My aunt, I said.

Dr. Tulp raised an eyebrow.

Never mind. Forget that. I don’t want to talk about her. Mr. Kindt.

Dr. Tulp straightened her papers and put them down.

My friend. He’s changed. I offended him. He’s getting out of control. He says he’s got his own visitor now. A guy in swim trunks. Is there a pool here? I think it’s supposed to mean something.

Sorry, Henry, I don’t follow you.

It’s me. I’m the one who’s been ripping this place off. Mr. Kindt took over for Job. I pissed him off.

Slow down, Henry.

He’s withholding my meds.

No one is withholding your medication, Henry.

Yes, someone definitely the fuck is.

No, Henry, Dr. Tulp said.

See, my boy, said Mr. Kindt when I returned. There is unfortunately absolutely nothing your beautiful young Dr. Tulp will do.

No, I don’t think there is.

I looked at him.

Well, I said.

Yes, dear boy? he asked.

I shut my eyes. I counted to fifty then opened them. He was still there. I took a deep breath. I sighed.

You could at least apologize for calling me a little shit earlier, I said.

Did I call you a little shit? After all it doesn’t quite sound like me, does it? Not quite the variety of vocabulary I would elect to employ.

I shook my head. It didn’t. It sounded like Aunt Lulu. Mr. Kindt took a step toward me and took my hands in his.

I am not the one who needs to apologize to you for anything, Henry, am I? he said. Not for anything, relatively speaking, too serious?

No, I suppose not, I said.

I think my apologies, if there are to be any, will be directed elsewhere — toward my poor wet young man. In fact perhaps I should slip off for a time and see if I can’t make myself more available to him.

Mr. Kindt gave a nervous little laugh, like a lightbulb breaking, like a tiny frozen fist shattering against a wall.

I nodded and squeezed his soft, near-translucent hands.

Ah, my dear Henry, my dear, dear Henry, I sense we are starting to understand each other, he said.

TWENTY-SEVEN

The night of Mr. Kindt’s murder it rained hard. I had a couple of drinks at the Horseshoe and watched the rain beat down on the park and finally wondered, with more than a mild sense of unease, what I’d gotten myself into. It’s not that I wasn’t happy enough to help Mr. Kindt out with his little fantasy, but after the events of the past week, since the night with Tulip, since my visit to Mel the Hat’s and his various insights, since a meeting with Cornelius and the others on, as Cornelius put it, the various modalities of the crime, not to mention my encounter with the proposed victim himself and the subsequent revelations about the famous night on Lake Otsego, my brain was really chewing at things, and these things did not taste good.

Sitting there, it seemed to me I could trace the beginning of the decidedly unpleasant taste to the latter portion of my night with Tulip, which is when, though I didn’t give it much thought until after my encounter with The Hat, I finally learned something concrete about the circumstances of her relationship with Mr. Kindt.

After our chat at Grand Central, Tulip and I had made our way back to the tattoo parlor on Orchard, where we poured ourselves shots from a bottle of Ketel One and toasted Cornelius, the knockout, the knockout’s formidable cleavage, the flexibility of the contortionists, my new tattoo, and, most of all, Mr. Kindt. On the subject of this latter, Tulip took pains to stress that she really had been stretching things into the realm of the speculative when she had offered me Mr. Kindt’s presumptive biography and, in high spirits, I lied and told her that Mr. Kindt’s origins didn’t matter to me in the least. He had been an extraordinarily generous friend, almost a patron, and if the 1 + 1 of some night on some lake didn’t feel like adding up to 2 then that was fine with me. Tulip said it was also fine with her — that if he had been a patron to me, he had been that and more to her in the time that she had known him. Which, I asked her, had been how long? She raised an eyebrow, started some kind of count on her fingers, stopped, shrugged, and said that it hadn’t been that long.

How long is that? I said.

Cornelius introduced me a month or so before I met you, she said. How long ago was that?

Cornelius introduced you to Mr. Kindt? I said.

She shrugged and took a sip of her drink. Then she toasted Anthony, the inept but very handsome first murderer. We drained our glasses, then Tulip put the bottle away, grabbed my hand, sunk a fingernail into it, and grabbed the back of my head.

It had been a very long time since anything like Tulip on that night in that back room had happened to me and by the time we were done and she had put on her T-shirt and gone to get herself another shot, I was lying in a heap extruding sweat, etc., and panting and feeling pretty magnificent. As I said previously, it was only the next day, as I was walking around the neighborhood in a daze, like someone had borrowed my brain and stuck an old cream-filled donut in its place, that any kind of even low-grade analytical thinking process kicked in. But after I left The Hat’s, and had poured a few midafternoon beverages on the paranoid feelings my visit and his peephole and commentary had produced, I went home and back to wallowing around in what, by the time I fell asleep in/was knocked out by the hot dog cart fumes, I had only half-convinced myself were probably just the symptoms of uncertainty inherent in any budding romance, let alone one taking root in the context of mock murders and so forth.

Anyway, my limping mind had gone on melting in and out of a sense of unease around the Tulip question. And sitting there at the Horseshoe that night, I kept coming back to the fact that she had only known Mr. Kindt for a little longer than I had, and that Cornelius had introduced her to him.

I hadn’t gotten much more to go on about this at my meeting with Cornelius and Co., though there had been plenty of information of a more general nature, especially in retrospect, to make my eyebrows tick up a notch or two.

This meeting had taken place the day before the murder at one of the outside tables at Veselka, and had started with Cornelius stressing to me that Mr. Kindt didn’t want to see me until after the job had been completed, that this was an important part of the scenario and should be adhered to.

Why? I said.

That’s the script, Cornelius said.

But I always see him.

Not before the murder.

The knockout and the contortionists were present at this get-together, which, like my conversation with the knockout at the Odessa, possessed a certain hard-boiled feeling that I will do my best to evoke, though not, in this case, I should stress, at the conscious expense of substantive or incidental accuracy: we are too deep into these sad, blurry proceedings for that. The knockout had on a black raincoat and a black miniskirt and kept crossing and uncrossing her legs, saying goddamn it, and sucking, almost slurping, on cigarettes, so that Cornelius finally told her to either take it easy or leave. For their part, the contortionists, dressed in matching purple velour tracksuits, had arrived late, then immediately settled into unpleasant leg and body positions and wouldn’t stop staring at me.

You’re all making me nervous, I finally said.

He’s nervous, one of the contortionists said.

I had a run-in yesterday, I said. With a guy called Mel the Hat. Old-timer. Anyone ever hear of him?

Mel the Hat? Is that a joke? the knockout said.

No, I’ve never heard of him. Now remember to hit him hard, said Cornelius, who had already run through the scenario once and was going over it a second time.

I heard you the first time, I said.