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this. I’d have realized a captain wouldn’t be here to ask questions on a murder case.”
    “I’m not sure I follow you,” he said. He’d taken the pipe from his mouth and was holding it in his hand, where it was in danger of going out. My matches were still in his other hand.
    I said, “Let me go over my statement again.”
    “I don’t see why that would be necessary.”
    “It won’t take long.”
    He shrugged, noticed he was holding my matches, and leaned forward to give them back to me.
    “Thank you,” I said. “Robin Kennely told me there was a plainclothesman who’d told her friends there were some violations in their coffee house they had to take care of. They weren’t entirely sure what they were supposed to do, so she asked me to have a talk with the plainclothesman and find out.”
    He frowned at me. “Are you changing your story?”
    “It’s a change of interpretation, that’s all,” I said. “Do you want me to dictate it?”
    It was too fast for him, he wasn’t being given a chance to get everything covered neatly with rationalizations. He said, “Your original statement accused Detective Donlon of attempted extortion. Now you want to change your statement. Was that earlier statement a lie?”
    “Not at all,” I said. “I stand by every word in it. But I can see now where it might be misleading, so I want to make an amended statement that you can put in place of the original one.”
    “If you have evidence of wrongdoing on my squad,” he said, “you can bring it forward. I’m not covering for anybody.”
    “I have no evidence,” I said.
    “Then it seems to me,” he said, “your original statement may be actionable.”
    “No. I only repeated hearsay, what I’d been told by Robin Kennely. I have never stated whether I believed or disbelieved her.”
    “Do you believe her?”
    “I have no opinion.”
    We disliked each other intensely by now, and neither of us was bothering to hide it. His pipe had gone out, still held in his right hand. He said, “Have you always been this cynical, Tobin? Or are you just bitter against the force?”
    “I know how the world works,” I said. “I don’t think you want to push me back to my old statement.”
    He hesitated, and I knew what was bothering him. He’d come here to get something, and he’d gotten it too easily. He’d expected to have to browbeat me into changing my statement about Donlon, instead of which I’d volunteered to do it before he’d gotten the question well asked. He was on a seamy task, and we both knew it, and I had agreed so readily that now we were perforce on the same team, accomplices, and he disliked the idea of being my accomplice in anything.
    Still, there was nothing he could do about it. He shook his head heavily, and looked at his unlit pipe, and then back at me, saying, “You want to make an amended statement.”
    “Naturally.”
    “I’ll arrange for a stenographer,” he said, and got reluctantly to his feet.
    “Thank you,” I said, trying to make it pointed, trying to rub his nose in the fact that he should be thanking me.
    He went out without a word.
    I had no doubt that Captain Driscoll was personally honest. If indeed I were to bring him direct and irrefutable evidence that Detective Edward Donlon was demanding bribes, I don’t doubt that Captain Driscoll would go after Donlon all the way. On the other hand, I don’t doubt but that Captain Driscoll already knew everybody on his squad who was square and everybody who was bent, knew in a silent and unofficial way, and was prepared to let the world go on behaving in its normal manner just so long as no one caused any trouble.
    In the present case, the double murder at Thing East, what he had was a straightforward homicide, complete with suspect in custody, into which my statement intruded the unwelcome and irrelevant specter of police corruption. If he could get me to alter my statement in a way that had nothing to do with the murder, so much