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the door on the passenger’s side. Part of that is due to the fact that it has less pollution equipment to drag it down than a Model T Ford, but so far I’ve been able to duck those periodic traffic stops the cops engineer to make sure no one’s putting anything past the EPA. Since there’s almost nothing moving before dawn, however, I took it easy on my way down the Walter P. Chrysler to Brush and Lafayette, where the county morgue is located behind Traffic Court, to avoid calling attention to myself, at no time exceeding the limit by more than ten miles an hour.
    Alderdyce’s name got me into cold storage, where I found him standing next to a wall full of things that looked like oversize file drawers but weren’t, with a white-coated attendant and Inspector Proust, whom I recognized from my last visit to headquarters. I went over there anyway.
    John Alderdyce is the only truly black man I’ve ever known. His skin is the color of the business side of a fresh sheet of carbon, with the same high gloss, and nobody looks better in a yellow silk bowling shirt. Not that we’d bowled together in a long time. Today he was wearing a pastel blue number with matching tie, a well-cut herringbone over it and a hip-length belted leather coat over that. If you can be a fashion plate on a police lieutenant’s salary, John’s what you’d have in mind for a model. Like something from the pages of a magazine if Vogue and Police Times ever merged. He has pugnacious, simian features with a brain behind them and wears his hair cropped short in a style that in the right light does a fair job of concealing the thin spots. This wasn’t the light.
    Proust was white, very much so since he practically lived under a fedora that made mine look like a Shriner’s fez, and was partial to suits as gray as his hair and as rumpled as his face. He was a holdover from the days of the old city STRESS crackdown unit, before they started shooting at each other and arresting too many citizens of the wrong color. Part of the reason for his attitude toward people in general, and private investigators in particular, was that he thought he should be an assistant commissioner by now. That dated back to 1970, when, stepping out of a New York Central boxcar that had just been broken into by a young Negro, he screwed his .357 magnum into the youth’s ear and said, “Guess who, you black motherfucker!” This unorthodox method of identifying oneself as a police officer was recounted widely after the young man testified in his own defense at his trial, and had a habit of cropping up again every time the subject of Proust’s promotion came up before the predominantly black police commission. An inspector he remained.
    “You got square wheels on that buggy of yours?” he said as I approached. He was considered the cop-house wit, which should give you some idea of the caliber of the humor down there.
    “There’s an energy crisis,” I reminded him. “You want me to break the law?” I nodded at John, who nodded back. That was the level to which our friendship had deteriorated since the day the state police issued me my license. He nodded hardly less effusively at the acne-faced kid in the white coat, who grasped the steel handle of a nearby drawer and tugged it out a third of its length.
    The harsh overhead light did little for Francis Kramer’s baby-fat features, which had crossed that line and were on the path to total obesity. The thumb-size black hole in his left temple did even less. The bullet had burrowed behind his eyes, bulging them, and exited with more fanfare than it had made going in, blowing out the right side of his skull like an overinflated tire on a hot day. The color of his skin made me wonder if I’d ever again be able to enjoy a jar of homemade preserves once I’d seen the paraffin with which it was sealed.
    I gave them a positive ID and added, “That left a mess somewhere.” My throat felt tight.
    “All over the back seat,”