Sometimes it provided a good antidote for the morning paper, with its deadening daily chronicle of contemporary crime. It was easy to read the paper each day and conclude that humanity was infinitely worse than ever, that the world was going to hell and that hell was where we belonged. Then, when I read about men and women killing each other centuries ago for pennies or for love, I could tell myself that we weren't getting worse after all, that we were as good as we'd ever been.

On other nights that same revelation brought not reassurance but despair. We had been ever thus. We were not getting better, we would never get better. Anyone along the way who'd died for our sins had died for nothing. We had more sins in reserve, we had a supply that would last for all eternity.

WHAT I read that night didn't pick me up, and neither did it ready me for sleep. Around midnight I went out. It had turned colder, and there was a raw wind blowing off the Hudson. I walked over to Grogan's Open House, the old Irish saloon Mick owns, although there's another name than his on the license and ownership papers.

The place was almost empty. Two solitary drinkers sat well apart at the long bar, one drinking a bottle of beer, the other nursing a black pint of Guinness. Two old men in long thrift-shop overcoats shared a table along the wall. Burke was behind the bar. Before I could ask he volunteered that Mick hadn't been in all evening. "He could come in any time," he said, "but I don't expect him."

I ordered a Coke and sat at the bar. The TV was tuned to a cable channel that broadcasts old black-and-white films uninterrupted by commercials. They were showing Little Caesar, with Edward G. Robinson.

I watched for half an hour or so. Mick didn't come in, and neither did anyone else. I finished my Coke and went home.

Chapter 10

The cops at the Twentieth Precint weren't overly impressed that I'd been on the job once myself. They were courteous all the same, and would have been happy to fill me in on the circumstances of Arnold Leveque's death. There was only one problem. They had never heard of him.

"I don't know the date," I said, "but it happened sometime between April nineteenth and June fourth, and if I were guessing I'd say early May."

"That's of last year."

"Right."

"That's Arnold Leveque? You want to spell the last name again, make sure I got it right?"

I did, and supplied the Columbus Avenue address. "That's here in the Two-oh," he said. "Lemme see if anybody heard of the guy." No one had. He came back and we puzzled over it for a few minutes, and then he excused himself again. He came back with a bemused expression on his face.

"Arnold Leveque," he said. "Male Caucasian, died nine May. Multiple stab wounds. Not in our files because it wasn't our case. He was killed on the other side of Fifty-ninth Street. You want Midtown North, that's on West Fifty-fourth."

I told him I knew where it was.

THAT explained why Herta Eigen got the runaround from the cops at her local precinct- they hadn't known what she was talking about. I'd walked up to the Twentieth first thing after breakfast, and it was mid-morning when I got to Midtown North. Durkin wasn't in, but I didn't need him to run interference for me on this. Anybody could give me the information.

There was a cop named Andreotti whom I'd met a few times over the past year or two. He was at a desk catching up on his paperwork and didn't mind an interruption. "Leveque, Leveque," he said. He frowned and ran a hand through a mop of shaggy black hair. "I think I caught that one, me and Bellamy. A fat guy, right?"

"So they tell me."

"You see so many stiffs in a week you can't keep ' em straight. He musta been murdered. Natural causes, you can't even remember their names."

"No."

"Except if it's the kind of name you can't forget. There was a woman two, three weeks back, Wanda Plainhouse. I thought, yeah, I wouldn't mind playin' house with you." He smiled at the memory, then said, "Of course she was alive, Wanda, but it's an example of how one name'll stick in your mind."

He pulled Leveque's file. The film buff had been found in a narrow alley between two tenements on Forty-ninth Street west of Tenth Avenue. The body had been discovered after an anonymous call to 911 logged in at 6:56 on the morning of May 9th. The medical examiner estimated the time of death at around eleven the previous night. The deceased had been stabbed seven times in the chest and abdomen with a long, narrow-bladed knife. Any of several of the wounds would have been sufficient to cause death.

"Forty-ninth between Tenth and Eleventh," I said.

"Closer to Eleventh. The buildings on either side were scheduled for demolition, X's on the windows and nobody living in 'em. I think they might have come down by now."

"I wonder what he was doing there."

Andreotti shrugged. "Looking for something and unlucky enough to find it. Looking to buy dope, looking for a woman or a man. Everybody's out there looking for something."

I thought of TJ. Everybody's got a jones, he'd said, or what would they be doing on the Deuce?

I asked if Leveque had been a drug user. No outward signs of it, he said, but you never knew. "Maybe he was drunk," he offered. "Staggering around, didn't know where he was. No, that's not it. Blood alcohol's not much more than a trace. Well, whatever he was looking for, he picked the wrong place to look for it."

"You figured robbery?"

"No money in his pockets, no watch and wallet. Sounds like a killer with a crack habit and a switchblade."

"How'd you ID him?"

"The landlady where he lived. She was some piece of work, man. About this high, but she wasn't taking no shit. Let us into his room and stood there watching us like a hawk, like we'll clean the place out if she turns her back. You'd think it was her stuff, which it probably wound up being, because I don't think we ever did turn up any next of kin." He flipped through the few sheets of paper. "No, I don't think we did. Anyway, she ID'd him. She didn't want to go. 'Why I got to look at a dead body? I seen enough in my life, believe me.' But she took a good look and said it was him."

"How did you know to ask her? What gave you his name and address?"

"Oh, I get you. That's a good question. How did we know?" He frowned, paging through the file. "Prints," he said. "His prints were in the computer and that gave us the name and address."

"How did his prints happen to be on file?"

"I don't know. Maybe he was in the service, maybe he had a government job once. You know how many people got their prints on file?"

"Not in the NYPD computer."

"Yeah, you're right." He frowned. "Did we have him or did we have to hook into the main system in Washington? I don't remember. Somebody else probably took care of it. Why?"

"Did you see if he's got a sheet?"

"If he did it must have been jaywalking. There's no notation in his file."

"Could you check?"

He grumbled but did it anyway. "Yeah, just one entry," he said. "Arrested four, almost five years ago. Released OR and charges dropped."

"What charges?"

He squinted at the computer screen. "Violation of Section 235 of the Criminal Code. What the hell is that, it's not a number I'm familiar with." He grabbed up the black looseleaf binder and flipped through it. "Here you go. Obscenity. Maybe he called somebody a bad name. Charges dismissed, and four years later somebody sticks a knife in him. Teach you not to talk nasty, wouldn't it?"

I probably could have learned more about Leveque if Andreotti had felt like jockeying the computer, but he had things of his own to do. I went to the main library on Forty-second Street and checked the Times Index on the chance that Arnold Leveque might have made the paper, but he'd managed to be spared publicity when he got arrested and when he got killed.