“And?”

“And… shit, I don’t remember. I’d been working all day. This place opens at seven in the morning, you know. I think I might have dropped off, sitting there with my feet up. Wait a minute. Yes, that’s right. I did drop off. I remember because when I woke up it was cold. I’d turned off the stove to save fuel, and…” Her voice trails off, and she turns away to look out the window at the empty street, somber and cold in the zinc overcast. A little girl runs by, screeching with mock fright as a boy chases her. The girl lets herself be caught, and the boy hits her hard on the arm by way of caress. Carrot inhales a stream of blue smoke through her nose. “It doesn’t sound too good, does it, LaPointe?” Her voice is flat and tired. “First I tell you I was watching TV. Then when you ask me what was on, I tell you I fell asleep.”

“Maybe it was all that coffee you drank.”

She glances at him with a gray smile. “Yeah. Right. Coffee sure knocks you out.” She shakes her head. Then she draws a deep breath. “What about your coffee, pal? Can I warm it up for you?”

LaPointe doesn’t want more coffee, but he doesn’t want to refuse her. He drinks the last of the tepid cup, then pushes it over to her.

While pouring the coffee, her back to him, she asks with the unconvincing bravado of a teen-age tough, “Am I your only suspect?”

“No. But you’re the best.”

She nods. “Well, that’s what counts. Be best at whatever you do.” She turns and grins at him, a faded imitation of the sassy grin she had when she was a kid on the street. “Where do we go from here?”

“Not downtown, if that’s what you mean. Not now, anyway.”

“You’re saying you believe me?”

“I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying I don’t know. You’re capable of killing, with that temper of yours. On the other hand, I’ve known you for twenty-eight years, ever since I was a cop on the beat and you were a kid always getting into trouble. You were always wild and snotty, but you weren’t stupid. With a day and a half to think up an alibi, I can’t believe you’d come up with a silly story like that. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless a couple of things. Unless you thought we’d never trace the victim to here. Unless you’re being doubly crafty. Unless you’re covering for someone.” LaPointe shrugs. He’ll see. Little by little, he’ll keep opening doors that lead into rooms that have doors that lead into rooms. And maybe, instead of running into that blank wall, one of the doors will lead him back to La Jolie France Bar-B-Q. “Tell me, Carrot. This Italian kid, did he have any friends among your customers?”

She gives him his coffee. “No, not friends. The only reason he ate here sometimes was because some of the guys talk Italian, and his English wasn’t all that good. But he always had money, and a couple of my regulars went bar crawling with him once or twice. I heard them groaning about it the next morning, so sick they couldn’t keep, anything but coffee down.”

“What bars?”

“Shit, I don’t know.”

“Talk to your customers tomorrow. Find out what you can about him.”

“I’m closed on Sundays.”

“Monday then. I want to know what bars he went to. Who he knew.”

“Okay.”

“By the way, does chocolate mean anything to you?”

“What kind of question is that? I can take it or leave it alone.”

“Chocolate. As a name. Can you think of anybody with a name like chocolate or cocoa or anything like that?”

“Ah… wasn’t there somebody who used to be on TV with Sid Caesar?”

“No, someone around here. Someone this Tony Green knew.”

“Search me.”

“Forget it, then.” LaPointe swivels on his counter stool and looks at the plump girl. She has given up clearing the tables, or maybe she has forgotten what she was supposed to be doing, and she stands with her forehead against the far window, staring vacantly into the street and making a haze of vapor on the glass with her breath. She notices the haze and begins to draw X’s in it with her little finger, totally involved in the activity. LaPointe cannot help picturing her squirming all over the bed, kneading her own breasts. He stands up to leave. “Okay, Carrot. You call me if you find out anything about this kid’s bars or friends. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll be back.”

“And maybe you’ll be back anyway, right?”

“Yes, maybe.” He buttons up his overcoat and goes to the door.

“Hey, LaPointe?”

He turns back.

“The coffee? That’s fifteen cents.”

8

On the way to his apartment, LaPointe passes the headquarters of the First Regiment of the Grenadier Guards of Canada. Two young soldiers with automatic rifles slung across their combat fatigues pace up and down before the gate, their breath streaming from their nostrils in widening jets of vapor, and their noses and ears red with the cold. They are watching a little group of hippies across the street. Three boys and two girls are loading clothes and cardboard boxes into a battered, flower-painted VW van, moving from a place where they haven’t paid their rent to a place where they won’t. A meaty girl who is above the social subterfuges of make-up and hair-washing is doing most of the work, while another girl sits on a box, staring ahead and nodding in tempo with some inner melody. The three boys stand about, their hands in their pockets, their faces somber and pinched with the cold. They have fled from establishment conformity, taking identical routes toward individuality. They could have been stamped from the same mold, all long-legged and thin-chested, their shoulders round and huddled against the cold.

By contrast, the guards keep their shoulders unnaturally square and their chests boldly out. LaPointe assumes that once the hippies have driven away, the guards will relax and round their shoulders against the wind. He smiles to himself.

Before mounting the wooden stairs, LaPointe looks up at the windows of his apartment. No lights. She must still be out shopping.

The static cold of the apartment is more chilling than the wind, so he immediately lights the gas heater, then sets water to boil, thinking to have a nice hot cup of coffee waiting for her when she comes back.

The water comes to a boil, and she has still not returned. He empties the kettle, refills it, and replaces it on the gas ring. As though putting on the water is a kind of sympathetic magic that will bring her home to the coffee.

It doesn’t work.

He sits in his armchair and looks across the deserted park, drab in the winter overcast. Perhaps she’s left for good. Why shouldn’t she? She owes him nothing. Maybe she has met somebody… a young man who knows how to dance. That would be best, really. After all, she can’t go on living with him indefinitely. In fact, he doesn’t want her to. Not really. She’d be a pain in the neck. Then too, someday soon…

Without thinking, he slips his hand up to his chest, as he has come to do by habit each time he thinks of his aneurism… that stretched balloon. He feels the regular heartbeat. Normal. Nothing odd in it. Yes, he decides. It would be best if she’s found somebody else to live with. It would be ghastly for her to wake up some morning and find him beside her, dead. Maybe cold to the touch.

Or what if he were to have an attack while they were making love?

Good, then. That’s just fine. She has found a young man on the street. Somebody kind. It’s better that way.

He grunts out of the chair and goes into the kitchen to take off the kettle before the water boils away. He will enjoy a quiet, peaceful night. He will take off his shoes, put on his robe, and sit by the window, listening to the hiss of the gas fire and reading one of his Zola novels for the third or fourth time. He never tires of reading around and around his battered set of Zola. Years ago, he bought the imitation-leather books from an old man who ran a secondhand bookstore, a narrow slot of a shop created by roofing over an alley between two buildings on the Main. The old man never did much business, and buying the books was a way of helping him out without embarrassing him.