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you up, want to keep you from writing your confession.”
    â€œWas she left-handed?”
    â€œIs that all you feel about it? Jesus, you cops are cold. They did it like she was some animal, but even an animal you would kill first. Those guys at the meat market, they treat a side of beef with more care.”
    â€œThanks, doc.” I try to keep from losing it, try to make nice because, you work homicides in this city, you need relationships. Being Irish helps; cops, coroners, city pols, FBI agents, we come from the same place. It’s changing, sure, but we still run things, and we help each other out. Cover for your brothers in blue at all times, my boss always says in that sanctimonious way of his.
    Reporters who picked up the news on a police radio frequency, they’re jockeying for position. A photographer in a stingy brim shuffles around, snaps the body. I could remember when that guy Arthur Fellig was around, taking police shots for the papers. I got hold of one. A long time after, when people decided Weegee—that was what he called himself—was art, I got a good price on it. Now it was only some young dumb photographer from the Journal-American .
    One of my pals, a detective from my station house looks like he knows what he’s doing and I get hold of him. “You OK with this for a couple minutes, man? I want to look around. I’m gonna take a walk,” I say, and he nods.
    For a few minutes, in the dark, away from the scene, I stumble down the tracks, smoking, watching the orange tip of my cigarette, looking for, what, for something.
    â€œThe Wild West was right here in New York City,” my pop always said when he brought me over to the High Line. “See, buddy boy, right back to the 1850s, they ran freight down Tenth Avenue, first wagons going to market piled up with potatoes, sides of beef, trolley buses later on, and then the train. That train it ran people down, and they were dying like flies. They called it Death Avenue. These men on horses, the Westside Cowboys, rode in front waving red flags for protection.” As a kid, that’s what I wanted to be. A Westside Cowboy. Couldn’t ride a horse, no place to learn. My old man thought I was nuts. He’d say, “you know, I worked on that line for a while; I was a pretty damn good welder. You shoulda seen them sides of beef, pigs, turkey, all kind of fowl, going right down there. After it was built, I got a job doing repairs for a while. We had it good, even ’32, ’33, when people was living in Hoovervilles, them shacks by the East River, eating out of garbage scows. You was a little nipper, and we went out on Sundays and had a look. You remember when your Uncle Jack took you for a ride? All you wanted was to drive them trains thirty feet up in the sky.”
    My pop always loved showing off his knowledge of the city. “Born at home right there on 39th Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, the original Hell’s Kitchen, they call it. My own da lived in one of them shantytowns on the river, worked the docks, after he come over during the Famine. We was all Irish then. Good times, building them viaducts.”
    I can hear his voice, even as, the flashbulbs popping behind me, fireworks spilling a red white and blue finale into the river, I keep walking into the dark. A empty bottle catches my foot, I trip, fall onto my knees on the tracks.
    In one of the warehouses is a faint orange glow. Hauling myself up onto the loading platform, I start banging on the door. No answer. Where’s the security? On a holiday night like this, you have to figure they’d have security, you didn’t know if some thug would be on the prowl. Weeds grow through the cracks of the pavement alongside the tracks. The city is getting shabby.
    After the war, the place was always buzzing, there was this feeling we owned the world, everything in everything switched on it in Technicolor—with jazz music for the