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on our table, then drew up a chair for herself without asking and settled her two hundred pounds in it. She poked the red-blonde wig on her head and called to the bartender, “Darlin’, give us a Bud over here.” Then she indulged in the house custom of free advice and counsel to her customers, based on her eavesdropping.
    “Let me tell you what’s important, my darlin’s,” Princess said. “You got to know crap from Christmas. Let’s say you get invited to a lawn party someplace nice out in the country. Now, you can play croquet—or you can head for the card table in the shade where there’s some good sun tea and a hot game of whist. Crap from Christmas.”
    The bartender brought Princess her can of Budweiser. She popped the tab and drank, looking carefully at me. Then she said, “Hock, I ain’t seen you come by with a decent-lookin’ woman in I-don’t-know-when. Now here you are and you ain’t but half-listenin’ to Pretty. What’s troublin’ your mind, darlin’?”
    I told Princess—and Ruby—about Celia’s death. And also a little bit about Picasso. And about Logue, and how I knew he had a crowded desk at Central Homicide and that he would put Celia’s file over toward the edge in hopes it might fall into the wastepaper basket. And I apologized for being distracted, especially since it was my first day of a well-deserved furlough and all.
    When I finished, Princess turned and said to Ruby, “Pretty, if you want this man then you got to come ’round to understandin’ he is a poor fool who can’t help but bein’ this all-day cop in a twenty-four-hour town. No more than he can help bein’ the only cop who knows how every life’s maybe not valuable, but how every life’s a big deal. My friend Hock—well, he ain’t a easy man, Pretty.”
    Princess stood up. “Y’all be good,” she said. Then she belched daintily and moved her ministry along to the next table.
    Ruby said, “I like her, Hock. She talks like Hemingway said a writer ought to write. Which is know everything there is to know about your subject, then toss it all out except for the essentials. Hemingway called it resonance. Princess would call it soul.”
    Then Ruby folded her hands and tucked them under her chin and leaned forward. I leaned forward, too, and kissed her. And the Little Kitchen band played “Old Devil Moon,” and I believe that was the exact moment when I knew that Ruby Flagg and Í were slow-dancing together.
    “You haven’t told me yet if you believe in the Emerald City,” I said.
    “No, but I believe in the Yellow Brick Road,” Ruby said.
    “Along which, the advertising dodge was, what, a pit stop?”
    “You might say. The trick was to get back on the road after the stop.”
    “And how did you do that?”
    “One day, I just got up from my big desk in my corner office with the view of the East River clear down to the Williamsburg Bridge. I walked out and never returned. Not even for my final paycheck...“
    Damn me! Damn my thoughts for drifting back to Charlie and Celia! What about Charlie Furman’s failures as a husband and father? “The wife, she went rotten. The kid went Christian. ” What about the taller man in the snapshot from a happy day at Coney Island back in the summer of ’ 54 ?
    „...So now, as you know, I am living over the shop. Over my very own little theatre. Only we do real plays there, written by real playwrights. My apartment upstairs is smaller than my old office uptown, and I draw less than ten percent of what I used to make.”
    I said, “Made, not earned.”
    “That’s right.”
    “And I suppose you would tell me that you have never been happier.”
    “Are you accusing me of having a mind that’s easy to read?”
    I laughed. Then I kissed her again.
    And then we just ate our supper and ordered sweet-potato pie and coffee for dessert. Then Ruby asked, in all innocence, “What’s it like being a cop?”
    Which is the perfect question to ask a cop when you want to be