"You never heard from them?"

"Nothing. Nobody tells me if his people are coming for his belongings, or what I'm supposed to do. When I didn't hear from them I called the precinct. They don't know what I'm talking about. I guess so many people get murdered nobody can bother to keep track." She shrugged. "Me, I got an apartment, I got to rent it, you know? I left the furniture, I brought everything else down here. When nobody came I got rid of it."

"You sold the videocassettes."

"The movies? I took them over on Broadway, he gave me a few dollars. Was that wrong?"

"I don't think so."

"I wasn't stealing. If he had family I would give it all to them, but he had nobody. He lived here for many years, Mr. Leveque. He was here already when I got this job."

"When was that?"

"Six years ago. Wait a minute, I'm wrong, seven years."

"You're just the superintendent?"

"What else should I be, the queen of England?"

"I knew a woman who was a landlady but she let on to the tenants that she was only the super."

"Oh, sure," she said. "I own the building, that's why I live in the basement. I'm a rich woman, I just have this love for living in the ground like a mole."

"Who does own the building?"

"I don't know." I looked at her and she said, "Sue me, I don't know. Who knows? There's a management company that hired me. I collect the rent, I give it to them, they do whatever they want with it. The landlord I never met. Does it matter who it is?"

I couldn't see how. I asked when Arnold Leveque had died.

"Last spring," she said. "Closer than that I couldn't tell you."

I went back to my hotel room and turned on the TV. Three different channels had college basketball games. It was too frenzied and I couldn't bear to watch. I found a tennis match on one of the cable channels and it was restful by comparison. I don't know that it would be accurate to say that I watched it, but I did sit in front of the set with my eyes open while they hit the ball back and forth over the net.

I met Jim for dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Ninth Avenue. We often had Sunday dinner there. The place never filled up and they didn't care how long we sat there or how many times they had to refill our teapot. The food's not bad, and I don't know why they don't do more business.

He said, "Did you happen to read the Times today? There was an article, an interview with this Catholic priest who writes hot novels. I can't think of his name."

"I know who you mean."

"He had this telephone poll to back him up, and he said how only ten percent of the married population of this country have ever committed adultery. Nobody cheats, that's his contention, and he can prove it because somebody called a bunch of people on the phone and that's what they told him."

"I guess we're in the grip of a moral renaissance."

"That's his point." He picked up his chopsticks, mimed a drumroll. "I wonder if he called my house."

"Oh?"

Avoiding my eyes, he said, "I think Beverly 's seeing somebody."

"Somebody in particular?"

"A guy she met in Al-Anon."

"Maybe they're just friends."

"No, I don't think so." He poured tea for both of us. "You know, I screwed around a lot before I got sober. Whenever I went to a bar I told myself I was looking to meet somebody. Generally all I got was drunk, but now and then I got lucky. Sometimes I even remembered it."

"And sometimes you'd rather you didn't."

"Well, sure. The point is I didn't give that up completely when I first came into the program. The marriage almost ended during the worst of the drinking, but I bottomed out and sobered up and we worked things out. She started going to Al-Anon, started dealing with her own issues, and we hung together. I would still have something going on the side, you know."

"I didn't know."

"No?" He thought about it. "Well, I guess that was before I knew you, before you got sober. Because I stopped fooling around after a couple of years. It was no great moral decision to reform. I just didn't seem to be doing that anymore. I don't know, the health thing may have been a factor, first herpes and then AIDS, but I don't think I got scared off. I think I lost interest." He took a sip of tea. "And now I'm one of Father Feeney's ninety percent, and she's out there."

"Well, maybe it's her turn. To have a little fling."

"This isn't the first time."

"Oh," I said.

"I don't know how I feel about it."

"Does she know that you know?"

"Who knows what she knows? Who knows what I know? I just wanted things to stay the way they were, you know? And they never do."

"I know," I said. "I was with Elaine last night and she said the M word."

"What's that, motherfucker?"

"Marriage."

"Same thing," he said. "Marriage is a motherfucker. She wants to get married?"

"She didn't say that. She said if we were to get married, then she'd stop seeing clients."

"Clients?"

"Johns."

"Oh, right. That's the condition? Marry me and I'll stop?"

"No, nothing like that. Just speaking hypothetically, and then she apologized for saying the word and we both agreed we want things to stay the way they are." I looked down into my teacup the way I used to look into a glass of whiskey. "I don't know if that's going to be possible. It seems to me that when two people want something to stay just the way it is, that's when it changes."

"Well," he said, "you'll have to see how it goes."

"And take it a day at a time, and don't drink."

"I like that," he said. "It has a nice ring to it."

WE sat there a long while, talking about one thing and another. I talked about my cases, the legitimate one that I couldn't seem to come to grips with and the other one that I couldn't seem to leave alone. We talked about baseball and how spring training might be delayed by an owners' lockout. We talked about a kid in our home group with a horrendous history of drugs and alcohol who'd gone out after four months of sobriety.

Around eight he said, "What I think I'll do tonight, I think I'll go to some meeting where I won't run into anybody I know. I want to talk about all this shit with Bev at a meeting and I can't do that around here."

"You could."

"Yeah, but I don't want to. I'm an old-timer, I've been sober since the Flood, I wouldn't want the newcomers to realize I'm not a perfect model of serenity." He grinned. "I'll go downtown and give myself permission to sound as confused and fucked-up as I feel. And who knows? Maybe I'll get lucky, find some sweet young thing looking for a father figure."

"That's a good idea," I said. "Find out if she's got a sister."

I went to a meeting myself. There's no meeting at St. Paul 's on Sundays, so I went to one at Roosevelt Hospital. A fair number of the people who showed up were in-patients from the detox ward. The speaker had started out as a heroin addict, kicked that in a twenty-eight-day residential program in Minnesota, and devoted the next fifteen years to alcoholic drinking. Now she was almost three years sober.

They went around the room after she was done, and most of the patients just said their names and passed. I decided I'd say something, if just to tell her I enjoyed her story and was glad she was sober, but when it got to me I said, "My name is Matt and I'm an alcoholic. I'll just listen tonight."

Afterward I went back to the hotel. No messages. I sat in my room reading for two hours. Someone had passed along a paperback volume called The Newgate Calendar, a case-by-case report on British crimes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I'd had it around for a month or so, and at night I would read a few pages before I went to sleep.

It was mostly interesting, although some cases were more interesting than others. What got to me some nights, though, was the way nothing changed. People back then killed each other for every reason and for no reason, and they did it with every means at their disposal and all the ingenuity they could bring to bear.