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type of man who would never hold up under police questioning. That morning, when he opened the door, McKelvey thought Fielding looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week. His usually clear eyes were red and glassy, and his face had taken on a new paunchiness.
    â€œThanks for coming, Charlie,” he said. “You must think I’m crazy.”
    â€œTo be honest,” McKelvey said, “you’re the most rational person I know.”
    Fielding went to the kitchen and poured two coffees from a drip machine. He handed a mug to McKelvey, and McKelvey read the swirling blue letters that proclaimed “World’s Best Teacher’.”
    â€œYou take sugar and cream, right?” the younger man said.
    â€œJust cream,” McKelvey said. “I’m supposed to go for skim, but what the hell. It’s a holiday almost.”
    Fielding stood with the fridge door open, staring. After a moment he turned and held his palm up.
    â€œSorry,” he said. “No cream. And the milk’s expired.”
    McKelvey nodded, accustomed to his own lack of fresh groceries. He sat in the living room on the sofa and set his coffee on the table. It was one thing for his own fridge to carry little more than a block of crunchy orange cheese, but Fielding was better organized and took better care of himself than that. These were the variety of observations that allowed a cop to form his appraisal of a situation. Everything meant something . It was the part of his job had that always driven his wife crazy. On the way home from a house party, Caroline might say, “Charlie, for god’s sake, those are our friends. Do you always have to watch people like that, like you’re on duty?” And for the most part he was unaware he was even doing it. The insinuation seemed to be that he wanted to find the dark spot in every soul.
    â€œDonia,” Fielding said, coming around the kitchen island to join McKelvey, “she’s a student in my night school course I was telling you about. She’s Bosnian, a survivor from the war. Her family was destroyed. She came over less than a year ago to work in a factory as a seamstress, working these industrial sewing machines. She wanted to get ahead, but her English isn’t strong enough. She’s from a small village. Her people were simple people, farmers and tradesmen. She always said that: simple people, but good.”
    McKelvey took another mouthful of the black coffee. It was caustic, like Liquid-Plumr running down the back of his throat. His doctor had warned against this sort of carelessness, for the peptic ulcer which had hemorrhaged and escalated his retirement meant a lifetime of vigilance against those four horsemen of the apocalypse: booze, cigarettes, stress and coffee. He had grown sick of the bitter and bland low-fat yogurt, of a life lived on the narrow margin of the health food aisle. A man could only eat so much plain rice and couscous before he snapped, walked into a steakhouse off the street and bought a twenty-two ounce prime rib with all the trimmings.
    â€œYou met her through the night school,” he said, getting his facts down.
    â€œI just…we hit it off. It sounds stupid, Charlie, I know. She’s a beautiful woman, and there was something there. She’s wounded, I suppose, and I’m obviously not a poster boy for the well-adjusted. We just seemed to fit.” Fielding threaded the fingers of his hands as he might do in demonstrating a point to his students. “We went for coffee and then it was lunch and then it was dinner. And then, you know…”
    â€œYou slept with her,” McKelvey said. Going easy here, for if he had been making inquiries on the job, he would have used guttural language in an attempt to draw some emotion, indignation— yeah, that’s what you did with her, isn’t it, you dirty dog?
    Fielding nodded and said, “I hope you know me well enough to know there was