another pickup right on the spot that he never had a chance to log in? And the answer is who cares, because the case is closed and the shooter's doing twenty-to-life in Attica."

The surprise must have showed in my face, because he answered my next question before I could ask it.

"He didn't go away for Cloonan," he said. "What happened, there was a rash of these in '90 and '91, gypsy cab drivers shot in Harlem or the Bronx, some Third World part of the city. There was a task force formed consisting of cops from five different precincts in the Bronx and upper Manhattan, and they set out a string of decoys and came up with Eldoniah Mims. A Norwegian kid, obviously."

"Well, they've always been a race of troublemakers."

"I know, them and the fucking Estonians. They had Mims flat-footed for half a dozen killings, and they took the most rock-solid case to trial, one where they had physical and eyewitness evidence. The plea they offered him, he could cop to six counts of second-degree murder, and in return they'd let him serve the sentences concurrently."

"Very generous."

"So he had to turn it down, and the case they brought was a Manhattan killing, so you didn't get one of those Bronx juries determined to avenge three hundred years of racist oppression. The judge and jury both did the right thing, and Eldoniah's got to do twenty upstate before he's eligible for parole, and if he ever gets out they can try him for some of the other cabbies he killed, the useless little son of a bitch."

"Could they try him for Cloonan?"

"He'd be way down at the bottom of the list. You know, you get someone dead to rights like that, you want to close whatever files you can."

"But you don't know that he did it."

"I don't know zip, my friend, because all of this happened up in Washington Heights and the fucking Bronx, so what do I know? What I hear, which isn't the same thing, is nobody's all that sure Mims did Cloonan, but what's it hurt to let him take the weight until somebody better comes along?"

"You said gypsy cabs," I said. "If Cloonan was picking up on Fifth Avenue, wouldn't he have been driving a metered taxi?"

He nodded. "He was in a Yellow and the rest were gypsies. He was also shot with a nine-mil and the others with twenty-twos. Not all the same gun, different guns, but all the same caliber."

"Sounds as though they were reaching some to hang it on Mims."

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "Anyway, there were similarities. They were all driving cabs and they all wound up dead."

"Of course Mims said he didn't do it."

"Mims said he didn't do anything. If Mims had gone to confession, all he'd have been able to come up with was impure thoughts and taking the Lord's name in vain. Matt, it's like muggings and burglaries. The typical mutt, by the time you land on him he's gotten away with it fifty times running. So you clear fifty could-bes and tie them to his ass. It averages out, and if you don't do it your clearance rate looks like shit."

"I know how it works."

"Of course you do."

"I just thought homicide was different."

"It is," he said, "and nobody plays as loose with it as with break-ins and chain snatchings. This case here, Eldoniah flat-out did five out of six of those cabbies, no question, no argument. Cloonan he probably didn't do, and if somebody else ever comes along and looks better for it, well, nobody uptown's gonna argue against reopening the file." He picked up a pencil, tapped the eraser three times on the desktop, set it down. "So if you got anything," he said casually, "I'd be happy to pass it on."

"Why would I have anything?"

"Well, you don't own a car, so I figure you probably take a lot of cabs. Maybe one of the drivers said something."

"Like what?"

"Like, 'Hey, mister, you look like you used to be a cop, an' ain't it a hell of a thing what happened to Tommy Cloonan?' "

"Nobody ever said anything like that to me."

"No, huh?"

"No," I said. "As a matter of fact, I don't take very many cabs at all. If it's too far to walk I'll take the subway."

"What about the bus?"

"Sometimes I'll take a bus," I said. "Sometimes I'll stay home. Where are we going with this conversation, do you happen to know?"

"Alan Watson should have taken a cab. He worked down at the World Trade Center and generally took the E train home to Forest Hills, but when he worked late he'd take an express bus because he didn't like the longer walk late at night, or standing around on subway platforms. So he rode on the bus in air-conditioned comfort, had a slice of pizza on Austin Street, and was a block away from his house on Beechknoll Place when somebody stuck a knife in him."

"What did he do, resist a mugger?"

"Sounds like it, doesn't it? Guy I talked to said it doesn't really add up that way. Incidentally, he had more questions than answers for me. Watson was an affluent commodities broker, two kids in college, owned a nice home in a solid neighborhood. They want to solve this one, and the case is only four months old so they're not ready to give up on it. So why was I taking an interest, and what did I know that he didn't?"

"What did you tell him?"

"I don't remember, something about we had a case with a similar MO. According to him, forensic evidence suggests Watson's killer surprised him from behind and got him in a choke hold."

"Muggers will do that."

"And then he promptly stabbed the poor bastard. Blade about four-and-a-half inches long, or anyway that's as far as he stuck it in. Stabbed him once, got the heart first shot, and death would have been instantaneous or close to it. Watson's wallet was gone, so either it was robbery or it was supposed to look like it."

"I don't suppose anybody saw it happen."

He shook his head. "He wasn't down long, though. Rent-a-cop from a private security patrol found him, called it in right away."

"Why do you stab a guy if you've already got him in a choke hold?"

"They've been asking themselves the same question in Forest Hills. That's why my guy got very interested when I talked about a similar MO, and I had to let him down easy, say our perp was a slasher, not a stabber, no choke hold, di dah di dah di dah. Incidentally, why are people surprised when occasionally a cop lies in court? We lie all day long, it's part of the fucking job description. You didn't lie, you'd never get any work done."

"I know. It's the same thing working private. In fact it's worse, you've got no power to threaten or intimidate because you've got no legal authorization. So you have to con everybody."

