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doors with frosted-glass panels, one of them marked C LERICAL , the other marked M EN’S L AVATORY . If a lady had to pee, she was invited downstairs to the first floor of the building, where a door on the wall opposite the muster desk was marked W OMEN’S L AVATORY . There was once a Southern cop in the station house, up there to extradite a man on an armed robbery warrant. He saw the doors marked L AVATORY and knew this was where you were supposed to wash your hands, but he wondered aloud where the commodes were. In this precinct, a toilet was a lavatory.
    In all of America, a toilet was something other than what it was supposed to be. It was a bathroom or a powder room or a restroom, but it was never a toilet. Americans did not like the word “toilet.” It denoted waste product. Americans, the most wasteful humans on the face of the earth, did not like to discuss waste products or bodily functions. Your average polite American abroad would rather wet his pants than ask where the toilet was. In the Eight-Seven, only criminals asked where the toilet was. “Hey, where’s the terlet?” they said. Get a clutch of muggers up there, a snatch of hookers, a stealth of burglars, they all wanted to know where the toilet was. Criminals had to go to the toilet on the average of three, four times a minute. That’s because criminals had weak bladders. But they knew what to call a toilet, all right.
    There were only two criminals in the squadroom at that moment, which was a bit below par for a Friday afternoon. One of those criminals was in the detention cage across the room. He was pacing the cage, but he was not muttering about his rights. This was strange. Most criminals muttered about their rights. That was a sure way of telling a criminal from your ordinary citizen accused of a crime. Your criminal always muttered about his rights. “I know my rights,” he said, and then invariably said, “Hey, where’s the terlet?” The second criminal in the squadroom was being interrogated by Detective Cotton Hawes at one of the desks just inside the row of filing cabinets on the divider side of the room. Looking at Hawes and looking at the man he was interrogating, it was difficult to tell who was the good guy and who was the bad.
    Hawes was six feet two inches tall and weighed 190 pounds. He had blue eyes and a square jaw and a cleft chin. His hair was red, except for a streak over his left temple where he had once been knifed and the hair had curiously grown in white after the wound healed. He had a straight unbroken nose and a good mouth with a wide lower lip. He looked somehow fierce, like a prophet who’d been struck by lightning and survived. The man sitting opposite him was almost as tall as Hawes, somewhat heavier and strikingly handsome. Black hair and dark-brown eyes as soulful as a poet’s. A Barrymore profile and a Valentino widow’s peak—both before our time, Gertie, but not before the gentleman’s. He was sixty-five years old if he was a day, and he had been caught burglarizing an apartment that afternoon. Caught right on the premises, burglar’s tools on the floor at his feet. Working on a wall safe when the doorman walked in with a passkey and a cop. There was nothing he could say. He listened quietly to Hawes’s questions, and answered them in a low, exhausted voice. This was his third fall. The rap was Burglary Two—he’d been caught inside a dwelling, during the day, and he’d been unarmed. But they’d throw the key away nonetheless. He was not too happy a burglar on that Friday afternoon as dusk seeped into the squadroom.
    Meyer turned on the overhead lights. Hawes looked up as if a mortar had exploded over his head. His prisoner kept staring at his own hands folded in his lap. But at a desk just inside the windows facing the street, Detective Richard Genero also looked up. Genero was typing a report. He hated typing reports. That was because he did not know how to spell. He especially did not know how