We’re stretched too thin, Cornelius explained to me one night after I had asked him about it. Business is booming and everyone has to work.

Do you work?

I’m old, Henry. I organize — I oversee. I do other things.

Like speak French?

Cornelius raised an eyebrow.

Real murders?

No comment.

Tell me more about Mr. Kindt swimming the length of Lake Otsego on a bet.

Shut up, please.

Usually, I would get a scenario, delivered verbally — by Cornelius — a night or so before the murder, which gave me time to pick up props if they were called for and think things through a little. Sometimes, though, all I got beforehand was the time and address, with no on-site instructions waiting for me — those jobs, after I had gotten over my prework jitters, were probably my favorites, although the results could get a little messy, even painful.

Once, for example, the job involved a couple in a building over on Second Street, across from the old Marble Cemetery — a nice little lower-rung tenement with mosaic floors and freshly painted green stairs. I’d been buzzed in, so I figured they would open up when I knocked, but they didn’t, even when I leaned close to the door and said I could hear them in there and that the meter was running and they should let me in. After a few more minutes, I knocked again, louder this time. The door next to theirs opened and a heavy old lady with greasy hair in a dirty housedress looked out. From somewhere in the apartment behind her a man’s voice said, who is it, Lupe? But the old lady said nothing, just kept staring at me, with a premises-vacated-but-haunted look in her eyes. I had seen a lot of that look out in the streets and down in the subway in the eighties. Once I had woken up on one of the old plastic bucket seats in Penn Station and found someone with the look about six inches away, peering into my face.

I knocked on the couple’s door.

I asked the old woman, who was still standing in her doorway, if she had the time.

She blinked, her nostrils flared slightly, she scratched her right side.

I was getting ready to leave when the husband opened the door and invited me in.

Sorry, he said. We were just getting things together. Finishing up. Come on in.

Who’s the neighbor? I said.

Go back inside, Lupe, it’s all right, he said.

Get back in here now, Lupe, came the man’s voice from behind her.

Lupe didn’t move.

Don’t worry about it, she’s just got a short circuit somewhere, he said.

I’m not worried, I said.

He vanished back into his apartment and, after I had said good-bye to Lupe, who did not answer, I followed him in. He introduced me to his wife. We all shook hands. They had some dinner — chicken with wild rice, salad, and sweet potatoes — going and suggested I join them. I sat down. Not too long into dinner — which wasn’t bad, although the chicken was a little tough — we got to it. It was when the wife, who had just finished her glass of 2000 Long Island Blanc Fumé, said, so this is the guy that’s been writing me those letters, Billy. Here he is. I wanted you to see him face-to-face. See who your competition is.

What? the husband said.

Yeah, what? I said. I wondered what I was supposed to have written. Maybe the imagined letters had been vulgar, full of details about what I’d do to her if I got her alone, etc. Or maybe they had just been enthusiastic, full of exclamation points, exciting interrogations, curlicues of banal but nicely turned supposition. Who knows what the mind wants, what it needs to talk itself into waking up. She looked nice. Pretty in a quiet, self-contained way. Like a lamp turned on in the early evening, or a modest triangle of green space on a crowded street.

The husband, for his part, did not look all that nice, though he had been pleasant enough through dinner. A tattoo of a wildly burning pinecone on his forearm had figured in the conversation. He told me he had gotten it during a stint as a construction worker in Jersey City. While sometimes, now that he wasn’t working a jackhammer, he regretted having had it done, other times it filled him with a kind of pride. More than once, “on that day they got us,” when he was helping with the stretchers, he had looked at it through the smoke, gritted his teeth, and soldiered on. Also, his wife found it cute.

A pinecone, she had said, as if by way of confirmation.

Listen, asshole, he said, standing up.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that now a struggle would ensue, things would get out of hand. I would kill the husband, and maybe even the wife.

All right, I said. We got to it. The trouble was the husband was more into grappling than I was, and before I knew it I was getting slapped around pretty handsomely. After a while, in fact, it was either do something drastic or give them a refund. Fortunately, the guy stopped and pointed at the big wooden salad bowl on the table. I picked it up and broke it over his head.

Sweet Jesus, God in heaven, said the wife.

Yeah, I said, starting to move toward her.

You won’t hurt me or anything will you?

I wasn’t exactly sure how I was supposed to take this, but after my tussle I was feeling a little fatigued, so I told her, albeit politely, to shut up, then put tape over her mouth, did my best to hog-tie her, and held my fingers over her nostrils long enough for her to lose consciousness. I took a look around the apartment. Nothing caught my eye until I was heading for the door. On a table in a corner was a box full of all shape and presumably variety of pinecones. I took one as a souvenir for Mr. Kindt.

Lupe appeared not to have moved from the open doorway, although she now seemed agitated and was even wringing her hands. After a moment, I could hear a soft snoring coming out of the room behind her. I must have been disoriented, because I was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that all of New York, like some horrible dark spider, had crawled into the apartment behind Lupe to sleep and shouldn’t, at all costs, be woken.

Bye, Lupe, I whispered.

A couple of gray cats had appeared and were sitting pressed up against her light-blue slippers.

Oftentimes, after I’d completed a job, I would go over to Mr. Kindt’s and tell him about my evening. He liked hearing about what he called my escapades, and took particular interest in the ones that had a more openly theatrical aspect, like the job involving a rooftop terrace overlooking Tompkins Square, a black chair sitting on a red blanket, and poison dripped into an old guy’s ear. He also took considerable pleasure in hearing about the simpler ones, including the murder of an older woman by following her into her apartment and smashing an ax into her head. Maybe not surprisingly, a considerable number of people were interested in death by falling, or smoke inhalation or sudden impact, and Mr. Kindt was always very interested to hear about how they had been accommodated.

Sometimes during these conversations, Tulip was present, and I have to say I tended to lay things on a little thick when she was there. Since our conversation in the bar after her murder, I had had the impression that certain elemental operations in my body, like cell mitosis or proper oxygen conversion or general nutrient replacement and calorie conversion, got interrupted when those eyes of hers would light on me. I had the impression that she had undergone an attitudinal adjustment toward me since the night of the second trial run, and, though it’s a little embarrassing to admit, it was hard not to keep hearing her say, you’re pretty too. Of course it’s important not to overstate this perceived shift in circumstances. It’s not like Tulip was suddenly falling all over me — hardly. Where before, a disinterested “whatever” might have come close to describing her attitude toward me, there now emanated some glimmer of maybe, just maybe, more than moderate interest from her direction when I would show up at Mr. Kindt’s and start talking.