The recording cut in again, asking me to deposit more money if I wanted to go on talking. That voice speaks those very same words thousands upon thousands of times every day of the year, and how often does its message come as welcome news? Rarely, I’d have to say, but this was one of those rare occasions.

I glanced at my handful of coins, dropped them back in my pocket. “I’m out of change,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

“For Christ’s sake, Bernie, I know you’re not in New Fucking Hampshire. Gimme your number and I’ll call you back.”

“It’s scratched off the dial,” I said. “I can’t make it out. Stay right where you are, Ray. I’ll get back to you.”

He was saying something else, but I didn’t wait for NYNEX to cut him off. I hung up on him.

When I called again a little later I didn’t get to talk to his wife. Ray answered the phone himself, and he must have been sitting on it. “It’s about time,” he said, “you son of a bitch.”

I didn’t say anything.

Neither did he for the longest moment, and then he said, “Hello?” He said it very tentatively, and I let it hang in the air for a beat before I replied.

“Hello yourself,” I said, “and aren’t you glad to hear my voice? Isn’t it suddenly more welcome in your ear than the commissioner’s, say, or some nosy parker from the Internal Affairs Division?”

“Jesus,” he said.

“I’m sorry it took so long, Ray. You wouldn’t believe how long it took to find change of a dollar.”

“Well, Wall Street on a Sunday. I knew that’s where you were.”

“You know me too well,” I said. “But getting back to Candlemas-”

“Yeah, let’s by all means get back to him.”

“You remember I was a little uncertain at the morgue.”

“You told me goin’ in you don’t like to look at dead people. I figured that was it.”

“I only made the ID to make your life easier. I let you know I couldn’t be sure it was him.”

“Hey, Bernie, c’mon. It’d be one thing if it was close, but these two stiffs couldn’t look less alike unless one of ’em was missin’ a head. How could you look at the one and say it was the other?”

I’d given myself time to come up with an answer. That’s why I’d hung up on him earlier. “I met them both at once,” I said. “And they both told me their names at the same time. I wasn’t paying that much attention to which name went with which face. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to their names. But it was the guy you found at Pitt and Madison that I thought was Candlemas, because he was the guy who bought the book from me.”

“So at the morgue…”

“At the morgue I got a look at him and it wasn’t the guy I was expecting to see. But it was somebody I recognized, so I figured maybe I got a wire crossed. Maybe I’d been thinking the one man was Hugo Candlemas, while all along it was the other man.”

“An’ you met both of these winners at your store?”

“That’s right.”

“An’ one of ’em bought a book from you, an’ what did the other one do?”

“Nothing.”

“They walked in together?”

“I didn’t even notice. I don’t think they were together, but I could be mistaken.”

I just knew he was frowning. I could picture it. “Something smells,” he announced. “They’re both in your store, they both introduce themselves to you, and they both wind up dead, only miles apart. An’ the one who isn’t Candlemas winds up in Candlemas’s apartment, an’ the other one winds up on Pitt Street with three different fake passports on him. An’ one of these Candlemases bought a book from you, an’ on the stren’th of that you gave him your touché case to carry it home in. Bernie, I don’t know whether to be insulted you think I’d believe such a load of crap or honored you’d take the trouble.”

Time to take another tack. “Ray,” I said, “when your wife answered earlier, I found myself remembering the time I helped you get a coat for her. Remember?”

“That’s changing the subject all to hell an’ gone,” he said, “but it’s a funny thing you should mention it, because I was thinkin’ earlier about it myself.”

“Really.”

“She was sayin’ as to how the coat has seen better days, which who hasn’t, herself included, only you don’t want to try tellin’ her somethin’ like that. It seems as though they don’t last forever, which they damn well ought to, the prices they get for them. Personally I think the only thing the matter with hers is she’d like a new one, but this is gonna be a bitch because she’s got a particular style an’ color in mind. One of these days, Bernie, the two of us’ll have to sit ourselves down an’ talk about it.”

“Maybe we won’t have to,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe Mrs. Kirschmann will be able to walk into some place nice, like Arvin Tannenbaum’s, say, and buy her own coat.”

“Very funny,” he said. “The only reason the coat she’s got is from Tannenbaum’s is that’s where you hooked it for her. You think I can let her walk into their showroom an’ pick somethin’ out? Where am I gonna come up with that kind of dough?”

“Ah,” I said. “I thought you’d never ask.”

CHAPTER Eighteen

That left me with a couple more phone calls to make, and I made them. Then I got on the East Side IRT and rode uptown once again, riding one stop past Hunter College this time and emerging at Seventy-seventh Street. I walked down a block and found the building where the whole thing started, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to call it that. It seemed clear that this business started a long while before the previous Wednesday night, and a long ways away.

But it was Hugo Candlemas’s building I was standing in front of now, and he had been more my employer than my partner, but he was dead, too, and it looked as though I was supposed to do something about it. I wasn’t sure just where he’d been killed, but there was no question as to where Cappy Hoberman had been stabbed to death, and I felt it was about time for me to return to the scene of the crime.

In the entrance hall, I studied the four buzzers before pushing the top one, marked CANDLEMAS, to save me the embarrassment of walking in on some police lab technicians, themselves returned to the crime scene in the wake of the second murder. I didn’t really expect there’d be anybody around, and there wasn’t, and when I’d waited long enough to establish that I took out my ring of tools and let myself into the building.

You’d have thought they were my American Express card, the way I never left home without them.

Up on the fourth floor, the door to Candlemas’s apartment was secured by a whole lot of that yellow crime scene tape, along with a couple of large handbills proclaiming the premises to be off-limits to unauthorized persons, sealed by order of the New York Police Department. To add a little muscle, someone-probably the yutz of a locksmith who’d opened up for the cops-had mounted a hinged hasp on the outside of the door and jamb and fastened it with a shiny new padlock.

None of this looked to be inexpungable. The stoutest padlock is no match for a brute armed with a can of freon and a hammer; spray it with the one and swat it with the other and you’ve unfastened the Gordian knot. I had neither of those precision instruments, but I wouldn’t need them; I knew this brand of lock, and it’s notoriously easy to pick.

I was more concerned with the paper and plastic. Anyone could get past them, but not without leaving traces of one’s passage. The ideal, of course, would be to have a roll of crime scene tape and a couple of handbills in your hip pocket; instead of trying to restore the originals on your way out, you could simply replace them.

But I was not so equipped. I filed the thought away for future reference, cast a wistful glance at the padlock, and trotted downstairs.

On my way, I remembered Ray’s review of the building’s other tenants-the gay couple in the basement, the blind woman on the ground floor, a businessman from Singapore in the Lehrmans’ apartment on two, and an unidentified tenant or tenants on the third floor. “The hell with who lives on the third floor,” Ray had said. “They’re like everybody else, they don’t know shit.”