“I am also very afraid.”

Angelo sipped his wine. He saw her lower lip begin to tremble, but she got control of herself quickly, taking a deep breath.

“There is nothing to be afraid of here,” he said.

She looked down at her lap. As though surprised to find the wineglass there, she raised it to her lips. “I want to pay you”-she hesitated-“but I must ask for, for arrangements to be different.”

Angelo was confused. After he had spoken to Johnny he had been confident things would get straightened out. “The vig is too much?”

She shook her head, sitting now in silence. A tear formed in her swollen eye. “It is not the vig. I could pay a hundred a week for a few weeks. After that”-she paused, collecting herself-“I haven’t paid any vig. Johnny LaGuardia”-she looked up, her large brown eyes now liquid-“Johnny…” She broke, crying aloud.

Angelo took a spotless white cotton handkerchief from his shirt pocket and touched it to her face. As he watched her try to collect herself, he was putting it together, feeling his rage. Johnny had been scamming other clients to cover Doreen’s short. When she couldn’t make the hundred he upped somebody else on his own-maybe the mysteriously disappeared Rusty Ingraham-and started taking Doreen’s vig out of her ass.

Doreen was sniffling now, wiping away the tears. “Mi scusa, Don Tortoni.”

Worst of all, Johnny had been keeping Doreen Biaggi a secret. A woman like this, in her situation, she could be priceless to Angelo. Not directly, perhaps, she might be too classy for that. But certainly a woman of her grace and breeding, her looks and substance, could be used somewhere-to bind an allegiance, to weaken an enemy, to blind a competitor in legitimate business. Perhaps even to marry a son.

Angelo moved closer to her on the couch. He knew the sunlight was now falling across his face. Doreen, embarrassed, looked down into her lap, his handkerchief clutched around the stem of the wineglass. Closer, he inspected the face, which now, even bruised, could, he thought, make the angels sing. The loyalty and love of a woman such as this was a gift from God. And he knew he could get it for nothing. Johnny had already paid enough of her vig to cover her principal-he would hardly even lose any money.

He lifted her chin and drew her face to his. He kissed both sides of her bruised lips, then both cheeks. Gently, with his thumb, he rubbed a trace of a tear away from under her eye.

“Look at me,” he said.

She raised her eyes. Johnny had nearly broken her. Angelo smiled. “Will you eat with my family today?” He moved his hand down over her neck, her shoulder, coming to rest under her arm, feeling the full curve of the side of her breast as he moved her back away from him as though trying to get her into focus. “As of this moment,” he said, “you owe me nothing except a smile from your beautiful face.”

He touched the corner of her mouth with a finger, lifting it as he would do to a baby. “A little smile,” he repeated.

She tried, and he pushed again at her lip, playfully. The smile, when it came, nearly broke his heart.

He would have to deal with Johnny LaGuardia.

Flo Glitsky and Frannie Cochran were doing dishes together. They watched Dismas and Abe walking in the small playground that bordered the backyard the Glitskys shared with their neighbors downstairs. They had moved into the duplex when O.J. was born, unable then, as they still were, to afford their own house on Abe’s salary in San Francisco.

Now, of course, there was no chance at all, but the duplex was rent-controlled and they paid less than most everybody else they knew. Her own house was one of the dreams Flo wasn’t going to get, but she had her three healthy boys and her man who loved her, and if that was the trade, she’d take it any day.

“Are you really leaving?” Frannie asked her.

It was all that had been on Flo’s mind for the last two days. She had never seen Abe this down. He had actually applied to the Los Angeles Police Department and was talking about moving there as if it were settled. All Flo knew about L.A. was that if Abe thought housing was high here, they wouldn’t stand a chance there. And she’d heard the public schools there were in bad shape-the teachers mere truant officers whose jobs were to keep kids off drugs and off the street until three o’clock. And not only didn’t Flo believe in private schools, she knew they wouldn’t be able to afford one anyway. And her boys were all smart.

Flo shook her head. “I’ll let Abe work out what he has to, and then I guess we’ll make some decision.”

“That’s how you do it, isn’t it?” Frannie said. “That was always it with me and Eddie. What he wanted and what I wanted, back and forth, until we got somewhere together.” She wiped at a soapy plate. “I’ve gotten out of that habit. I miss it, I think.”

Flo took the plate from her, starting to dry it. “How long has it been now?”

“Four and a half months.”

Flo, like the other cops’ wives Frannie knew, didn’t let herself think too often about losing her husband. It was a possibility that came with the territory, and you accepted it and went on if you wanted to stay together.

“You’re holding up better than I would,” Flo said.

Abe kicked at the tanbark under the swing he and Hardy were on. His arms were looped around the chains and as he kicked he rotated from side to side, facing Hardy then turning away.

“How are you gonna be a good cop anywhere if you don’t care?”

“How many guys care?”

Hardy waited on the rotation, until Abe was faced back toward him. “I think about four, but you were always one of them.”

Glitsky, spinning now on the swing, shook his head. “Now I’m a professional policeperson. I go where they pay me to. Enforce the law.”

“And the brass decide?”

“Correcto.”

Hardy did a pull-up on the A-frame of the swing. He did another one, the two big guys playing on the monkey bars.

“Besides,” Abe said, “Lanier is handling it. They’ll pass off my cases to McFadden ’cause he’s the other solo, and Baker will go down like he should. Order will be restored to the cosmos.”

Hardy was hanging full-length from the frame. “You reading Shakespeare again?”

Glitsky stood out of the swing. “Criticism. The Tragic Fallacy by Krutch. You ought to check it out. Says there can’t be any tragedy unless there’s a Zeitgeist of ultimate order that can be destroyed and then restored.”

“Zeitgeist,” Hardy said.

“Kraut word. Means the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era, such as our very own, for example.”

“I know what the fuck it means, Abe. I’m a college graduate.”

“So that’s why we don’t have any modern tragedy. We don’t believe in the importance of any one individual anymore. Since nobody screwing up can destroy the order of the cosmos, then nobody getting enlightened can restore it, see?”

“I was just thinking about this yesterday.”

Glitsky cast a sideways glance at his friend. “So how’d we get on this anyway?”

“You said Louis Baker going down will restore order to the cosmos.”

Glitsky nodded. “Yeah, right. Let’s go get another couple of beers.”

They headed back to the house, but Hardy still couldn’t let it go. “But my problem is the blindside thing-it was like ‘what girl?’ ”

“Maybe he was concentrating on Rusty so hard he didn’t even notice Maxine.”

“You don’t notice a naked woman you have to shoot three times?”

Glitsky stopped again by the back door. They stood on a square of porch, hands in their pockets. The boys were playing somewhere within earshot, maybe around the front of the house. Hardy blew out, surprised to see a vapor trail. The chill had come in fast-a high-pressure cold that had wiped the sky almost purple.

“Okay, so he noticed her.”

“But, Abe, that’s my point. Baker said he had no idea what I was talking about when I said a woman had been killed at Rusty’s. And he sounded convincing, even to these ears.”