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living-room doorway and listening above the background music of the movie for the sounds of voices at the door. Bill was back from Long Island today, at the moment up in his room at work on one of his mysterious projects, and this could conceivably be someone for him.
    When Kate came back a minute later, she looked troubled, and two men in suits came in after her. She said, “They’re detectives, Mitch.”
    I looked at them, trying to see in their faces if they knew about me, but they were both impassive. They were youngish men, very neat but slightly burly. One of them said, “We’d like you to come along with us, Mr. Tobin, if you have the time.”
    I said, “What’s the problem?”
    “No problem. Just a portion of your statement on the Wilford case we’d like to go over with you.”
    “Why can’t you do it here?”
    The other one said, in a reasonable voice, “The captain wants to talk to you, Mr. Tobin. It won’t take long, and we’ll bring you right back here.”
    I felt a grim familiarity, listening to him. Those same assurances had come calmly from my own mouth at one time, and I felt my hackles rise slightly at the echo now returning. When I had given such assurances, sometimes they had been true and sometimes they had been tactical lies aimed at bringing a potentially dangerous person into custody with the least trouble and fuss.
    Surely this time it was the truth. There was no reason to suspect me of being a potentially dangerous person, and looking at these two I could see from the bored calmness of their manner that they had no such suspicion. But why bring me in? It might merely be to give me a little bit of a bad time, just on general principles. In any case, there was nothing to do but go along with them and see what happened.
    I said, “I’ll have to put on shoes. They’re upstairs.”
    “Of course.”
    They didn’t accompany me upstairs, which was another sign that I wasn’t under any particular current cloud. I made it as fast as I could, wanting to get the thing over with, taking only enough time to put on my shoes and change to a less wrinkled shirt.
    They were waiting near the front door when I came down. I told Kate I would either be home within the hour or would call her, and then the three of us left the house.
    Their car was a green Mercury. I said, “Back or front?”
    One of them said, “You might as well ride in back.”
    They both got into the front seat, and we started off.
    The one who wasn’t driving turned and grinned at me over his shoulder and said, “You didn’t have to make time limits with your wife. We really will bring you back.”
    “Good,” I said.
    “What does she do, if you don’t show up in an hour?”
    “Starts making phone calls,” I said.
    He nodded. “That’s what I thought. I hear you used to be on the force.”
    “That’s right.”
    He kept looking at me, smiling, waiting for me to say something more, which meant he didn’t yet know the story. He wouldn’t hear it now, either, not from me; when the silence between us became awkward I turned my head away and watched the buildings go by the side window, and that was the end of conversation in the car.
    The precinct, when we got to it, was an old brick building with slate steps, flanked by a tailor shop on one side and a grim-looking public school on the other. We double-parked by a fire plug and they brought me in, both of them much cooler toward me now. They escorted me up to the second floor, told me to wait on a bench in the hall there, and went through a door with DETECTIVE SQUAD on the frosted glass.
    It had been a long while since I’d been in a place like this, and I found its sense of distorted familiarity more unsettling than I would have suspected. There was no comfort for me in the old wood of the bench, the walls painted two unlovely shades of green, the dark oiled wooden floor, the ceiling with its cream-colored paint peeling in one corner. As I sat there alone and waited, I