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in long before this, but I didn’t push the point because I’d lost just about all my confidence in the police anyway.
    Corben said, “I can’t speak to you now.”
    “You damn well better.”
    “I can’t. Later. Why don’t you come up tonight for a drink? It’s been a while since we’ve talked.” He slowly closed the door in my face. I had no idea how I’d gotten out into the hall.
    ~ * ~
    I had three cards from the three teams of cops. I picked up the one from the whiners and started to phone them, but before I tapped out all seven numbers I hung up. I was already a second-rate suspect in a cooling murder case. How smooth would it go down with the police if I called them about Gabriella? They’d question Corben and he was a New York celebrity, a personal friend of the mayor and the governor. He’d slick it over if he wanted, and they’d just have even more reason to presume me guilty of something. I couldn’t waste the time. I had to find her. I had to make him crack. I felt it was something I had to do. Something only I could do. Audacity is sometimes its own reward.
    Leave it to Corben to call a decade and a half “a while.” I decided to play along.
    A few hours later we sat in his living room drinking bourbon. From the stink of his breath I could tell he’d been at it for a while before I got there. We skipped fifteen years and anything of substance. I wanted to let my gaze roam his apartment. I’d been in the place many times before. Whenever a toilet clogged. Whenever the garbage disposal backed up. I’d cleaned up Corben’s shit for two years, but I’d never been a guest and I’d never spent a minute taking in the personality of his apartment. I wanted to look at the photos with him and movie stars, on the sets of his films. I wanted to get up and hold all his rare, nineteenth-century first editions. There were many paintings, mostly small originals done by artists who resided in the world’s greatest museums. His tastes were similar to mine and I knew I would find many wondrous, beautiful, awe-inspiring aspects to his home.
    But I simply sat and looked at him and waited.
    He started off with trivial matters. We discussed our latest works–I mentioned the last manuscript I’d finished and made enough misleading comments for him to think it was still under consideration at my publisher. This one was a grand family drama delving into such an assortment of relationships and secrets and personal mysteries that I had no idea what the hell the story was about. He mentioned his latest bestseller, the one I’d bought and left on the front stoop. He didn’t talk about the Stark House book.
    He was splitting his attention between our conversation and writing in his head at the same time. He was letting his mind wander the building. The slightest noise made him snap his chin aside. The muscles in his legs jumped. He was trying to kill his interest with booze. He wouldn’t be able to stand it much longer.
    I started in where I’d left off earlier. “Why didn’t you call the police?” I asked.
    “We had argued that morning–”
    “I know. I heard you.”
    It did something to him. It got down beneath the layers of his created persona and dragged up his real self. I got a view of my old pal again, the kid he was back in the day before we blew our friendship. He was just a scared boy, alone without his mothering wife to lead him safely through the extent of his own life. He’d been coddled for so long that he’d lost any kind of veneer. His hard shell had cracked badly over the years of his success, and it had let in all his insecurities and reservations and doubts. No wonder he screamed out his titles when he was losing a fight. He couldn’t apologize and he couldn’t debate. It was all he could defend himself with.
    It’s sometimes a curse to have an imagination that can draw up detailed visuals, and when you got down to it, he was better at it than me. He had a worse affliction to