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he do this?"
    "That's
another thing. First Avenue. By the market. What could he be doing in
that neighborhood at that time of night?"
    I
decided the question was rhetorical and stood mute.
    "Finally,"
she intoned, "there's the pictures." "The pictures?"
    "I
just noticed them a few days ago. I was shuffling rough all of our
recent pictures, sort of feeling sorry for myself. That's when I
started looking for you. I probably could have lived with the rest of
it, if I hadn't gone through those damn pictures. They flushed me
over the edge."
    "What
about the pictures?"
    "All
the pictures we took over the couple of months she was around. Heck
had become quite the cameraman. There must be thirty or forty
shots she's in, and you know what, Leo? There's not a single good
picture of her. Not a single frame where her hand isn't somehow in
front of her face, or where she isn't half covered by somebody's
shoulder or by her own hair. It defies the law of averages. It had to
be on purpose. The pictures were the last straw. I had extra prints
and negatives made."
    She
opened the drawer in the nightstand, took out a pale green paper bag
with interlocking silver rings woven into the pattern, and held it
out to me. I walked over and took it from her hand.
    "Those
are his notes and all the stuff he took out of the apartment. He's
been a man possessed, Leo. He hasn't done anything else but
investigate for the past few weeks. You'll have to go through all
that stuff. I imagine he's just been running in circles. There's also
keys to the Lady Day and to Nicky's apartment." Again, she
anticipated my question. "Heck wouldn't part with the apartment
either. I'll pay the power company so you can see in there. I let it
lapse, hoping if he couldn't see, maybe he'd give it up."
    She
rose, folding her arms over her ample chest. "Can you help me,
Leo?"
    "I
don't know, Marge. I can promise you I'll try, but I think I should
tell you up front that things are generally just the way they seem to
be. The cops are pretty good at what they do. There are damn few
insidious plots. People generally die in bed or get killed by the
people closest to them."
    "I
understand that, but I need to feel that I've done everything
possible. Will you help me?"
    "I'll
see what I can do."
    "Do
you need some money, a retainer or something?"
    "What
I'll need," I said, "is to get with your attorney."
"Why?"
    "We
need to follow the money. The money is the only tangible thing we've
got here. Even when there are other leads to follow, it's still best
to follow the money. If your attorneys aren't up to it, I know one
who is."
    "For
what we pay them, they'd better be up to it," she snorted.
    "Can
you get him down to your office on a Saturday?" "In
his jammies, if I insist." "Insist." "What time?"
    "One,"
I said, heading for the door.
    "You'll
bill me later?" she persisted.
    "Then
I'm working for you?"
    "So
it would seem."
    "Then
you can count on it."
    She
gave me a smile thin enough to pass for a scar.

4

    It
was a clear case of premature jocularity. From the second he'd
figured out that I wasn't there to lease a yacht, he'd dropped the
jovial sales facade and moved with practiced speed from simply
insolent to downright unpleasant.
    I'd
spent an hour and a half in Vito's, down the hill from Swedish,
nursing a coffee and going through Heck's notepad, as the late lunch
crowd came and went. Heck had covered a lot of ground without getting
much accomplished. The yacht leasing agency had seemed as good a
place as any to start.
    "Do
I have to call security?"
    "Easy
there, Scooter," I said, showing a palm.
    While
his right hand danced above the phone, he used his left to jab at the
pale blue business card on the counter. Each word punctuated by a
jab.
    "All
questions about the accident need to go to our attorneys."
    The
embroidery on his pink Ralph Lauren pullover said this was a Chipper,
not a Scooter, but what the hell? He was a compact little fellow,
about thirty, with a pitted face, a fair