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breath.
    Rest of the night, same story. Lew’s quiet. We wind up in a greasy spoon a block from Pershing Square, sitting over eggs and home fries and coffee, and out of nowhere he says, “You wouldn’t know it, but that’s a fine-looking woman underneath it all. Beautiful girl, she used to be. Son of a bitch cost her her looks, along with her spirit.”
    I asked how he knew her. He was quiet, then pointed out something on the other side of the room. Somebody he recognized. Far as how he knew Millie, I never did get an answer.
    There may have been a third time we got called there, or maybe not. Hard to keep everything straight. But then our shift changed, and we were working days, and if there were any calls to see the woman at the Olive Street address, well, we were off duty by the time they came in.
    I think there must have been other calls. And looking back, I think Lew kept up with it, checked reports. He had an interest that ran deeper than mine.
    A month, maybe six weeks, and we rotated back to nights. I liked nights better. You didn’t have the traffic, and it was dark, and just being in the car was better at night. The things Lew would find to talk about, and the way a conversation would just twist and turn like an old river. And the silences, too. It was all somehow better at night.
    Of course, domestics were the downside of working nights. Now, you’d have husbands drinking any hour of the day, so you could in theory have a domestic disturbance on the stroke of noon, but they mostly happened in the hours right after midnight. And we weren’t back on the night shift a full week before we heard the Olive Street address coming over the radio. “Seven-forty-four South Olive, see the woman.”
    You hear that? I just remembered the street number, it popped right into my head. Now, ten minutes from now I may forget my own name, but right now I remember the address.
    At least I think that was it. But you know it didn’t matter when I couldn’t remember it and it doesn’t matter now. All torn down now, anyway. I can picture that little house clear as day, for all that I only saw it in the middle of the night, but in a few years when I’m gone there probably won’t be a person alive who remembers it.
    That’s when something’s really gone, isn’t it? When there’s nobody left who remembers it…
    Sorry, I just got distracted there. Hopped a train of thought and disappeared into the distance. That particular night, well, it was the same as the others. Maybe he was passed out that time, maybe he was belligerent or ob—what’s the word I want?

Obnoxious?

    Obstreperous. Maybe he was this or that, maybe he was apologizing all over the place. Whatever it was, at bottom it was the same story. She had some new bruises and he was the one that put ‘em there. And over the next couple weeks there were two or three more calls, just variations on the theme. No, she won’t press charges. No, it’s really her fault, and he’s sorry, and they’re married, and this is something for them to work out on their own, and she’s just sorry we had to waste our time coming all that way, but we can go now, and thank you very much.
    “Next time we hear that address,” Lew told me in the car, “we acknowledge it, and then we’ll go grab a hamburger someplace. Why burn gas chasing out there? Why waste our damn time?”
    Then we’d get the call again, and we’d answer it, same as always.
    And then one night the call came in, with the usual address. One thing different: “See the husband.”
    I said, “See the husband? What did she do, beat him up?”
    Lew shook his head. He knew what it meant, and by the time we got there I’d pretty much worked it out for myself.
    He met us on the front step, standing out there in his underwear, and there were bloodstains on the front of his undershirt. He was bleary-eyed, and he reeked of Three Feathers. It wasn’t just on his breath. He was sweating like a pig, and the alcohol was