“Maybe it’s best you just sit down,” Laurie suggested with a laugh.

“No, I insist,” Lou said.

After they’d gotten most of the contents back into the briefcase, Lou picked up the videotape. “What’s this, your favorite X-rated feature?”

“Hardly,” Laurie commented.

Lou turned it over to read the label. “The Franconi shooting?” he questioned. “CNN sent you this out-of-the-blue?”

Laurie straightened up. “No, I requested it. I was going to use the tape to corroborate the findings when I did the autopsy. I thought it could make an interesting paper to show how reliable forensics can be.”

“Mind if I look at it?” Lou asked.

“Of course not,” Laurie said. “Didn’t you see it on TV?”

“Along with everyone else,” Lou said. “But it would still be interesting to see the tape.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have a copy at police headquarters,” Laurie said.

“Hey, maybe we do,” Lou said. “I just haven’t seen it.”

“Man, this ain’t your night,” Warren teased Jack. “You must be getting too old.”

Jack had decided when he’d gotten to the playground late and had had to wait to get into the game, that he was going to win no matter whom he was teamed up with. But it didn’t happen. In fact, Jack lost every game he played in because Warren and Spit had gotten on the same team and neither could miss. Their team had won every game including the last, which had just been capped off with a sweet “give and go” that gave Spit an easy final lay-up.

Jack walked over to the sidelines on rubbery legs. He’d played his heart out and was perspiring profusely. He pulled a towel from where he’d jammed it into the chain-link fence and wiped his face. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest.

“Come on, man!” Warren teased from the edge of the court, where he was dribbling a basketball back and forth between his legs. “One more run. We’ll let you win this time.”

“Yeah, sure!” Jack called back. “You never let nobody win nothing.” Jack made it a point to adapt his syntax for the environment. “I’m out’a here.”

Warren sauntered over and hooked one of his ringers through the fence and leaned against it. “What’s up with your shortie?” he asked. “Natalie’s been driving me up the wall asking questions about her since we haven’t seen nothing of you guys, you know what I’m saying?”

Jack looked at Warren’s sculpted face. To add insult to injury, as far as Jack was concerned, Warren wasn’t even perspiring, nor was he breathing particularly heavily. And to make matters worse, he’d been playing before Jack had arrived. The only evidence of exertion was a tiny triangle of sweat down the front of his cut-off sweatshirt.

“Reassure Natalie that Laurie’s fine,” Jack said. “She and I were just taking a little vacation from each other. It was mostly my fault. I just wanted to cool things down a bit.”

“I hear you,” Warren said.

“I was with her last night,” Jack added. “And things are looking up. She was asking me about you and Natalie, so you weren’t alone.”

Warren nodded. “You sure you’re finished or do you want to run one more?”

“I’m finished,” Jack said.

“Take care, man,” Warren said as he pushed off the fence. Then he yelled out to the others: “Let’s run, you bad asses.”

Jack shook his head in dismay as he watched Warren amble away. He was envious of the man’s stamina. Warren truly wasn’t tired.

Jack pulled on his sweatshirt and started for home. He’d not won a single game, and although during the play the inability to win had seemed overwhelmingly frustrating, now it didn’t matter. The exercise had cleared his mind, and for the hour and a half he’d played, he hadn’t thought about work.

But Jack wasn’t even all the way across 106th Street when the tantalizing mystery of his floater began troubling him again. As he climbed his refuse-strewn stairs, he wondered if there was a chance that Ted had made a mistake with the DNA analysis. As far as Jack was concerned the victim had had a transplant.

Jack was rounding the third-floor landing when he heard the telltale sound of his phone. He knew it was his because Denise, the single mother of two who lived on his floor, didn’t have a phone.

With some effort, Jack encouraged his tired quadriceps to propel him up the final flight. Clumsily, he fumbled with his keys at his door. The moment he got it open, he heard his answering machine pick up with a voice that Jack refused to believe was his own.

He got to the phone and snatched it up, cutting himself off in mid-sentence.

“Hello,” he gasped. After an hour and a half of full-court, all-out basketball, the dash up the final flight of stairs had put him close to collapse.

“Don’t tell me you’re just coming in from your basketball,” Laurie said. “It’s going on nine o’clock. That’s way off your schedule.”

“I didn’t get home until after seven-thirty,” Jack explained between breaths. He wiped his face to keep his perspiration from dripping on the floor.

“That means you haven’t eaten yet,” Laurie said.

“You got that right,” Jack said.

“Lou is over here, and we were going to have salad and spaghetti,” Laurie said. “Why don’t you join us?”

“I wouldn’t want to break up the party,” Jack said jokingly. At the same time he felt a mild stab of jealousy. He knew about Laurie’s and Lou’s brief romantic involvement and half wondered if the two friends were starting something up.

Jack knew he had no right to such feelings, considering the ambivalence he had about becoming involved with any woman. After the loss of his family, he’d been unsure if he ever wanted to make himself vulnerable to such pain again. At the same time, he’d come to admit both his loneliness and how much he enjoyed Laurie’s company.

“You won’t be breaking up any party,” Laurie assured him. “It’s going to be a very, very casual dinner. But we have something we want to show you. Something that is going to surprise you and maybe even make you want to give yourself a boot in the rear end. As you can probably tell, we’re pretty excited.”

“Oh?” Jack questioned. His mouth had gone dry. Hearing Lou laughing in the background, and putting two and two together, Jack knew what they wanted to show him; it had to be a ring! Lou must have proposed!

“Are you coming?” Laurie asked.

“It’s kind of late,” Jack said. “I’ve got to shower.”

“Hey, you old sawbones,” Lou said. He’d snatched the phone from Laurie. “Get your ass over here. Laurie and I are dying to share this with you.”

“Okay,” Jack said with resignation. “I’ll jump in the shower and be there in forty minutes.”

“See ya, dude,” Lou said.

Jack hung up the phone. “Dude?” he mumbled. That didn’t sound like Lou. Jack mused that the detective must be on cloud nine.

“I wish I knew what I could do to cheer you up,” Darlene said. She’d made the effort to put on a slinky silk teddy from Victoria’s Secret, but Raymond hadn’t even noticed.

Raymond was stretched out on the sofa with an ice pack on his head and his eyes closed.

“Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?” Darlene asked. She was a tall woman over five feet ten, with bleached blond hair and a curvaceous body. She was twenty-six years old, and as she and Raymond joked, halfway to his fifty-two. She’d been a fashion model before Raymond had met her in a cosy East Side bar called the Auction House.

Raymond slowly took his ice pack off and glared at Darlene. Her bubbly vivaciousness was only an irritation.

“My stomach is in a knot,” he said deliberately. “I’m not hungry. Is that so difficult to understand?”

“Well, I don’t know why you are so upset,” Darlene persisted. “You just got a call from the doctor in Los Angeles, and she’s decided to come on board. That means we’ll soon have some movie stars as clients. I think we should celebrate.”