“Business,” she said, giving me a cunning little sideways glance. “Sure…”

“Oh, ah, Doctor Stevie!” the woman on the line said, satisfied. “Only just ein moment, please!”

She set the phone down with a crash that echoed into my ear and made me pull my receiver away. “Jesus Christ!” I said, hoping my eardrum wasn’t busted. “Whole damned family’s nuts…”

In a few seconds the phone on the other end rattled around again, and I heard Detective Sergeant Lucius speaking, though not into it. “No, Mama, Stevie isn’t a doctor, he just-please, Mama, go!” There were some unidentifiable protests from the woman, then Lucius again: “Mama! Go!”He took a deep breath and spoke into the phone. “Stevie?”

“Right here.”

“I’m sorry about that. She still doesn’t really understand this thing, and I don’t know that she ever will. What’s going on?”

“I got some news, and I think it’ll save you and Detective Sergeant Marcus some work. Can you collect him and get over here?”

“I can come,” Lucius answered. “I’ve been doing the chemical analysis of the sample I took from the tip of that stick, but I just finished. It is strychnine, by the way. But Marcus is poking around down at headquarters, then going on to the Doctor’s Institute. Why?”

“I think you’d better tell him to come up,” I said. “What I’ve found, it-I think it’s important.”

“Where’s the Doctor?”

“Him and Cyrus went to the museum already. They shouldn’t be too long, though. Can you make it?”

“I’ll get a cab now, and try to intercept Marcus at the Institute.” He yelled away from the telephone again: “No, Mama, that’s the chemicals you’re smelling, there’s nothing to clean-” His voice came back to me. “I’ve got to go before my mother sets herself on fire. See you in half an hour.” The line clicked, and I hung the receiver up.

Wandering back into the kitchen, I found Kat had scared up some eggs and a few herring and was getting ready to fry them in a big skillet. “So,” she said with a smile. “How’s ‘business’?”

I was too amazed by what she was doing to hear the question. “Kat-you can cook?”

“Don’t gimme that kinda air,” she answered playfully. “You think me and Papa had servants, Mr. Stuyvesant Park? I cooked for him all the time. Eggs and herring, now that’s a breakfast.” She tried to crack an egg into the pan, but her hand shook badly; and as it did, she lost her smile and took a deep breath. “Say-Stevie,” she said quietly, again without looking at me. “Does your doctor friend have-well, you know, does he see any patients here?”

“Unh-unh,” I said, shaking my head and knowing full well what she meant by the question. “None of that, Kat.”

“It’s just-” Her hand shook again, and her eyes filled with those sickly, desperate tears. “I don’t know if I can crack the eggs…”

My mind seemed to grab hold of a thought, something the Doctor’d said when I’d been at the Institute and he’d dealt with a kid who was in even worse shape than Kat: something about what a cold cutoff of drugs could do to the human body. I knew that in fact he might have some cocaine stashed in the small examination room he maintained toward the front of the house on the ground floor, but I wasn’t going to let Kat have it. When she suddenly let out a little cry, though, then grabbed at her gut and sat down quick on a chair, I figured I’d better do something; so I ran to the examination room and opened a little glass case what held a series of bottles. Looking them over quick, I came across some paregoric tincture. I knew that people gave it to colicky babies, and such being the case I figured it couldn’t do Kat any harm. I ran back out into the hall and then to her, crouching down.

“Here,” I said, handing her the bottle. “Try some of this.”

She kept one hand on her stomach and moaned as she took a deep pull off the bottle. Then she held the thing away from her and stuck her tongue out. “Ugh! What the hell is that?”

“Just something to calm your gut down.”

“I need burny!” she answered, with a little stamp of her foot.

“Kat, there ain’t any here. Just try to stay calm. Take another shot of this-” I held the bottle to her head as she shook it, trying to avoid the foul-tasting medicine; but after another swig, her nerves did seem to calm down some. “Better?” I asked.

She nodded slowly. “Kinda. Whoo…” She finally took her hand away from her stomach, got a deep breath into her lungs, and stood up. “Yeah. That is better.”

“Maybe some food now, hunh?” I walked her to the stove. “I still ain’t so sure I buy this cooking business outta you…”

Kat was able to laugh a little at that; and when she picked up another egg, her hands were steady. “You wait, boy,” she said, cracking the little brown shell on the lip of the skillet with practiced skill. “You’re gonna wish you had this breakfast every day.” She winced once, then turned to the table. “Gimme a little more of that stuff, will you? Tastes awful, but it helps.”

As she labored over the eggs and herring Kat took not one but several more shots of the paregoric, and her mood brightened considerably. The next half an hour or so was one of the happiest times I can remember spending with her, just making breakfast and eating in the kitchen like two ordinary types, chatting, laughing, forgetting, for the time being, what had driven her to the Doctor’s house. She began to talk about the day when she’d have a big, beautiful house of her own, and though I didn’t believe that whoring would ever lead her to such a place, I didn’t say anything to interfere with the daydream, so chipper and healthy did it make her seem.

In fact, I was a little sorry when the front door bell finally rang at a little past ten o’clock. I had just set to washing our dishes and Kat had lit up a smoke, still romancing away about her future and even joking, at one point, about how she’d hire me to work in her house. I’d never thought of that idea before, me and Kat under one roof as adults, not even in my own moments of dreaming; nor could I conjure it up that morning, so outside the realm of possibility did it seem. Her imagination, I suppose, was a lot better than mine; had to’ve been, when I think about it.

Drying my hands on a kitchen towel, I started running for the front door, Kat joking about my being her butler and telling me to send whoever it was away, as she was not “receiving” that morning. She straightened right up, though, when I came into the kitchen with the two detective sergeants-she still wasn’t completely sure that their visit didn’t have anything to do with her. I introduced them to Kat, and together the four of us went on up to the parlor, where they all sat down. For my part, I ran further on to the Doctor’s study to fetch the picture of Nurse Hunter. When I brought it back down, I found the Isaacsons arguing-in their usual testy, childish way-over the exact ratio of chemicals that was supposed to be used in the test what Lucius had conducted that morning. Kat was sitting on the edge of the same easy chair she’d been in before, glancing over at the two men and wondering, I’m certain, what in the world kind of cops behaved in such a way.

“Here we go,” I said, taking the picture to Kat as she stood up. “Kat, tell the detective sergeants who this woman is.”

She just stared around at the three of us for a second, then mumbled to me, “But I already told you.”

“Yeah,” I whispered back, “but tell them. Don’t worry, it ain’t gonna get you in any trouble.”

“I heard that before,” Kat answered. Then she spoke aloud: “Her name’s Libby Hatch. She’s-well, her and Goo Goo-”

“Goo Goo Knox?” Marcus asked. “Chief of the Hudson Dusters?”

“That’s right,” Kat said. “She’s his girl. Well, she’s one of ’em, anyway. They all got plenty, the sons of-” Kat caught herself and cut her fuming short. “But she’s his favorite right now.”