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like to get some idea for myself whether this is really the guy who did it.”
    â€œAnd if he is?”
    â€œWell, I’ll have given him the very least I owe him as his lawyer. I couldn’t just plead him without checking out some of the facts.”
    â€œThen let’s get going before it gets too late,” Mike said with enthusiasm, as they left the club.
    Sandro let Mike drive. They headed out into traffic, through the streets alive with people and noise, turning onto the East River Drive. They emerged at Houston Street, into streets equally throbbing. Mike parked a few doors from 153 Stanton Street. They sat in the car for a moment, looking around to get their bearings. It was a typical Lower East Side street, with old buildings, their facades seeming to be as much fire escape as brick, their windows open, unwashed, an astonishing variety of window shades behind them, and people leaning out. Children ran and screamed back and forth across the sidewalks, dodging between cars, throwing beer cans at one another. Their parents and other adults, white, black, Latin, mixed, were also out, sitting on the stoops, sitting on milk boxes on the sidewalk, sitting on the sidewalk, propped against the sides of buildings, standing in the lighted doorways of bodegas and candy stores that were blaring music, drinking from beer cans, singing, throbbing to Spanish songs over blaring radios. Four children had already begun to rest on the trunk of Sandro’s car.
    In the middle of the block, a fire hydrant had been turned on, water gushing, and the kids were diverting the water skyward with a topless and bottomless barrel. A crowd of them stood in the falling, cooling spray.
    â€œThat must be the house up there, with the stoop,” Mike pointed. One fifty-three Stanton Street was a brick-faced building of five stories, with a fire escape entwining the length of its face and a short stoop leading into its entrance. On one side was a tenement of the same height, on the other side one that was two stories taller. On the street level, to one side of the stoop, was a shoe-repair shop, now closed for the night. On the other side was a bodega , a Spanish grocery. Two women lounged on the stoop.
    â€œLet’s go,” said Sandro, opening the car door.
    As they approached the building, they passed a small group on the sidewalk. In the center was a short Puerto Rican dancing. He was naked to the waist, wearing only a pair of gray slacks, sandals, and a panama hat. His neck was encircled with a fine gold chain, from which a small crucifix hung. In one hand he held a can of beer, and with his arms keeping rhythm to the music he danced a slow circle around a heavy woman, who was smiling patiently, amusedly. A protruding belly bulged her thin dress.
    Perspiration welled from Sandro’s face. In this heat, a suit and tie became instruments of torture. His eyelids were pressing shut. He felt droplets rolling down his back. He had debated with himself whether to dress casually and pass as just a friend of Alvarado’s or to dress as Alvarado’s lawyer. The latter, he decided, so people would respond to his pointed queries. A friend could not command the respect or get the answers Sandro needed. Besides, no one would respect an abogado who couldn’t afford a suit. Now he was afloat within that suit.
    The two women on the stoop were machine-gunning Spanish at each other. Sandro and Mike started up the stoop. They stopped and eyed Sandro. His suit, his tie, his briefcase made him obviously an outsider, perhaps an enemy.
    Sandro stopped as he reached them. “Do you know where the superintendent lives?”
    One of the women was young, her hair pulled tight into a pony-tail. Her face was etched around the eyes and mouth with lines of hard work and struggle, lines that tenement women get when they have to yell at the super to collect the garbage, to send up hot water, to clean the halls. The other woman was older,