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a funny little smile. “You know, Mr. Hammer, I think my impression of you all those years ago was wrong, very wrong.”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œYou really are quite a nice, caring human being.”
    I glanced at Velda, who didn’t bother stifling her grin.
    â€œYeah,” I said. “I get that a lot.”
    If Wilcox at eight-thirty p.m. was a ghost town, the East Village at eleven-something was a freak show. This was a landscape of crumbling buildings, with as many people living on the streets as walking down them, where in a candy store you could buy a Snickers Bar or an eightball of smack, and when morning came, bodies with bullet holes or smaller but just as deadly ones would be on sidewalks and alleyways like so much trash set out for collection.
    Tompkins Square Park was this neighborhood’s central gathering place, from oldtimers who had voted for FDR and operated traditional businesses like diners and laundries to students, punkers, artists, and poets seeking life experience and cheap lodging. Every second tenement storefront seemed home to a gallery showcasing work inspired by the tragic but colorful street life around them.
    NYU student Nick Burrows lived in a second-floor apartment over a gallery peddling works by an artist whose canvases of graffiti struck me as little different from the free stuff on alley walls.
    His buzzer worked, which was saying something in this neighborhood, and he met me on a landing as spongy as the steps coming up had been. He wore a black CBGB T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, a kid of twenty or so with the wiry frame of his father but taller, and the pleasant features of his mother, their prettiness turned masculine by heavy eyebrows.
    He offered his hand and we shook under the dim yellowish glow of a single mounted bulb. “I appreciate you helping out my mom, Mr. Hammer. You know, I think I’ve heard of you.”
    â€œA lot of people think they’ve heard of me,” I said, moving past him into the apartment. “They’re just not sure anymore.”
    His was a typical college kid’s pad—thrift-shop furnishings, atomic-age stuff that had looked modern in the fifties and seemed quaint now. Plank and cement-block bookcases lined the walls, paperbacks and school books mostly, and the occasional poster advertising an East Village art show or theatrical production were taped here and there to the brick walls. The kitchenette area was off to one side and a doorless doorframe led to a bedroom with a waterbed. We sat on a thin-cushioned couch with sparkly turquoise upholstery.
    He offered me a smoke and I declined. He got one going, then leaned back, an arm along the upper cushions, and studied me like the smart college kid he was. His mother had told him on the phone that I had something important to talk to him about. I had spoken to him briefly, as well, but nothing about the book.
    Still, he’d been told there was danger and he seemed unruffled. There was strength in this kid.
    I said, “You know who your real father was, don’t you, Nick?”
    He nodded.
    I grinned. “I figured a smart kid like you would do some poking into that Vietnam-hero malarkey. Did the don ever get in touch with you? He came to the occasional school event, I understand.”
    He sighed smoke. “Get in touch? No, not in the sense that he ever introduced himself. But he started seeking me out after a concert, a basketball game, just to come up and say, ‘Good job tonight,’ or ‘Nice going out there.’ Even shook my hand a couple of times.”
    â€œSo you noticed him.”
    â€œYeah, and when I got older, I recognized him. He was in the papers now and then, you know. I did some digging on my own, old newspaper files and that kind of thing. Ran across my mom’s picture with him, too, back when she was a real knockout. She wasn’t just a chorus girl, you know, like the press would have it. She had speaking parts,