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of what I'd been feeling earlier.
    Before I left I counted out a hundred fifty dollars, and on my way out I slipped the money into a slot marked "FOR THE POOR." I started tithing not long after I began spending odd moments in churches, and I don't know why I started or why I've never stopped. The question doesn't plague me much. There are no end of things I do without knowing the reason why.
    I don't know what they do with the money. I don't much care.
    Charles London had given me fifteen hundred dollars, an act which didn't seem to make much more sense than my passing on a tenth of that sum to the unspecified poor.
    There was a shelf of votive candles, and I stopped to light a couple of them. One for Barbara London Ettinger, who had been dead a long time, if not so long as old Cornelius Heeney. Another for Estrellita Rivera, a little girl who had been dead almost as long as Barbara Ettinger.
    I didn't say any prayers. I never do.

    Chapter 4
    Donald Gilman was twelve or fifteen years older than his roommate, and I don't suppose he put in as many hours with the dumbbells and the jump rope. His neatly combed hair was a sandy brown, his eyes a cool blue through heavy horn-rimmed glasses. He was wearing suit pants and a white shirt and tie. His suit jacket was draped over the chair Rolfe had warned me about.
    Rolfe had said Gilman was a lawyer, so I wasn't surprised when he asked to see my identification. I explained that I had resigned from the police force some years earlier. He raised an eyebrow at this news and flicked a glance at Rolfe.
    "I'm involved in this at the request of Barbara Ettinger's father," I went on. "He's asked me to investigate."
    "But why? The killer's been caught, hasn't he?"
    "There's some question about that."
    "Oh?"
    I told him that Louis Pinell had an unbreakable alibi for the day of Barbara Ettinger's murder.
    "Then someone else killed her," he said at once. "Unless the alibi turns out to be unfounded. That would explain the father's interest, wouldn't it? He probably suspects-well, he could suspect anyone at all. I hope you won't take it amiss if I call him to confirm that you're here as his emissary?"
    "He may be hard to reach." I had kept London's card and I got it out of my wallet. "He's probably left the office by now, and I wouldn't think he's arrived home yet. He lives alone, his wife died a couple years ago, so he most likely takes his meals at restaurants."
    Gilman looked at the card for a moment, then handed it back. I watched his face and could see him make up his mind. "Oh, well," he said. "I can't see the harm in talking with you, Mr. Scudder. It's not as though I knew anything substantial. It was all a fair amount of years ago, wasn't it? A lot of water under the bridge since then, or over the dam, or wherever it goes." His blue eyes brightened. "Speaking of liquid, we generally have a drink about now. Will you join us?"
    "Thank you."
    "We generally mix up some martinis. Unless there's something else you'd prefer?"
    "Martinis hit me a little hard," I said. "I think I'd better stick with whiskey. Bourbon, if you've got it."
    Of course they had it. They had Wild Turkey, which is a cut or two better than what I'm used to, and Rolfe gave me five or six ounces of it in a cut-crystal Old Fashioned glass. He poured Bombay gin into a pitcher, added ice cubes and a spoonful of vermouth, stirred gently and strained the blend into a pair of glasses that were mates to mine. Donald Gilman raised his glass and proposed a toast to Friday, and we drank to that.
    I wound up sitting where Rolfe had had me sit earlier. Rolfe sat as before on the rug, his knees drawn up and his arms locked around them.
    He was still wearing the jeans and shirt he'd put on to introduce me to Judy Fairborn. His weights and jump rope were out of sight. Gilman sat on the edge of the uncomfortable chair and leaned forward, looking down into his glass, then looking up at me.
    "I was trying to remember the day she died," he said.