He had a point.

A damn good one.

“I see,” I mumbled, staring down at the floor, ashamed that I’d been giving Detective Flannagan such a hard time when he’d been doing such a good job (or so it seemed).

If it weren’t for Flannagan and Dash, I humbly admitted to myself, Abby and I would be on the way to the city morgue right now-or in transit to the Staten Island landfill. I was trying to find the right words to express my heartfelt apologies and gratitude when Abby jumped in and saved me the trouble.

“Hey, bobba ree bop!” she whooped, catapulting out of her chair and darting over to Johnny Dash, who was standing to one side of the desk, leaning against a wooden file cabinet. “You’re my hero!” she cried, flinging her arms around his neck and planting a huge (and I’d be willing to bet openmouthed) kiss on his unsuspecting lips. Then she hopped over to Flannagan, threw herself down on his lap, pulled his face down close to hers, and repeated the procedure.

Both men were shocked, but pleased. Breathless and blushing. And for several long minutes after Abby danced away and returned to her chair on the other side of the desk, their chests were so puffed up with pride I thought they’d pop.

I hated to put a damper on the friendly fireworks, but I was still curious about the case. “Was Detective Dash following me the night of the Fourth, when I went to the party at the Keller Hotel?” I asked. “The night I got hit on the head?”

“Yes, of course he was,” Flannagan answered. “Who do you think called us when you were assaulted? How do you think we got there so fast?”

“So Blackie… I mean, Detective Dash was the anonymous caller you told me about?”

“Right.”

“That settles it then,” I said. “The man who knocked me out was Aunt Doobie.”

“The one and only,” Flannagan said. “But his real name is Christopher Dubin. He’s a thirty-four-year-old lawyer with a wife and two kids. He’s also a covert homosexual who was so terrified you would find out who he really is and expose his sordid secret to the world and his wife, that he bashed you on the head with a rock and took off like a bat outta hell.”

Christopher Dubin. Married. Two kids. “How did you get all this information?” I sputtered, begging for more. “Did you find him at the Mayflower Hotel? Did he confess to hitting me? Did he admit that he was Gray’s lover?”

Blackie, not Flannagan, answered my first question.

“Never went to the Mayflower,” he said. “Didn’t have to. After Dubin hit you, he took off in a black limo and I memorized the plate number. Then-after I made sure you weren’t hurt too bad-I called the station for help and put out a citywide bulletin on the car. As soon as Detective Flannagan and the boys arrived at the scene, I jumped in one of the squad cars, got a location on the limo from the radio, and then tracked the vehicle to its final destination-an East 65th Street brownstone owned by one Randolph Godfrey Winston.”

“Baldy,” I mumbled.

“Yeah, the guy

is bald,” Blackie said. “Completely. I saw that when he and Dubin got out of the car and went into the building.”

“So what happened next?” I asked. “Did you go inside and question them both together?”

“No, he did not!” Flannagan broke in, obviously annoyed that Blackie was claiming so much attention. “Detective Dash stayed outside and kept watch on the building until I got there-which wasn’t until after midnight since you took so goddamn long to tell me the truth about the attack and your own little private investigation.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said, really meaning it. “I was wrong. I should have told you everything from the very beginning.”

“You’re goddamn right you should!” Flannagan snapped, tossing me such a gloating, self-righteous sneer I considered retracting my apology.

I didn’t do it, though. I was still aching for more details about the case, and I was afraid Flannagan would clam up if I crossed him again. “So you conducted the interrogation yourself, Detective Flannagan?” I probed. “That night in Baldy’s brownstone?”

“I sure did,” he boasted, sitting back in his chair and lighting up a Camel. Then, snorting two streams of smoke from his nostrils like a dragon, he launched into the longest, most drawn-out, most self-aggrandizing monologue you ever heard in your life. I’m not kidding! He described and explained every single moment of his session with Baldy and Aunt Doobie (i.e., Winston and Dubin), but his focus was on

himself, not the subjects of his inquiry, and his zeal was reserved for his own “extraordinary” (his word, not mine!) powers of discovery. (He determined this, and he uncovered that, and then he established this, and he exposed that, and then he… well, you get the picture.)

After all was said and done, Flannagan had delivered a lot more details than I’d bargained for. (Don’t worry! I won’t make you wade through a word-for-word account of his grandiose dissertation. I’ll edit out all the pretentious stuff and repackage the rest in a nutshell. Am I a considerate writer, or what?)

What it all boiled down to was this: Christopher Dubin and Gray Gordon had been lovers for five months. They’d conducted their forbidden affair in hotel rooms so that Dubin-a successful theatrical lawyer and respected family man-would never be seen in Gray’s company. Because of his fear of being branded a homosexual, Dubin never would have been caught dead at the gay party at the Keller Hotel if: 1) his wife and kids hadn’t gone to spend the holiday weekend with her parents in Canada; 2) his beloved gay boyfriend hadn’t been brutally murdered; 3) his good friend and gay business associate Randolph Godfrey Winston hadn’t persuaded him to meet him at the party for a healing regimen of booze, fireworks, and forgetfulness.

And he never would have bashed me on the head if I hadn’t called him Aunt Doobie.

But once that name escaped my lips, Dubin knew that I had recognized him from our first meeting at the Mayflower-when, if you recall, I had also mentioned the name of Gray Gordon. And since the party at the Keller bar was for gays only, Dubin also knew that I now had ample proof that he was a homosexual. As a result, he went nuts and ran out of the bar, looking to get as far away from me as possible, hoping I’d never learn his real name and expose his secret life, which would destroy his public one.

When Dubin realized that I had followed him out of the bar and over toward the river, however, and that I was standing watch under the West Side Highway-right between him and the limo in which his friend Randy had just arrived-his uncontrollable panic took over. He picked up a rock, snuck up behind me, and knocked me cold. Then he fled the scene in the black limousine.

Toodleloo. Bye bye. Over and out.

“What about Baldy?” I asked, when Flannagan finally stopped talking. “Did you find out anything more about him?”

“Besides his real name, you mean?”

Duh. “Yes,” I replied, “and besides his profession, too. I already know that he’s the producer of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. What I don’t know is why he was pumping the bartenders at the Village Vanguard for information about me. Did you ask him anything about that?”

“Uh, yeah, I did,” Flannagan said, suddenly looking kind of vague, rubbing his pallid, baby-smooth chin with his nicotine-stained fingers. “He said something about seeing you and Miss Moskowitz backstage the night of Gray Gordon’s debut, and again the next day, after the matinee. And then, he said, when he saw you

again at the Vanguard the very next night, he started wondering who you were and why you kept showing up everywhere he went. So he tipped the bartenders and asked them a few questions about you on his way out. That’s all there was to it.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” I exclaimed, utterly amazed (and also a bit amused) that a situation I’d thought so sinister could turn out to be so ordinary.