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therapy group for the husbands of romance writers. Helping them cope with their wives’ success.”
    I needed another cigarette.
    “It’s very necessary work,” Caroline said. I couldn’t decide if she sounded defensive or smug. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of neuroses these men get.”
    “Verna,” I said desperately. “Verna was drunk.”
    “Oh, God,” Caroline said. “I’d hate to be an agent. Dana must be a saint.”
    “Right,” I said again.
    “Dana got her by the arm,” Caroline said. “Verna, I mean. They started talking about—mystery stories. Agatha Christie. Ellery Queen. Somebody. Then Miss English said she’d never been in a subway, so Phoebe started herding us up to Twenty-third Street—”
    “From the Mudd Club?” I asked, trying to hold onto sanity.
    “Never go near Bellevue at night,” Caroline said. “They let these people out and even the people know they shouldn’t be out and they come back asking to be let in but the gates are locked and—”
    “The Mudd Club,” I said. “The Mudd Club.”
    “Oh,” Caroline said. “We were above Eighteenth already. It was a long walk.”
    “I can see that.”
    “Anyway, Max Brady got hold of Verna then and started trying to loan her a copy of The Big Sleep. Which is what she was doing the last time I saw her before the train.” The train seemed to get through something heavy and thick in Caroline’s brain. “My God,” she said. “What a mess.”
    I put my cigarette out under my heel, picked the butt off the floor, and put it in my pants cuff with the match. Then I folded my legs up under me and lit another cigarette.
    “I can’t understand how you ended up with Max Brady in the first place,” I said.
    “Neither can I,” Caroline said. “First he was there, then he wasn’t there, then he was there again.”
    “What?”
    “He was with us at Eddie Condon’s. Then he disappeared. Then he reappeared at the Mudd Club. I think.”
    “How did he find you at the Mudd Club?”
    “How am I supposed to know?”
    I thought of saying “You were there,” but I didn’t. It would have been useless.
    Nick leaned over the dividing rail and waved frantically in my direction.
    “Could you come here?” he asked me. “We want you to talk to Phoebe.”
    The scene was frozen in amber, written as history, decided for all time. Phoebe had her arms crossed over her chest and her eyebrows lowered. Her cheeks looked hollow, meaning she was probably biting them from the inside. The policeman was red where he wasn’t black and blue and looked a breath away from going for his gun.
    “Let me bring you up to date,” he said.
    “Let me bring you up to date,” Phoebe said. She turned to the policeman. “Patience knows me. I’m not stupid and I’m not blind and I’ve never been a liar.”
    “Gotcha,” the policeman said. He looked her up and down, checking out the floor-length royal blue velvet caftan, the eight strands of rope diamonds, the sixteen diamond and sapphire rings, the pear-shaped diamond earrings so heavy they made her earlobes droop. I could almost hear what he was thinking: this woman might or might not be a liar, but she was certainly a nut. He held out his hand to me. “I’m Jerry O’Reilly,” he said.
    “Pay McKenna,” I said. I found a chair, dragged it over, and sat down in it. Phoebe has a lot of staying power.
    “The problem we have here,” Jerry O’Reilly said, “is I think your friend is mistaken. She says—”
    “Patience knows what I’ve been saying,” Phoebe said. “Everybody knows what I’ve been saying. They heard me in Hoboken.”
    “Gotcha,” Jerry O’Reilly said. “The thing is, this Miss Train couldn’t have fallen backward like you said and then pitched forward. Nobody could do that unless they were pushed, and you say—”
    “Patience,” Phoebe turned her chair to face me. “I was standing right next to her. I was looking behind her trying to see up the tracks if the train was