I wait another ten minutes, drain my drink. I decide to pay the bill and leave. It was a mistake to come. I have appointments.

A few minutes later, waiting for my change—my mind adrift on the scent of a doorway on East Fortieth Street and Central Avenue, on bleached white skin, blued by moonlight—I hear, from just behind me, a man’s voice:

“Could you stand up please?”

The noise erupts. This time, a loud, discordant blood rush in my ears. The blaring brass of imminent violence.

Again: “Sir?”

My hand moves slowly toward the knife sheathed on my left hip. Heart slips into high. Exits mapped—front door to my right, back door through kitchen. I calm myself enough to speak. “I’m sorry?”

I turn around to see a graying, Asian businessman of sixty, pointing to my stool. His jacket is hanging from the back.

It is nothing.

I get up, blow past him, rage out of the bar.

The cacophony in my head begins to recede slightly as I walk to the parking lot, disgusted with myself for coming in the first place. I start the car, pull into westbound traffic, drive toward the auditorium, my fury, for the moment, turned inward, my heart beating in my ears like some ancient metronome counting down a coda of inescapable madness.

31

Madness: Two hundred children between the ages of one and twelve, all fully charged on cheap frosted cake, Tootsie Pops, and Faygo root beer. The cavernous Masonic Temple on Euclid Avenue and East Thirty-sixth Street is awash in brightly colored snowsuits, rubber galoshes, and neonhued knit caps.

Billy Coughlin, a lifer from the Second District, is Santa again this year, his decades of holding down the first stool at the Caprice Lounge and a back booth at Elby’s Big Boy Restaurant providing a bulbous red nose and a billowing gut that negated the need for makeup or pillows. Billy sits on his makeshift throne, once again bracing for the onslaught, once again looking as if he’s about to hit the door at a crack house.

Earlier in the day Mercedes insisted that she had no plans for the evening and would be delighted to show up and help out. Paris tried to talk her out of it, never having been one to foist his charity efforts on anyone, but she was adamant. At the moment, Mercedes E Cruz—aproned and adorned with a red satin bow in her hair—is behind a huge coffee urn, dispensing coffee with what Paris is beginning to believe is a perpetual good mood. Except, of course, for those few minutes that she wanted to kill that kid in the Plymouth.

Paris is sitting at the back of the auditorium, near a heat duct, trying to get the warmth into his hands. After a few moments, he looks up to see a very small person studying him.

Happy Holidays! My name is Kamal Dawkins! the young boy’s name tag declares. He is black, braided, no more than four years old.

“Hi,” Kamal says. “Are you a policeman?”

“I am.”

“Ever shoot anybody?”

“No sir,” Paris says. “Never have.”

Kamal thinks for a minute, apparently trying to reconcile all that gunplay he’s seen on TV. “Ever take someone t’jail?”

“Oh yes. Now that I’ve done. All the time. Every day if I can.”

“Were they bad guys?”

“Very bad guys,” Paris replies, lifting Kamal onto his knee. “Very, very bad guys. And now they’re all locked up.”

Kamal takes a deep lick on his cherry Tootsie Pop. “My daddy’s in jail.”

Ah shit, Paris thinks. Now what the hell do I say? “Well, see, sometimes really good guys do a bad thing. Just once. And sometimes they get caught and have to go to jail for a while. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad guys. They just did a bad thing.”

Kamal ponders the concept for a moment. “I do bad things.”

“You do? What kinds of bad things?”

Kamal looks at his boots, confesses. “I push my sister.”

Paris sees an opening. “Does your mom punish you for pushing your sister?”

“Yeah. I have to sit on the time-out step.”

Perfect. The old time-out-step-as-juvenile-metaphor-for-jail argument. “Well, see, the time-out step is kind of like jail. Sometimes adults do bad things and they have to go sit on the time-out step.”

This seems to register with Kamal. As does the overwhelming question: “Then why can’t my daddy sit on the time-out step at my house?”

With this admittedly savvy question, Kamal throws his hands into the air to emphasize his point. As he does, the Tootsie Pop goes flying straight up in the air, twisting, end over end, like the bone that turns into a space station in 2001.

For a moment, Paris and Kamal watch it rise, hover, then begin its descent.

Paris reaches out to grab the plummeting sucker before it hits the floor, but instead of wrapping his hand around something warm and sticky, he wraps his hand around something warm and soft.

Someone else’s hand.

He looks up to see who he is holding hands with. It is a very pretty young woman—lustrous brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, dark caramel eyes, twenties. She is holding a two-year-old blond girl dressed in a red velvet jumper.

“Ya gotta be quicker than that, officer,” she says with a smile, but makes no move to extract her hand from his. Paris lets go, a little embarrassed.

The woman is slender, shapely, wearing a black turtleneck sweater, tight denim jeans. Paris is accordingly tongue-tied. “I . . . uh . . . I guess we both—”

“Former first baseman,” she says, interrupting him. “We always put the worst kid in right field. Nothing ever got by me.”

“Yeah, well, I was always the kid in right,” Paris says.

Kamal looks back and forth, between the two adults, apparently wondering when the part about him getting his Tootsie Pop back was going to be brought up.

“I’ll get you a new one, sweetie,” the woman says. She puts the little girl down, who immediately toddles off toward Santa.

“Rebecca,” the woman says, holding out her hand to Paris. “Rebecca D’Angelo.”

“Jack Paris.”

They shake hands and immediately become glued together. Rebecca laughs, covers her mouth with her other hand, realizing what she’d done. She’d shaken hands with her Tootsie Pop hand. “I’m so sorry,” she says, unsticking herself, slowly, from Paris. “Let me go get some water and some napkins.”

“That’s okay.”

“I insist.”

“Really,” Paris says. “It’s—”

But the young woman is already on her way to the coffee stand. Paris watches her walk across the room, then sits back down, next to Kamal. His little inquisitor. “See that lady?” Paris asks, pointing toward Rebecca.

Kamal nods.

“Follow her, okay?”

“Okay.”

“She’ll get you a new Tootsie Roll.”

“Tootsie Pop,” Kamal says.

“Tootsie Pop,” Paris corrects.

With that, Kamal gives Paris a hug and runs off after the woman. And Paris has to laugh. Kamal Dawkins, Esquire. He could see the shingle now.

After a few moments, Mercedes sidles up next to Paris. “Pretty gal,” she says.

“Yes, she is.”

“Thinking of adopting?”

Paris notices a little jealousy in her voice. Or does he? “Smart-ass,” he says. “I just met her. She’s probably somebody’s daughter.”

“I’m an investigative reporter, detective. I’d be willing to go to print with the fact that she’s somebody’s daughter.”

“You know what I mean. The daughter of some cop I know. Guy about my age.”

“Hmmm. A guy your age. What age would that be?”

“Somewhere between Huggies and Depends,” Paris says. “Right about halfway.”

“I see,” she says, lifting her pen and notebook. “And can I—”

“Miss Cruz?”

Paris and Mercedes look over to see two young girls, around eleven or twelve years of age. Melissa’s age. Paris notices how similar they are to his daughter; trying to shed their girlish ways, bodies poised to become women, yet still a bit coltish and sharply angled, a bit clumsy. One of them whispers something into Mercedes’s ear. It seems that Mercedes Cruz has become an instant role model.