"Yeah, I feel sorry for 'em," he said. "I bet they're really shitting in their pants. So far they only made a hundred grand this month. What they don't realize is Matt "Bulldog" Scudder is on their trail, and the poor bastards won't get to spend a dime of it."

Chapter 21

The telephone woke me. I sat up, blinked at daylight. It went on ringing.

I picked it up. Tommy Tillary said, "Matt, that cop was here. He came here, can you believe it?"

"Where?"

"The office, I'm at my office. You know him. At least he said he knew you. A detective, a very unpleasant man."

"I don't know who you're talking about, Tommy."

"I forget his name. He said-"

"What did he say?"

"He said the two of you were in my house together."

"Jack Diebold."

"That's it. He was right then? You were in my house together?"

I rubbed my temples, reached over and looked at my watch. It was a few minutes past ten. I tried to figure out when I'd gone to sleep.

"We didn't go there together," I said. "I was there, checking the setting, and he turned up. I used to know him years ago."

It was no use. I couldn't remember anything after I'd assured Skip that Frank and Jesse were living on borrowed time. Maybe I went home right away, maybe I sat drinking with him until dawn. I had no way of knowing.

"Matt? He's been bothering Carolyn."

"Bothering her?"

My door was bolted. That was a good sign. I couldn't have been in too bad shape if I'd remembered to bolt the door. On the other hand, my pants were tossed over the chair. It would have been better if they'd been hung in the closet. Then again, they weren't in a tangled heap on the floor, nor was I still wearing them. The great detective, sifting clues, trying to find out how bad he'd been last night.

"Bothering her. Called her a couple of times and went over to her place once. Insinuating things, you know, like she's covering for me. Matt, all it's doing is upsetting Carolyn, plus it makes things awkward for me around the office."

"I can see how it would."

"Matt, I gather you knew him of old. Do you think you could get him to lay off me?"

"Jesus, Tommy, I don't see how. A cop doesn't ease up on a homicide investigation as a favor to an old friend."

"Oh, I wouldn't suggest anything out of line, Matt. Don't get me wrong. But a homicide investigation is one thing and harassment's another, don't you agree?" He didn't give me a chance to answer. "The thing is, the guy's got it in for me. He's got it in his head I'm a lowlife, and if you could just, you know, have a word with him. Tell him I'm good people."

I tried to remember what I'd told Jack about Tommy. I couldn't recall, but I didn't think it amounted to much in the way of a character reference.

"And touch base with Drew, just as a favor to me, okay? He was asking me just yesterday what I'd heard from you, if you'd come up with anything. I know you're working hard for me, Matt, and we might as well let him know, too. Keep him in the picture, you know what I mean?"

"Sure, Tommy."

After he hung up I chased two aspirins with a glass of water from the tap. I had a shower and was halfway through with my shave before I realized I'd virtually agreed to try to talk Jack Diebold into letting up on Tommy. For the first time I realized how good the son of a bitch must be at getting people to buy his real-estate syndications, or whatever the hell he was peddling. It was just as everybody said. He was very persuasive over the telephone.

OUTSIDE the day was clear, the sun brighter than it needed to be. I stopped at McGovern's for one quick one, just a bracer. I bought a paper from the bag lady on the corner, tossed her a buck and walked away wrapped in a fog of blessings. Well, I'd take her blessing. I could use all the help I could get.

I had coffee and an English muffin at the Red Flame and read the paper. It bothered me that I couldn't remember leaving Skip's office. I told myself I couldn't have been too bad because I didn't have all that bad of a hangover, but there wasn't necessarily any correlation there. Sometimes I awoke clearheaded and physically fit after a night of ugly drinking and a large memory gap. Other times a hangover that kept me in bed all day would follow a night when I hadn't even felt drunk and nothing untoward had taken place, no memory lost.

Never mind. Forget it.

I ordered a refill on the coffee and thought about my discourse on triangulating on the two men we had taken to calling Frank and Jesse. I remembered the confidence I had felt and wondered what had become of it. Maybe I'd had a plan, maybe I'd come up with a brilliant insight and had known just how to track them down. I looked in my notebook on the chance that I'd written down a passing thought that I'd since forgotten. No such luck. There were no entries after I'd left the bar in Sunset Park.

But I did have that entry, notes on Mickey Mouse and his adolescent career as a fag-basher in the Village. So many working-class teenagers take up that sport, sure that they're acting on genuine outrage and confirming their manliness in the process, never realizing they're trying to kill a part of themselves they don't dare acknowledge. Sometimes they overachieve, maiming or killing a gay man. I'd made a couple of arrests in cases like that, and on every occasion the boys had been astonished to find out that they were in genuine trouble, that we cops were not on their side, that they might actually go away for what they'd done.

I started to put my notebook away, then went over and put a dime in the phone instead. I looked up Drew Kaplan's number and dialed it. I thought of the woman who'd told me about Mickey Mouse, glad I didn't have to see her bright clothing on a morning like this one.

