Jason didn't do well in school, she said, and then when she remarried he didn't get along with his stepfather, who was, she had to admit it, a hard man to get along with. And Jason sort of drifted, and he wasn't too good at staying out of trouble, but he was never what you'd call bad. There was nothing hurtful about him, nothing mean-spirited. They said he'd been arrested for sneaking under a subway turnstile, and she could imagine him doing that, or even shoplifting from a supermarket or department store, but what they'd said he'd done…

I told her how I was investigating from the other direction, trying to find someone with a motive specific to the Hollanders. If I could find some common element, someone in her son's life who was in any way linked to Byrne and Susan Hollander, then I might be able to connect the dots.

She thought it over while she spread butter on her toasted bran muffin ("one thing that's definitely better in New York, I'll grant you that") and took a little bite. She sipped some iced tea, ate more of the muffin, drank more of the tea, and looked up at me and shook her head.

"I just don't know who he did or didn't know," she said. "He would call me just about once a week, he was good about that. He called collect, of course. I told him to, he didn't have the money to pay for his calls. In fact I helped him out a little, I sent a money order every few weeks. I didn't send checks because it was almost impossible for him to find a place that would cash a personal check on an out-of-state bank, and of course he didn't have a bank account of his own to deposit it into. He didn't have anything."

Except, she said, he was beginning to find himself, to get his feet planted. Not to take charge of his life, that made him sound a little more capable than he had yet become, but at least to play an active role in his own life instead of watching passively as it unfolded before him.

"He was working," she said. "Three hours a day, Monday through Friday, delivering lunches for a delicatessen. They paid him in cash at the end of his shift each day, and it wasn't very much, but he got tips, too. And he worked nights, too, making deliveries for a package store."

I didn't know the term, and she said, "Don't you call it that? A store that sells packaged goods. Beverages, alcoholic beverages. What do you call it?"

"A liquor store."

"Well, that's New York for you," she said. "I guess we're more discreet in the Midwest, or maybe just more namby-pamby. We call them package stores. Now you didn't know that, and I didn't know there was anything else to call them, so I guess we both learned something, didn't we?"

Jason's life didn't sound like much, she knew. A couple of part-time subsistence jobs hardly amounted to a budding career. But when you knew him and where he'd come from, well, you could see that he was on the right track.

"The last time he got in trouble," she said, "they had him see a counselor, and I have to give New York credit for this, because Jason said the man helped him see things a little more clearly. How he was just getting in his own way time and time again, and how it didn't have to be that way. And from that point on, his life began to improve."

Some specifics might have helped. The name of the social worker, for instance, who might have known the names of some of the other people in Jason Bierman's new life. It would have been nice to know the names and locations of his occasional employers; she knew only that the deli was in Manhattan, which didn't narrow it down much. The package store ("or liquor store, I'll have to remember to call it that") might have been anywhere.

She finished her bran muffin and iced tea, and I decided I'd had as much of my coffee as I wanted. I picked up the check, and she took a wallet from her purse and asked how much her share came to. I said it was on me. She insisted she'd be happy to pay, and I told her to forget it. "You're a visitor," I said. "Next time I'm in Wisconsin, I'll let you pick up the tab."

"Well, that's very nice of you," she said. "And after I just about accused you of trying to drum up some high-priced business!" But she'd had audiences with several private detectives, she said, and one told her to go home, that she was wasting her time, and the others wanted substantial advances before they would undertake to do a thing.

"Two men asked for two thousand dollars, and one wanted twenty-five hundred," she said. "And there was another man who asked for two or three thousand, I can't remember which, and I said that was much too high, and he said, well, how about a thousand? And I hemmed and hawed, and he said if I gave him five hundred he could get started. And it came to me that he wanted whatever I could give him, and he probably wouldn't do a thing once he had the money in his hand."

I told her she was probably right. She apologized again, unnecessarily, and asked if I thought she should stay in New York. She was supposed to fly home in the morning but she supposed she could stick around for a few more days.

I told her there was no need. I gave her one of my cards and made sure I had her address and phone number written down correctly. And I walked her back to her hotel, even though she told me not to bother. I waited until she had collected her key from the desk and boarded the elevator, then went outside and looked for a taxi.

When I walked in the door, Elaine told me Ira Wentworth had called twice. He wouldn't say what it was about, just that I should call him as soon as I got in.

I tried his number and a nasal-voiced male said, "Squad room, this is Acker." I gave my name and said I was returning Detective Wentworth's call.

"He's not in," Acker said, "but I know he wants to talk to you. Will you be staying put for the next ten minutes?"

"I'm not going anywhere. He's got the number, but let me give it to you again."

He repeated it back to me and rang off, and I realized I'd missed my chance to ask the number of the precinct. I picked up the phone and had my finger on the redial button but didn't push it.

I had a feeling I knew which precinct it was.

I put the phone down while I checked my notebook, picked it up again, and tried a number I'd tried before, with no success. It rang once, twice, and then somebody answered but didn't speak.

I said, "Ira Wentworth?"

The voice I'd heard once before, on my machine, said, "Who the hell is this?"

TWENTY-SIX

Half an hour later the doorman called upstairs to announce a Mr. Wentworth. I said to send him up, and was waiting in the hall when he got off the elevator. He was in his late thirties, tall and broad-shouldered, with a square jaw and a high forehead. His dark hair was combed straight back.

He said his name and I said mine, and we shook hands. "I made a couple of phone calls," he said. "You were on the job yourself."

"That was a while ago."

"You had a gold shield."

I suppose that accounted for the handshake. You can't shake hands over the phone, but even if you could I think he'd have passed it up. He'd been wary earlier, thrown off-stride by my having called him on Lia Parkman's cell phone. He'd picked it up once they'd established there were no fingerprints but hers to be found on it, and he'd been carrying it around ever since.

That was how he'd called me. The phone logged recent calls, and all he'd had to do was find the last call she'd made and open the mouthpiece to redial it. He'd called me without knowing who I was. Thus his original message, requesting I call back without identifying me by name.

Then I'd called back and left my name, and he'd called again, twice, and left messages, and I called him, and Charlie Acker had managed to reach him, and he was all set to call me when the phone in his pocket rang. And it was me, asking for him by name, and confusing the hell out of him for a minute there.