The following afternoon I called her. "I was thinking of you," I told her, but I don't even know if that was true. She told me to come over, and I went.

Two days later I went to the 8:30 meeting at St. Paul's. I left on the break and called her from a pay phone on the corner. No, she said, she wasn't busy. Yes, she felt like company.

In her bed that night, she lay beside me and told me that she was still seeing the art director for the airline magazine. "I've been to bed with him," she said.

"He's a lucky man."

"I don't know why I bother planning conversations in my head. You never say what I expect you to say. Do you really think he's a lucky man? Because I don't."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm such a whore. I saw him the night before last. You came over during the afternoon, and then I went out to dinner with him that night. And brought him home and fucked him. I was still sore from the afternoon but I went ahead and fucked him anyway."

I didn't say anything and neither did she. Through her window I could see New Jersey all lit up like a Christmas tree. After a long moment I reached out and touched her. At first I could feel her trying to hold herself in check, but then she let go and allowed herself to respond, and I went on touching her until she cried out and clung to me.

Afterward I said, "Am I screwing up your life, Lisa? Tell me and I'll stop."

"Ha."

"I mean it."

"I know you do. And no, you're not. I'm screwing up my own life. Like everybody else."

"I guess."

"Someday you'll stop calling me. Or someday you'll call and I'll tell you no, I don't want you to come over." She took my hand, placed it on her breast. "But not yet," she said.

The days came and went and the summer slipped away. Elaine and I got out to a few movies and listened to some jazz. I went to meetings and, a day at a time, I didn't pick up a drink.

Wally called, but I told him I couldn't take on any per diem work, not until I cleared the case I was working on.

On Sundays I had dinner with my sponsor. Now and then I dropped in at Grogan's, usually after a midnight AA meeting. I would sit for an hour or so with Mick, and we always managed to find things to talk about. But we never made a long night of it, and I was always home well before sunrise.

A friend of Elaine's invited us out to East Hampton for the weekend, and I didn't feel I could afford to put myself a couple of hours away from the city. I told her to go by herself, and she thought it over and went. Perversely, I didn't call Lisa at all that weekend. I did go out for dinner with Ray Gruliow, to a seafood restaurant he liked. They didn't have his brand of Irish whiskey, but he made do with something less exotic, and drank a hell of a lot of it in the course of the evening.

I wound up telling him about Lisa. I'm not sure why. He said, "Well, what do you know? The guy's human."

"Was the issue in doubt?"

"No," he said, "not really. But I thought people quit doing that sort of thing when they joined AA."

"So did I."

"So we were both wrong. Well, that's good to hear. And good for you, my friend. You know the four things a man needs to sustain life, don't you?" I didn't. "Food, shelter, and pussy." That was only three, I said. "And strange pussy," he said. "That's four."

He was good company until the booze took him over the line, and then he started telling me the same story over and over again. It was a pretty good story, but I didn't need to hear it more than once. I put him in a cab and went home.

The Yankees were making it interesting in the American League East, winning a lot of games but having trouble gaining ground on the Blue Jays. In the other league, the Mets had last place pretty well sewn up. We stayed in the city for Labor Day, and Elaine kept the shop open the whole weekend.

On a Thursday afternoon in the middle of September, I was sitting in my hotel room watching it rain. The phone rang.

A woman said, "Is this the man looking for the man in the picture?"

There had been calls from time to time. Who was the man in the picture? What did I want with him? Was it true about the reward?

"Yes," I said. "I'm the man."

"You really gonna pay me that money?"

I held my breath.

" 'Cause I seen him," she said. "I know right where he's at."

31

Two hours later I was in a Laundromat on the corner of Manhattan Avenue and 117th Street, next door to a Haitian store-front church. I had TJ with me, dressed in khakis and a light green polo shirt and carrying his clipboard. The manager was a short, squat woman in her sixties with unconvincing yellow hair and a European accent. It was she who had called me, and I had a hard time convincing her that she would indeed get ten thousand dollars when we had the man on the palm card in custody, but nothing if he gave us the slip. She wanted more than a promise before she parted with her information, and I could see her point. I gave her two hundred dollars up front and made her sign a receipt for it, and I think it was the receipt that convinced her, because why would I want anything on paper if I planned to stiff her? She took four fifties from me, folded them together, tucked them in a pocket of her apron and secured them there with a safety pin. Then she took me to the window and pointed diagonally across the street.

The building she indicated was a seven-story apartment house built sometime before the First World War. The facade was in good repair, and there were plants hanging in some of the windows. It didn't look like any SRO I'd ever seen.

But she was sure that was where he lived. He had come in at least once before, and afterward she had remembered the card someone had given her and found it in a drawer, and sure enough, it was him. So she almost called the number, but what was she going to say? She didn't know his name or where he lived. And if she said anything to anybody, how could she be sure she was the one who wound up with the reward?

So she'd said nothing, electing to wait for him to return. Laundry, after all, was not a one-time occurrence. You washed your clothes, sooner or later you would have to wash them again. Every day she looked at the sketch on the card to make sure she would know him if she saw him again. She was starting to think maybe it wasn't really him, and then today he'd come in with a laundry bag and a box of Tide, and it was him, all right. No question. He looked just like his picture.

She almost made the call while his clothes were spinning around, first in the washing machine, then in the dryer. But how could she make sure she was the one who collected the reward? So she'd let him sit there, his face buried in the newspaper, until his wash was done. When he left, she slipped out the door and followed him. She left the Laundromat unattended, risking her job in the process. Suppose the owner stopped in while she was gone? Suppose there was an incident in her absence?

But she wasn't gone long. She followed her quarry a block and a half uptown and waited across the street while he stopped in a deli. He came out moments later carrying a shopping bag in addition to his sack of clean clothes, and he turned back in the direction he'd come from, and wound up entering the apartment house diagonally across the street from her Laundromat.

From the doorway of the apartment house, she watched him get on the elevator, watched the doors close behind him. There was a panel of numbers above the elevator that lit up when the car was moving to show you what floor it was on. She couldn't make it out from the entrance, but when the elevator had finished its ascent she walked through the unattended lobby and pressed the button to summon it. The 5 lit up right away.

"So he's on the fifth floor," she said. "I don't know which apartment."