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munchkin with encephalitis.
    “Nobody knows what he’s doing here,” Amelia said. “Least of all him.”
    Nobody found out what Max was doing there, not that night. Phoebe remembered asking him to come on the round of bars because she “felt sorry for him and he looked lonely.” Dana remembered sharing a cab with him. Caroline remembered DeAndrea getting disgusted and going home. We didn’t have time to explore the issue. The police were interested in asking questions, but not in the middle of an empty subway station in the freezing late-October dawn. They started rounding us up for a trip to the precinct house. Nick got very lawyerly and advised us to go along.
    “Actually,” he told me when we were getting into a cab on Twenty-third Street (since we weren’t material witnesses, the NYPD didn’t think they owed us transportation), “I’d advise you to go home, but you wouldn’t listen to me.”
    “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”
    “In that case, I’d advise you to keep your mouth shut. It’s not a murder, Pay. It’s a tragedy. It’s a god-awful mess in more ways than one. It’s not a murder.”
    “I didn’t say anything about murder. I’m worried about Sarah.”
    “If the verdict is suicide, it’ll be bad enough.”
    There were “Driver Allergic” signs all over the partition, but the driver was smoking a panatela, so I lit another cigarette and sat back in my seat. Nick had a very odd look on his face. His eyes were secretive. His mouth was tight.
    “Why do I get this feeling you’re not telling me something?” I asked him. “Why do I get this feeling something is going on I know nothing about?”
    “I wouldn’t know.”
    “Bullfeathers. You mentioned suicide. You were the second person to mention suicide.”
    “It’s always a possibility. In cases like these.”
    “In cases like these.”
    “Exactly.”
    I took a deep drag. Every answer he gave wound him up tighter. He was no longer looking at me. He was staring out the window on his side of the cab, pretending an interest in the popcorn boxes in the gutters of Madison Avenue.
    “Exactly nothing,” I told him. “Something’s been wrong all night. I can feel it. I didn’t think anything of it before, but I think something of it now and it’s not because Verna died. It’s because you’re acting weird, Nick. You aren’t even talking like you.”
    He took a deep, going-on-the-offensive breath. “You’ve got murder on the brain,” he said. “You’ve been involved in two cases and you see them behind every tree. If your grandmother died of heart failure, you’d go running to the dictionary of poisons to find out what drug could imitate coronary occlusion. It’s become an obsession with you. There isn’t any murder, McKenna.”
    “So there isn’t any murder,” I said. “If that’s all you’re worried about, don’t worry about it. I told you I don’t want to get involved in anything.”
    “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
    “Believe it,” I said. I was lying. I didn’t care. I studied the tip of my cigarette, keeping my face turned away from him. “Why do you think Verna committed suicide? Why do the police think she did?”
    “They try to keep it quiet, except for the insurance companies,” Nick said. “For the sake of the family.”
    “Yes, yes,” I said. “But why—”
    “She was too far out on the tracks,” Nick said. “Much too far out.”

FIVE
    “I WAS STANDING RIGHT next to her,” Phoebe said. “First her knees buckled. Then she sort of fell backward. Then she pitched forward. Then she was sort of floating over the tracks.”
    The officer at the desk was middle-aged, middleweight, and overtired. His cheeks were jowly. The rings around his eyes were charcoal. He was wearing an expression of nearly inhuman patience.
    “Let’s try this again,” he said. “First her knees bent. Then she pitched forward—”
    “Backward,” Phoebe said. “First her knees buckled and then she fell