“Anyway, Bern -”

“Besides eating in restaurants and not paying for their meals,” she went on. “Besides swapping jokes on street corners while old ladies get mugged and raped. Besides-”

“Besides puttin’ up with insults from some little dyke who needs a rabies shot an’ a muzzle.”

I said, “Get to the point, Ray. You just read me my rights and it says I don’t have to answer questions, so you can stop asking them. I’ll ask you one. What’s this circus about?”

“What’s it about? What the hell do you think it’s about? You’re under arrest, Bernie. Why else’d I read you your Miranda?”

“Under arrest for what?”

“Aw, Jesus, Bern.” He sighed and shook his head, as if his pessimistic view of human nature had once again been confirmed. “This guy Onderdonk,” he said. “They found him in his bedroom closet, bound and gagged with his head bashed in.”

“He’s dead?”

“Why, was he breathin’ when you left him like that? Inconsiderate of the bastard to die, but that’s what he did. He’s dead, all right, and what I gotta bring you in for is murder.” He showed me a pair of handcuffs. “I gotta use these,” he said. “Regulations which they’re enforcin’ again these days. But take your time first and close up, huh? And do a good job. Place might wind up stayin’ closed for a while.”

I don’t think I said anything. I think I just stood there.

“Carolyn, whyntcha hold the door and me’n Bern ’ll bring in the table. You don’t want to leave it out there. They’ll steal it empty in an hour and then somebody’ll walk off with the table. Aw shit, Bern, what’s the matter with you, anyway? You were always a gentle guy. Stealin’s stealin’, but what’d you go an’ kill him for?”

CHAPTER Eleven

“What gives me the most trouble,” Wally Hemphill said, “is finding the time to fit in the miles. Of course what really helps is if I got a client who’s a runner himself. You know how some people’ll do their business over nine holes of golf? ‘Suit up,’ I’ll say, ‘and we’ll lope around the reservoir and see where we stand on this.’ You think we could pick up the pace a little, Bernie?”

“I don’t know. This is pretty fast, isn’t it?”

“I’d judge we’re doing a 9:20 mile.”

“That’s funny. I could have sworn we were going faster than sound.”

He laughed politely and picked up the pace and I sucked air and stayed with him. Gamely, you might say. It was still Thursday and I still hadn’t been to bed, and it was now around six-thirty in the evening and Wally Hemphill and I were making a counterclockwise circuit of Central Park. The circular park drive was closed to cars throughout its six-mile loop, and runners beyond number were out taking the air and turning its oxygen into carbon dioxide.

“Call Klein,” I’d told Carolyn when I left the store in handcuffs. “Tell him to come collect me. And pick up some cash from my place and bail me out.”

“Anything else?”

“Have a nice day.”

As Ray and I walked in one direction and Carolyn walked in the other, I thought how Norb Klein had represented me several times over the years. He was a nice little guy who looked sort of like a fat weasel. He had an office on Queens Boulevard and a small-time criminal practice that never got him any headlines. He wasn’t very impressive in court but he handled himself nicely behind the scenes, knowing which judge would be sympathetic to the right approach. I was trying to remember when I’d seen Norb last when Ray said, conversationally, “You didn’t hear, Bern? Norb Klein’s dead.”

“What?”

“You know what a skirt chaser he was, and he never had a hooker for a client that he didn’t sample the merchandise, and how’d he wind up goin’ out? He was bangin’ his secretary on his office couch, same girl’s been with him eight, ten years, and his ticker blows out on him. Massive whatchacallit, coronary, an’ he’s dead in the saddle. Girl said she tried everythin’ to revive him, and I just bet she did.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Carolyn!”

So we’d had a hurried conference on the street, and the only name I could think of was Wally Hemphill’s, who was ensuring himself against Norb Klein’s fate by training for the upcoming Marathon. His was a general legal practice, running to divorces and wills and partnership agreements and such, and I had no reason to believe he knew his way around what people persist in calling the criminal justice system. But he’d come when called, God love him, and I was out on bail, and I’d declined on the advice of my attorney to answer any and all questions put to me by the police, and if I just survived the trek around the park I might live forever.

“It’s funny,” Wally said now, leading our charge up a hill as if he thought he was Teddy Roosevelt. “We’d see each other in Riverside Park, we’d do a few easy miles together, and I always thought of you as a runner.”

“Well, I rarely go more than three miles, see, and I’m not used to hills.”

“No, you didn’t let me finish. I’m not knocking your running, Bernie. I thought of you as a runner and it never occurred to me that you might be a burglar. I mean you don’t think of burglars as regular-type guys who talk about Morton’s Foot and shin splints. You know what I mean?”

“Try to think of me as a guy who runs a secondhand book store.”

“And that’s why you were at Onderdonk’s apartment.”

“That’s right.”

“At his invitation. You went over the night before last, that was Tuesday night, and you appraised his library.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And he was alive when you left.”

“Of course he was alive when I left. I never killed anybody in my life.”

“You left him tied up?”

“No, I didn’t leave him tied up. I left him hale and hearty and saying goodbye to me at the elevator. No, come to think of it, he ducked back into his apartment to answer the phone.”

“So the elevator operator didn’t actually see him there when he took you out of the building.”

“No.”

“What time was that? If he was talking to somebody on the phone, and if we can find out who-”

“It was probably around eleven. Something like that.”

“But the elevator operator who took you down went on after midnight, didn’t he? And the doorman and the whatchamacallit-”

“The concierge.”

“Right. They changed shifts at midnight, and they identified you, said they let you out of the building around one. So if you left Onderdonk at eleven-”

“It could have been eleven-thirty.”

“I guess you had a long wait for the elevator.”

“They’re like the subways, you miss one at that hour and you can wait forever for the next one.”

“You had another engagement in the building.”

I don’t think Norb Klein would have figured it out any faster. “Something like that,” I agreed.

“But then you went back again last night. Without using Onderdonk to get you into the building. The after-midnight staff said you left the building late two nights running, and both times the elevator operator swears he picked you up at Onderdonk’s floor. Did he?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And the other staff people say you managed to get in delivering sandwiches from the deli.”

“It was flowers from the florist, which shows how reliable eyewitnesses are.”

“I think they said flowers, as a matter of fact.”

“From the deli?”

“I think they said flowers from the florist, and I think my memory changed it to sandwiches from the deli, and I think you’re fooling yourself if you think those witnesses aren’t going to be good ones. And the medical evidence isn’t good.”

“What do you mean?”

“According to what I managed to learn, Onderdonk was killed by a blow to the head. He was hit twice with something hard and heavy, and the second shot did it. Fractured skull, cerebral hematoma, and I forget the exact language but what it amounts to is he got hit and he died of it.”