“Other story,” Samson said, “is the con-be talkin’ about taking over the cut, how Dido best be movin’ on, like that. Come down to blood.”

Lace was thinking that if Louis Baker had wanted the cut, and killed Dido, wouldn’t he have stayed to hold the claim? But he said, “What’s three?”

A cold wind from behind Lace blew some leaves and papers up the street. Samson squinted into it at Lace, his eyes even smaller, glinting. “Be no three,” he said. “Only two stories. Be no one tellin’ any third stories is what I’m saying.”

Lace wondered if the gun that had been used on Dido, the one Lace had originally assumed had been Louis Baker’s, whether the gun-Samson’s-was still in the cut, if he could find it and get his hands on it. He clenched his fists inside the pockets of the jacket, released them, fighting the shivering that was threatening to take over. “I hear you,” he said. “Hey, I hear you. It’s casual.”

Chapter Nineteen

The picture of Eddie was still on Frannie’s dresser. She got home from work and, changing into a sweatshirt and some jeans, noticed for the first time that things weren’t fitting the same. She reached for a dab of perfume and saw the photograph of Eddie.

She stopped, her hand still outstretched. Something curled up inside her. Eddie had been caught climbing up into a friend’s pickup down by Dune Beach. One leg was up on the tailgate and he’d just been turning around to answer as Frannie had yelled something at him. He was smiling his two-hundred-watt smile and his hair was blown every which way, his jacket collar turned up. She’d enlarged the picture to eight by ten and it hadn’t been perfectly focused, so there was a graininess to it that for some reason added to its immediacy.

Forgetting the perfume, she watched her hand go to the frame, and she brought the picture back to the bed, where she sat holding it on her lap.

Eddie looked about eighteen in the picture, impossibly young. She closed her eyes.

It was hard to imagine that they’d been the same age. Eddie now stopped forever only eight months older than the photograph. Frannie felt she’d aged a lifetime.

But the pregnancy kept things in real time. The baby, Eddie’s baby, growing inside her so slowly that it had hardly changed her yet.

There he was-her man-waving back to her. Daring to claim back a little space, charming her so she’d let him back in.

The grief over Eddie’s death had affected her differently than she’d have thought. The only way she found she could cope without crying all the time was to put him, put their life together, out of her mind. Actively not to remember how it had been, how they’d been together. Move on. Look ahead.

Or, the few times she’d let down, allowed his memory back into her mind, the anger would overtake her. Why did he have to go meddle in things that weren’t his business? She thought she’d loved his idealism. But that’s what had gotten him killed, and she tried to convince herself that she even hated him for being that way, because it was what took him away from her. Why did she have to have met him in the first place? It wasn’t fair.

Eddie’s smile didn’t fade, didn’t change. It was grainy, like an old photograph, getting older every day. Smiling, charming, kidding her. I’m still here, Frannie. Can’t deny it forever. I’ll bet the kid winds up looking like me.

A tear fell on the glass that covered the picture.

The kid.

One hand held the frame. The other pressed itself-flat against her belly, somehow had worked its way under the sweatshirt.

God, Eddie, she thought. Come on, this isn’t fair.

What isn’t fair? he said. That I’m in you? That all this moving ahead and looking forward and getting together with Diz… that’s okay. I realize I’m gone… is just setting yourself up for the fall later. You’ve got to find a real place to put me. I was your husband. I’m the father of that little person in there. Don’t hide me. Don’t shut me out. I don’t deserve that. If it’s painful I’m sorry, but I miss you, too. Don’t you think I wish I could be there?

“Yes, I do.”

Well, then?

Hardy came and sat next to her where she lay on the top of the bed, the picture of Eddie Cochran face down on her stomach.

Her hair was spread out behind her on the pillow, the face slightly puffed.

“What?” he said.

“It’s just too soon.”

“I know it is. I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

She moved the picture of Eddie to the floor, put her hand on his thigh, curled onto her side against him. He rubbed her back inside the sweatshirt.

“You are the only male friend I have, Dismas.”

“I am that.”

“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I’ve done with Eddie.”

Hardy patted her stomach. “Eddie’s here.”

“That’s what I mean. I’m not just lonely.” She revised that. “I’m not even lonely. I’m trying to find Eddie and that’s not fair. To you.”

“Move over,” Hardy said.

She lay, one leg over him, her head in the hollow of his arm, a hand between the buttons of his shirt.

“Because something in me loves you,” she said. “A lot.”

“But there’s the other stuff.”

“There is.”

He blew a breath out at the ceiling. “It’s pretty natural. You’re nesting. You want a man around. You trust me, and I show up needing a place to stay. It’s a neat little dream.”

“It’s more than that, too.”

Hardy turned onto his side and undid the button on her jeans, the zipper.

“They finally feel a little tight.”

She bit at his lower lip, flicked her tongue against the tip of his. His hand, down inside her pants, pressed against her.

“See, this is real too,” she said. “This part.”

The kiss, Frannie undoing his pants, freeing him. Another kiss, deep and slow, then more getting out of clothes and he was entering her, breathing her in, mouths together, bodies close and hard pressed, pushing but not moving, her legs wrapping him, holding him as far in as he could get.

The house was cold. Walking down the long hallway, he checked the thermostat and saw it was at 58 degrees. By the time he got to the kitchen, six steps later, he heard the creaks in the responding furnace. In his bedroom he realized he hadn’t fed the fish in several days. Bad. He shook some food over the surface and they didn’t wait for him to tap the glass.

“Sorry, guys.”

He raised the blackout curtain in front of the one window in his office and looked back toward downtown, out at the twinkling lights. He could see the very tip of what the previous week had seemed the evil Pyramid presiding, like the triangular cyclops eye on the dollar bill, over the shadowy line of Jackson Heights. Leaning out, off to his right, the once spectral Sutro Tower, now vaguely benign, thrust its fingers toward some high clouds. The moon was up, nearly full.

He wondered at the change in his perception of things. He listened to his house creaking as the warmth spread in the pipes. The sound wasn’t ominous.

After the coal fire was going well, after the heat had really kicked in, after he’d gone through all his mail (except for one postcard), sitting in the pool of light cast by the green-shaded brass lamp on his desk, he switched on the room’s main lights and grabbed his darts from the board next to the fireplace.

These were his office darts, the same type of custom 20-gram tungsten beauties he carried with him at almost all times. He hadn’t thrown since he’d left the house, but in his first round, shooting for the bull, he hit two and the last one thokked low in the “ 20.”

He picked up the postcard. Hong Kong by night.

His ex-wife.

Carrying the card with him, he went back out through his bedroom to the kitchen. He kept no hard liquor in the house, but there were four bottles of Anchor Steam in the rack on the refrigerator door. He found some frozen chicken breasts and in the cupboard a can of cream of mushroom soup and a can of green beans. He put the breasts in his heavy black all-purpose cast-iron pan, poured the green beans and soup over them, added a little beer, covered the whole thing and turned the heat on low. Jane was appalled at his home cooking.