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head. “If you’d have come an hour earlier, I could have put a healthy dinner in you.”
    I slid past her. “Good to see you too. I’ll have you know some twenty-two-year-old all but propositioned me today, stimulated entirely by my fabulous physique.”
    “Twenty-two? Joe, she was looking for a father figure—probably wanted to feed you some proper food.”
    I hung my coat up in the hallway, something I did in this house almost as frequently as I did in my own. “You still worked up over that dinner I served Frank a few weeks ago?”
    “Mayonnaise, pickle and Velveeta sandwiches… I mean, really.”
    I kissed her on the cheek. “Don’t you ever walk on the wild side?”
    “Sure, but I try not to kill myself. You should have seen what that meal did to his system.”
    “Hell, that was probably all the scotch he poured on top of it.” That hit a nerve, and I was sorry I’d said it. I patted her shoulder. “Okay, you win. Beans and sprouts from now on.”
    She shook her head and sighed. I worked my way back to Frank’s den beyond the kitchen. He was lying on a brown vinyl couch in front of the television watching the news. There was a tall glass of scotch on the floor by his hand.
    “Hi, Joe. You want a drink?”
    I shook my head. I’d given up drinking several years ago. Frank knew that, but there’s something inside a hard-drinking man that can only see abstinence as a passing and regrettable phase. And Frank was a hard-drinking man; I’d seen him absorb five stiff scotch-and-sodas and not show a hair out of place. The only visible evidence of his daily drowning was an ever-expanding soft gut and a growing inability to move quickly—physically and mentally. I’d thought about going the same route after my wife Ellen had died many years back, but watching Frank even then had kept me straight. Unfortunately, either despite or because of Martha’s concern, Frank had kept right on going.
    “You have any tonic water?”
    He lugged himself out of the couch and ambled over to a freestanding bar set up near the wall. “Still on the wagon, huh? I don’t see how you can drink tonic water without something to kill the taste.”
    He filled my order, handed me a glass and motioned to the couch. “Take a load off. I’m finding out who was asshole of the day—at least according to the TV. I’ve got my own opinion, of course.”
    “John Woll?” Murphy grunted. “That’s not a bad place to start.”
    “It was hardly his fault.”
    “Oh, hell. I said ‘of the day,’ and the day’s almost up. I’ll find someone else tomorrow. Besides, what I think doesn’t matter much anyway.”
    I cupped my ear. “What’s this? Violin music time?”
    He glanced at me and shook his head. “Yeah. Sorry. I’m getting sick and tired of being the resident lame duck.”
    “No one listening anymore?”
    “Oh, they listen. They just don’t pay much attention. I know what’s going through their minds: if we just stall him long enough, he’ll be gone and we can forget about it. I can’t say I blame them. It’s just a lousy way to wrap things up. I’ve given those bastards a lot of good time.”
    He leaned forward and turned up the volume a bit. The sports report was beginning—Frank’s idea of heaven.
    As slow as he had become, his insight hadn’t suffered any. He was right about what people were thinking. He was retiring in four months, after thirty-five years on the force; it was the last chance a lot of folks had to subtly let him know they weren’t heartbroken.
    I thought that stank. He was a good cop and a better friend. When I came out of Korea, I was twenty years old and scarred by something nobody wanted to hear about. Korea was the “action” between the Good War—World War II—and the Living Room War—Vietnam. We had racked up almost as many casualties in three years as they had during ten years in Vietnam. The Vietvets complained that people spat at them when they got back home; most of us didn’t