"Scudder," I said, when the girl rang me through to Kaplan. "I don't know if it helps, but I've got a little more proof that our friends aren't choirboys."

AFTERWARD I went for a long walk. I walked down Ninth Avenue, stopping at Miss Kitty's to say a quick hello to John Kasabian, but I didn't stay long. I dropped into a church on Forty-second Street, then continued on downtown, past the rear entrance of the Port Authority bus terminal, down through Hell's Kitchen and Chelsea to the Village. I walked through the meatpacking district and stopped at a butchers' bar on the corner of Washington and Thirteenth and stood among men in bloody aprons drinking shots with short beer chasers. I went outside and watched carcasses of beef and lamb suspended on steel hooks, with flies buzzing around them in the heat of the midday sun.

I walked some more and got out of the sun to have a drink at the Corner Bistro on Jane and Fourth and another at the Cookie Bar on Hudson. I sat at a table at the White Horse and ate a hamburger and drank a beer.

Through all of this I kept running things through my mind.

I swear to God I don't know how anybody ever figures anything out, myself included. I'll watch a movie in which someone explains how he figured something out, fitting clues together until a solution appeared, and it will make perfect sense to me as I listen along.

But in my own work it is rarely like that. When I was on the force most of my cases moved toward solution (if they moved that way at all) in one of two ways. Either I didn't know the answer at all until a fresh piece of information made itself instantly evident, or I knew all along who had done whatever had been done, and all that was ever needed was sufficient evidence to prove it in court. In the tiny percentage of cases where I actually worked out a solution, I did so by a process I did not understand then and do not understand now. I took what I had and stared at it and stared at it and stared at it, and all of a sudden I saw the same thing in a new light, and the answer was in my hand.

Have you ever worked a jigsaw puzzle? And have you then been stuck for the moment, and kept taking up pieces and holding them this way and that, until finally you take up a piece you must have already held between thumb and forefinger a hundred times, one you've turned this way and that, fitted here and fitted there? And this time the piece drops neatly into place, it fits where you'd swear you tried it a minute ago, fits perfectly, fits in a way that should have been obvious all along.

I was at a table in the White Horse, a table in which someone had carved his initials, a dark brown table with the varnish wearing thin here and there. I had finished my hamburger, I had finished my beer, I was drinking a cup of coffee with a discreet shot of bourbon in it. Shreds and images flitted through my mind. I heard Nelson Fuhrmann talking about all the people with access to the basement of his church. I saw Billie Keegan draw a record from its jacket and place it on a turntable. I watched Bobby Ruslander put the blue whistle between his lips. I saw the yellow-wigged sinner, Frank or Jesse, grudgingly agree to move furniture. I watched The Quare Fellow with Fran the nurse, walked with her and her friends to Miss Kitty's.

There was a moment when I didn't have the answer, and then there was a moment when I did.

I can't say I did anything to make this happen. I didn't work anything out. I kept picking up pieces of the puzzle, I kept turning them this way and that, and all of a sudden I had the whole puzzle, with one piece after another locking effortlessly and infallibly into place.

Had I thought of all this the night before, with all my thoughts unraveled in blackout like Penelope's tapestry? I don't really think so, although such is the nature of blackouts that I shall never be able to say with certainty one way or the other. Yet it almost felt that way. The answers as they came were so obvious- just as with a jigsaw puzzle, once the piece fits you can't believe you didn't see it right away. They were so obvious I felt as though I were discovering something I had known all along.

I called Nelson Fuhrmann. He didn't have the information I wanted, but his secretary gave me a phone number, and I managed to reach a woman who was able to answer some of my questions.

I started to phone Eddie Koehler, then realized I was only a couple of blocks from the Sixth Precinct. I walked over there, found him at his desk, and told him he had a chance to earn the rest of the hat I'd bought him the day before. He made a couple of telephone calls without leaving his desk, and when I left there I had a few more entries in my notebook.

I made phone calls of my own from a booth on the corner, then walked over to Hudson and caught a cab uptown. I got out at the corner of Eleventh Avenue and Fifty-first Street and walked toward the river. I stopped in front of Morrissey's, but I didn't bang on the door or ring the bell. Instead I took a moment to read the poster for the theater downstairs. The Quare Fellow had finished its brief run. A play by John B. Keane was scheduled to open the following night. The Man from Clare, it was called. There was a photograph of the actor who was to play the leading role. He had wiry red hair and a haunted, brooding face.

I tried the door to the theater. It was locked. I knocked on it, and when that brought no response I knocked on it some more. Eventually it opened.

A very short woman in her mid-twenties looked up at me. "I'm sorry," she said. "The box office will be open tomorrow during the afternoon. We're shorthanded right now and we're in final rehearsals and-"

I told her I hadn't come to buy tickets. "I just need a couple minutes of your time," I said.

"That's all anybody ever needs, and there's not enough of my time to go around." She said the line airily, as if a playwright had written it for her. "I'm sorry," she said more matter-of-factly. "It'll have to be some other time."