The doorbell chimed.

One of the neighbors? The doorman would have announced an outsider on the house telephone. On the day she had moved into this building, Louis Markowitz had put the fear of God into the doorman, that and a hundred-dollar bill. And then, he had gone home alone to Brooklyn, to a dark-windowed house where he had once been a part of the little family of three: himself, the wife, and the thief.

The bell chimed again as she was crossing the front room.

Her purse lay on the table by the door, and in it was the gun lying over the folder of her badge. It was early yet. She hadn't had time to leave any tracks, to make any noise. But when she opened the door, she had the gun in her right hand and hidden behind her back.

It was Riker who rilled out the door frame, a shaggy bear in a bad suit. By the look of his graying muzzle, he hadn't shaved since Markowitz had died. A slob's idea of tribute, she supposed. Riker was looking down toward the hand he couldn't see. He raised his wrinkles in a smile and said, "You wouldn't hurt me, would you, Kathy?"

He was testing the waters. If she let him call her Kathy, she probably wouldn't shoot him. She gave him a smile. A stranger wouldn't have guessed how little practised she was in that expression.

She opened the door wide and waved him inside. While she stashed her gun back in the purse, Riker was already moseying to the refrigerator where she kept the beer. He flicked off the cap of a cold bottle, and the metal top went spinning across the kitchen floor. Mallory stooped to pick it up and dropped it in the garbage can. She hated anything out of place. Helen Markowitz had always kept a neat, clean house.

The day after Helen had died, she had begun to clean the house in Brooklyn where they had all lived together before the surgeon had cut Helen away from her. Before Mallory was done with that old house, there was not a cleaner attic nor cellar, nor all points in-between, in all of Brooklyn. But when she took to cleaning the fireplace and then what she could reach of the chimney, Markowitz had pulled her out of there, out of the ashes which were spreading to the carpet beyond the drop cloth, and she was horrified to see the carpet smudged after half a day of scrubbing with a wire brush. She had flown into a rage as Markowitz held her tight. She had screamed and beat her fists on his chest. He let her, pretended not to notice, and held her tighter. And then she had cried. The crying had gone on for days. Then the tears were over with, and she had never cried again. It was like Helen had taken all her tears, all at once.

Riker made himself at home on the couch.

"Coffey sent me to pick up all the stuff you pinched. But not the Xerox machine. He hasn't missed that yet." He started to drape one leg over the arm of the couch but checked himself, remembering where he was and who he was dealing with.

"You can have the Xerox, too," she said. "I'm done with it."

"Naw. I'm the sentimental type. It was Markowitz's Xerox. You hold on to it." He took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and held it up with a question.

She nodded and pushed the ashtray across the low table.

Before he set the silver cigarette lighter back on the table, it was marred with his paw prints. "So, are you hanging in there, kid? We didn't get much chance to talk during the great precinct robbery. Jeez, the way Coffey carried on. I thought the poor bastard was gonna cry… So, how are you, Kathy?"

"Just fine."

"Anything I can do for you?"

"Yes."

One hour later, the cork roll was flattened out on the back wall of the den. It only took up half of the wall; the other half was newly covered with fresh cork. She walked up to the dividing line to approve the joining of the old and new surfaces with a carpenter's plumb line and pronounced it perfect. Biker struck in the last nail. She stepped back to the door and took in the entire room and its new character. There were snips of cut-away Xerox paper all over the floor, and empty film boxes. Two empty beer bottles had rolled to the far corner, and Biker was in the act of spilling much of the third bottle on her polished hardwood floor.

The collage of paper on the wall was a disorganized layer of trash to anyone who hadn't known Markowitz. The room was no longer a reflection of neat perfectionist Kathy Mallory. It was more like Markowitz now, as though he had recently inhabited it.

She was holding the copy of Markowitz's pocket calendar when Riker walked over to spill beer at her feet.

"You got any ideas on the Tuesday-night appointments?" he asked, reading over her shoulder. "It's driving Coffey nuts."

Scrawled in black ink on each entry for Tuesday were the initials BDA, and the time, 9:00 p.m. According to older calendars, this habit of Markowitz's Tuesday nights had begun a year ago, after she had moved out of the old house in Brooklyn.

"I asked the guys in his poker game and the neighbors. They don't know where he went on Tuesday nights. Can you get me a list of the cross-offs?"

"Sure thing, kid. Just cross off every business in the phone book with those initials. And we don't have any prior arrests with those initials either."

When Riker was gone with his bag of looted paperwork and the copy camera, she went back to the den to admire the new corking stretched over the wall alongside of Markowitz's collection. This half of the wall was pristine in its emptiness, a painter's canvas in the moment before the first stroke. She stepped up to the wall and added the reports and photos from the double kill in the East Village. For this murder, she had her own glossy prints of the crime site.

There was more than an absence of paper dividing the wall between Markowitz and Mallory. Markowitz's thumbtack style was haphazard. Out of the hundreds of bits of paper, in positions she had duplicated exactly, only one was straight, and this was by accident and the law of averages. On her own side of the wall, each sheet of paper and glossy print was machine-precision straight. The spaces between the statements and reports, the prints on the corpse robber, the photographs of Markowitz and the woman, each page of the medical examiner's preliminary report, all these spaces were exactly the same.

She looked at the most recent crime-site photos. There were ten. She walked down the length of the wall and studied Markowitz and Pearl Whitman killed ten times over. Below these photos, she tacked up a new print-out on the Whitman Chemical Corporation, courtesy of the raided computer in the US Attorney's Manhattan office. One party listed in the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation was Edith Candle, described by the SEC investigator as a psychic financial advisor. She resided in Charles Buder's Soho apartment building.

This slender case connection to Charles wouldn't have starded Markowitz. He had told her more than once that they were all only a few people removed from everyone else on the planet. The core of good police work was ferreting out those connections. "There are no dead ends, kid. Everybody knows somebody who knows something."

"Don't call me kid," she had said to him then.

She had only one sheet of scant information on Edith Candle. She used the last tack and centered it at the top so the paper would hang perfectly straight. As she walked away from the cork wall, the page on Edith Candle defied the laws of perfect paper balance and dipped to hang at an odd angle, as though a hand had done it. And it was odd, too, that she did not notice this as she took one last look at the wall and closed the door behind her, car keys jingling in her jeans pocket.

In the last hours before dusk, she made a left turn on Twentieth Street, and her compact brown car left the noise of horns and sirens, street confrontations and the loud static of heavy traffic to roll quietly into another century.