“Didn’t it occur to him that your parents would try to find you? And that he might wind up facing criminal charges?”

“I don’t think any of that ever entered his mind,” she said. “Gully’s not reckless, but I don’t think he spends much time considering the consequences of his actions. He may not really believe that actions necessarily have consequences. You read Nobody’s Baby.”

“Yes.”

“So you know what he says about synchronicity. Anyway, he knew there wouldn’t be a problem. The same way he knew I would use the airline ticket.”

“And your parents?”

“They were a couple of old hippies,” she said. “My father was in Nepal at the time, staying stoned in Katmandu. My mom was back home in Greenwich, Connecticut, living on a trust fund and volunteering three days a week at that organization lobbying to legalize marijuana. NORML, though it and she were anything but.”

“So she didn’t object?”

“She drove me to the airport. Gully didn’t have a phone, but I called her a few days later from down the road and told her I would probably stay awhile. She thought that was cool.”

“And you were fourteen.”

“I used to say I had an old soul. I don’t know that I believe that, but I wasn’t your average fourteen-year-old, either. And I never felt as though I was in over my head. I was right where I belonged.”

She told me some of this at the bookstore, with Raffles purring on her lap and other customers staying away in droves, as if they somehow sensed they would be intruding. She told me more at the Cedar Tavern on University Place, where we went after I closed for the day, and where she asked the waiter if they had rye whiskey. He came back to report that they had Old Overholt, and she ordered a double shot with water back.

I said I’d have the same, but on the rocks with a splash of soda. I asked her if it was good that way. She said it was better straight up, and I changed the order-double rye, straight up, water back.

We had two rounds of drinks at the Cedar, then walked a couple of blocks to an Italian place I know that doesn’t look like much on the outside. The interior’s not too impressive either, but the food makes up for it. We ate osso buco and drank a bottle of Valpolicella, and the waiter brought us complimentary glasses of Strega with our espresso. The meal might have been better at a little trattoria in Florence, but I can’t imagine how.

She told me more while we ate and drank, and on the pavement outside the restaurant, in the wine-warmed cool of the evening, we gazed into one another’s eyes even as she and Fairborn had done in the Albuquerque airport, and she answered my question before I could ask it.

“Your place,” she said.

I held up a hand and a cab appeared. It was that kind of evening.

CHAPTER Seven

“So this is rye,” Carolyn said. “It tastes a little sweet to me, Bern. Compared to scotch.”

“I know.”

“But it’s not bad. The taste’s kind of interesting, once you get past the sweetness. There’s a real depth to the flavor, though you couldn’t put it in the same class with Glen Drumnadrochit.”

Glen Drumnadrochit is a rare single-malt scotch that we sampled on a weekend in the Berkshires, and it’s in a class by itself. You couldn’t compare anything to it, except perhaps whatever Bacchus was pouring for the heavy hitters on Mount Olympus.

“I thought rye was what you called a cheap blend,” she went on. “You know, one of those whiskeys with numbers.”

“Numbers?”

“Like Three Feathers, Bern. Or Four Roses.”

“Five Gold Rings,” I offered, and motioned to Maxine to bring us another round.

“Six Swans a-Swimming,” she said. “Seven Lords a-Leaping. When I was growing up, rye and ginger ale was what most of my aunts would have before family dinners, and that meant Three Feathers or Four Roses. Or Schenley’s, or something like that.”

“Blended whiskey,” I said. “Mostly grain neutral spirits. A lot of people call that rye, but properly speaking it’s not. Real rye is a straight whiskey, like scotch or bourbon, except that it’s made from a different grain. Scotch is made from barley and bourbon is made from corn.”

“And rye?”

“ Rye is made from rye.”

“Who would have guessed it? Thanks, Maxine.” She raised her glass. “Here’s to crime, Bern.”

We were, as you’ve likely guessed, at the Bum Rap. I’d called Carolyn to cancel our usual after-work drink the night before, and then she’d called in the morning to cancel our usual lunch, so we were making up for lost time.

“It seems to me,” she said judiciously, “that this stuff gets better as you go along. That’s the test of a good whiskey, wouldn’t you say?”

“I think that just proves there’s alcohol in it.”

“Well, maybe that’s the test of a good whiskey. Rye, huh? That’s a grain?”

“Ever hear of rye bread?”

“Of course I have. But this stuff doesn’t taste anything like those little seeds.”

“Those are caraway seeds, for flavoring. Rye is what they make the flour out of.”

“And what they don’t bake into bread they turn into whiskey?”

I nodded. “And it’s the only thing Gully Fairborn drinks, and he evidently drinks a lot of it.”

“Well, more power to him. And it’s what she drinks, too? Alice Cottrell?”

“She also managed to put away some wine with dinner and a glass of Strega afterward. And I didn’t have any rye at my apartment, and she seemed to find my scotch perfectly acceptable. But rye’s what she drinks. That’s one lingering effect of three years with Fairborn.”

“And now you’re drinking rye,” she said, “and, come to think of it, so am I. You think there’s a trend forming here, Bern? You figure it’s going to sweep the country?”

“Probably not.”

“‘If rye whiskey don’t kill me, I’ll live till I die.’ You know that song, Bern?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’d sing it, but it’d take three or four more of these to get me in the mood. It goes ‘Jack of Diamonds, Jack of Diamonds, Jack of Diamonds I cry, If rye whiskey don’t kill me, I’ll live till I die.’”

“Why Jack of Diamonds?”

“How do I know, Bern?”

“And what kind of sense does it make, anyway? Everybody lives until they die, whiskey or no whiskey.”

“ Bern, it’s a folk song, for God’s sake. ‘Go tell Aunt Rhody the old gray goose is dead.’ Does that make any sense? Who’s Aunt Rhody? What does she care about a goose, gray or otherwise? Folk songs aren’t supposed to make any sense. That’s why they’re written by ordinary people and not by Cole Porter.”

“Oh.”

“I can’t believe you don’t know the song. Didn’t you ever have an affair with a folksinger?”

“No, and when did you…Oh, of course. Mindy Sea Gull.”

“Née Siegel. Remember her?”

“The guitar player.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call her a guitar player, Bern. She only knew three chords and they all sounded the same. She just strummed the guitar to accompany herself when she sang.” She shrugged. “She didn’t have much of a voice either, as far as that goes.”

“She had a nice little body, though.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say, Bern.”

“Don’t tell me it was a sexist remark, because you were just about to make it yourself. ‘She didn’t have much of a voice, but she had a nifty little body.’ Isn’t that what you were going to say?”

“It’s different if I say it. You’re not supposed to notice what kind of a body she had.”

“Mindy Sea Gull? Who could miss noticing a pair of wings like those?”

“ Bern…”

“And what do you mean, I’m not supposed to notice? Because she’s gay? You notice straight women. You even hit on them, and sometimes you get lucky.”

“Short-term lucky, Bern. Long-term miserable. And not because Mindy was gay. You weren’t supposed to notice her neat little body because she was my girlfriend.”