“Then let God and conscience take care of it.”

“Which means doing nothing. Sometimes nothing is not an option. He had to do something. He had a duty to do something.”

“Duty? And who imposed such a duty? A ghost, covered head to toe in armor.”

“The ghost of his father.”

“The ghost of a murderous pirate, of a criminal, the ghost of war, the ghost of violence. If Hamlet had a duty, it was to remain true to the best part of himself, the part that loved art, that loved Ophelia, that worshiped life, not death.”

“You simply don’t understand. You can’t understand.”

I stopped, stared. It was as if an emotion was struggling to form itself in the lifeless flesh of his face, something dark and bitter and wholly personal.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Maybe I’ll never understand the play the way you can. What happened to your face?”

His features smoothed back toward their bland frigidity, as if what I had seen had been merely a phantom of emotion overlaid on lifeless wax, and he turned away slightly. “There was an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“It is time for you to go.”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but I was out of town. Paid a visit to the Shoe City of the World. I visited Tommy Greeley’s mother. Sad lady, but I did see something extraordinary. In her china hutch, saved as if they were presents from a god. Twenty bottles of gin. She gets one each year on Christmas.”

“Charming.”

“And I also visited an old friend of Tommy’s, a man named Jimmy Sullivan. He gave me something he had been saving all these years.”

Eddie Dean cocked his head slightly, as if waiting for some revelation.

“Some sort of tool chest that Tommy had given him to hold,” I said.

“How intriguing. Maybe you should hand it over to me for safekeeping.”

“It’s pretty safe where it is. I know who betrayed Tommy Greeley.”

“For certain?”

“For pretty damn certain.”

“Tell me, Victor. Tell me who.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Not until I get the answers I’m looking for.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know who killed Joey Parma.”

“That again. I can’t help you. I don’t know.”

“Okay.”

“Truly, I don’t.”

“Okay.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to find out. So how do you think it turns out in the end? The play, I mean.”

“Oh, pretty well, I would say. The father is avenged, the king is dead.”

“Yes, but so is Hamlet, and his mother, and his love, and all that his father had won with blood on the battlefield is turned over once again to his enemies.”

“A warning against indecision.”

“Somehow I don’t think so.” I lifted the Shakespeare volume, said, “Thanks for the book,” and then headed past him, along the long wall of bookshelves. As I passed a specific collection of volumes I stopped. I pulled one out, looked at it. It was part of a set, all in fine leather bindings, the collected works of Alexandre Dumas.

“By the way,” I said, “the Dumas novel you loved as a child, the one that gave you the greatest reading experience of your life, that wasn’t The Three Musketeers, was it?”

“No,” said Eddie Dean.

“It didn’t come to me until just now. The Count of Monte Cristo’s faithful and devoted servant was named Jacopo, wasn’t he?”

“If you say so.”

I turned, faced him as I slid The Count of Monte Cristo back into its place. “See, here’s the problem with using literature as a guide for life, Eddie. From everything I’ve learned about him, it’s pretty clear that Tommy Greeley was not the innocent and noble-hearted Edmund Dantes. And Alura Straczynski, I can tell you with utter certainty, is not the fair and loyal Mercedes. And Hamlet, well, in the end what can you say except that our pal Hamlet, despite all his evident talents and depths, was a careless son of a bitch who royally screwed the pooch.”

I banged on the door. It was late and he was most likely asleep and so I banged hard enough to shatter his slumber. Through the little glass peephole I saw a light switch on, then be blocked by a peering eye.

“Oh,” said Jeffrey Telushkin when he finally opened the door. “It’s you.” He was wearing pajamas and a robe, his hair was mussed, his little beady eyes red beneath his round glasses. He wrapped his robe more tightly around himself. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Is it too late for a visit?” I said.

“What do you want?”

“A dance?”

“Are you serious?”

“No, just tired. Do you still have a contact in the FBI?”

“Maybe.”

“A contact you trust, a contact who can move quickly on evidence you give to him.”

His eyes narrowed behind his thick lenses and his lips curled in curiosity. “Yes, I do.”

“Don’t get too excited, we’re not getting married here.”

“What do you have?”

I handed him the leather-bound volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies. He looked at it for a moment and started to open it.

“Don’t,” I said. “Treat it like you would a fragile piece of evidence. Put it in a bag and give it to your contact to take down to the lab. Have them check the inside for fingerprints, especially the pages where the silk marker sits. Then compare what they can lift to some old prints you might still have hanging around.”

“Old prints?”

“You know.”

His head jerked up. “Is he alive? Have you found him?”

“That’s why I came here,” I said. “For you to tell me. The person whose prints are in the book is named Eddie Dean. He’s living for the time being in a rented town house on the southwest corner of Rittenhouse Square.”

“Does his reappearance have something to do with the eminent jurist whose relationship to these matters we discussed?”

“I don’t want to talk about him.”

“But his involvement could have far-reaching consequences. Any revelation would have national importance. It is most vital.”

“Not to me. But if you’re going to move on Eddie Dean, you better move fast.”

He turned the book over in his hands, the eyes behind his thick glasses glistening now with excitement. “Don’t worry about that. We’ll be quick as snakes.”

“I bet you will. Call me when it’s done. But be warned. He has a goon with him, name of Colfax, so if you find a match, you might not want to show up alone.”

Chapter 62

IT WAS JUST after eleven when I finally got to the office after Lonnie Chambers’s funeral, a faint dusting of Lonnie still on my shoulders. It had been an almost touching ceremony at the burned-out building that had once been Lonnie’s shop, what with the howl of the motorcycles, the roar of the boom boxes, the belch of the beer cans in tribute before one of the motorheads had taken the urn with Lonnie’s remains, opened the top, tossed it high into the air so that the metal dropped into the burned-out hulk of his shop and his ashes fell upon the mourners and the neighborhood where he had worked and died. And then had come the guitar. Soft chords, a simple progression, A to D to E to D back again to A, over and over again, played as slowly as a dirge, before a voice started and others joined, singing slowly and softly as if the most solemn hymn.

Wild thing,

You make my heart sing,

You make everything

Groovy.

Wild thing.

I had stood off to the side for the whole event, conspicuous in my suit, and after the strains of “Wild Thing” disappeared, replaced by something loud and Metallica played from a boom box, I was about to turn and leave when I saw Chelsea come my way. She was crying and smiling at the same time.

“He loved that song,” she said.

“How are you doing?”

“Better. Thank you. I still miss him, I think I’m going to miss him for the rest of my life. There’s a hole in my heart.”