"Very generous."

"So he had to turn it down, and the case they brought was a Manhattan killing, so you didn't get one of those Bronx juries determined to avenge three hundred years of racist oppression. The judge and jury both did the right thing, and Eldoniah's got to do twenty upstate before he's eligible for parole, and if he ever gets out they can try him for some of the other cabbies he killed, the useless little son of a bitch."

"Could they try him for Cloonan?"

"He'd be way down at the bottom of the list. You know, you get someone dead to rights like that, you want to close whatever files you can."

"But you don't know that he did it."

"I don't know zip, my friend, because all of this happened up in Washington Heights and the fucking Bronx, so what do I know? What I hear, which isn't the same thing, is nobody's all that sure Mims did Cloonan, but what's it hurt to let him take the weight until somebody better comes along?"

"You said gypsy cabs," I said. "If Cloonan was picking up on Fifth Avenue, wouldn't he have been driving a metered taxi?"

He nodded. "He was in a Yellow and the rest were gypsies. He was also shot with a nine-mil and the others with twenty-twos. Not all the same gun, different guns, but all the same caliber."

"Sounds as though they were reaching some to hang it on Mims."

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "Anyway, there were similarities. They were all driving cabs and they all wound up dead."

"Of course Mims said he didn't do it."

"Mims said he didn't do anything. If Mims had gone to confession, all he'd have been able to come up with was impure thoughts and taking the Lord's name in vain. Matt, it's like muggings and burglaries. The typical mutt, by the time you land on him he's gotten away with it fifty times running. So you clear fifty could-bes and tie them to his ass. It averages out, and if you don't do it your clearance rate looks like shit."

"I know how it works."

"Of course you do."

"I just thought homicide was different."

"It is," he said, "and nobody plays as loose with it as with break-ins and chain snatchings. This case here, Eldoniah flat-out did five out of six of those cabbies, no question, no argument. Cloonan he probably didn't do, and if somebody else ever comes along and looks better for it, well, nobody uptown's gonna argue against reopening the file." He picked up a pencil, tapped the eraser three times on the desktop, set it down. "So if you got anything," he said casually, "I'd be happy to pass it on."

"Why would I have anything?"

"Well, you don't own a car, so I figure you probably take a lot of cabs. Maybe one of the drivers said something."

"Like what?"

"Like, 'Hey, mister, you look like you used to be a cop, an' ain't it a hell of a thing what happened to Tommy Cloonan?' "

"Nobody ever said anything like that to me."

"No, huh?"

"No," I said. "As a matter of fact, I don't take very many cabs at all. If it's too far to walk I'll take the subway."

"What about the bus?"

"Sometimes I'll take a bus," I said. "Sometimes I'll stay home. Where are we going with this conversation, do you happen to know?"

"Alan Watson should have taken a cab. He worked down at the World Trade Center and generally took the E train home to Forest Hills, but when he worked late he'd take an express bus because he didn't like the longer walk late at night, or standing around on subway platforms. So he rode on the bus in air-conditioned comfort, had a slice of pizza on Austin Street, and was a block away from his house on Beechknoll Place when somebody stuck a knife in him."

"What did he do, resist a mugger?"

"Sounds like it, doesn't it? Guy I talked to said it doesn't really add up that way. Incidentally, he had more questions than answers for me. Watson was an affluent commodities broker, two kids in college, owned a nice home in a solid neighborhood. They want to solve this one, and the case is only four months old so they're not ready to give up on it. So why was I taking an interest, and what did I know that he didn't?"

"What did you tell him?"

"I don't remember, something about we had a case with a similar MO. According to him, forensic evidence suggests Watson's killer surprised him from behind and got him in a choke hold."

"Muggers will do that."

"And then he promptly stabbed the poor bastard. Blade about four-and-a-half inches long, or anyway that's as far as he stuck it in. Stabbed him once, got the heart first shot, and death would have been instantaneous or close to it. Watson's wallet was gone, so either it was robbery or it was supposed to look like it."

"I don't suppose anybody saw it happen."

He shook his head. "He wasn't down long, though. Rent-a-cop from a private security patrol found him, called it in right away."

"Why do you stab a guy if you've already got him in a choke hold?"

"They've been asking themselves the same question in Forest Hills. That's why my guy got very interested when I talked about a similar MO, and I had to let him down easy, say our perp was a slasher, not a stabber, no choke hold, di dah di dah di dah. Incidentally, why are people surprised when occasionally a cop lies in court? We lie all day long, it's part of the fucking job description. You didn't lie, you'd never get any work done."

"I know. It's the same thing working private. In fact it's worse, you've got no power to threaten or intimidate because you've got no legal authorization. So you have to con everybody."

"All in the name of truth and justice."

"And in the service of a higher good. Don't forget that."

"Never."

"What's their thinking, Joe? Ordinary street crime?"

"That's their best guess," he said, "but they're not married to it. It's hard to find anybody with a reason to kill Watson. He was married to the same woman for twenty-five years, and if either of them had anything going on the side nobody knows anything about it. Both of them well-liked, both of them active in the community. About a year ago he got phone threats from a client who blamed Watson for a beating he took. That's a financial beating, not two mutts holding you up in an alley while their buddy works on your rib cage."

"The client checked out?"

"The client moved to fucking Denver. Anyway, what kind of a grudge killing is that, a quick knife in the heart and make it look like robbery for profit? You want to get even with somebody, either you whip out a gun and make a little noise or you tear into him with a baseball bat, break his bones, and beat his fucking brains out. Something wrong?"

"Remind me never to get you mad at me."

"Why, did I sound like I was really getting into it there?" He grinned. "I'm ten days off cigarettes."

"I noticed the ashtray was gone."

"That snitch of Bellamy's, I wanted to tell him to blow some of that smoke in my direction. Not this time, though. This time I'm not sneaking drags on other people's cigarettes, or checking ashtrays for a butt long enough to relight. This time I get it right."

"Good for you."

"But there's moments when I could kill the whole world."

"Well, I'd better stay on your good side," I said, and drew an unsealed envelope from my hip pocket and slipped it among the papers on his desk. He glanced around, lifted the flap, and counted the contents without removing the bills from the envelope.

There were two bills, hundreds.

"Couple of suits," he said.

"If that's low-"

"No, it's fine," he said. "What did I do, use the phone on the city's time? I'm happy. But it's not enough, Matt."

"What do you mean?"

"What do I mean? I want to know what it's about. You're looking for information on four homicides over a twelve-year stretch, all of them unsolved-"

"Cloonan was solved."

He gave me a look. "I stuck my neck out," he said, "and I can use the suits, but I want to know what's going on. If you've got something that can break these cases, you can't just sit on it."