"All in the name of truth and justice."

"And in the service of a higher good. Don't forget that."

"Never."

"What's their thinking, Joe? Ordinary street crime?"

"That's their best guess," he said, "but they're not married to it. It's hard to find anybody with a reason to kill Watson. He was married to the same woman for twenty-five years, and if either of them had anything going on the side nobody knows anything about it. Both of them well-liked, both of them active in the community. About a year ago he got phone threats from a client who blamed Watson for a beating he took. That's a financial beating, not two mutts holding you up in an alley while their buddy works on your rib cage."

"The client checked out?"

"The client moved to fucking Denver. Anyway, what kind of a grudge killing is that, a quick knife in the heart and make it look like robbery for profit? You want to get even with somebody, either you whip out a gun and make a little noise or you tear into him with a baseball bat, break his bones, and beat his fucking brains out. Something wrong?"

"Remind me never to get you mad at me."

"Why, did I sound like I was really getting into it there?" He grinned. "I'm ten days off cigarettes."

"I noticed the ashtray was gone."

"That snitch of Bellamy's, I wanted to tell him to blow some of that smoke in my direction. Not this time, though. This time I'm not sneaking drags on other people's cigarettes, or checking ashtrays for a butt long enough to relight. This time I get it right."

"Good for you."

"But there's moments when I could kill the whole world."

"Well, I'd better stay on your good side," I said, and drew an unsealed envelope from my hip pocket and slipped it among the papers on his desk. He glanced around, lifted the flap, and counted the contents without removing the bills from the envelope.

There were two bills, hundreds.

"Couple of suits," he said.

"If that's low—"

"No, it's fine," he said. "What did I do, use the phone on the city's time? I'm happy. But it's not enough, Matt."

"What do you mean?"

"What do I mean? I want to know what it's about. You're looking for information on four homicides over a twelve-year stretch, all of them unsolved—"

"Cloonan was solved."

He gave me a look. "I stuck my neck out," he said, "and I can use the suits, but I want to know what's going on. If you've got something that can break these cases, you can't just sit on it."

"I don't have anything, Joe."

"What case are you working? Who's your client?"

"You know," I said, "one reason a person goes to somebody like me is to keep things confidential."

"What I figure," he said, watching me carefully, "is AA."

"Huh?"

"Wouldn't be the first time you got a client who knew you from your AA meetings. There's things you have to do when you get sober, right?"

"All you have to do is not drink."

"Yeah, but isn't there a whole program? Almost like going to confession, but instead of a couple of Hail Marys you make restitution, set things straight."

" 'Cleaning up the wreckage of the past,' " I said, quoting one of the immortal phrases from the literature. "Say, Joe, if you think you're interested, I'll be happy to take you to a meeting sometime."

"Fuck you, okay?"

"Well, if you just wanted to see what it was like."

"I repeat, fuck you. And quit changing the subject."

"You're the one who brought up AA. I never realized you had a problem, but—"

"Jesus, why do I tolerate you? What I was starting to say, I figure you know somebody from AA who's got guilty knowledge of some crimes, including the four homicides we've been talking about. I wouldn't want to think you're gonna sit on something that ought to be brought out and looked at. Whoever did the gay fellow, Uhl, is probably dead himself by now, and Cloonan's file's closed for the time being, but the boys in the One-oh would love to catch a break in the Shipton case, and Watson, Jesus, the body's barely cold, that's still an active investigation. If you know anything, it should get channeled to the right people."

"I don't."

"There's probably a way to keep your client out of it, at least in the early stages."

"I realize that."

He looked at me. "Your client didn't do all four guys himself, did he?"

"No."

"You answered that one awfully quickly."

"Well, I knew you were going to ask it. And the answer didn't require a whole lot of thought."

"I guess not. Matt—"

I had to give him something. Without planning to, I said, "They knew each other."

"They? Meaning your client and who? Wait a minute. The vics knew each other?"

"That's right."

"What did they all do, wipe out some Vietnamese village together and some slope's looking to get even?"

"They were part of a group."

"A group? What kind of a group?"

"Like a fraternity," I said. "They got together once in a while to have dinner and compare notes."

" 'Bet my note's bigger than your note.' Let's see, you got a commodities broker, a famous artist, a cabdriver, and a faggot. That's a hell of a fraternity. Wait a minute, was this a gay thing?"

"No."

"You sure of that? Shipton and his wife ran in a kind of a kinky crowd. Wouldn't surprise me to hear he swung from both sides of the plate."

"It wouldn't surprise me to hear it about anybody," I said, "but this wasn't about sex. I can't go into details without clearing it with my client, but there's nothing out of the ordinary about the group. The only thing unusual is that four of them have been murdered."

"How big's the group?"

"Around thirty."

"Thirty men and four of 'em murdered, Jesus, that's high even for New York." His eyes narrowed. "Same killer?"

"No reason to think that."

"Yeah, but you think it yourself, don't you? You asked if a single killer could've done the Shiptons."

"Never forget a thing, do you?"

"Not if I can help it. You got a suspect? A motive? Anything?"

"Nothing."

"I won't say level with me, Matt, but don't hold out the moon and the stars on me, will you?"

"I'm not holding out anything concrete."

"Yeah, and what the hell does that mean? What's the opposite of concrete?"

"Asphalt," I suggested. "Plaster of Paris."

"Twelve years between Uhl and Watson," he said, "you're talking about a killer who likes to take his time. The other twenty-six guys, time he gets around to them they'll be too old to care. You know what he's like, this guy? He's prostate cancer. By the time he kills you you're already dead of something else."